Content Strategy Myopia: Toward a Toolkit for Better Content

How does our perception of our audience influence the ways we develop content for our university websites? Explore the mistakes made with regard to building content across mediums and identify the ways we can revamp digital content to reflect our actual audiences.

Transcript

1. Content Strategy Myopia:
   Toward a Toolkit for Better
   Content
   #CASEMMW
   Ron Bronson
   

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2. About Ron
   Strategist at large.
   (Service design, digital, UX & product)
   Curator, Aggregate Conference (#GGRGT)
   

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3. “The explosion of digital technologies over the
   past decade has created empowered consumers so
   expert in their use of tools & information they can
   call the shots. Hunting down what they want when
   they want it and getting it delivered to their
   doorsteps at rock bottom price.”
   -Harvard Business Review (Nov. 2015)
   

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4. What is service design?
   

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5. What is service design?
   A collaborative approach to creating
   service experiences from the customer
   perspective. Focused on quality, service
   design helps organizations gain end-to-
   end understanding of their services.
   

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6. What is service design?
   ● People focused
   ● Research based
   ● Iterative
   ● Participatory
   

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7. What is service design?
   ● Tangible
   ● Empathetic
   ● Experiential
   ● Cross-disciplinary
   

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8. In service design, the end is just the beginning.
   

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9. “A business suffers from marketing myopia when
   a company views marketing strictly from the
   standpoint of selling a specific product rather
   than from the standpoint of fulfilling customer
   needs.”
   - Ted Levitt (1960)
   

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10. Some examples
    

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17. So what’s content
    myopia?
    A refusal to see beyond your own
    narrow view of your product &
    audience.
    

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18. The purpose of personas is to create reliable and
    realistic representations of your key audience
    segments for reference.
    

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19. “Stress cases aren’t only about crisis — they apply
    when something mundane goes wrong, too.”
    Eric Meyer + Sara Wachter-Boettcher
    “Design for Real Life”
    

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20. Designing for worst case scenarios
    

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23. Decision Journey
    

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24. Journey Mapping
    

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26. Vocabulary
    ● Frontstage
    ● Backstage
    ● Touchpoints
    ● Service User
    ● Service Provider
    

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27. ● Pain points: places where you know from research or analytics
    that users are currently getting hung up and have to ask
    questions, or are likely to abandon the site or app.
    ● Broken flows: places where the transition between touchpoints,
    or through a specific interaction on a site (like a form), isn’t
    working correctly.
    ● Content gaps: places where a user needs a specific piece of
    content, but you don’t have it—or it’s not in the right place at
    the right time.
    

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34. “Quality, relevant content can't be spotted by an
    algorithm. You can't subscribe to it. You need
    people - actual human beings - to create or curate
    it.”
    -Kristina Halvorson
    

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35. Our content is reactive. We rely on
    third parties to tell us what our users
    are doing or too heavily rely on data to
    translate clicks into experiences.
    

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36. “Why do users or retention or revenue or click-
    through or likes or pages views matter?
    ...What are you trying to do for the world?
    What is the value that a person will get by using
    your product or feature at the end of the day?”
    - Julie Zhuo
    

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37. We create biases toward our imagined
    outcomes. This makes us more likely to
    forget about, or at least minimize, the
    possibility of other outcomes.
    

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38. Takeaway
    

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39. ● Better content means understanding your audiences &
    stakeholders better.
    ● Collaboration is critical. Content isn’t a spectator sport.
    ● Exercises like journey mapping make content strategy
    interactive & involve others.
    ● Demonstrate more skepticism with regard to assumptions about
    your audiences.
    ● Design content for stress cases.
    ● Examine your own blinders in content.
    

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40. Tusen Takk.
    @ronbronson
    ronbronson.com
    ron@rbsg.dk
    

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