The case for thoughtful content

We are all publishers now. The internet allows any organization or individual to instruct, inform, and connect. But with this comes a responsibility to think before we post and consider the reasons we’re sharing.

Think of all the content a typical marketing department produces and maintains: email campaigns, blog posts, comments and responses, user reviews for every product, and materials spanning print and digital channels as well as sales associates and customer service representatives.

At Madeo, when we launch a website, begin a blog, or post on social media, we’ve become a publisher. But the publishing opportunities made possible by the internet also come with real challenges. A publisher would never consider starting with design and then throwing in content at the last minute. Yet that is what often happens on the web.

As Jeffrey MacIntyre, content and editorial strategist, put it, “to those of us who work daily and intimately with words, the phrase ‘lorem ipsum’ sounds out a special kind of death.”

“Lorem ipsum, that loyal chum of designers, is the placeholder signaling text-goes-here the world around. Text goes here, that is, in this ominous black box. It works, after a fashion: it gives us a valuable feel for the contours of a webpage, providing an undifferentiated pour of words down a page’s columns. It also distills copy down to an ornament, making decorations of our content assets and all but insisting the content will sort itself.”

— Jeffrey MacIntyre

Content, of course,  will not sort itself out. Digital experiences are built around content, and we’ve become so enmeshed in these environments that it’s easy to forget that content isn’t just born. It does not just appear. Just as traditional publishers plan far in advance, hire teams of professionals, and put in place established processes, digital content must be consciously planned, created, and maintained.

Editorial Strategy

These are challenges faced even by content-first organizations. Recently Jeremy Zilar, former designer and editorial strategist at The New York Times, spoke on a panel at HUGE. Hired by the design team in 2006 to help tackle blogs, he quickly discovered that much of his work was not in the designing and building, which was actually pretty straight-forward.

90% of his time was spent on strategy—making sure the editors understood these new tools alongside best practices and thoguht about how to shape an online brand that made sense within the construct of The New York Times.

Instead, he found himself spending 90% of his time on strategy—making sure the editors understood these new tools alongside best practices, and thinking about how to shape an online brand that made sense within the construct of The New York Times. This meant asking questions like: What’s its reach? What’s its volume? How many posts? How many authors? What’s the focus? Business? Tech? How is it going to enter the market and respond to what’s going on?

The answers to these questions informed how the vehicle for publishing was then built, and ultimately Jeremy brought together a team of designers and engineers to better support that type of ongoing conversation within the organization.

Defining Communication Goals

Often though, strategy does not win the day, and design dominates the conversation. Within an agency setting, at Madeo, we know this well: A client may want to update the look of their website, make it more modern and sleek, add a blog, infographics, a video of company culture—all good things—but we sometimes fail to step back and ask…why?

In order to measure the success of a project, you need to set clear communication goals. Because if you can’t define a vague and subjective request like “modern”, you can’t deliver it.

Enter the content strategist. She works with the client to discover and define these communication goals and priorities.

Margot Bloomstein, discusses one valuable technique in her book: creating a message architecture. A message architecture is a hierarchy of communication goals that takes the form of attributes appearing in order of priority, typically in an outline used to develop a cohesive, consistent user experience.

She points to MOO, the charismatic custom printing company recognized for a unique and engaging user experience. And one of the ways the organization accomplishes this is by never breaking character, by ensuring that the brand comes through in every touchpoint and interaction, from a confirmation email to product packaging, to something as small as an error message. Case in point:

From: Little MOO | Print Robot <noreply@moo.com>

Hello

I’m Little MOO—the bit of software that will be managing your order with moo.com. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will print it for you in the next few days. I’ll let you know when it’s done and on its way to you. You can track and manage your order from the accounts section at https://www.secure.moo.com/account. Remember, I’m just a bit of software. So, if you have any questions regarding your order please first read our Frequently Asked Questions at http://www.moo.com/help/ and if you’re still not sure, contact customer service (who are real people) at https://www.secure.moo.com/service/.

Thanks,

Little MOO, Print Robot

This friendly and approachable tone is maintained throughout all interactions. If we were to envision what their message architecture would look like, it would be something like this:

Cheeky

Witty and fun

Young without being childish

Customer oriented and responsive

Approachable, friendly, welcoming

Championing and empowering

Helpful

Accessible

Unlike brand values, which are more indicative of a company’s credo, a message architecture outlines how the company communicates with its intended audience. Brand values, such as MOO’s, which include design, innovation, and community, while inspiring, don’t indicate priority. A message architecture goes beyond a mission or vision to offer a strategy that is specific to communication and actionable.

In addition to prioritization, concrete and shared terminology gives a message architecture its value. That means getting past edicts like “make us look traditional!” when one stakeholder’s “traditional” is another’s “experienced,” or “conservative,” or “American.”

— Margot Bloomstein

So when a client asks for traditional, we don’t just deliver a muted color palette but keep digging: Why do they want to seem traditional? Is there a larger challenge? Does the competition depict them as young and unreliable? The communication goals are somewhere in the answers to these questions.

Substance and Value

At the same panel mentioned earlier, Sue Apfelbaum, former editorial director for AIGA and author, posed the question, how do really good content experiences happen? The web has allowed for a staggering amount of published content. “My heart goes out to people who have to keep up with that frenetic pace of publishing,” she said. “I personally don’t know how to do it, which is part of why I stepped back into strategy. I like time to develop content. I like time to produce things that matter…with digital maybe you can be a little more disposable, but I still personally recommend putting things out into the world that have substance and value.”

Substance follows intention. So let’s step back before we jump in and ask who, what, where, how often, and that big one — why.

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Written by Rachel Bronstein