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Posts Tagged ‘content’

Content Strategy?

Posted in uncategorized, tagged on 15 April 2011 | 2 Comments »

“Content strategy…” hmm, what’s that?

@halvorson‘s definition (yes, I am in the midst of reading Content Strategy for the Web):

Content strategy is the practice of planning for the creation, delivery and governance of useful, usable content.

Which sounds great, but deceptively simple.

Anyhow, content strategy is something that I have been thinking about a lot lately. And will be a lot more, since “content” became my responsibility in the shuffle at work.

See, we’ve got a ton of it (about 100M web pages on the gc.ca domain, last I heard). And a lot of it’s out of control.

  • ROT: redundant, out-of-date, trivial – think of all those forgotten web pages hiding on your servers that have been sitting around since the 90s.
  • Ineffectively presented for the web – think of publications and brochures converted to HTML, with no thought to whether this makes sense.
  • Endlessly proliferating – as every “bright” idea from every corner of the org seems to make its way online…

And it’s about to get a whole lot worse, as gov content moves beyond our websites and into mobile apps, social networks, open data, etc.

Yup. Time for a plan. (& it better be a better one than this).

So the first question: Where to start?

More to come…

Update: In the original version of this post, I cited the wrong number of GoC web pages — there’s 100M rather than 1M. Thanks to @spydergrrl for flagging this!

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Reduce the ROT (or Not)

Posted in government, web communications, tagged , , , on 4 November 2010 | 6 Comments »

ROT is in the air. Not because it’s late fall and everything is dying in the garden, no. I’m talking about web ROT – redundant, outdated and trivial content that clutters up big websites.

In the Government of Canada context, with CLF updates coming down the pipe, the opportunity to reduce the ROT [NB internal GCpedia link] is there. You’re gonna have to update your site anyhow, so why not kill off those old pages that have been online & unchanged since the 1990s?

It’s a noble quest, but I do wonder if it’s tilting at windmills.

The “reduce the ROT” idea is basically to prune back your content so that what’s left is the good stuff. The quality stuff that most of your users want, the long neck of your website. The top tasks.

Thing is, to remove the ROT, precious hours of your web team’s time will be spent identifying, unposting and archiving all that mess. If your site is big enough, it’s a question of many hours on that “mind-numbing” journey through the depths of your web content. & if responsibility for web is shared (as in decentralized situations that are still very common in government web management), you’re likely going to have to do battle with small-minded content owners who refuse to see the big picture.

Weeding out the ROT is actually an indirect way to fix your website. So instead, why not just cut to the chase and push the good stuff to the top of the pile? Rather than cutting away ROT, why not directly optimize your killer content?

Here’s some ideas on how that might happen:

  • tweak your on-site search to push the top content up the results
  • offsite, enhance the findability of your best content via SEO
  • provide dedicated landing pages for top tasks and content — and then make sure search results and site nav get you to these
  • tweak your nav to provide more direct paths to the good stuff
  • feature the good stuff prominently on your home page
  • and most of all, switch your focus from managing content to managing those key tasks.

… and there’s many more things that can be done. That’s just a quick off-the-top-of-my-head starter list. What are you doing to bring quality forward on your site?

(Of course, both reducing the ROT and optimizing the quality content would be the best possible approach, but since I live the reality of limited time and resources, I need to prioritize… and so these days, I’m putting my energy towards surfacing the good stuff first.)

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100th Post

Posted in blogosphere, observations, tagged , , , on 12 January 2009 |

"100 fotos de My Buffo," by My Buffo on flickr

(Image credit: “100 fotos de My Buffo,” by My Buffo on flickr)

This is my 100th post. Amazed I made it this far actually.

Some quick observations on blogging practice:

  • It’s hard. Writing posts comes to me a lot less naturally that I thought it would. Prolific bloggers amaze me. But then  I’ve never been one to think out loud (or with a keyboard).
  • It takes time. Each post takes me a lot longer than I thought it would. I really tend to fuss over the words. In fact, most of my published posts end up quite differently than they start out — my creative process requires a lot of re-working.
  • Links are a pain. I know they’re important and great for SEO and all that, but finding and inserting the ones I want (even the ones I’ve boomarked) takes a lot of work.
  • Images and multimedia are fun. I love the way that they complement (or replace!) the words. But they also take a lot of time to find and insert.

Given all these whines, why don’t I just quit? After all, most of the time I’m perfectly happy to part of the 90% who lurk. Why bother struggling to be part of the 9% who contribute from time to time (never mind the 1% who account for the bulk online content)?

Well, for one thing, I like how blogging gives my writing muscles a good workout. My blog writing is very different from the writing I do in my “regular” work, being in the first person and all. It’s good practice in a different mode. And hitting the publish button after a good post is very satisfying.

Another good reason is that the blog provides me a good excuse to keep an eye on the social media, web 2.0, and government 2.0 spaces. And this has good effects on my day job — advising my colleagues on web communications has become a big growth area for me. And I’m very happy about this. (Can you tell which way I want to move in my career?)

And of course, I would be dishonest if I didn’t mention the ego boost that comes with knowing that others are actually reading what little old me has to say.

BTW, here’s a great essay on the practice of blogging from one of the granddaddies of the medium.

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Ottawa Government Barcamp and Unofficial Government Bloggers

Posted in blogosphere, bureaucracy, tagged , , , , , , on 8 September 2008 | 2 Comments »

Many thanks to Colin “Canuckflack” McKay for organizing the Ottawa Government barcamp get-together last Friday. I really enjoyed getting to meet other Web 2.0 keeners from around town. Nice to be able to chat about some of the issues around social media and web comms for government types in an informal setting.

Important now is to keep momentum going!

One of the key venues to help with that will be the barcampOttawaGov mailing list. So as I checked in this morning, I noticed that a discussion is getting underway on public servants and their “unofficial” blogs. Specifically, to what extent should the unofficial government blogger make their management aware of what they are doing?

My take (hardly unique): discretion is the better part of valour. I’ve disclosed what I was doing from the very start of this blog. I don’t want to put management on the defensive by letting them find out about my little posts by accident or only if someone complains. I try make sure that my management won’t feel blindsided if someone has a problem with what I am doing.

And while I feel that it is key to keep the bosses in the loop, there’s something even more important: the tone and content of the blog itself. In my case, I try not to use the blog as a platform to vent or complain. I don’t get into specifics about situations or issues that I am confronting in my daily work. However, I will use those situations as a springboard to explore larger issues on my blog though – that is, when I’m not geeking out about the latest gadget or toy that I’ve discovered…

And I’m open about who I am and that this blog is not an official thing also. Given the terrain I want to cover here, anonymity doesn’t work for me.

By the way, here’s a great post from Neil Williams, a UK civil servant blogger, that gives some great pointers on personal blogging for government types. Sure it’s the UK, but the issues are largely the same – and they’re ahead of us over there, so we can (and should) learn from their experience.

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