This week I was treated to the inaugural London Agile Content Meetup. What was formerly the Content Strategy Meetup, has now become something a lot larger and more holistic – indicative of the way in which Content Marketing and Content Strategy has evolved.
The term ‘agile content’ is used to describe a strategy that allows a number of departments, teams, individuals and stakeholders to help with the content process in a dynamic way, as well as being produced with their individual goals in mind. In other words, content is now a collaborative effort which needs to be published across multiple platforms and tick a number of boxes. Agile content facilitates this, and this is what I learned.
Kate Towsey – An agile content case study: process, team, tools, and lessons
- Agile content is not a circular process, it’s actually quite chaotic: researching, conceptualizing, and making all at the same time
- Agile only works once everyone knows their roles
- For The University Of Surrey Case Study – tone of voice is important when it comes to the user – show don’t tell. They spoke to the audience, not the stakeholder
- Talk to your audience, get everyone to help with the creation process – this helps when making agile content
Helena Quartey – Make friends and influence people online
- Get what you want to share in the hands of those that ‘get you’
- Relationship building is key – reach out to the ‘super platforms’ e.g. Huffington Post
- 4Chan is a good place to meet and share images
- Also reach out to the smaller key influencers – they matter too
- Your goal should be to solve their issues – not just look for ReTweets
- Share content once the relationship has been built, not before
Rachel Anne Bailey – Content First: COPE Made Easy
- COPE means ‘create once publish everywhere’
- Make your content easy for search engines to find e.g. use Schema to create the same content but for different audiences around the world
- Two ways towards a COPE strategy e.g. Technology driven and user driven
- Understand the technical requirements for COPE, otherwise you’re stuck with what the developer wants
Andy Freeman – Gaudi and the marriage of content and design
- Harmony is key for content and context
- Embrace design principles e.g using colour to bring out structure
- Spend time and understand your context e.g it has to be about people, the user
- Content is an ethos and inspiration, not just bricks and mortar
- Gaudi became a metaphor to explain to people about agile content – how design works with content
Rupert Bowater – Why trouble with triples? An introduction to the semantic web
- We need machines to better understand our content and answer our questions i.e. things not strings
- To do this, we need to think in triples – detailing a relationship between subject and object
- Use Schema.org to mark up your content
- Get better snippets and better social sharing
- Create a richer context for your content so search engines understand this better
Cress Rolfe – Content, custom templates and formulaic experiences
- Large scale sites must have structure for their content and user experience
- Structure works, e.g WordPress themes work and are copied
- Without structure, a typical evening’s browsing is quite fatiguing
- We need to design the whole experience
- Content needs to know itself so it can deliver better e.g. A personalised user journey and information architecture
- There needs to be something more and we need to establish what our role is within that
Lana Gibson – Using search data to find out what our users want
- User data is the voice of our audience – use it to measure performance
- Start with user needs – look at what people are searching for e.g. More people search for ‘holiday entitlement’ rather than ‘annual leave’
- Look at the holistic user journey and better understand what links to put where
- Changes in traffic tells you about the need for that content or webpage
Rob Grundel – When is the song over? What digital teams can learn from music
- What can we learn about the state of flow when it comes to content creation?
- Start with listening and then build; listen to your teams and clients
- Feedback is important, we need feedback to get better
- Are you happy with the music your band are creating / the content your team is creating?
- Most music is the same, you need to put your stamp on it to make it different
- Sometimes you’re going to get it wrong, but if you’re in a supportive team then listen and redo
David Adams – Is Adaptive Content a holy grail or complicated fad?
- Adaptive content is difficult and complicated but it’s valuable
- Websites are conversations between you and your user, but normal conversations are not repeated like websites are, so websites need to learn and get better for the user
- The clues you get from your users are subtle but effective e.g. browser choice, actions, time spent, location
- These help us draw together an image – but we need to adapt what we are saying to each user – we need a CMS to deliver a unique experience
- If you have a website where people only visit one page but lots of times, push them to visit more pages
- David doubled total page views easily doing this – all you need is adaptive content
Paola Kathuria – How will you change my life?
- Presenting two case studies, 18 years apart, Paola showed how she organised Barclays’ products and services into customer goals and how she later pitched a similar idea to MOO
- In 1995, Barclays wanted to put all their content online, she organised this into what people want rather than just detailing the information
- She then got in touch with MOO after making a wedding invite for her friend. Her friend would not have used Moo because it didn’t have her friend’s needs on the Home page. This is a good example – think about your products in terms of user needs
- Once she grouped this into user needs she established lots more product ideas for MOO
- Don’t rely on Analytics to establish what your users need, speak to them
Graham Francis – Agile and the army
- Content in an emergency is difficult but you can make it work
- Give people specific roles to deliver what is needed at the time
- The army made sure everyone knew what was going on during the Foot and Mouth crisis – they got people to say what they were going to do at the start of the day and what they had done at the end of the day
- This made people more accountable for delivery
- This Army did not start Agile content, but such techniques helped to sort a crisis
A big thank you to all of the speakers for sharing such great tips and the organisers for arranging everything and making it run smoothly.
Image Source
Crowd Shot via Jonathan Kahn
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