[MUSIC] My friend and colleague Candy Lee is going to take things up to the organizational level. Candy's a professor at Medill here at Northwestern. She teaches journalism and integrated marketing communications. Before that, she was vice president of marketing at the Washington Post and she oversaw multiple functions, from marketing to research, as well as originating innovative programs. For example, she developed the PostMasterClass, a series of online courses full of dynamic interaction with experts from the Post newsroom who reached out to people all over the globe. So Candy, if you think about it, you and I went to a meeting of Confab, which focuses on content strategy. It was founded by Kristina Halvorson. She has a lot to say about how to create content. If you take that and all your years of thinking about how content is created at the organization level, start there and tell us kind of where you see this going and what we can think about at the organizational level of what works and what doesn't. >> Thanks, John. So Kristina spends a lot of time talking about organizational structure for content creation within the organization. Underlying this discipline is trying to figure out the difference between content strategy and just employing writers. The strategy concerns all areas of creation, delivery, and governance in alignment with objectives, as you've mentioned previously in the class. We need to look at the objectives with both their content and human components. One area to ensure clarity is around the area of governance. Who sets the policies? Who decides the guidelines? Who says the content is okay? If no one really owns the content, and too many people have to approve it, then you have this question of, does it get up in a timely manner? And we also need to think about succession planning, because who is going to take over the content and worry about the content after the initial creation? Kristina Halvorson builds her organization around five D's and she uses those D's as sort of a framework. So it's discover, define, design, develop, and deploy. >> So before you go on, let me just be sure I've caught up and I get it. Those five D's are a framework, almost like steps or progression, that would apply in any organization, giant, only a couple of people, for profit, not-for-profit, government. You're going to help us sort of apply those, and that's the framework she's laid out. >> Yes, and I'm glad you mentioned that because it's a framework for both the organization and for anybody involved in content strategy. So let's talk about the first D, it's discover. And it's everything that you need to do before you actually put any content out in the public's view. It's thinking about your purpose and getting your objective set. But this may also include some user research, and not exactly the kind of user research we think of, like surveys. It may be interviews with stakeholders. So what about your board of directors? What about your employees? What do they think about your content? But it also takes a look at your current technology and what kind of functional requirements you're going to need, as well as what are your competitors doing? And what are the industry trends? But all of this cannot happen without first a content audit. And the content audit needs to actually list every piece of content you already have, because if you have this inventory, you know you can reuse some of it and you can know what you've put out previously. So a content audit would include, what's the subject matter, what are the keywords, where do you find it, where is its current URL? You also need to start out with a content style guide, and I know we've talked a little bit about this in the course. But the content style guide is a guide for you as a commissioner of content but also as a writer of content. And you need to think about the search analytics, the legal requirements, and who is going to own each piece of this content, and who is actually going to approve it? And included in that is what kind of translation requirements you need if you need extra languages. So let's go to define. What do we mean by define? Well, one of the first things you need to define is, how are you going to think about success? When you've set your objectives, you also need to think about what is achieving those objectives. What does it look like? How do you think about success? If you're asked in a year from now, did it work? How are you going to analyze, yes, it worked well? So you need to set that at the beginning and have it aligned with your objectives. Another area in this particular D is actually thinking about QA and how are you going to ensure quality assurance for your content, which of course refers back to your governance policies. Who is actually looking at the content in order to be sure that it meets your original objectives? And your style guide and workflow design get defined here as well. And importantly, what is your content migration plan? After your initial use of the content, what happens to it? When setting up your editorial calendars, you need consider seasonality, and your home page and blog topic mix. How frequently are you updating your calendar and your multimedia mix? Now let's go to design, another D. You will need a detailed site map with wireframes and storyboards and definition of the visual treatment. And you're going to need to design the hierarchy of styles. What is a headline? What's a subhead? What's the author's name? What font are the captions in? How does the page work? You need to set objectives for each page. So develop has much fewer bullet points in its checklist, but it can take the most amount of time. Partially that's because all the HTML templates and coding are being worked on in this phase. And you need to think about the testing and fixing. In order to do that, you'll need to keep an error log. In order to have the error log, you'll need to set up a problem-solution page, where you list the problem and then the solution so that everybody works off the same script. And you'll need a training manual so that everybody understands what to do in the future. So when you put all of this together, you get to the fifth D, which is deploy the material. And think about success metrics every day, not just at the end of the year, but also at the end of each day. >> Another way to think about success is to take the D's, each of them, and apply them in your situation. You've heard some. There will be more on Candy's slides, which we're going to post. Pick those that fit your organization and then you'll have real impact with your content strategy. [MUSIC]
