Content 911

Need to know what users want in your web site? Just ask!

Learn how user research--including surveys, focus groups, interviews, online user testing or formal lab testing--can give you priceless insight into your users' needs and preferences.

Start planning the next version of your web site the right way. By learning more about what your target customers need, you'll design your site to meet their needs and will be able to focus on items with the highest potential ROI.

Read the rest of this article about how Flair Interactive can help you with all of your user research needs.

The iPad, the Kindle, and the Future of Books : The New Yorker

Excellent recap of the history between Amazon.com, Apple and traditional publishing houses by Ken Auletta at The New Yorker. This has forever changed my view of Amazon!

As a writer, avid reader, former magazine editor and someone who's kept a close eye on the emergence of ebooks and Amazon's domination of that market, I found this article really interesting. Here at Flair, we've definitely seen digital publishing, social networking and Web 2.0 technologies become much more visible pieces of our clients' projects and overall marketing strategies during the last few years.

On the morning of January 27th—an aeon ago, in tech time—Steve Jobs was to appear at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in downtown San Francisco, to unveil Apple’s new device, the iPad. Although speculation about the device had been intense, few in the audience knew yet what it was called or exactly what it would do, and there was a feeling of expectation in the room worthy of the line outside the grotto at Lourdes. Hundreds of journalists and invited guests, including Al Gore, Yo-Yo Ma, and Robert Iger, the C.E.O. of Disney, milled around the theatre, waiting for Jobs to appear. The sound system had been playing a medley of Bob Dylan songs; it went quiet as the lights came up onstage and Jobs walked out, to the crowd’s applause.

via www.newyorker.com

Taxonomy Boot Camp

Still Time to Register for Taxonomy Boot Camp 2009!

We talk a lot about strategies for making your content, site and company visible to your customers and target audiences. We extoll the virtues of building a great taxonomy for your site, as well as leveraging strategies and tools to improve search engine hits and drive traffic to your site. We even attend events like this to keep our insights fresh.

Since your site taxonomy is one of the key strategies for making your site known, consider spending the time to listen to the experts at Taxonomy Boot Camp on November 19-20. You can still register at:

http://www.taxonomybootcamp.com/2009/

At Taxonomy Boot Camp 2009 attendees will learn about:

• Creating and implementing successful taxonomies
• Enhancing your information infrastructure with the right taxonomy
• Taxonomy design concepts and strategies
• New technologies & tools and where the market is headed
• Selecting the right metadata, taxonomy approach, and tools for your environment
• Evaluating auto-categorization schemes and tools
• Managing the build, buy, or automate decision
• Working collaboratively with your content and stakeholders
• Case studies, lessons learned, and best practices
• Measuring and demonstrating the business impact and ROI
• Managing and growing a taxonomy

Come back and let us know about your experience at this boot camp, or let us know how you're using taxonomies for your site already.

Stephanie Bach

UX Lead

Flair Interactive Services Inc.

Web Content Management: Inconvenient Truths and Industry Challenges

There is no best web content management system. But there is probably a good Web CMS for what you’re trying to do. With that, we kicked-off a heated debate on Inconvenient truths and unsolved WCM industry challenges at the J.Boye 2009 conference in chilly Aarhus, DK.

via www.cmswire.com

Great summary of notes from CMS Wire for the "Inconvenient truths and unsolved WCM industry challenges" session from the J. Boye 2009 conference. I love the fact that user experience improvements are noted as a must-have requirement for the web content management (WCM) industry, particularly open source tools.

I'm also glad to see the recognition that matrices and Excel charts should not be used to compare and analyze WCM tools during the selection process. See our blog post about this topic, "Why You Don't Need a Detailed CMS Comparison Chart."

What are your thoughts on what's working and what's not in WCM today?

Lisa Kirschner
Founder and Managing Director, Flair Interactive Services Inc.
Managing Editor, Content 911 Blog

Viral Content is King!

Here's a GREAT article on viral content, and why it matters beyond social media circles:

http://www.dailyblogtips.com/5-reasons-why-viral-content-is-the-new-king/

What is ‘viral’ content?

"Seth Godin coined the term 'viral' as it applies to ideas. Viral content is:

• Easy to understand
• Worth sharing and talking about
• Simple to spread and share
• Rewarding to share"

Viral posts are meant to be shared and designed to drive traffic. Although its beginnings can be found in social media, creating viral content--including video, articles and live discussions--is just as applicable to traditional web sites. As viral content becomes increasingly more popular, it plays an important role in search engine optimization strategies, since the more other sites link to yours, the higher your search engine rankings can be.

Have you seen viral content in action? How has it worked for you? Share!

Stephanie Bach
UX Lead
Flair Interactive Services Inc.

Optimizing Your CMS for Search Engines--on a Dime

It seems that everyone is playing the SEO game these days, and with all the players out there (such as Google, Bing! and Yahoo!), getting swept up in the pay-per-click model can cost big bucks over time. How to make the most of your CMS tool and your budget--and still get great returns from search engine traffic? Start with 'homegrown' tactics before you tackle PPC.

Our fellow content gurus at Beansbox in Hong Kong say it best:

• Utilize built-in CMS tools for optimizing meta data, title tags and URL structures
• Optimize content pages, looking at keyword density and the location of keywords on each page
• Cross-link heavily within your own site, and encourage partners, vendors and customers to link to your site from their own

http://www.beansbox.com/blog/what-is-cms-and-how-to-optimize-cms-for-search-engines/

Not only can these tips increase search engine hits--and hopefully your site's success--you can leverage the features and functionality built into the CMS investment that you've already made.

Any other great 'homegrown' tips out there?

Share them with us!

Stephanie Bach
UX Lead
Flair Interactive Services Inc.

Winning Over Your CMS Content Contributors

Over the years, we've worked with numerous CMS tools--from enterprise-level to open source and homegrown tools. The bells and whistles may differ from product to product, but the challenge of training and managing content contributors remains universal: How to make the process of managing content easier and more compliant, even if users are not 'technically inclined'?

Here are our best tips:

-Customize training materials to your organization, and make materials readily available to all contributors via the CMS, a shared drive or your intranet. A step-by-step format works best for new users. Be sure to update these materials regularly.

-Create and update a style guide that provides proper usage for company terminology, voice and tone. Encourage 'approvers' to follow these guidelines for every post. Your marketing, communications or IT department may already have a style guide that you can utilize.

-Create a 'cheat sheet' or checklist for content contributors to follow each time they create or edit a content posting. The checklist should contain tips for maximizing content contributions, rather than a step-by-step instruction guide. Examples include: 'Add meta data which contains keywords based on the content topic,' 'Add hyperlinks to other pages within the site as relevant to the content and to the user,' etc.

-Stay connected. Solicit contributor feedback and provide FAQs, tips or other information to aid users in troubleshooting and problem-solving.

We've worked with the team at CrownPeak, who have this to say:

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/9433.imc

Providing internal support and training for your content authors may mean the difference between good content and great content, and will make contributors feel like they're part of your CMS team.

Let us know what challenges you're having as you train and manage content contributors for your CMS.

Stephanie Bach
UX Lead
Flair Interactive Services Inc.

Developing an Effective CMS Style Guide

You've selected a new content management system (CMS) for your Web site and you're ready to start implementing it. One of the things you should really think about at this point is how to make sure all of your pages maintain a consistent style. Given free reign, everyone who sets up new pages and loads content could find a different way to do it--unless you've given them clear guidelines.

To some extent, CMS page templates will determine the overall layout and specific style elements, but most CMS tools allow page authors a certain amount of flexibility regarding formatting fonts and inserting graphics.  This is why it's important to have a style guide that provides direction in all of these gray areas.

The keys to developing an effective style guide are simple, but important to keep in mind:

Develop and distribute your style guide early

Determine which elements in each template could be open to interpretation and state your rules for these in as much detail as possible. Ideally, the style guide will be distributed before any content is loaded...if not, a lot of time can be wasted re-working the pages. Make sure everyone with authoring permission gets a copy--and uses it.

Be as specific as possible

The more detailed you can be, the less chance you have of someone misinterpreting your style guide. As a test, ask someone unfamiliar with the guide to build sample pages using it. You'll quickly find out if you've provided enough detail.

Include visual examples

Wherever possible, insert screen grabs or links to pages with examples of the correct style. As the old saying goes, "a picture is worth a thousand words."

Keep it up to date

Make updates as often as necessary, including when new page templates are created or when you see new issues finding their way into pages. As hard as you try, you won't be able to identify all of the style issues that will ultimately need to be addressed when you're creating the first version of your style guide. People will constantly surprise you with new ways to be inconsistent. Add these elements to your style guide as they arise.

Using a CMS style guide that follows these basic tips will not only keep your site looking professional, but will also save your organization the time and effort required to update pages that were not loaded correctly the first time around.

If you have a CMS style guide success story or additional tips you'd like to share, we'd love to hear them.

Barb Conway
User Experience Lead
Flair Interactive Services Inc.

What You Can Learn about Content by Riding a Unicycle

Seth Godin has written a great post on learning to ride a unicycle:

The reason riding a unicycle is difficult

Why is this relevant to you, Content 911's readers? Think about it...

If you write web content, you need to gain your readers' trust. You want to help them get them over their fear that they'll waste precious time by reading your carefully crafted words, clicking through to another page or buying from you.

You need to convince them that they'll get something in return...either learning new information, finding answers to a business need or pain point, discovering a product or service that will save them time, saving money or possibly all of the above. If you make the falling part easy for them, they'll be more likely to ride with you.

Likewise, if you've ever worked on a content management system (CMS) implementation, you'll undoubtedly see the analogies here right away...

Most CMS vendors will tell you that their product will allow "anyone" or "non-technical users" to start building pages instantly. But as you've now learned through the school of hard knocks, it takes time for content managers, authors and editors to learn a new CMS tool (or any software tool, for that matter). It takes patience, practice and a little bit of effort to remember how to make the wheels turn the right way...seamlessly and with little effort.

And most good CMS tools out there have multiple paths you can take to accomplish a single task. Only with practice and diligence will you learn to recognize which is the right approach for your given CMS tasks or goals each day. If you're lucky enough to find a CMS consultant or vendor who can help you "learn" how to use your CMS, your uphill climb will be easier and you'll be riding on your own in no time.

What are your thoughts? How else do you see this analogy relating to web content management, strategy and development--or interactive marketing in general?

We look forward to hearing from you.

Lisa Kirschner
Managing Editor, Content 911 Blog
Founder and Managing Director, Flair Interactive Services Inc.