The Digital Crown. Winning at Content on the Web

332 Pages·2014·12.422 MB·English

by  Ahava Leibtag (Auth.)

T H E D I G I T A L C R O W N
T H E D I G I TA L C R O W N
WINNING AT CONTENT
ON THE WEB
Ahava Leibtag
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Leibtag, Ahava.
The digital crown : winning at content on the web / Ahava Leibtag.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-12-407674-7 (pbk.)
1. Internet marketing. 2. Branding (Marketing) I. Title.
HF5415.1265.L447 2013
658.8′72–dc23
2013022878
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-12-407674-7
Printed and bound in China
14 15 16 17 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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D E D I C AT I O N
For my greatest teachers, my children:
Tzophia, Amaya, and Navon
You are my glorious crowns.
To actually improve user experience in a sustainable way—that is, while achieving
business goals—we need to help organizations deal with the revolutionary changes
that the web has created in their business models, operational structures, and
customer relationships. Denial isn’t a strategy.
—Jonathan Kahn
F O R E W O R D
“A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.” – Ralph Waldo Edison
As toddlers, they keep us safe: don’t touch the stove. Look both ways before you
cross the street. Dessert comes after broccoli.
In school, they keep us orderly: Raise your hand. Get to class on time. No running
in the hallways.
And the older we get, the more we have to remember: Pay your bills on
time. Use your turn signal. Don’t wear white before Memorial Day. Call your
mother.
To be honest, I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about rules, at least not
when it comes to my work. As Thomas Edison once said, “Hell, there are no rules
here—we’re trying to accomplish something!”
And yet, when it comes to content, I think the main problem we face is that we
don’t have enough rules. Or, in many cases, any at all.
Why? Is it that, like me, we often find them unnecessarily restrictive—as in,
“These shouldn’t apply to me, because I am a unique snowflake?” Is it just too
hard to fight the battle, so we stay with the status quo? Or is it simply that we
don’t know where to start?
Over the past ten years, I’ve worked with clients of all shapes and sizes, from
small startups to Fortune 100 enterprises. But no matter where I go or who I talk
to, time and time again, I hear the same woeful complaints:
• “We have too much content.”
• “We don’t have enough content.”
• “Our content is off-brand/inconsistent/out-of-date/inaccurate.”
• “We don’t know where all our content is or where it’s coming from.”
• “Content is being produced in silos.”
• “No one is in charge of the content.”
• “The technology we use/don’t use to manage our content doesn’t work
the way we want it to.”
• “We can’t keep up with the [fill in a scary number] digital properties
we’ve launched over the past [fill in a scary number] of years.
xvi FOREWORD
This, my friend, is what we call chaos.
I’ll tell you what, though. The one that always breaks my heart is when people
say:
• “This is all so very embarrassing.”
There is no need to feel embarrassed, dear reader. Visit any website and do
a little digging, and you quickly realize that you are not the only one whose
content could use some help. And although you may be in caught in a quagmire
of content ickiness, it’s important to understand that most likely, you, personally,
haven’t done anything wrong. You are a simply working for a company that lacks
the infrastructure that supports the ongoing creation, delivery, and governance
of content people actually care about.
But, really. Why would we expect your company—any company—to have that in
place? That’s what a publisher does. You are not a publisher. You are a service or
product provider. That’s where your core competencies lie.
Except, of course, the minute you launched a website … the minute you put up
a Facebook page, or started a video channel, or signed up for Twitter … you
assumed the mantle of publisher. You’re creating content. You’re curating it.
You've started a conversation people expect you to continue for as long as that
digital property lives on.
Welcome to your new reality.
Here’s something to consider. The more work I do with organizations, the more
convinced I become that there is, in fact, a finite set of content problems to be
solved. This implies that, perhaps, there are some common solutions that might
be shared among anyone who deals with content. We’ve been sold on a variety
of silver bullets—buy this expensive CMS! Let your users create all the content!—
but, frankly, nothing has really, truly addressed one of the core problems that
exists within organizations: when it comes to content, people often either don’t
get it or don’t care.
The Digital Crown will go a long way in changing that. By offering seven
hard-and-fast rules for delivering valuable content to your core audiences, Ahava
has provided you with an extraordinarily valuable framework to build sustainable,
profitable content marketing campaigns. Her seven unbreakable rules are
real-world solutions that will help you get on track for both today’s complex
content environments and tomorrow’s unpredictable challenges.
Finally, here is something that every marketer needs to understand: when it
comes to winning at digital strategy, you are not an exception to the rules.
For too long, companies simply have refused to step up and acknowledge that
content—far from being a simple byproduct of necessary business activities—is
in fact a valuable business asset that deserves our strategic consideration.
FOREWORD xvii
In order to fully realize its value, it’s critical that we invest our thought, time, and
resources to get it right … not just the first time, but every time.
The Digital Crown changes the content game. Follow the seven rules, and you’ll
win. Beat that!
Kristina Halvorson
CEO, Brain Traffic
Author, Content Strategy for the Web
I N T R O D U C T I O N : W H Y C O N T E N T
M AT T E R S
Information in This Chapter
• Solving the Content Problem
• Managing Content with a System
• Knowing Your Audience
• Using the Right Talent
Whether you are a marketing executive, a small business owner, a content
professional, or the chief technology officer of a Fortune 1000 company, chances
are you’re freaked out by the demand for online content. Bill Gates famously
said in 1996, “Content is King.” Everyone keeps repeating that quote, but some
people have no idea what it really means—how to achieve content excellence,
ascend the throne, and wear the crown.
If you need to understand the how, why, when, and who of creating great
content for your audience to consume, then this book is for you. You may feel
unequipped to create and deliver fabulous content experiences for a variety
of reasons: not enough money in the budget, not the right staff, not enough
content, too much content. If you’ve noticed that focusing on video, or blogging,
or search engine optimization (SEO), or social media, or the next hot digital thing
isn’t getting you where you really want to go, then you’re in the right place.
Together, learning the theory of content, as well as tactics and tools for content
success, we will build a roadmap toward digital strategy victory.
SOLVING YOUR CONTENT PROBLEM
Chances are you picked up this book for one, two, or maybe all three of these
reasons:
1. Your business isn’t performing the way you want it to and you’re
suspicious that after two expensive redesigns the problem may not lie
with design.
2. You’ve been on too many website and digital strategy projects that have
failed and you’re looking for a new way to think about digital strategy.
3. You buy any book with the word content in the title.
xx INTRODUCTION: WHY CONTENT MATTERS
The reason that websites and other digital strategy projects fail is because the
people managing them don’t focus on what really matters. They begin changing
things for the sake of change, to “update,” without first asking themselves why.
They usually also forget to ask what the update will accomplish. This creates a
focus on the wrong priorities.
In the case of any strategy for a business, not-for-profit organization,
government agency, or other organization, the first question we must ask is:
Why are we doing this? This question is otherwise known as the business case.
A business case demonstrates the reason we do something that costs resources
such as money or someone’s time. If you want your digital projects to be
successful, you need to move your focus away from doing what everyone else is
doing to “keep up.” Instead, start focusing on your audience—what they want
to say as well as what they want to hear. Start with a conversation. In the digital
world, content makes conversations happen.
In the digital Your design can look good, it can even win design awards, but without
world, content the content to attract the audience, keep them there, and get them to buy
something or use your service, your pretty website or social media page does
makes
not meet the needs of your business. Meeting the needs of your business is what
conversations
content is about: content supports the sales process.
happen.
THE INHERENT TENSION IN CONTENT
Our challenges with content lie with two different but interrelated challenges:
• How do we capture the information we need from our internal sources?
• How do we create a publishing system to release that content into the world?
The information you need from inside your organization is the content your
audience needs and wants. Content consists of all of the information assets of
your company that you share with the world.
And, it’s not just text. Mind-shift time: We need to stop thinking about content
as articles, blogs, and catalogs. Content is the information, resources, and
materials that you want to communicate to your audience. This includes, but is
certainly not limited to, written text, photographs, graphics, infographics, PDFs,
documents in other formats, reviews, video, audio, and so on.
Getting all those information assets out to the public in a systematic, sensible
process feels overwhelming. Publishing has become so instantaneous that it’s
(almost) impossible to keep up with your audiences’ demands—four years ago
it was Facebook. Eighteen months ago, Google+. Now, if you don’t have an
infographic, you’re not relevant (that’s Pinterest). Vine exploded just a few
months back. Apparently, even MySpace is back. How can any organization,
especially smaller ones with very limited budgets, keep up?