Here are the slides the panel put together for the Adobe Day Europe discussion on “Assisting the millennial user – challenges and opportunities in the decade ahead”. We didn’t get time to cover all of the topics in the time we had available (unfortunately some of the previous speakers overran their time slots).
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In yesterday’s post, How technical content on the Web is turning traditional marketing strategy on its head, we discussed the importance of technical content to today’s marketing funnel. You might be thinking, show me more evidence.
Kathy Sierra famously summed up most marketing departments’ approach to content in this slide:
To paraphrase her, the website and brochure are a thing of beauty, while the user manual is a thing of boredom.
There’s been an interesting series of posts recently by Tom Johnson on enabling users to navigate through content in lots of ways (instead of just providing them with a Table of Contents and a search box).
It’s the type of approach used by sites such as Ravelry.com. Ravelry is a popular social networking site, with over 3 million users, for people who like to knit. It has sophisticated faceted navigation and search capabilities that mean users can search for the ideal knitting project in lots of different way.
You can search by type of pattern: cardigan, socks, dress, and so on. You can also search by type of yarn. For example, if you have 4 metres of two ply lace, it will show you the patterns which require that type and length of yarn. In fact, you can search by lots of different factors, such as the type of knitting needles you have, the level of difficulty and the users’ ratings of each patterns.
This approach works well if you have content that follows a predictable structure: if your content could be entered by filling in fields in a form or a database.
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Adrian Baniak has written an article (3 Ways to Engage with Today’s Empowered Consumer) about how brands can “cut through the clutter” and communicate with their customers and prospect. He states one of the key ways to do this is “Write Your Own Tale, Or Someone Else Will Do It First”.
This mantra was originally made by Lisa Shalett, a partner at Goldman Sachs, and the global head of brand marketing and digital strategy. Continue reading
You’ll find our latest post for the Society for Technical Communication on its Notebook blog. It’s called Letter from the UK: Learning from Netflix:
“Netflix can track and analyse, in minute detail, the behaviour of every person who watches a programme on its service. The rumour is that Netflix used its “big data” to decide what would be the best programme to make for its audience …. In some cases, unfortunately, technical publications teams are more in the dark about their customers than the TV networks.”
Last night I saw presentations at the Content Strategy London Meetup from Rob Hinchcliffe (a community strategist), and Sara Treewater (Content project lead for Citi Private Bank’s Web and Mobile team) in which they both mentioned relationship marketing and how it was influencing content strategy.
If your marketing and sales strategy focuses on developing a relationship with your customers and prospects, it makes sense your pre- and post- sales content (such as user documentation) sustains and builds relationships as well. Joe Gollner has called this “relationship content”. This may mean giving people an opportunity to comment, and supplement, your user documentation. In other words, moving from a monologue to a dialogue.
This can be challenging for organisations, particularly for those where there are compliance and regulatory considerations. However, there may be little choice but to do this. Rob Hinchcliffe said in his presentation that, today, content is everywhere. There are unofficial information sources where Google will direct users, if you do not provide content that’s relevant and useful.
If this relationship goes further, you can gain a significant insight into how each individual customer and prospect behaves, and start to disrupt your industry sector. We discuss this in our latest post on the STC’s Notebook blog (we’ll post a link once the post has been published).
Below is the video recording of my lightning talk at the London Content Strategy Meetup February 2013: