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Contented Management

Contented Management

A 2011 retrospective

Eyes looking back

When you reach the end of a sprint, you look back and consider what went well, what went badly and what can be improved. There’s a similar process for waterfall projects when you produce a lessons learned report to share with the rest of the PMO. While I’m sure you floccinaucinihilipilificate about this company’s 12-month performance, allow me to highlight three things I’ve noticed come to the fore in the last 12 months.

You need to demonstrate the tangible benefits your project will deliver as quickly as possible.

Of course, this has always been true. But the pressure to be lean and value-driven is greater than ever, driven I think not just by wider economics but also because the technologies we work with are more mature and with that, so are customer expectations.

Many people are in the third or fourth significant implementation of a content management system, whether for web or across the enterprise. Marketers have already made their initial forays into social media. Not seeing returns on information systems or web engagement simply isn’t good enough. So before putting their hands in their pockets, they’re quite rightly asking what they’re going to get back. As an industry, we need to answer that question quickly and credibly.

Events are being stretched.

People are increasingly participating in events from a distance and after they’ve finished. Television has stretched beyond the screen by broadcasting with hashtags which allow an audience – not all of whom are actually watching – to discuss programme content beyond the control of the programme’s producers. Whether this is music or politics, it’s a long way from the controlled comments policies of newspaper discussion forums. Huge numbers of people are using tablets and smart phones to communicate as they watch TV.

This applies to football matches too, whether from the armchair or the stadium; and very much to music, be it at a festival or on Spotify. The discussion extends way beyond the geography and the duration of the event; supported by the fact that the media doesn’t need to be watched there and then either. There’s gold in those hills, I just haven’t figured out how to extract it yet…

We could understand our market a lot better if we just took the time.

Sales people and analysts have been harping on about big data as the next big thing without too much detail around what it is or why it’s useful. But consider this. People now reveal huge amounts of personal information under highly obfuscated terms and conditions. If you could join up Facebook profiles, Flickr, Amazon, loyalty cards, credit ratings, browser history, and online social interactions, you’d have an incredibly complex and potentially frighteningly accurate picture of your market and how to sell to them.

If you’re a D2C organsiation or want to become one, getting that kind of data and being able to process it in a meaningful way is going to make your current online engagement look… well, pretty poor. Start thinking now about how you can get more data legally and how you might exploit it to reveal business information that will give you a competitive advantage. You can be sure that if you don’t, your competitors will.

Philippe Parker on , , | 21 December 2011 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

The marriage of content strategy and online engagement

Wedding cake

Some people seemed a bit miffed by my last post. All that silence and then I say their product’s not as beautiful as some others. But as Arsène Wenger said, “Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home.”
Well I’m not in the business of software-bashing. I deal with clients who have complex systems that they’re trying to get the most of in order to boost their business. So I do want to highlight a point in the last post that some readers seemed to have missed: Tridion is a really useful tool for supporting a content strategy.

What do I mean by that? Well, as Brain Traffic tells us:

Content strategy plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.

And isn’t that what you want WCM software to do? I’ve recommended Tridion on the basis that it gives web managers good visibility over who owns content on the site and where it should belong, as well as providing powerful ways to devolve ownership. There are few products that do this as well as Tridion in my opinion; although I seem to be in a minority when I say that I like the way TeamSite does it too.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like everything about the product. User interface may be a matter of personal taste (and one of the posts that I still haven’t written questions how important editorial UI is anyway). But I’m yet to see a really good demonstration of a product that supports both content strategy and customer engagement in an integrated way. I’ve seen bits and pieces in different products, but:

  • where are the security and content-type models that we see for standard content being applied to UGC?
  • where’s the personalisation of content based on a visitor’s publicly-shared profile, e.g. Twitter and Facebook?
  • how are you tailoring your website content to relevant trends on the rest of web?
  • how are the performance ratings of your page content then reflected in the way other users navigate content? Does your WCM even let you track those KPIs?
  • can you promote content to a visitor based on what other people – and most specifically people that they trust – found useful or enjoyed?

Those are just examples, but fundamentally I think vendors have found this kind of integrated content engagement strategy a challenge because WCM and UGC approached content from polar opposites. I don’t think they’re wholly incompatible, but I think we’re still in an earlier stage of evolution than most vendors would want to acknowledge.

So let’s just say that true web engagement on content-driven sites is still somewhat immature, as I would suggest that there are others who might prefer to express that more robustly.

Philippe Parker on , | 16 December 2011 | Tweet this |

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My threepence for 2011

I can’t help myself. It’s New Year and that means some kind of retrospective, and indeed preview. I’ve been working a lot less with off-the-shelf CMS and doing a lot more work involving custom-built web applications. I’ve no idea if this is reflective of a wider market trend but I thought I’d share three things that I’ve seen in the past year which I think will become even more important over the next 12 months.

1953 Thrupenny bit

1. Content management applies to off-site content too

It’s all very well thinking about content as the “stuff” people in your organisation create in repositories that you control. But there’s a really big issue. There’s a whole load of content that’s not in your repositories that you need to deal with. From an internal operations perspective, this is the tacit knowledge and the documents that people take outside your office when they leave each day and doesn’t come back until they return. From an external marketing perspective, this is the content that people outside your organisation are creating on platforms you don’t control: Facebook, Twitter, blog posts. Just getting a handle on what’s going on strikes fear into many. But exploiting this off-site content will bring huge benefits to your organisation.

2. The web is a competition

Look at all the online reputation tools out there like Klout and We Follow. Isn’t online participation just a competition where the brands with the biggest reach have the largest social market capitalisation? It used to be about whether you appeared on the first page of Google’s search results, but now we can measure influence and advocacy in other ways too. The web encourages you to ensure that your online presence exceeds those of your competitors. The services that you offer need to tap into that mindset if they’re going to be successful. But you also need to consider what tangible returns you make on raising your web profile. It’s a competition, there are trophies, but is there a cash prize?

3. Designers need to think a lot harder about multi-platform

While people who’re engaged in heavy content entry will continue to use devices with comfortable physical keyboards, we’re obviously going to see even more use of mobile phones and tablets. This means smaller screens, touch screen controls and often, slower performance. Designers who are constantly trying to cram ever richer user experiences onto a page are going to fail their audiences if they don’t consider how people on slow connections can download media, or interact with fiddly HTML buttons. It’s no good expecting the device browsers to be clever enough to handle your designs well. Test-driven interface design is going to be essential.

Philippe Parker on | 5 January 2011 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Your website shall go the ball

Is yours a Cinderella website? Does it have an inner beauty that’s hidden away in some corner of the internet that potential Prince Charmings never visit? Does it suffer at the hands of a step-mother whose only interest is self-aggrandisement rather than nurturing their charge?

Get your website out of the scullery!

Promoting your web presence isn’t about just finding some kind of SEO godmother so you can trend on Twitter or make a splash on Google. You need to have content that’s stimulating, up-to-date and relevant to your target audience. If you simply tart up your presentation and wave it under people’s noses, your website will be about as popular as the ugly sisters.

So how do you get to the ball?

1. Make your content presentable.

Cleanse, freshen, and exfoliate! Remove anything that’s unsightly or redundant, accentuate your positive features by promoting them in your navigation and ensure that your design is focussed on your users’ needs.

2. Get out and network.

Once you have a website you think people will want to visit, you’ll need some kind of vehicle for getting your website in front of them. The channels that you use will depend on your target audience, but clearly SEO, social networking profiles and non-web media are all legitimate ways of getting yourself noticed. Unlike Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage, however, there needs to be honesty in the way you promote yourself. Habitat shot themselves in the foot recently by tagging their sales tweets with keywords about the Iranian election. Similarly if people are drawn to your website because it has popular but irrelevant keyword matches, they’re not going to hang around for long.

3. Keep that glass slipper.

Once you’ve got people to visit your site and experience your well-presented content, you need something to keep them coming back. RSS feeds are an obvious way of doing this, but you need to keep publishing good content if you want the party to carry on past midnight.

There’s not much point in having a website that’s an ugly sister – in your face but unattractive – or that’s beautiful but unknown. Every little website can grow up to be a princess if you can just show off its inner beauty.

Some further reading:

As a brief aside, did you know that Cinderella’s name comes from having her behind covered in cinders because she used to sit in the chimney to keep warm? And that her slippers were made from squirrel fur: vair in French, converted to verre (glass) by Charles Perrault to make the story more magical. Honest, guv’nor.

Philippe Parker on , | 26 June 2009 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Persona non grata

These days, most content-managed websites are familiar with the concept of user-centric design. You don’t present your information in a way that mirrors your organisation; you focus on your audience’s requirements and how they can meet their goals on your website.

But how should you go about this design process? There are a bewildering array of techniques that fall under the general heading of usability.

At the most basic level, you can employ an expert. Someone with extensive experience of designing customer-focussed websites is going to be of a lot more value than a non-specialist. This is a quick way to get up and running.

To give the specialist some structure, you should provide heuristics about what you want your site to achieve. The expert can then analyse your site against these heuristics and tell you if it’s likely to meet your objectives.

This is still pretty subjective stuff, so the next step would be to develop persona: constructed character profiles which represent the kind of visitors you have on your site. You can then test your site’s objectives against these user profiles.

A more tangible way of doing this is to test the objectives against real people: recruit people from your user base and test their interaction with your site in a lab, or using a multivariate testing tool. There are many agencies which conduct this user testing, but it’s often difficult to get enough users to be truly representative sample.

Probably the most solid basis for user-centred design is to consider your website traffic analytics: click-throughs, bounce rates and page hot spots. This requires considerable investment in technology and analysis. These techniques all bring value, but with diminishing returns based on the effort and cost you need to commit.

Which one is right for you? The table below provides a very cursory guide.

Type of website Testing technique
Simple web presence where web is not a business channel
Do these sites even exist anymore?		 Expert design
Brochureware: marketing-driven, but not the primary selling channel. Heuristic evaluation
Large, content-driven news or information sites. Persona development
Complex regulatory information or self-service intranet / extranet. User testing
eCommerce / point-of-sale website. Analytics-based

All the techniques will provide you with some return on investment, but it’s only the more complex or commercially-driven content that’s likely to benefit from serious user testing or analytics.

Some further reading on usability and persona development:

Philippe Parker on | 13 May 2009 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Confucius, on user-centric design

Perhaps the longest-standing philosophical text from China known to Europeans are the Analects. These discuss filial respect and devotion, self-betterment and how the state can best exploit individual skills. There’s a running theme of humility as an essential virtue, and this is a quality that is prodigiously important in web interface design.

The sage, Confucius tells us, is not afflicted by men not knowing him, but is afflicted by not knowing men. Translate this to a website and you should see that we shouldn’t be affected by not being able to disseminate our range of services, just so long as our users can access them simply.

There’s no point in showing how artfully you can put your brand across on your website if your audience can’t use it. Consequently, you need to base your designs on real user experiences and continue to revise them based on their interactions with your site.

  1. Start by conducting paper-prototyping to determine requirements.
  2. Test wireframes and user journeys on real people.
  3. Continue to monitor the design by implementing continual soft changes and evaluating their impact.

A good website responds to its audience.

More on China and WCM to follow.

Philippe Parker on | 19 August 2008 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Create a commercial persona

There’s a lot of stuff on the web about knowing your audience. It’s pretty obvious really: understand who the people are who visit your site, the kind of people who you want to attract to your site, and provide content and services to them in a way they understand. The process for doing this is well-documented too. You may already have developed a number of personae to represent your audience, but have you created a persona who will pay money to be associated with your site?

Your readership and advertisers may have surprisingly divergent requirements. Advertisers aren’t necessarily interested in your audience: they’re interested in your audience’s money and in their own reputation. We’ve all been to deeply unattractive sites with great content (this site may well be one of them) and we’re satisfied with the look and feel because we know our way around.

But when it comes to advertising your product on an ugly page, it’s a quite different proposition. You can attract loads of traffic to your site, but why would a prestige supplier want to promote their product on an ugly page? Advertisers are attracted by things that are new: rich media, web 2.0 functionality (whatever that may be), boxes with curved edges, regular font sizes in Helvetica… All right, that’s quite a cynical view, but it’s hard to sell space on a site that is visually unattractive.

So even if your audience are telling you that they like the simplicity of your pages, pause to think. If they’ll put up with ugly pages, they’ll put up with beautiful pages as long as the content is good. And if you have beautiful pages, you may even make some money out of your content.

Philippe Parker on | 20 December 2007 | Tweet this |

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Websites are like cars

Visiting a website is just like driving a car.

Or at least it should be. I’ll try not to labour the analogy.

The other evening I was watching the TV programme about cars, Top Gear. The presenters were looking at how long it took to standardise on three pedals in the same order, gear stick, ignition, etc. No one imposed this standard: Cadillac invented the layout and Austin copied it in the 7, a prodigiously popular car that was copied across the world. Ever since, when you get in a new car, you know how to speed up and slow down, irrespective of make and model.

The experience is of course completely different if you’re on the track in a Ferrari, off road in a Land Rover or commuting in a Nissan Micra. And you always need a moment to get your bearings: adjust the mirrors, find the windscreen wipers, gauge the clutch. This — as you probably figured out — is exactly the same for websites.

You should be able to go to any website and know what to do instantly. The experience will be very different on facebook to John Lewis to Dresdner Kleinwort, but the principles remain the same: people need to be able to perform a task in a way that’s obvious. If they have a great experience achieving the task, so much the better; but don’t put obstacles in their way.

What sort of obstacles do I mean? They’re obvious really…

  • Grouping links that don’t belong together, like Print this page and Find out more.
  • Labeling similar functionality differently across the site: e.g. Go / Submit / Enter buttons on forms.
  • Giving your site a name and brand that’s different to your domain name.
  • Challenging a visitor to say who they are in order to get more information, when the distinction is unclear: e.g. Investors / Public.
  • Delaying people with irrelevant promotions (example).
  • Making things that aren’t links look like links, and vice versa.
  • Making people guess how to get to content, either through poor naming of your navigation or through navigation interfaces that show only some of the options.
  • Putting core functionality in different places on your web pages.
  • Having stuff no one uses: empty forums and wikis, folksonomies that aren’t updated, related links that no one follows.
  • Mimicking browser functionality: to increase font sizes, link back in history, bookmark a page.

All right, so these aren’t web standards, but why would you want to do these things differently to every popular website out there? Do you believe that your users are really so different from those of any other website? What’s wrong with following a conventional layout and stamping your own look and feel on it?

To return to our analogy, if I pick up a hire car and the accelerator is on the left, I’m going to hand the keys straight back at the desk; even if it means trading a Bugatti for a Perouda.

Visitors are only ever going to experience your websites if they actually use them.

Philippe Parker on 7 December 2007 | Tweet this |