An Intoxicating Tale of Content Strategy

An effective content strategy bridges the critical gap between online and offline worlds, and the gaps between departments. When a content strategy is put in place, business goals will be met more easily, and people’s expectations with the brand will be fulfilled. I’ll drink to that.

A new product, a new opportunity

There it sat, on the shelf in the liquor store. An unfamiliar whisky housed in one of those fancy, boutique-style bottles. It wore an already-iconic label. I was intrigued.

This distilling company put some careful thought into this whisky. They even created some delightful point-of-purchase pricing signs echoing that label design. The text at the top of those tiny pricing signs reads “Just Released”–an announcement to the world, proud and urgent.

They want people to know about the whisky. They want people to buy it. But, as of this writing, THAT’S THE END OF IT.

The portable web changes everything

Like any other whisky nerd, I searched the web from my smartphone for any mentions or reviews of this whisky. To my surprise, there was only one relevant listing. And it wasn’t a helpful listing, either: an online retailer that offered only a price and size of the bottle.

The label on this bottle includes the company’s website. Unfortunately, it, too, was unhelpful. The whisky was not listed anywhere on the site. Searching for the whisky’s brand name on the company site brought up a page full of PHP errors. (That’s another matter altogether.)

Lots of whisky enthusiasts would have stopped right there. Despite the lack of information, I purchased a bottle.

(I shan’t mention the company name, lest this post become the only thing about this whisky on the all of the Internet.)

The gap between online and offline strategy appears

Time and money were spent on the product design and retail accoutrements, but the online presence? NOT A DROP. A chasm between the distillery’s new product strategy and the online strategy quickly became apparent.

This distillery has a product, a niche whisky. They want to sell it. Lucky for them, people want to buy distinctive whiskies. But they don’t buy them blindly. They want to know all kinds of things before making that purchase: age, blend, whose grandpa distilled it in the hills 100 years ago, etc.

If that information is not presented at the point of purchase or on the item itself, they’ll seek it out online. Possibly right there on the spot.

When companies present anything less than a complete and unified presence online and offline, people notice. Really, they do. Those people may shrug their shoulders and carry on with their tasks on your site (albeit with less satisfaction and ease.) Or, in the absence of any info online, they may give up and go to a competitor.

Each item and brand, especially in a retail environment, should have a corresponding presence online. That presence needs a solid strategy to inform its messaging, target audience, distribution, workflow, and maintenance.

Instill your projects with content strategy

I’ve heard online content strategy described, at its most basic, as the alignment of business goals and user expectations:

• Company provides a product or service
• People complete tasks related to that product or service (e.g. learning, purchasing)

The closer we align the meeting point(s) of those business goals and the user expectations, the better. Both sides need to be addressed. The one-way, broadcast model the distillery put in place, either actively or by omission, will no longer cut it. They missed the mark entirely in this case. No pun intended.

A toast to your future content projects

Part of the burden (or joy, I mean) of content strategists is keeping up with an organization’s new initiatives and changes to ongoing efforts. The launch of this whisky is a fine example.

To avoid a similar situation, get a seat at the table early in the process to engage with all staff involved on a project:

• Ask lots of questions
• Consider the implications of new company endeavors in the short and long term
• Filter each and every situation through your core online content strategy
• Be ready for changes that will inevitably come up along the way
• Make sure that new efforts are sustainable

Content strategists can have a great impact, but they are not a cure-all. Some projects may suffer from scalability issues, unwise decisions, or legacy organizational baggage.

What content strategists can do, however, is follow the standards for making great online experiences. They can ensure that the right audiences are addressed in the most effective way. And, they can guide the process with an overall strategic vision in place.

When your project is (hopefully) successful and all things are operating in sync, I have but one more bit of advice: pour yourself a glass of whisky.

This material first appeared on a post I contributed to the Follow the UX Leader blog. (Minus the Muddy Waters tune.)

Yahoo! Special K!

I saw an ad on the TV this morning that ended with an uncommon call-to-action.

Special K, that Kellogg's diet standby, asked me to go to Yahoo to search for "Special K diet."

I have seen this before; some years ago Pontiac pointed people to Google to search for 'Pontiac.' They did the same thing that Special K did in this most recent ad -- instructed folks to go to a specific search engine and enter a term, circumventing the need for a special URL or landing page that might be hard to remember.

Blogger Cabel Sasser noticed this same phenomenon in Japan on a recent trip; this post details what he saw as a major shift away from URLs toward suggested search engines and terms.

Digging further into the Kellogg site, you will notice that the second item on their left-side navigation is an invite to join them at their Yahoo Group. I went there to find a lavishly branded Group, easily navigable even by those unfamiliar with Yahoo Groups. Newsgroups have come a long way, and this is no exception; there are social functions built in, maps, etc. This is an extensive project, not just a social media tag-along. Props for that. [I am just waiting for a Facebook app...]

The hardest part about trying to integrate this sort of partnership into ad campaigns is yet to come. Folks are pretty well set in their ways when it comes to search engine loyalty. There needs to be an appealing value proposition to make a switch from something as ingrained as Google in their browsing habits. Especially in light of the fact that tons of people are typing URLs into search engines instead of their address bars.

Feeling both lazy and insolent, I went to Google rather than Yahoo to do the search thing. I did the search in my Firefox search field, with Google as the default. Their helpful little 'suggestion' feature brought up 'Special K diet' after I finished the 'K.' Since this feature is based on common searches as entered by other people, I discovered that I was not the only lazy/insolent one. So much for following instructions, America.
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Do Not Track me, unless I want you to.

[ image courtesy of Andrew Møøre / Flickr ]

In the past few years we have seen some contradictory events in the realm of privacy and information sharing. Even more events have happened in the past week that add to this odd timeline.

There was the NSA warrantless wiretapping scandal of recent years.

In 2003 our national lawmakers saw fit to enact the Do-Not-Call Implementation Act -- the act that enables each of us to place our phone numbers on a do-not-call registry to avoid unwanted telemarketer intrusions. This has been in the news again as lawmakers are looking to make the Act permanent, as it had a sunset period of 5 years.

The Washington Post reports on that a Do-Not-Track proposal is in the works. This would give consumers an opt-out provision to avoid the activities resulting from tracked data, including but not limited to better refined searches and more refined advert serving.

There seems to be a disconnect here -- and a bit of dis-ingenuity as well. There is a clear difference between getting a phone call during dinner, and being served an ad [which would be there no matter what] that is selected for you based on your surfing habits.

As Mark Cooper, director of research at the Consumer Federation of America, points out in the WaPo article "In some respects improving the efficiency of advertising could be a consumer-friendly activity... If it's not abuse, if it's not coercive, matching consumers with products could be a good thing."

This is all happening in an interesting new behavioral marketing arena. The Telegraph reports mobile phone companies have a similar and perhaps more intrusive way of doing this. The technology now exists for the mobile service providers to monitor text messages and calls, and serve ads to those users based on keywords texted or uttered. These ads, in some cases, will give fiscal consideration to those using the service in the form of mobile bill credits.

Will users be concerned? It depends. In a discussion I had yesterday, folks of varying age [30-50+] were hashing this over and all arrived at the same conclusion -- they are not comfortable or interested in letting that much 'out of the bag.'

However, the users of Facebook and MySpace have grown accustomed to the notion of providing copious amounts of personal data to the world. For a certain age set, providing personal photos, videos, and data is part of the fun. Having companies use that data to more efficiently sell those people things will seem like part of the deal as well.
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