The growing field of content strategy has been with us for over a decade, but is still rapidly evolving. Some of it hearkens back to fundamental storytelling from thousands of years ago. And some of it reinvents itself with each new social media platform.
Explore when, where, how, and why to engage in storytelling for brands. This visual and engaging presentation will incorporate several emerging content strategy issues addressed in my blog at www.EMFATIK.com.
This presentation was given at Information Development World on October 2, 2015.
87. @EMFATIK #ContentStrategy
#InfoDevWorld
“We need to stop
interrupting what people are
interested in and be what
people are interested in.”
– Craig Davis, former Chief Creative Officer
at J. Walter Thompson
99. @EMFATIK #ContentStrategy
#InfoDevWorld
Robust Team
Head of Content
Content Strategist
Content Strategist / Traffic Coordinator
Copywriter / Creative Editor
Copywriter Pool
Proofreader
Social Media – Strategy
Social Media – Community Engagement
Social Media Promotions
Video Producer / Director
Video Editor
Visual Designer
Analytics / Optimization Manager
Details: bit.ly/ContentRoles
109. @EMFATIK #ContentStrategy
#InfoDevWorld
Build upon facts to get story
Master storytelling basics – they haven’t changed
Good story first; then worry about wall it goes on
Context is king: Think in 3D
Quality content requires a quality team
Use metrics; don’t torture them
Take-Aways
110. @EMFATIK #ContentStrategy
#InfoDevWorld
Content Insights & Storytelling
Blog / Website
The Story of Telling
Humans of New York
Brain Pickings
Seth Godin
YouMoz Blog
Unmarketing
VICE Magazine
Twitter
@BernadetteJiwa
@ThomasBarta
@DiaryCS
@brainpicker
@iMelody
@BrandRepublic
@EMFATIK
Brand Content
Doritos
Guinness
Southwest
Denny’s
Dove
Coca-Cola
Red Bull
112. There is no greater
agony than bearing an
untold story inside you
- Maya Angelou
Notes de l'éditeur
Who knows what the first cat video ever uploaded was?
Trick question. It wasn’t a video, it was a film. And it wasn’t uploaded. It was distributed and projected physically. Because the year was 1894!
Forget Grumpy Cat. Or even Cat in the Hat. This film was a success in 1894, and showed that people just love watching cats do silly things. A century before Buzzfeed was serving up cats and Kardashians.
Good lesson to keep in mind throughout all of this: What’s old is new.
With that backdrop, I present…
What do these all have in common:
They’re FACTS. Stories would be:
Grateful for dog: First ever, cuz horrible allergies as a kid. But also, played with lizards and frogs, which led to a feature doc, ended up on PBS and got Emmy nomination.
Common thread in careers: Creating content that persuades or enlightens others.
It’s that human element of emotional impact that provides connective tissue, to make a story.
And it’s been with us forever. It’s what makes for human storytelling.
Magura Cave, Bulgaria, 8,000 B.C.
Dancing men, women, animals; plants and tools and weapons; religious symbols and holidays and calendars.
Basically, shared cultural information, things they cared about, stressed about…
[READ]
Fast forward to 2015, and our Facebook wall. What are we drawing? [READ] Things that have meaning in our daily lives that we want to share…
Look familiar?
Key point: As humanity and technology evolve…
[The BIG IDEA]
So what makes a story something we want to share and want hear? What resonates?
Moving on from prehistoric times to ancient Greece…
Aristotle wrote of the crucial parts of a good story.
Story elements present in ancient western mythologies to stories in the Bible, Koran, Hindu holy texts, and elsewhere…
All the way through early Chinese theater, oral traditions of Africa, through Shakespeare, original people’s folktales from around the world, through modern novelists, Hollywood scriptwriters, to TV to web series to Vine videos… Whew.
Many consistent elements. Some we just feel at a root level…
Quick experiment. Two random shapes. One is named Lolo, one named Kiki.
How many think the one on left is Kiki, and the on the right is Lolo?
We have common ways of interpreting the world we can’t even always express.
Quick exercise. Pick a neighbor. Tell a family or personal story. 60 seconds max. Then switch.
Ask for volunteers to say WHY a story was memorable.
Here’s what storytelling was used for since pre-history…
Why relevant to us at [IDW] today?
A new use for storytelling arose in the last century…
Mass marketing.
Why?
From Stone Age times until early 1900s, SCARCITY was the rule. Average got just what they needed, if they were lucky.
Industrialization brought assembly lines, leisure time, and a consumer culture to the world. (Fair distribution is another topic!)
Post WWII, in the West, a surplus of goods, to sell.
This spawned an entire new industry…
Thus was born Don Draper and Madison Avenue friends…
To show us all these goods and conveniences that we maybe didn’t know we needed, but now had the means to buy with our unprecedented wealth!
How did Don Draper do it? He was a masterful STORYTELLER.
And what kind of stories was he telling? What themes?
Same stories…
Our CAVES: living rooms
Our WALLS were TVs and magazines
Down to a science – very controlled walls, very profitable. BUT traditional advertising was more or less linear, one-way.
[How’d that get in there?]
Until now, talking Content of Stories, with a one-way, linear delivery
But now, a new 3D world of digital communications brought so many new cave walls, and the cave itself is moving!
WHAT IT MEANT: Someone had to figure out how ad agencies could manage storytelling content with all these new digital walls!
So now we flip the conversation to the STORY OF CONTENT – specifically…
…Content Strategy.
You ask 4 content strategists, you’ll get 5 definitions.
This is one that I’ve developed over the years that best covers all the bases.
How was this applied?
Early years
Websites: Dense, hard to scan online, pure copy, no interactivity
Early content strategy – Webification
A new form of WRITING.
Transforming 2 dimensional content into 3.
Not perfection, but shows evolution: Imagery, hierarchy, social interactivity
Webifying content is just one small aspect now…
Big transformation was taking place in digital content, obviously. Traditional legacy content wasn’t just getting converted into suitable digital content. Native digital content was getting created.
With it, transition in professions: Content Strategists were coming from ranks of copywriters, but also journalists, brand specialists, ad agency people, public relations, library science, law…
3 main pillars today
Content creation in all of its forms
Content: Anything you can consume with your eyes, ears, and mind
Driven by business goals and research
Wrangling of assets, documentation for development, uploading, distribution, CMS – Left Brain
More specialized today. Some still cover all the bases, some are more focused.
Here are some of the tools and deliverables you’ll see with Content Strategy today…
Depth, tone, cadence of content rolled out
Exhaustive inventories of all web or social or blogging content, with qualitative analysis and recommendations for existing, future, and missing content
Research-based personifications of potential content consumers – help focus content creation and UX design
Content Style Guides, including Voice & Tone, Usage, other copy guidelines
Content creation: Research, concepting, and writing for native digital content, in many forms to adapt to different sections
Crucial for rolling out large quantities of content around strategic milestones, especially with brands publishing so much today
Along with UX designer, content strategists must think about user flows as they construct content for each relevant stage of content
Heat mapping, to analyze eyeball traffic patterns on a page, to help prioritize content
Broad thinking: Content series, videos, imagery, short- and long-form…
One favorite – working with creating and spreading a brand story from scratch. Great for startups.
CONSISTENCY across all channels & opportunities – all the different WALLS (including elevator)
America’s Cup captain, sailing multi-day race, in middle of ocean, off Rhode Island, 1977.
Exciting race, storms, near capsized boats, drama…
But the news coverage scant, and only at 11 p.m. Very removed, uncompelling reports for TV viewers. But he loved the sport and knew that media publicity would help it grow.
Captain thought, what if there were a news channel round the clock to cover events like this?
Huge skepticism, but this captain, who built up his father’s modest media business, ended up founding CNN, the first all-news network. Ted Turner never looked back.
Why so many resources and people thrown at all of this?
Gee, thanks Captain Obvious.
But it wasn’t always the case.
This formula led to content farms
Many search engines could happily lead you to crappy content based on keywords and basic algorithms (Demand Media & Ask.com)
Until there was basically just one. Superior algorithms, better quality results. Still could game the SEO system.
Google’s search traffic is 17 times higher than its next five competitors combined (Shareaholic, 2014 study).
2011 Panda update penalized poor quality content
2012 Penguin update penalized poor quality links
2015 change purported, to prioritize mobile-optimized sites (Big Commerce Blog, 3-7-15). [Did it happen??]
What does this mean? High quality content is relevant again.
So all is easy again, right? Just make great digital content and you’re golden. Well……
Those shifting cave walls again…
Website + Push (subscription newsletter, blog, special promos) + Social (native content that stays there and interacts on social platform)!
PLUS mobile! That little cave wall we bring with us…
With all this 3D thinking, CONTEXT is really critical to content strategy now.
“Time, place, and manner” part of definition
In screenwriting, Pre-Life and Post-Life for characters in every scene
The NOW scene must be believable, and flow naturally, to resonate within a story you’re trying to tell.
Example of no pre-life: In movie where new scene starts in a car, and one character asks:
“So where are we going?” WAY late to ask that…
But also for digital content, sales funnels, social media marketing: FRAME OF MIND of character (user)
Example: Jaguar-sponsored content on Instagram >> film site >> interactive car banner >> Jaguar concept car landing page >> Vehicle shopping page
At banner: Users coming from film site; want them to go to Jaguar to shop. CONTEXT = CONNECTIVE TISSUE
VARIATIONS too – 3D thinking.
GQ.com banner, but maybe users there aren’t as interested in Tandie Newton, so try different banner? Or press release with link to Jaguar style landing page gets developed into story in GQ style section…
SEGMENTATION / Personas
Remember Aristotle and story elements? Basic storytelling arc… RW content strategists should be good writers – grapple with story and 3D content progression.
Why is this all more important than ever? A “new” beast has emerged that is devouring as much content strategy as it can swallow:
The essence…
Brands themselves ARE the story these days, they ARE the publisher, not just media companies.
Dove, Chipotle, Red Bull, Reese’s… These are consumer goods/services companies, not TV networks, magazines, news outlets!
55% of B2B companies will increase content marketing budget next year
[2015 Content Marketing Trends North America… report by Content Marketing Institute]
[2015 Content Marketing Trends North America… by CMI, p. 30]
Producing Engaging Content – 5 years running now!
(Followed by Producing Content Consistently)
[2015 Content Marketing Trends North America… by CMI, p. 30]
Curiously, 2nd to last… Good sign.
[2015 Content Marketing Trends North America… by CMI, p. 30]
We’ve talked about the What, Why…
What about the WHO?
Who creates all this much-desired quality content?
If you have 90% of a quality team, that 10% gap will become apparent…
…like no proofreaders
Here’s what teams can look like, depending on organization size, needs, and budget.
Nestle – 20 person digital editorial team, creating content every day
Red Bull – Roughly 135 employed on its content marketing media strategy
[Source: Express Writers – infographic 8-17-15]
With all this talk of numbers, it’s fitting that we wind up by looking at a natural obsession of marketers…
I’m a big fan of instant, measurable feedback.
No need to sing the song of content measurement and metrics data – we all know it’s incredibly valuable to content marketing and social media campaign tuning and much is free.
As soon as a number is used to measure something, someone will confuse or distort it, thinking they’re improving the underlying metric.
Social scientist Donald Campbell, 1976 paper.
Nixon – led to underreporting, and downgrading of crimes to look less problematic; actual crime did not decrease
Seth Godin applies his own take
Examples of what are easy indicators vs. what our true objectives are
If you don’t pay attention to Campbell’s Law, it’s too easy to satisfy your boss or client or yourself with “easy” numbers
And if you torture numbers enough…
Just some sample resources for content marketing and storytelling