Bits of Influence

My Struggle

During the past six months, I’ve wrestled with two concepts:

Should the term “content strategy” refer to activities that seem detailed or technical and, consequently, tactical?
(See this post for my brief exchange with content strategy guru Richard Sheffield on the topic. Fortunately, he still talks to me.)

How do I convey the power of influencing in small, subtle ways?
I am convinced it is important, but I have difficulty conveying the point. (See my presentation Usable, INFLUENTIAL Content, where I show a quote as a “bite-sized” story and a subtle reminder of benefits.)

Slowly, my struggle is resolving. In a discussion on the content strategy Google group, Elena Melendy reiterated that “if you think about content from a strategic perspective, you’re practicing content strategy.” Last week, Craig Bromberg wrote a clever post summarizing the conversation amongst “self-conscious” content strategists about “big” versus “little” content strategy, which triggered more insightful conversation. One of his conclusions was that size doesn’t matter, frequency does. I mostly agree.

Influential Bits + Right Time + Right Place = Influential Big Picture

Decisions about content, whether about a tagline on a home page, an article about a health condition, a video testimonial, or anything in between, are strategic. These decisions are strategic partly because of their effect on users or customers. As a customer encounters a brand through multiple touchpoints (website, social media, offline channels, etc.) over time, a cumulative picture of the brand emerges in the customer’s mind.  The more consistently and pertinently the content supports, reinforces, and expands on brand attributes, the more lucid and cogent the emerging picture becomes.

It’s not unlike a photomosaic, where the snippets of images ultimately contribute to a larger picture. See, for example, this Wikimedia logo mosaic.

A mosaic of Wikimedia content forms the Wikimedia logo.

In this photomosaic, snippets of Wikimedia content form the Wikimedia logo.  In content strategy, the bits of content are glimpses of the larger brand picture.  Together, these bits support brand messages, themes, and characteristics. Will customers literally envision snippets of your content in a logo formation?  Of course not.  But, they will sense a brand personality, remember a larger message, or attribute qualities to the brand.

Time is important here. Jeffrey MacIntyre and Lou Rosenfeld have noted that content strategy has a temporal quality (see Publishers and Content Strategy). Bromberg’s post suggests the time factor is mainly frequency.  I agree in that content must stay updated and pertinent to remain fresh. I also agree in that some repetition helps customers remember, and therefore be influenced by, a message or characteristic.  But we also need to think about kairos, or the opportune moment. Content published many times is not necessarily as effective as the right content published at the right time and place.

With content strategy, a brand can form the content bits into a meaningful larger picture while seizing opportune moments. Without content strategy, a brand has only content bits.  Without content strategy, ineffective tactics such as posting 500-word meaningless, outdated articles to support search key words will reign.  Without content strategy, every bit of poorly crafted, poorly timed, and poorly placed content is a piece that doesn’t fit into the larger picture and a missed opportunity to influence.

Um…How Do We Do That Technically?

I’m not the expert here. Rachel Lovinger has excellent insights into bridging the gap from SEO to the semantic web and more.  She clearly shows that understanding content as data also is a strategic perspective. An excerpt from her comments on Bromberg’s post:

Googlejuice, SEO and SEM are not the wave of the future when it comes to a data-driven environment – these are stopgaps, a temporary bridge between the old, flat-marketing-messages world and the new digital age where online experiences are driven by social networks, user behavior, and flexible content augmented with semantic metadata.

Rachel’s comments and the promise of the semantic web imply that the content bits wouldn’t form just one larger picture.  They will dynamically evolve the larger picture or form many larger pictures. It is not unlike the live version of the Wikimedia mosaic, where the bits are moving, evolving, changing…yet framed within the brand.

And…How Do We Measure That?

A recent thread on the content strategy Google group articulates well that quantitative analytics alone do not cut it. I am interested in the potential for engagement as one metric, and I explored the topic briefly a year ago in the UXmatters column Engagement: Should We Care? I think we need to take a two-pronged approach: measuring the big picture and measuring the bits. That’s fodder for another blog post, coming soon.