Confab: Day 2 Recap from Beehive PR

Category: Blog - May 11, 2011

The second day of Confab, the content strategy conference hosted by Brain Traffic, is over, and it proved to be just as thought-provoking as Day 1. John Schneider and Bridget Nelson Monroe took notes at as many sessions as they could, in addition to live-tweeting from the @beehivepr account. Here's a recap of their day:

Morning Keynote: The Soul of Your Brand, Ann Handley, author of Content Rules

• Everything is content. Everything.
• Content: Anything an individual or organization creates or shares to tell their story.
• Good content is soul of who you are
• Social media is reaching your network’s network
• Hubspot: Blogging yields 55% more site traffic, 75% more inbound links, 434% more indexed pages. Content.
• 23% of messages shared via SM contain a link to content. 27M pieces of content shared every day, according to Nielsen.
• B2B content marketing usage: 88% use content marketing, 12% do not use

Strategy: Content Strategy’s Other Half, Melissa Rach, Brain Traffic

• Three reasons to explore this

1. Discussion about CS or content being a real thing?
2. Most of us came up as content experts or content people. There’s a whole world of strategy out there we need to catch up on.
3. Business people don’t get content. They’re not content people. We need to learn their strategy.

• What is strategy: Enacting a plan to realize goals. The art of creating advantage.
• Strategy is a concept word. Definitions are personal. Your personal theory is not fact.
• Classical American Method of Strategy (as a business term circa 1950s): Military influence via Alfred Sloan. Top down. Recon/research intensive.
• Did it work? It continued to evolve into the 1990s and resulted in silos, which stopped the evolution of strategy in business. Additionally, it resulted in multiple layers of strategy, which introduced unsustainable complexity into organizations. This persists to today.
• 60 years later: Things are jacked. It’s not 1950 anymore. We have hyper competition and hyper communication. There are a bunch of theories of strategy in play, most still built on the classic 1950s concept of strategy. Game theory. Complexity theory. Still not addressing current reality.
• Today, adaptability is the key. Today’s sustainable strategies need to have:

1. flexible frameworks
2. ongoing learning/education
3. quick responses and reactions
4. strategic routines vs. long-term strategies

• Knowledge is the advantage:

1. Gives you ability to change quickly
2. valuable because it is not easily captured
3. is dispersed throughout organization
4. relies on innovation
5. requires constant learning and education

• Keeping knowledge in your company is critical. When it leaves it is crippling.
• Today, organizations need content to survive. They need experts in content to help them figure out what to do.
• Current theory of content strategy: Helping organizations use content to achieve their business goals. Guys at top still don’t get it.
• We have no obvious superpowers. We cannot define value conventionally. We need to start thinking about content in a new way.
• Think of strategy as a verb; everything you do needs to do one of these things:

1. create clarity
2. align stakeholders
3. make smart decisions
4. operationalize change

• Adaptability is the only way the strategy will work.
• Deliverables are tools, not outcomes: education moments, conversation starters, records of past conversations, memory aids.
• We are not competition, we are a complement. How do we blend and add value to the overall effort? Make smart decisions.
• Give people the tools, knowledge and expert advice they need to move confidently, act independently and move quickly.

Data-Informed Content Strategy, Clare O’Brien, Content Delivery and Analysis (CDA)

• This needs to stop: the classic cases of very in depth reporting with absolutely no associated analysis.
• As content strategists, we have a responsibility to make sure our content will be given real insights when numbers come in.
• We should be using our core strength as content strategists. We're very creative AND very detail-oriented.
• Good content strategy needs strong insights. Think of it as a pyramid, with data forming the base and layer of information and knowledge leading to insight.
• "Are we delivering the information that people intended to find in a way that turns them into customers?" Arienne Holland, RavenTools
• Data-informed content changes drive immediate results in onsite conversion rate

Love Thy Geeks: Working in and Amongst Web Teams, Relly Annett-Baker, Supernice Studios

• Multidisciplinary is the future, working side by side with designers and developers.
• We are all creative problem solvers.
• Content Strategists are in danger of becoming a commodity. Something that's brought in to fix things. We need to be in the thick of it. We need to have a seat at the table.
• Show the value of bringing you into a project from the beginning. Find a way to solve problems right away.
• Find common ground and learn their language. Show them that you do care about the “little” things such as error messages.
• If people don’t understand your role or know how to scope for you, show them examples of deliverables to help them understand.

Learning to Love Your CMS, Jeff Cram, ISITE Design

• Huge expectation gap between what a CMS is supposed to do and what it actually does.
• How do we help CMS actually work? Get involved in the process early and partner with IT (who typically owns the project).
• Content management is not a technology project. It’s about people. IT needs to embrace this, but it’s always a challenge.
• Why does CMS fail? Unmet expectations and “fatware” - feature sets that are over complex and themselves obstacles to adoption
• 85% of CMS deployments fail for these and many other reasons.
• It’s all about content, about people. These need to be central to an effective CMS strategy, but they rarely ever are. It’s usually about stability and workflow. Problem is, most orgs don’t have an existing workflow so a CMS managed workflow is useless.
• CMS can enable great customer experiences because CONTENT enables great customer experiences.
• Ask “how” this tech can support great customer experiences. Ask that first.
• Why does IT own a CMS project? It makes no sense. But it’s better to work with them than to make them your mortal enemy.

Social Network Content Strategy: Building Content Curation into the Mix, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

• Content is a business asset worthy of being managed efficiently and effectively.
• To manage content effectively you must break down silo walls.
• To manage content efficiently you must streamline processes and reduce reliance on manual labor.
• In order to succeed, you need an audience. You need to get their attention.
• One way to attract audiences is to publish original content – but that takes a lot of time. We need to spot and stop time-sucking activities so that we have more time to work on valuable things. What’s the ROI of your time?
• Go shopping for content. Create content exhibits. Think of your twitter stream as a content exhibit. Find content consumers.
• Use a blend of Google Reader and Dlvr.it to curate content and publish it across platforms.

Make Your Content Nimble, Rachel Lovinger, Razorfish

• Nimble content is content that travels freely without losing context and meaning. It’s necessary to create new products that are reusable, engaging, profitable, and have a quick time to market.
• In order for content to be nimble, it has to be well structured, well defined and well described.
• Nimble content must be in a CMS, with an adaptable content model.
• Retain, crowdsource, and share. We need to make use of the metadata that people are already creating.

Tags: John Schneider, Bridget Nelson Monroe, confab, content strategy, event, recap

2 comments on this topic