The value of content

Manage the tasks, not the content

The people who come to your website aren’t interested in your content—they’re interested in their task. They want to complete it quickly and easily, reading as little as possible. If you have a mature website, 90% of its content is probably useless. Worse than useless, it’s annoying people and getting in the way.

Sadly, giving a website to a content professional is like giving a pub to an alcoholic. It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it? As writers who love words and big books, we have to remember that we are not the customer.

Gerry's presentation will discuss how to manage the tasks to make websites successful. He'll talk through his approach called Top Task Management. It will help you do two things:

1. Identify the top tasks of your customers.
2. Measure how well these tasks are performing.

It’s time to add task management to our content strategy repertoire.

Topic: The value of content →

How did we all get here?

This is the big content strategy experiment: the story of one man’s quest to map the farthest reaches of the discipline.

In the months leading up to CS Forum, Richard will engage the content strategy community in the creation of a diagram which will map the different paths we’ve taken to get here and, at the same time, shed some light on how our diverse skills and experiences can be applied to the modern web team.

In this presentation, Richard will present the final diagram and talk about the exciting, torturous, and satisfying community-driven process that led to it. (Read the post announcing the project on Richard’s blog.)

What you’ll learn

1. Where our skills and experiences can be applied within the modern web or project team.
2. How and where a content strategist can be useful to teams from other disciplines.
3. How difficult it is to reach large-scale consensus.

Topic: The value of content →

Is your content worth it? Prove it.

Unless you’re publishing blank HTML pages, you have content. But what’s the value of your content? What content are you measuring, and is it achieving its goals? How are you allocating funding and resources for content, and why?

For many organisations these questions are answered by a “gut check”, or worse—they aren’t asked at all. Imagine what would happen if you knew that your images were outperforming your videos by 300%. What processes would you change? How would you reallocate funding? How much could you save on production and storage costs?

Marko will help you prove what content is and isn’t working on your site by teaching a simple, proven, and repeatable process for understanding the goals of your content and creating easy-to-use success metrics.

What you’ll learn

1. Basic content measurement metrics.
2. How to align your messaging and measurement to your content goals.
3. How to set up a content measurement programme.

Topic: The value of content →

Cut the crap: why deleting is improving

Content is a critical business asset, but having too much content leads to disaster. Put your website on a diet—like Norwegian telco-giant Telenor, who reduced their content by 80%, resulting in increased sales, more self service, and improved customer satisfaction.

Ove will show how content-driven development drastically improves the quality of both the content itself, and the design and information architecture. He’ll discuss why collaborating with information architects, interaction designers, and developers is crucial, and ask what lean and agile approaches can teach us about content strategy.

What you’ll learn

1. How to prioritise and define core content.
2. How to encourage learning and collaboration between writers in a big corporation.
3. Tools and tactics to avoid becoming an information dump for the rest of the organisation.

Topic: The value of content →

Developing an analytics strategy for your content

Without context, our data is meaningless.

Measurement is the “so what?” of content strategy, letting us evaluate content quality, including the efficacy of communications, usability, SEO, branding, and user experience design. Web analytics is crucial: it identifies how users interact with our content, informing content audits, analysis, and governance. But standard dashboard metrics aren’t sufficient. Real insight depends on context—so we need an analytics strategy.

Rick will explain how to develop an analytics strategy with methods for assessing content quality. Understand how to define useful, contextually relevant metrics and KPIs that support your content strategy and governance plan; evaluate content types and delivery channels; measure conversions and engagement; identify influence and reach; and enable website owners to adapt to evolving business and user goals.

What you’ll learn

1. How web analytics can inform the elements of content strategy, including audits, analysis, and governance.
2. How to align website goals with meaningful metrics that enable decision-makers to maintain effective web content.
3. How to demonstrate the value of quality content that meets business objectives and user needs.

Topic: The value of content →