Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

“Users don’t come to Web sites for an experience, they come for the content”—that’s a quote from the industry-leading content strategist, Kristina Halvorson. While it was a one-off quip during her presentation at SXSW Interactive, I was left thinking “wait, isn’t it my job to design experiences?” Then it hit me. Users actually come to Web sites to experience the content. My work is to actually make sure that users have a pleasurable experience when finding, consuming and sharing our precious content.

Industry-wide, companies struggle with their Web content—and while this includes video, audio and images, we (as an industry) struggle the most with text. Why is that? Writing is often an afterthought. We know that we need content, but we wait too long to engage our writers. Once they are engaged we give them a stack of documentation like wireframes, sitemaps and design mockups and ask them to sort out the mess. That isn’t fair. We should take more time to carefully plan for our content. After all, it’s what the users want.

At Capstrat we’re not completely guilty of this, but we could do better.

I’m committed to taking a renewed look at content in my next project. I’m going to start by working with our writers to answer the hard questions about content:

1. Why do we need it?
2. What business goal does it support?
3. What do our users expect?
4. What’s driving the client to insist that this be included?
5. Does it support the brand?

Asking these (and more) will lead us to a better understanding of the most important deliverable of any project: the content.

Ever get the strange feeling that you're being watched?

Well...SURPRISE! You are.

Recall that time when you walked into work or class, minding your own business. Now, you didn't realize it, but someone was discreetly peeking at you thinking, "Oh...(s)he's here."  Recall that time when you spoke up in a meeting or group discussion. That person was thinking, "Oh...(s)he's talking, let me pay attention." Now recall that time when you were with a group of friends in a public area; yes, that person was still looking at you.

It sounds creepy doesn't it? As "stalkerish" as it sounds, the truth is that we often serve as the object of someone's attention, whether they know us personally or not. Our life, as they see it, is on display for them to critique and analyze, out of (hopefully) innocent curiosity. It could be someone that you speak to in passing, or it could be that random janitor that comes in at the end of the day. Whether you realize it or not, someone is thinking about you at this very moment, and honestly, they're probably scanning your Facebook page for its latest update.

Social media has brought about a new age of accessibility for people to get to know each other, without the "inconvenience" of having a face-to-face conversation. These people know what you like, who you associate with and they may even know about that strange obsession that you thought was personal. Their habit of keeping tabs on you has evolved from peeking around the corner and asking others about you, to spending time scanning your latest tweets.

Now, the anonymous attention may be flattering for some, but it can also be downright scary. Users of social media sites have often treated it as something more personal than it really is. We can be so candid in our status updates and random tweets, not realizing that someone is closely following every single one. Singer Erykah Badu recently twittered through the birth of her daughter. She told the world when she was finally in labor, then proceeded to inform followers about the timing of her contractions. Her husband finally took over (I guess she was busy) and proceeded to describe the baby's crowning. He said, “I see the head, full of hair!”

Can you say, "TMI?"

The truth is, you are constantly being watched. Even though you've set your privacy settings and may only have close friends and colleagues on your list, these social networking sites are like small towns; and nobody (I repeat, nobody) talks to every single person in town.

I have tried to narrow my own friend lists down to the people that I would at least smile at or say "hello" to in passing. But does that mean that I'm comfortable with them following me so closely? I don't know.

As social media grows and expands to include employers, co-workers, moms, dads, the little kid you used to babysit and even Grandma (yes, Grandma); we've got to be very cautious about how we present ourselves online. Someone close to me came very close to losing a scholarship because of something he posted on his own Facebook page. So, remember that people are always looking at and taking special attention to you. Your online representation and presentation should be like a mirrored reflection of yourself...

but try to think of it as a "Funhouse Mirror" and makes sure that it's presenting you in the most positive light (without the hairy mole and uni-brow).

Facebook's recent change in their Terms of Service is causing quite an uproar.  To professional photographers and others who post original works, it has serious implications.

For many of you this is probably a moot point. Who cares if Facebook owns the drunk photos of you in college? But what if they then licensed the pics to classmates.com or an online dating service and your mug suddenly showed up in banner ads everywhere?

A quick summary of the change: You own your stuff as long as your account is active. However, once the account is closed the line that protected your old content has been removed from the Terms of Service, so technically Facebook now owns it. 

Will they do anything with all this old content? That remains to be seen, but the possibility that they can worries many:

http://www.adotas.com/2009/02/facebook-now-owns-old-content/

http://consumerist.com/5150175/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever

and commentary here:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/16/zuckerberg-on-who-owns-user-data-on-facebook-its-complicated/

You see ‘em everywhere. They're on CitySearch; they're on Yelp; they're tucked away in the footers of knowledgebase articles. Content ratings. Those little 5-star widgets and their kin. For such an innocuous little widget, the decision to put them on your page brings up all kinds of philosophical questions.

So, if you're considering putting these things on your site, read further. Below is a primer on what goes through my head when I hear the feature uttered.

Business goal

What should the rating achieve? In corporate intranets, for example, ratings might be used as a community-generated way to notify content authors that their document needs to be updated or deleted.

In a review site like Yelp, it might be a way to help bubble-up restaurants that other people liked. This helps distinguish Yelp from its competition and potentially increases its value to the user.

For a recommendation service like Netflix, this might be a way to help develop a profile of what a user and a community likes.

Takeaway: determine what problem you're trying to solve and then choose the proper rating widget and rating experience.

 

Axis of rating

What does the rating mean? Conducting usability tests on our sites, we often ask "What did you rate that content on?" The answers are eye opening - they include usefulness, to relevance, to accuracy, to personal agreement.

The first two are especially compelling. Usefulness and relevance are tied to what the user came there to accomplish. A technically accurate piece of content - but one that is not relevant to a user's task - is likely to be rated irrelevant. That's no good.

Takeaway: establish up front, what that rating represents.

 

User momentum

Most of the time, someone rating a page is diverging from the task they came to your site to do. If you want people to rate content, you need to put up the minimum amount of barriers for them to do so. AJAX-enabled ratings as almost a necessity, since users can rate content quickly without breaking stride with a page refresh.

But consider if the people rating need to log in. That's a big ol' speedbump in their experience and will absolutely impact the volume of ratings you receive.

Takeaway: require the absolute minimum overhead to rate content.

 

Who gets to rate

In concert with user momentum, in some cases you might only want authorized users to rate content. In others, you may take a more laissez-faire approach and open it up to everyone.

But consider what may happen if you choose either. If you require users to log in to rate content, many aren't going to go through that trouble.

If anyone can rate, you have to deal with people skewing the results by rating more than once. Plus, you can't build user profile data off it, since those users are untracked.

Takeaway: consider the balance between volume of ratings and the need to impose access restrictions.

Content Volatility

If the owner of rated content decides to change it, is the community rating still accurate?

This is especially relevant in user-generated content is rated by a community. If it changes, should it be reset to zero? For example, if I rated something as very useful, then the author changed in a materially adverse way, I might get irritated that my rating no longer represents how I feel about that content.

Conversely, if I am a content author, I might get aggravated if you don't let me update the material I contributed. This is beyond a buzzkill. It can be a community killer, simply because users lose the privilege to manage the content they took the time to give you.

One tactic is to take the middle road. For any content that is provided, some of it remains editable and some doesn't. I'm calling this the "material change" pattern and it suggests that some parts of the content cannot be changed, but others can. If I create a recipe, for example, maybe I can change the description of it but not fiddle around with the directions or ingredients.

The problem here is that users don't always know why some things can be changed and others can't. That can degrade user experience and their satisfaction.

Takeaway: consider the impact of allowing ratings on content that can change.

Incentives

This is a bit of a corollary to "momentum" above.  Namely, what are you doing to encourage people to rate?

Many studies suggest that only a small slice of visitors rate anything, period. Couple that with the fact that those who do rate, usually only do so for a few items at a time. If you have a ton of traffic, that might not be a big deal. However, for those of us who aren't Amazon, getting an accurate pulse on the community's reaction to content can be statistically difficult.

Netflix and Pandora are models of good incentives. Both tie user ratings back into their recommendation engine, serving you more accurate suggestions the more that you rate. Both impose little overhead, so it's quick and pleasurable to give your one-star salute.

Take away: pay it forward. Give users a reason to rate, whether it's tying the action back to their community ranking or giving them more relevant content.

 

The object and scope of the rating

What exactly is being rated? Is my vote cast for the page, the site as a whole, or just this specific little nugget of content? Proximity and visual cues play a big part is drawing the relationship between the rating widget and its scope.

Takeaway: consider where you place rating widgets. Use text and design to clarify the scope of the search. This can be as simple as "How helpful was this article?"

 

Anchoring effect

This is something I borrowed from behavioral economics. If you provide the community's overall rating when the user rates the content, it often biases their rating. People rate things higher when other people rate them higher.

Takeaway: be wary when interpreting results. Ratings are usually not statistically valid evidence about how people feel about your content.

 

Motivation to rate

People tend to rate anything when they have very strong opinions about it and less often when they are indifferent. Ratings, then, can often inaccurately reflect the sentiments of all users simply because some people hated or loved the material enough to take the time and express their opinion. This goes back to the anchoring effect, as well

Takeaway: again, we careful in the interpretation. You're likely to be skewed.

Lack of ratings

When you go live with a rating widget, you will have no ratings. If you are hanging your hat on showing "Highest Rated Articles" or something similar, you will have a dearth of results. 

Takeaway: be aware of this and have a back-up algorithm in place.

So, those are just some of the first things that come to my head when thinking about ratings.

PS: Rate the needless minutae in this article (1 - 5, where 5 represents "chock full" and 1 represents "none at all".)

 

"Content is King," according to our >Cord Silverstein,  our Engagement Marketing VP here at Capstrat. “Content and links are the two main players in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). That’s it. There’s not even a close third. Sure, a few minor things can be done to help out, but it’s a lost cause if the main players aren’t in the game.”

Content
Search engines want to deliver the best results to their users. So how does Google decide what your site is about? They evaluate pages much like Web users do: by looking at the words in the page title, in the headers, in bold, and mentioned repeatedly throughout the text.  Google calculates "keyword density" to see what your site is about.

Links
Search engines count the number of links pointing to your site to evaluate how credible and popular it is. Only one-way links count -- you can’t swap links with someone else and get credit for it. Best way to get links? Write good content. Once that’s done, you can participate in online forums, blogs, and social media to get the ball rolling. If you’ve done your job well, people will naturally want to link to your site. They will want to share it with their friends. They will bookmark it on StumbleUpon and recommend it on Digg.

So as you're creating your site, don't focus on SEO, but rather focus on creating great content. Keep in mind how Google reads your site, but remember that if your site has something to offer, the rest pretty much follows suit.


Tools:
See what search engines think your site is about:
http://www.seomoz.org/term-extractor

See what links Google gives you credit for:
www.google.com   (search for “link:www.YourSite.com”)

What's news to me may not be news to my super-smart coworkers in the Interactive department here at Capstrat. But what's news to me is likely news to my cohorts in the client services and government relations departments. (Not to mention definitely news to my friends who don't have a clue what it is we do here at Capstrat and barely grasp the concept of the web.)

So, with that, I'm going to provide a snapshot of my favorite findings from the Web Content 2008 Conference in Chicago. (My format = Presentation title, Presenter, Best things I learned.) If you're interested in something particular and would like me to dive into further detail, give me a shout out. I'm happy to oblige.

The Next Content Wave: Hypersyndication by Dick Costolo of Google

• There's a new travel site out there, for addicted web travel researchers like me. Build your trip ideas from sites all across the web and publish them in one place, at www.offbeatguides.com . Dick tells us this site is still very early in their beta program, but that it's going to be a huge success. They'll mail you a pocket-sized guide of your destination - including your specific accommodations - or you can print to a PDF version. Either way, it would be a relief to hit the road with something other than my manila folder with a stack of print-outs from various sites. I've signed up for an invitation to the beta version. No luck yet. 

• Interesting remark from Dick: Those who comment across the web (even without association with a company or personal Web site) will be their own brands. And not too far off in the future. Think about that before posting a rash reaction to your friend's latest round of uploaded party photos or worse, getting fired up in a string of comments on a highly publicized news story. Yep, your own brand. I kind of like that.

• One more thing: www.getsatisfaction.com is the future of customer service. Dick recommends a third party customer service organization as a means to participate in conversation with your customers. Whole Foods does it. Food for thought.

The Many-Armed Starfish: Today and Tomorrow in Social Media by Darren Barefoot of Capulet Communications (Voted most popular presenter in unofficial poll.)

• Your brand is what people say your brand is. Case in point - www.brandtags.net (I'm not sure why people would associate Disney with ‘evil', but hey, not everyone is a fan like me I suppose.) The idea of this site is that a brand only exists in our heads. I'd recommend checking out your clients on the site. Go contribute yourself. Could be an eye-opener. Maybe it will lend itself to an argument that they should relinquish control, embrace social media and it'll all be ok Depending on what you find, obviously, you may be doing damage control.

• Dogster . Catster . What about Hamsterer? A quick online hunt reveals Hamsterer really did exist, but does no longer. Shame.

• His five lessons:

•     Relinquish control. Think about pulling your Google results as your bio.
•     Users will help each other.
•     Empower your most passionate customers, perhaps as advocates or private beta users.
•     Think outside the page.
•     Go where your customers are! Don't start your own social network. Try starting a broad discussion online and lightly sponsor it. Check out www.babycenter.com . (All my pregnant friends love it!)

When John Lovett of Jupiterresearch took the podium at the end of the first day of the conference, I thought, "This better be good." By 4pm, we were all on major information overload.

Working on several Web projects that require dynamic content, I was curious to see what John was going to share with us. What perhaps stood out the most to me was his acknowledgment of the challenge of creating dynamic content for business-to-business sites. He also showed examples of dynamic content and reassured us that it could be as simple as adding an image gallery to introduce the concept to a nervous client.

My favorite example was Hotels.com going from a community of 'experts' who post their opinion of hotels to a community of hotel-goers like you and me. He had us raise our hand if we went online to check user reviews of our hotel for this trip, and most of us lifted a hand. It's perfect. Hotels.com has dynamic content, we're providing it for them (thus cutting back on their internal resources) and it's what we want to read anyway.

I take back hotels.com as my favorite example now. It had to be the Target example. Think of the last product search you did on their site - let's say for a blender. The actual content of the product information is maybe two or three paragraphs. The rest is star ratings from users, comments from purchasers, recommendations of other products bought by blender buyers, and the list goes on. Target has dynamic content nailed. At least for now.

The trick is business-to-business. Like John said, that's a tougher nut to crack. I will now (thanks to John) look at my online Target and travel experiences to come up with ideas to address my client's needs dynamically.

One thing I continue to struggle with is how relevant sitemaps are--and to whom?¹

Below is an example sitemap, which indicates the basic hierarchy of pages or categories within a site.

What's wrong with this picture?

Sitemaps don't represent pages...

Implicitly, they communicate pages of content. This is not necessarily the case. They are a quasi-system model that blurs the lines between content and page. This leads to misinterpretation.

Extending this, they are rooted in a page-centric approach that assumes pages have one state. Ajax-y interactions that reload different content into the same page aren't communicated. 

...and they don't really represent content.

They suggest content, but a through the lens of a page. This, I believe, is an artifact left over from the days where sitemaps were closely tied to the physical implementation. As we've evolved the idea of a sitemap away from actual pages, we didn't rethink how it is actually interpreted or used by either developers or clients. 

...and they don't reflect true navigation or interaction paths.

In fact, they indicate a hierarchical flow between pages. Sitemaps suggest that users typically access the site through the home page. Users who arrive via a search or a link from a friend are likely to be entering at a deeper level than the home page. Luke Wroblewski has a great podcast and set of slides on this.

And sitemaps don't account for related items--hyperlinks that bring together similar content that exist in different categories of the site. Similar information may be "nearer" than sitemaps suggest. The perceived distance is content too and associate navigation can be as important as the categorical navigation. 

So, what do they do well?

For me, they are good as a sketch -- not a final product -- for how content may be organized and how navigation may occur. They work well for initial scoping. But having to caveat what sitemaps are feels like a cop out. There's gotta be a better way.

 Any thoughts? Do sitemaps help you or confuse you?

¹I'm talking about the information architecture kind, but many of the points also extend to those junk drawer sitemap pages that many sites have. That's entirely another issue to address.

Finally getting around to posting here. The idea of writing or reading a blog daily — or even weekly — had me flummoxed. There’s so much information coming at me from other directions, I can hardly keep up. Why would I want to punish myself even more with the burden of keeping up with multiple blogs?

But then I started thinking of blogs as the equivalent of magazines. I don’t feel compelled to read the vast array of publications out there. I pick and choose what interests me. Some I read regularly, some I just pick up to read one article. And I don’t feel guilty for not reading every magazine on the stand. So why should blogs intimidate me? I can just drop in for what interests me. (And try not to be sucked in for the rest of the day….)

Matter of fact, as a copywriter, I appreciate how blogs simply highlight the primacy of content. It’s the only explanation for an incredible volume of text, often with little formatting and egregious typos. (I love that word. Say it with me: egregious .) It’s the strength of the ideas shared in blogs that give them the power to catch and hold our attention. With the explosion of blogs, it’s clear that people are starved for content that’s authentic and relevant, that sounds like them. They’re not screaming for marketing speak. A cautionary reminder for every other form of communication.

Have you ever watched a Mom try to reason with a toddler in a toy store? That’s the image that came to mind when I heard about the NFL’s attempt to control its online content. From an article in Ad Age.

It’s great that the NFL is capitalizing on its vast storehouse of clips. Armchair quarterbacks, fantasy football enthusiasts and even casual fans ought to enjoy “instant replays” from today and seasons past. But, while ramping up its Web site, the NFL has decided to restrict other sites from featuring NFL clips. This runs counter to the mass democratization of the Web. It remains to be seen whether this approach will be successful.

And, I had to chuckle when I read that the NFL’s legal team is going to police other news and video sites, including YouTube. Like the Mom trying to wrestle control from a 3-year old, I suspect the NFL would be better off with a less rigid approach.