Better rankings for better content
Tired of getting low-quality search engine results from sites like eHow? Well, so is Google. Big-wigs at the search giant Amit Singhal and principal engineer Matt Cutts announced a few days ago a “pretty big” improvement to results, based on providing “better rankings for high-quality sites - sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

In Google’s sights are “content farms” run by organisations such as Demand Media (eHow, Livestrong, Cracked and more). Demand Media pay freelancers (poorly) to create content on long-tail search engine terms. They have one goal in mind, and it’s not to educate or inform web users.

Gaming the SERPs
While not every eHow article is useless, quality is certainly secondary to keyword optimisation. Content farms are all about ranking highly in search engine results pages (SERP). But because of the sheer weight of numbers and a clever approach to SEO and SEM, eHow is all over your Google results.

Only a few days before the most recent announcement, Google released an extension for its Chrome browser that allows users to blacklist sites they don’t want in their results. While it might be fun to block your competitors and see yourself soar, it seemed like another example of Google admitting that it was failing to keep up with SEO spammers (read my previous post about how SEO tricks Google). Why not fix search instead of making users hack results?

The right direction
The latest announcement is a far more positive step for Google. Users need search engines to deliver the best and most appropriate results. Google’s job is to deliver the best algorithm, and any result page that prioritises quality, original content over $5 articles paid for by word count is OK with me.

So get your content on
Now there are two great reasons for businesses to boost their content stocks with professionally-written, high-quality, useful content:

1. There’s a gap emerging in the market, as eHow slips down the ladder
2. Google are on the lookout for the best original content out there.

Take advantage. Hire a web copywriter today.

I’m not alone in thinking this. Earlier this year, R. Stephen Gracey wrote a great piece about FAQs for A List Apart. And he was following on from stalwart Jakob Nielsen who talked about “infrequently asked questions” in an end-of-year summary of web mistakes on useit.com.

Both Nielsen and Gracey reflect on big problems with FAQs, but both also concede that they’re sometimes necessary. I’m not convinced. I think they’re a scourge.

So why are FAQs bad?
As a content strategist, a hefty part of my day is spent thinking about content. Not content floating on its own in the ether in a writerly, poetical kinda way. Content in situ.

Good website content (and, indeed, good content anywhere) is best when it fits (space, tone, context) and when it’s found (i.e. it is where you either expect it or need it to be).

Sitemaps, page structure, design and words…all of these things should combine online to create an intuitive, comprehensible experience for website visitors. Content should be structured (and labelled) in a way that enables visitors to see it, and to click with confidence. This is the fundamental job of content strategy and user experience folks.

FAQs = fail. They’re a generic spot where businesses and site writers lump stuff, out of context. Any stat you have that shows a user moving from any other page of your site into your FAQs is a mark of failure.

Content should be clear and in context. No room for it on the page where a user might expect to see it? Make room!

Questions are OK….sometimes
I’m not saying that question-and-answer sections are, in themselves, bad. Usually they are, but sometimes they’re the best way to communicate information, and have the advantage of forcing site writers to actually try to think like a site visitor.

If I’m selling t-shirts, it makes great sense to have a “Questions about our t-shirts” area, where I might pre-empt queries such as:

• How do I choose the right size?
• Are there special washing instructions?
• Where are the t-shirts made?
• What if my t-shirt doesn’t fit?

If I’m feeling radical, I might even keep track of questions people actually do ask, and use these on the site. Crazy, sure. But it might be just crazy enough to work.

I could link to these questions from every specific t-shirt product page (actually, I’d probably recommend listing the questions on each of these pages and linking to answers or showing them in hover windows).

I might also have a section containing info about shipping and returns. And I’d call it “Shipping and returns”. If I wanted, I could present these as a Q&A. But what’s the benefit? Might as well present my information clearly under friendly, easy-to-scan headings such as:

• Shipping options and costs
• Tracking and delivery times
• Customs
• Multiple items
• T-shirt returns

…and anything else I needed to tell people about the fine art of mailing a t-shirt to someone.

In both of these examples, it would be a mistake – a terrible, lazy mistake – to put this important info into a generic FAQ.

Why?

When did you last look at FAQs? Was it up-front when you first arrived on a new site? Did you load the site thinking, “Oh golly, I just can’t wait to feast my eyes on them FAQs!”?

Probably not.

Most likely, you were looking for information that you couldn’t find elsewhere. Your search around the site probably wasn’t exhaustive, but you figured, well, there’s the FAQs in the navigation. Maybe I’ll take a look there.

And did you find what you needed?

Probably not.

Terrible.

(As others have pointed out, FAQs are rarely actually questions people ask frequently. They’re more likely to be details the site owners want to tell people, but they couldn’t think of a better place to put them.)

Or maybe you landed in the FAQs from a search of the site. Good news – you probably got the information you needed. Shame it wasn’t placed in its logical site context, where you probably would have found it without needing to search.

Lazy.

Content strategy is about putting the right content in the right place at the right time. It’s about creating positive experiences for users. It’s about making sure the content is there when and where they need it.

FAQs fail every one of these objectives. Site designers, UX practitioners and lovers of content need to work harder. FAQs must die!

I agreed, of course, and asked her if she had designs or wireframes I could see, so I could understand where the content was meant to sit, and where the opportunities were for related content, calls to action, contextual links, etc.

Gotcha!

I’m the guy who bangs on and on about how the best way to develop your website is to create the content first (or at least at the same time as your designs). And here I was asking for the designs. Why?

I’m glad you asked. A couple of reasons:

History: In most cases, the designs or wireframes would have already been done. It’s not right; it’s just how people work. It’s a bad habit. But it is extremely common. For a reminder of why it’s not the best way to develop your next web project, read my first ever blog post about how lorem ipsem (placeholder content) leads to bad websites.

Teamwork: While I’m sometimes the person who actually develops the wireframes in addition to my content strategy role, this isn’t always the case. And for this project, a digital agency is doing the design work.

But this doesn’t mean I’m hopeful that they’ll wait to see the content before commencing wireframe work. The client is controlling the project, and – understandably – wants to see everything happen at once. So this means that the page design is happening in parallel with content development (good…), but the content strategist isn’t working directly with the designers (bad).

With this Chinese Wall between content strategy and design, it would actually be best if I could see the designs up-front, for the best outcome in the circumstances.

For the best outcome full stop, though, we need to tear down the wall.

This terrific session was held at Loop in Melbourne, and was focussed on describing the what and the why of content strategy to a group made up mostly of UX practitioners, with the odd content person thrown in.

Although from my perspective there weren’t many surprises in Karen’s talk, it was a very successful top-level overview of how content strategists can (and should) be involved in web projects. The basic take-away: leaving content (and the strategy informing it) until the last minute is a recipe for disaster.

Having worked in editorial and CS roles online for well over a decade now, I’m a strong advocate of Karen’s message (indeed, some of her main points have even featured in previous posts on this blog). The most exciting things for me were that this event even happened here in Melbourne, that the conversation has started, and that so many smart web professionals are clearly interested in taking part.

If people in project teams advocate for the inclusion of content strategists, project managers and team managers will increasingly include them…and websites will be better. Promise.

So many thanks to Karen for inspiring so many people, and a big call out to Andrew Green who was instrumental in making the event happen. Yaay.

And, finally, after months (or years) and thousands (or millions) of dollars…we launched! We actually went live!

Yaaay. We had a party. There were clowns and free drinks and little bits of cured meat on puffy biscuits that I don’t really like and lots of back-slapping and lots of recognition of foot soldiers. Why clowns? Still don’t know…

Anyhow, along comes Monday…

Day 2.

Hmmm.

The content isn’t quite right.
Marita in accounts reckons the links don’t work.
People using Chrome are getting this weird glitch on the subscribe form.
We need to update the blog categories.
An image we used wasn’t approved.

Hmmm.

Day 2. The day after. It’s the day when nobody cares. That day, and every day after.

But
But your site shouldn’t have a day 2. Every day is day 1. Every minute is a deadline. The job is never done.

Is that intimidating?

Maybe the project was too big in the first place. Are you sure your users really wanted all that stuff? Don’t they just want fast access to the thing you do best?

Business planning is about identifying your strong suit. Content strategy is about playing a confident hand.

What’s your game like?

What’s becoming apparent in recent media flare-ups is the extent to which users of these sites are still operating with old-fashioned concepts of online communication:

• Anonymity: some users think that, even though it’s plain to everyone who they actually are, they remain somehow hidden in this online world
• Alternate persona: it seems that some users - even celebrities - think that they can operate using a different persona or voice to the one they maintain in real life.

Be who you are
One of the key messages I deliver to clients is that when you’re online, everything you do is ‘publishing’. And, as any comms professional knows, to communicate effectively (online or off), you need to know who your audience is and - importantly here - who you are:

• Are you just you?
• Are you a representative of an organisation?
• Are you a fictional or exaggerated character?

Deciding this and then being it consistently is vital. Otherwise, your message can be too easily misunderstood.

The sad tale of Catherine Deveny
Look at poor Catherine Deveny. She was until recently a writer of intentionally-controversial opinion pieces in the Age, Melbourne’s apparently more-reputable newspaper. While watching the local TV awards, she tweeted a few things that were - depending on your perspective - funny, stupid or just plain mean and inappropriate.

The next day she was told by the Age that her column was cancelled. She had crossed a line and her public ‘voice’ was not deemed approriate for the Age or its readers, apparently.

Two things here:

1) “Sacked”: Catherine Deveny then spent some days in the media descibing how she was “sacked and heartbroken”. Deveny decried the Age for “dragging my corpse through their paper for hits and circulation while I am on the phone cancelling the trip to Wet’n'Wild I’d promised the kids”. It’s pretty sad. I really liked her columns.

But she wasn’t sacked. She was never employed. She had no contract. She is a freelance writer, and publications have a right to publish what they want. She lives all the time with the threat of unemployment. All freelancers do.

Deveny has the right to say what she wants too. I hope she finds a new outlet better suited to her forthright style. But the Age did nothing wrong. Perhaps Deveny was the one at fault, selling her wares to them in the first place?

I wrote for the first 99 editions of Australia’s Big Issue magazine, with about 400 articles published. My submissions for issue 100 went unpublished, and I never had anything in that magazine again. Sure, I was a bit disappointed. But I never complained about being sacked. It’s up to the editor. That’s as it should be. I got another job.

2) Who was she? Catherine Deveny needed to decide who she was. Was she a freelance controversialist (a personal brand)? Was she an Age columnist? With a clear public identity, publishing decisions (including tweets) become more obvious. And they have predictable outcomes too. A freelance controversialist would have ‘tweeted and be damned’. A high-profile Age columnist wouldn’t have tweeted in the first place. Or, if they had, wouldn’t have been surprised by the fallout.

Kyle and consistency
While Kyle Sandilands might actually be a good bloke (his friends say he is) it doesn’t really matter. The fact it that all of his public behaviours demonstrate a consistent, nasty, boorish personality.

So props to Kyle: at least he’s consistent. He knows who his audience is. And he knows who he is, as far as his public persona goes. A Sandilands tweet from last September: “having trouble paying attention perhaps I need to go to a concentration camp?”. Just terrific Kyle.

Sadly, Sandilands has joined the ranks of celebrity Twitter quitters (Helen Razer, Ricky Gervais, Miley Cyris, that hilarious fake Stephen Conroy guy and more…). Why, I wonder? No self control? Or the result of misunderstanding its purpose, power and reach?

Tellingly, and thankfully, Catherine Deveny still tweets regularly.

But for all the aspects of content creation, production, management and deployment that DO qualify as content strategy, there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t.

Content strategy ubiquity
Do a search on Google, subscribe to a blog alert, or lick your pinkie and hold it to the wind and you’ll hear a lot of things described as content strategy:

SEO is great, but it’s not a content strategy. It’s part of one. Your SEO strategy is not your content strategy.

Deciding to outsource your writing to Media Giants or someone in Boronia or someone in Bangalore is not a content strategy. It’s part of one. Content production is not a content strategy.

Creating an online content style guide is not a content strategy. It’s part of one.

Conducting research on user needs is not a content strategy. But – yep – it is part of one.

Content strategy isn’t deciding to do better; it isn’t hiring a proper web writer; it isn’t realising that your web writers are the most valuable salespeople on staff; and it isn’t understanding why your online communication needs should take precedence over technologists and Flash-happy designers.

Content strategy is all of this, and more. It is your business, your comms plan, your brand values, your uniqueness, your site content, and much more.

Do you have someone who intuitively gets it? Do you need a content strategist?

Cheap as chips
I recently visited a website and was interrupted by a pop-up asking if I wanted to take part in a 10-minute survey. I’d go in a draw to win an iPod.

No. I don’t really.

First – of course – I probably wouldn’t win the iPod. Second, I actually own an mp3 player. You can buy them now for about $10. And third, what a bunch of cheapskates! [I did appreciate being told up-front that it would take 10 minutes, though. Points for that, at least.]

I might have done the survey if they’d offered a night away as their prize. Or a car.

Real rewards
A couple of months ago, I got a survey enclosed in my electricity bill. 5 questions. If I answered them and sent it back inside a fortnight, they’d knock $10 off my next bill.

Did I do the survey? You bet I did. Took a minute. There was a postage-paid reply envelope. Too easy. Happy to help.

Money for nothing?
So whether you’re offering a prize or an up-front reward, make sure you’re not just taking your web visitors (or real-world visitors) for granted. Doing real market research costs money. If you want to involve your users or community, don’t take the piss. You can still get a cheap deal, but offering the slimmest of chances of winning a $150 music player doesn’t really cut it.

Got an in-store competition? That’s great! But the same rules apply. Make the prize worth it.

Not like this in-store window display that I saw recently… Is there anything sadder than a sad bear offered as a prize to kids with lice and nits?

• Of a high standard?
• On message?
• On brand?
• Compelling?
• Consistent?

ANSWER: Make a style guide.

Ha ha. OK, bad joke. No. Not by creating a style guide. Or not only by doing that, anyhow.

And using spell checkers doesn’t really help either.

It’s all about communication. People engaged in content creation (text, design, video, etc) need to understand more than just the subject matter to create effective content.

They need to be brand experts and brand ambassadors. They need to understand:

• Voice: Who is the content from? Is it an organisation or a person? How should the content be seen by the audience?
• Context: Where will the content be placed? What will be next to it? Will it be reused in different contexts?
• Audience: Who will read it? When and why? Are there particular search terms being targeted that help identify who the likely consumer of the content is?
• Influence/Outcome: What are consumers of the content meant to do after they are finished?
• Search and Find: How should the content be structured to enable users to find it, and then to read it easily?

It’s only after all of these questions are answered that content creators can go about their business.

After that, it’s all about talent (which can’t be taught) and technique (which can). Oh, and a style guide.

Do your content creators (in-house or external) have all the information they need?

Lanier: Web 2.0 is anti-humanist
Jaron Lanier, the virtual reality and avatar trailblazer (and philosopher and multi-instrumentalist) has recently published a book called You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. In this sweeping book about individuals, culture and the Web, he argues that the Web 2.0 revolution in online social networking and collaboration is a problem. A BIG problem.

According to Lanier, sites like Wikipedia, Facebook and even Amazon are anti-humanist: they elevate the ‘wisdom of crowds’ and the power of advertiser-driven algorithms above the discriminating judgement of individual people. They create a ‘hive mind’ that leaves little room for individual expression, let alone an environment that respects such creativity.

The root cause of this is the design of technology. First, Lanier claims that we, as users, get ‘locked in’; we have to conform to a particular ‘relationship status’ on Facebook; Wikipedia becomes an authority, even though it is written by anonymous contributors; if you bought this book, you should buy that book; etc.

Propelled by 1960s anti-government paranoia, technologists designed the Internet to be anonymous. And because of this, the online world (and especially Web 2.0 manifestations of it) is riddled with trolls who can easily and cynically shut down reasonable conversations, and who have created an environment (and tools) that devalue individual artistic accomplishment (“Content wants to be free”, copyright infringement, etc).

SXSW - Rushkoff: Program or Be Programmed
In a zeitgeisty moment, at last week’s South by Southwest tech event, Douglas Rushkoff – post-McLuhan media theorist, one-time cyberpunk and the pioneer of ‘social currency’ – gave an address titled Program or Be Programmed: 10 Commands for a Digital Age.

You can read lots of descriptions of the talk (here, here and here for example). Interestingly, many of Rushkoff’s ideas intersect with Lanier’s book.

The overarching theme is that, rather than ask how we can use technology, we should be asking what we can make technology do for us. Jaron Lanier called it being ‘locked in’. Rushkoff says that if the Web is something we consume, rather than create, that’s a problem. A BIG problem. “If we create a society that is programmed, we will be the users and most importantly, the used.”

Other big ideas:

• The Web can be happily asynchronous, so why are we ‘always on’ and demanding synchronous communication?
• Why do we send text messages to the person sitting next to us?
• Facebook (and others) promotes forced choice. What’s your relationship status? Feel free not to opt in to this. (Rushkoff says that withholding choice does not denote failure. It reminds me of that great line from Richard Linklater’s 1991 movie Slacker : “Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy”.)
• Anonymity promotes facelessness, polarisation and a lack of consequence.
• Contact is King, not content. Rushkoff says, “Social marketing is an oxymoron”.
• Nothing is free. Don’t steal. It breaks the social contract.

Overly negative? Maybe a bit. These guys were born in 1960 and 1961, and have been technical pioneers; they’ve seen a bit.

Are they jaded oldies who are getting in the way of the cool kids, or wise elders in a world that needs just this kind of introspection and critique?

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