Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

Book publishers are an endangered species. That’s right. The producers of textbooks, romance novels, and cookbooks aren’t long for this world. Their likely extinction is both predictable and preventable. Even if they put up a good fight, it’s unlikely they’ll survive in their current form for one reason: They are slow to evolve.

Case in point: Just over two years ago, while book publishers were busy conducting business as usual, an outsider invaded the industry and reshaped it in the publishers’ image. The invading force was Apple, a fierce predator with a history of conducting well-orchestrated, highly publicized takeovers. And take over it did.

After conquering both the music and telecommunication industries, the technology maker applied the exact same strategy against book publishers.

Step 1: Orchestrate immense expectations and generate amazing buzz.

Step 2: Deliver a new experience that not only lives up to the hype but exceeds expectations.

Step 3: Generate demand for the experience by delivering exceptional value that opponents are unable to duplicate.

Step 4: Generate revenue.

Step 5: Repeat Step 4, repeatedly.

With the introduction of the iPad, Apple redefined the entire book publishing industry. It created an immersive “experience platform” (iOS) to help publishers build the next generation of books. It even gave them access to a digitally savvy base of customers via iTunes and the iBookstore. In short, Apple provided an evolutionary path that would allow publishers to move from print to digital with little effort. All it asked of them is to “think different,” something few purveyors of print have been willing or able to do.

The challenge Apple issued to publishers was clear: Go forth and create a new-and-improved book. Create exceptional experiences that are not possible in the print world. Develop innovative solutions that assist those with disabilities and who have other challenges with reading. Use the iOS platform and the wireless iPad to dazzle readers. Tap into the digital world and generate immense revenue from an audience and ecommerce platform we’ve provided for you. We’ll even throw in a financial incentive-the elimination of printing, duplication, transportation, and sales expenses associated with producing printed books. And as an added bonus, we’ll market your products directly to the consumers who will most likely be interested in buying them.

Instead of thinking differently and re-engineering old publishing processes to support the creation of a new breed of enhanced, interactive, accessible ebooks and apps, most publishers decided to create digital photocopies of existing books and charge top dollar for them. Big mistake.

A survey of book publishers conducted by digital publishing solutions provider Aptara, Inc. found that while 64% of publishers are creating ebooks, only 21% are producing enhanced ebooks. The majority of publishers are rushing error-laden, half-baked ebooks to market, instead of taking the time to do ebooks right from the get-go. While this approach may yield short-term profits for publishers, it’s a bad strategy.

First, it’s less expensive to enhance ebooks during the conversion process. It’s going to cost a lot more to retrofit first-generation ebooks with enhancements, offsetting short-term profits gained. That’s bad news for all involved, especially investors.

Second, enhanced ebooks provide publishers with opportunities to capture entirely new markets. For instance, enhanced ebooks that follow accessibility standards can help publishers reach the 3.4 million Americans (3%) 40 yard and older who are blind or visually impaired. By leveraging functionality that is native to devices such as the iPad, Nook, Kindle Fire and the iPhone, enhanced ebooks can help those with dyslexia (15% of U.S. population) and the nearly 44 million U.S. adults who want to read but don’t have a mastery of the English language.

Third, enhanced ebooks can command higher prices. Consumers are willing to pay more for useful content experiences (like The Elements, an enhanced eBook that actually made the Periodic Table of Elements sexy). Cookbooks, how-to manuals, textbooks, and other types of educational publications can provide new-and-improved learning opportunities. And the same enhancements can make ebooks from all genres more enjoyable. Once consumers experience enhanced, interactive ebooks that provide exceptional value beyond what digital photocopies can deliver, they’ll gravitate toward publishers that provide them with the best experiences.

To avoid becoming irrelevant, traditional book publishers must evolve. They’ve got to start thinking differently about the business of publishing and realize that they’re now in the experience business. There’s a huge pool of profit waiting for those who get there first-and do it right. For others, well, only time will tell.

Note: Apple has introduced an easy-to-use eBook authoring tool that allows anyone to create basic, interactive iBooks, eBooks that run on Apple devices. The software is called iBooks Author. Give it a whirl. Then ask yourself, “If authors can create their now eBooks and market them in the iBook Store and iTunes, why do they need a publisher at all?”

I’d love to hear from you. Share your opinions in the comment trail below.

Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

I’ve got a challenge for you. Take a look at the way you create, manage and deliver content. No, really. Take a close look. Conduct a systematic, fair, scientific survey of your content production lifecycle. Get professional help if you need to. Look at each and every step in your process and ask yourself, “Is this the best we can do, or is it just the way we’ve been doing it for so long that we believe it is the correct — and only — way to work?”

What I’m certain you will find is that your organization utilizes an assortment of outdated processes weaved together into an unnecessarily time-consuming content production cycle riddled with inefficiencies. Chances are you rely heavily on time-sucking manual tasks, many of which fail to provide any measurable value to customers. If you’re like most organizations, you have absolutely no idea what it costs you to work as inefficiently as you do because you don’t measure anything that’s actually important.

Sound familiar? Don’t fret, you’re not alone.

Recent research by Crimson Research indicates that manufacturers of life-saving medical devices spend nearly one percent of their revenues — a whopping one billion dollars a year — creating, updating, and translating their content. And that’s a conservative cost estimate based on straight salary calculations that fails to take into account such things as employee benefits, overhead, lost opportunity costs, and time-to-market savings, among other things. As such, this estimate is believed by some to drastically understates actual costs.

But the medical device industry is just the tip of the iceberg. Most organizations have never examined the way they create, manage, and deliver content. It’s always been a cost of doing business. A necessary evil that costs what it costs. When an organization looks to cut expenditures, seldom do they look at their content production lifecycle as a source of savings. Instead, they cut staff content production staff and outsource content work. While these efforts can have an immediate financial impact, they are short-sighted and provide only temporary benefit.

How have we managed to get into such a big mess?

Fairly easily, actually.

First, we mistakenly view those who create content as different from those who build products. For example, we expect the people who manufacture cars, computers, and coffeemakers — even cappuccino machines — to do so in the absolutely most efficient way possible. Their processes are clearly defined, consistently followed, efficiently managed, diligently measured, and systematically repeatable. In short, their workflow is optimized; every unnecessary step is shaved away. But we don’t demand the same of those who create all of the content necessary to build, market, sell, and support our products.

Second, we nurture a culture of process immaturity. We fail to train our content creators (and their management) to constantly optimize and fine tune their processes. We fail to support them with the tools, technologies, and financial resources they need, and we don’t reward them for spotting and fixing inefficiencies.

Many workers undoubtedly sense that they could work more efficiently, but for a variety of reasons, they learn to accept inefficiencies as part of the way their organization works. Even when they identify specific process problems, they may opt not to share them with management, and instead devise creative “workarounds” that make the problem less challenging for themselves. By stepping outside the official process, workers introduce unintentional consequences that have negative impacts on those downstream from them in the content production lifecycle.

Forward-thinking companies, especially those in ultra-competitive markets, have found that optimizing content production lifecycles can reduce expenses and increase sales. The productivity improvements made help organizations become more efficient and lead to fewer errors. The time saved is funneled into innovation and projects designed to improve customer satisfaction and increase sales.

So, are you ready to accept my challenge?

Let me know what you discover.

If you’ve already undertaken such an exercise, share with us what you learned — and what you did — to fine-tune your processes and become more efficient.

The question of whether links on a web page should be inline in the text or relegated to one of the margins is not a new one. It deserves re-examination because the increasing popularity of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) introduces a technical bias into the question. Managing inline linking in reusable content in DITA is complex, which makes it expensive, which makes it rare. It is commonly considered a DITA best practice to avoid inline links in favor of links created by external reltables, which means that the links are listed at the bottom of the page. (DITA 1.2 keyrefs provide some support for inline linking, but at the cost of significant complexity).

This strikes me as the tail wagging the dog — a design approach being dictated by the limits of a particular tool. Naturally, DITA advocates justify this approach by referring to those studies and style guides that come down on the no inline-linking side of the question. But I think it is a design approach with serious flaws and dubious justification, and this limitation should give people pause when they consider jumping on the DITA bandwagon.

There have been several small studies on the appropriate location of links in a web page, and they have produced conflicting results. There are a few reasons for this, including the time at which the studies were done, the design of the studies, and the presumptions that the researchers made about what kind of reading web pages should be optimized for.

In a comment on my blog post Are We Causing Readers to Forget, Larry Kunz made reference to the IBM style guide (I don’t have a copy myself, so I am grateful to Larry for the reference):

The IBM Style Guide (a very comprehensive guide for writing software documentation, and now available to the general public) recommends placing links in a list at the bottom of a topic (page) rather than inline. Their research has found that a reader is less likely to become distracted when the links are at the bottom, where they won’t entice the reader to go off-topic but where they still can be used if needed.

I don’t know how old the research is on which this recommendation is based, but I do know that 15 years ago I certainly found inline links distracting. My brain saw the underlining and the color change as emphasis in the text. But my brain is now fully used to seeing links (which are generally more subtly presented today) and I read right past them without any sense that the text is emphasised or inflected in any way. Concern on that front, therefore, seems somewhat out of date.

There are other ways links could be considered distractions, but I will get to them later. Another criticism of inline linking is that readers may fail to see the links. This is the exact opposite worry: the worry that inline links are so inconspicuous that people won’t even notice them, let alone be distracted by them. This opposite fear leads, interestingly, to the same conclusion: place the links at the bottom of the page.

This, alas, runs afoul of another common web study: eyetracking studies, which show that people’s eyes follow a F pattern on a page. Combine this with Jacob Nielsen’s unsurprising findings that people largely ignore the navigational elements of a page and go straight to the text, and it looks like putting links at the bottom of the page is going to be a great way of making sure no one ever sees them.

This conclusion is contradicted, however, by a 2001 study from SURL (The Software Usability Research Lab at Wichita State University), which found that links were equally easy to find, no matter where they were located. Here is where we can begin to see how the design of the experimental influences the results. In this study, the participants were asked questions which required them to follow the links to find the answers. Thus they had to explicitly look for links. This suggests that when people have to find links, it doesn’t much matter where they are. But the success rate of people explicitly looking for links does not tell us whether people not looking for them would be more likely to notice them if they were inline or in the margins.

Another problem with this type of study is that, precisely because it is a study, and the participants know that it is a study, they will expect that the answers are to be found within the content or its links. The text being studied exists in an implicit box, from which no participant is likely to break out by Googling for the answers on the test. But in real life, where there is no guarantee that the text before you contains all the answers you seek, Google beckons constantly.

Interestingly, while the study found no difference in the ability to find links based on their location, it found a strong anecdotal preference for inline linking:

[T]here were significant subjective differences between the link arrangements favoring the embedded links. That is, participants indicated that they believed that embedding the links within a document made it easier to navigate, easier to recognize key information, easier to follow the main idea of the passages, and promoted comprehension. Moreover, participants significantly preferred the embedded link arrangement to the other arrangements. Conversely, placing links at the bottom of a document was perceived as being the least navigable arrangement, and was consequently least preferred.

This strong user preference is apparently at odds with studies that actually set out to test comprehension and retention, at least according to Nicholas Carr’s alarmist The Shallows (an excerpt here from Wired). Carr worries that the web is full of distractions, such as inline links, which are rewiring our brains and causing us not to think deeply or retain what we read. All this is deeply at odds with the many tracts that tells us that Web users don’t read, they skim, and that therefore we should make every page a frenetic mix of titles, tables, lists, graphics, and other geegaws, lest the sight of two plain paragraphs in succession should send the reader spinning off into space.

On the web, you can’t win, it seems. Readers won’t read plain text, and they won’t retain text filled with distractions.

All of this concern seems to me to rest on two deeply flawed presumptions: that reading on the web should be like reading on paper, and that people read in order to retain the text. Here’s what’s wrong with both these ideas:

Distinguishing information seeking from information consumption

All the studies of reading on the web that I have seen seem to miss one very basic fact. Before information consumption, comes information seeking.

In the book world, information seeking begins with a trip to the library or to the bookstore. It then involves a lot of flipping through card catalogs, a lot of walking through the stacks with your head tilted sideways reading the spines, and a lot of flipping through introductions, TOCs, and indexes as you select which books to actually borrow or buy. Finally, you proceed to the checkout and take yourself back home with your stack, settling into your easy chair, and start reading. That is a lot of time, effort, and cash invested in information seeking before any real reading begins.

By contrast, on the web, information seeking starts with a Google search, followed by opening all the likely looking search results in browser tabs, followed by going through the tabs one by one skimming for promising content, closing unpromising tabs, and finally going back and reading more thoroughly the tabs that seemed promising (at least, that’s my process). All this involves a lot of reading that is pure information seeking, equivalent to the time spent in the card catalog and the stacks at the library or bookstore.

But when people compare web reading to book reading, they count all of the information seeking behavior as “reading” on the web, whereas they only count the time after you settle into your easy chair as “reading” for the book world (if they measure it at all). This is a gross distortion. In the library to find your way to texts; on the web you find your way through texts.

Another difference between the library and the web is that once you have found a likely text, your investment in that text in the book world is much greater than your investment in the web world. Even if the books you got from the bookstore or library prove disappointing at first, you are likely to stick with them because it will take a lot more time, effort, and money to replace them. Sticking with them to see if they will eventually prove at least adequate for your needs is a good economic strategy because the cost of starting over is high.

On the other hand, if you find a text on the web that proves disappointing, your investment is very small, and it makes much better economic sense to look for a better text, since doing so is very inexpensive. This does not represent a loss of the ability to concentrate, just a rational change in behavior based on the reduced cost of acquiring alternate texts.

So, most of the eyeballs on your text are not in settled reading mode, they are in wayfinding mode. They will skip and skim, because that is what you do in wayfinding mode. (This is not a web thing at all, since you do the same thing standing in the stacks at the library. But the eye tracking tools can’t measure you there.)

In fact, the mostly-wayfinding/sometimes-reading pattern is exactly what shows up in the studies. It is simply that the studies all seem to interpret it as a difference between reading paper and reading on the web when a simpler explanation is that information finding in a paper world mostly takes place before the seeker sits down to read.

Some people think of links as exit points, but for someone in wayfinding mode, anything you are not interested in or don’t understand is an exit point. If I am reading (or skimming) a text, and it makes a reference to a concept I don’t understand, or a task I don’t know how to perform, what do I do? My choices are:

1. Go back to Google and find another text written more to my background.
2. Highlight the text that refers to the unfamiliar concept or task, then right click and select “Search Google for…” (that is, make my own link).
3. Go hunting around the margins of the page to see if there are helpful links there.
4. Click on the handy link that the thoughtful author has provided right on the troublesome reference and go to content on the same site that clarifies the concept or describes the task.

Options 1 and 2 both take the reader away from your site, perhaps for good. Option 3 is improbable, given that:

1. Most sites don’t do this, so why would you be in the habit of looking for them?
2. Even if there are links, their relevance may not be obvious, and I have to go through the entire list to find one that might be relevant.
3. Option 2 is easier and works universally.

Only option 4 keeps the user on your site. A useful link turns an exit point into a re-entry point. It also has the added bonus that it is quite difficult to select text that is a link, so it actively discourages option 2. Not providing a link is not likely to keep the disappointed wayfinder on your page; providing a link creates the possibility of keeping them on your site.

The goal of most reading is not retention

Five or six times a year I make a six hour drive to visit one of the scattered parts of my family. Along the way, I read hundreds of road signs, yet by the end of my journey, I don’t remember any of them.

Did those road signs fail as communication devices because I don’t retain them? Of course not. Those signs exist to inform me of specific local situations requiring specific local decisions and actions on my part. For them to do their job, all this is required from me is that I decide and act correctly in the moment. Once I have taken the correct action, there is no reason to remember the sign. Forgetting past signs is actually a good thing, allowing me to concentrate on the immediate road ahead.

Most of our reading is like this — in the moment. When we read a novel, we read for the visceral impact of the imagined events, not to retain the text (unless we are reading for school, which, of course, makes the reading joyless).

When we read technical documentation, we read to complete our immediate task, not to commit the procedure to memory (if we do remember a procedure, it will be through repetition, not reading to retain).

When we read the news or a family letter, what we read may pass into the mass of experiences that shape our hopes and opinions, our sense of how the world works, but they are seldom individually recalled, unless highly affecting and frequently repeated, like the images of the planes hitting the twin towers.

No one reads tweets for retention.

When we read articles or blogs in our professional sphere we read mostly to confirm or to dispute. Let’s be honest about this: if you are pro inline linking, you are reading this to confirm your preference, and if you are anti, you are searching for weaknesses, omissions, and flaws in the argument so that you can rebut. And I would suggest this is a perfectly healthy way to approach this. Antagonism leads to debate, and debate leads to discovery and new understanding.

Even in a school setting, we don’t generally read for lifetime learning; we read for test passing. If we are going to talk about communications media rewiring our brains, we have to acknowledge that the school system rewires our brains to retain texts up till exam time, and to discard them as soon as the exam is complete.

And while we are on the subject of schools, we should note that a great many of the studies on this issue use what is essentially a school model of testing. The subjects are assigned to read a text and then to answer questions, just as they would be if they were in school. As in school, they are not motivated by their own tasks or their own interests, and, as in school, they are consequently easy prey to distraction. Purpose and focus makes all the difference in concentration, retention, and resistance to distractions, but purpose and focus are hard to reproduce in laboratory conditions.

Reading to do

It is comparatively rare, then, that we actually read with the goal or retention and long term learning, either in school or out of it. Most of the time we are reading to complete a specific short term task. Hypertext and search are great for this because they allow us to move very quickly through a large body of content to narrow in on the piece of information we need to complete our immediate task. There is no reason to read thoroughly every text we encounter on this search and no reason to remember any of them once we have completed the task. To complain that people reading for this purpose do not read thoroughly or retain what they have read is to entirely miss the point of why they are reading in the first place. They are reading to do, not to learn.

Reading to learn

On those relatively rare occasions when we do actually sit down to read with the intention of learning and retaining, I think we naturally fall into the mode of reading thoroughly and with attention. At least, I do, and I, at least, don’t find that I even notice links in the text when I am in that mode. I am motivated by a goal to which I am committed and in which I am deeply interested. I’m not seeking distractions, and I am not easily distracted.

On the other hand, if I do come across a concept in what I am reading which is not explained in the text, I do want to take a side trip to understand that concept so that I can return to what I am reading and continue with full comprehension. Again, therefore, an inline link is welcome.

That said, I do find that it is when I am reading in this mode that I tend to move away from the web and pick up a book or an e-book. If I am set upon a course of study, it is generally easier to pick up a good long-form volume that is designed specifically to instruct in that subject area. I will usually keep a tablet nearby in case I need to look up something that the author does not explain, but generally, I do this type of reading off the grid.

This is important too, because if other people are like me in this regard, that means that an even higher percentage of reading on the web is done not for retention but for action, immediate experience, reference, or debate. To condemn inline linking on the grounds that it is detrimental to retention, therefore, is to apply an almost entirely irrelevant standard. The issues should be, does inline linking support navigation, information finding, and getting to action?

Escaping the limits of paper

In the book world, it was reasonable to assume that your reader was going to read your text in a single narrative flow. This was due to the limits of paper and the effort required to switch to another text. Linear reading was an optimal strategy in the paper-and-libraries world, and so it became a cultural norm, something that people were trained to do, not because it was optimal in abstract, but because it was optimal within the limits of the available technology.

On the web, it is not reasonable to expect the same linear reading behavior to be the norm, nor should we wring our hands or imagine that civilization is coming to an end because people are discovering new ways to optimize their information finding in an online world.

Helping the unprepared reader

Readers come to texts from impossibly diverse backgrounds. Even in the most carefully planned book-based curriculum, no two students arrive equally prepared (or identically unprepared) for the same text. With web texts, arrived at by search, link, or social curation, readers, if anything, arrive even more unprepared.

The only way that the unprepared reader is going to successfully comprehend your text is by filling in the gaps in their preparation. Keeping their attention focussed on the single narrative line of your text is not the right answer, because they are not prepared to understand that narrative line.

Forcing them to continue can only produce an uncomprehending recollection of the text itself (a phenomenon anyone who has spent time in a classroom is thoroughly familiar with). But on the Web, there is no way to force them to continue. They can leave anytime they want to. And once they leave, why should they come back to your site, since it failed them? But if you provide them with a rich set of links, you provide them with a way to fill their gaps and equip themselves to comprehend your text. You thus give them a reason to stay, and a reason to return.

Sometimes not linking can be the best strategy

This is not to say that you should always prefer inline linking. It is certainly possible to imagine situations in which inline links should be avoided. Ginny Reddish points out, for instance, that links are distracting for low-literacy readers.

Of course, we don’t design most content for low-literacy readers We don’t design most things for novices. If we did, the Tour de France would be contested on tricycles. We design things for regular users, and expect novices to push through their novice difficulties and learn. But even so, there will be times when you design a site for low-literacy readers.

Different types of content may also call for different approaches to linking. More contemplative content may be better served by fewer links, while more action oriented content may benefit greatly from rich linking. Commercial content clearly benefits from rich linking that keeps the reader browsing and seeing more products. Public service or compliance oriented content, on the other hand, may benefit from providing a fixed path (providing the content itself works well enough to keep the reader on it).

If you choose not to link, however, don’t fool yourself that the mere absence of links will induce people to read your content to the end. Google is always just a swipe and a click away, and everyone but a rank novice web user knows exactly how to make a link for themselves anytime they want one.

A good link strategy is important

Given the choice to link, it is, of course, important to link in the right way. Links should provide context so that the reader has a reasonable expectation about where the link may lead. Links should be useful, rewarding, and deliver on what they promise. A poor or inconsistent linking strategy, or poor selection of link targets, will frustrate the reader and send them away from your site.

Fundamentally, links should fulfill a useful purpose for the reader and/or the writer. Purposes may differ for different sites, but the main purposes I see are these:

• Assist the wayfarer for whom the current text is not their final destination reach the text they really need (preferably on your site).
• Assist the reader who is not fully prepared for the text to fill in gaps in their knowledge or preparation so they can complete their task using your text (as opposed to someone else’s).
• Support your arguments or claims with evidence or argument from other sites. (Yes, this involves sending the reader to another site, but if doing so improves your credibility, that may still be a win.)
• Keep the reader on your site as long as possible. (Your site is what matters here, not the individual page. For most commercial purposes, having the reader visit multiple pages on your site, rather than just one, is highly desirable.)

Achieving a consistent link strategy

I began this essay by complaining about link strategy being dictated by the limitations of tools. Unfortunately, most tools on the market limit your linking strategy in one way or another. Sometimes this means limiting the kinds of links you can create or maintain, but the more common problem is that they simply make the creation and management of links so expensive that in practice organizations cannot afford to provide rich linking.

Whatever your linking strategy, you want to make sure that that strategy is implemented consistently. You don’t want your tools to dictate your strategy to you, and you don’t really want to leave it all in the hands of individual authors either, especially if you are reusing content in different places where you might want to implement different linking strategies.

Link management does not — or should not — mean letting individual authors create links higgledy piggledy and then deploying expensive CMS systems and/or exotic mapping systems to keep them from breaking. What link management should mean is having a consistent linking strategy and being able to apply it in a consistent way.

This is really hard to do if your tools don’t support central control of link creation and you depend on individual authors to adhere to your linking policy. And it creates significant overhead for the author if they have to make these kinds of decisions as they write. If authors have to concern themselves with when to link, what to link to, and where to locate the links on the page, chances are they will not create very many links, and certainly you will not get consistency across the site especially if you have a large number of authors.

One solution is to use a soft linking approach, such as that supported by the SPFE architecture. Soft linking lets authors quickly mark up mentions of concepts, objects, and tasks that you might want to provide links for, without creating actual links. At build time, you can then apply a consistent link policy to these potential link points, selecting when to link, where to place the links, and which resource to link to. All this is done algorithmically based on available metadata, which means you get highly consistent linking, and the correct density and location of links for each media or publication, without having to police individual authors, and without your strategy being dictated by your tools.

We are still adapting to hypermedia systems. This applies equally to readers and writers, thought we all seem to adapt faster as readers than we do a writers, behaving one way when we read, but still writing as if everyone else read the old way. But hypermedia are very different from the old fixed media, and we cannot continue to think of the content we push to the web the same way as the content we used to print and bind and throw in the box. On the web, links are not a decorative gloss that we lay over a static publications. They are the nerves and sinews of hypermedia. We need to stop dismissing links as distractions or exit points, and start using them strategically as mechanisms for navigation, empowerment, and reader retention.

About The Author

Mark Baker, President of Analecta Communications Inc., is a twenty-year veteran of the technical communication industry, with particular experience in developing task-oriented, topic-based content. He has worked as a technical writer, a publications manager, a structured authoring consultant and trainer, and as a designer, architect, and builder of structured authoring systems. He blogs at everypageispageone.com.

Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

I’ve been contacted several times this month from content professionals charged with making SharePoint work. While each project is different, they all seem to share a common problem — a lack of understanding in the SharePoint department. Specifically, how to optimize content for findability when SharePoint is in the mix.

Unfortunately, I have little knowledge (and even less experience) in the SharePoint arena. But, as luck would have it, I know some folks over at Earley & Associates who are well-versed in SharePoint who have tons of real-world experience. Not only do they offer SharePoint consulting services and project management, but they also put on a traveling series of master classes designed to help you leverage SharePoint to accomplish you business goals. One class I find particularly interesting is SharePoint Information Architecture – How to Optimize Findability in SharePoint.

The 3-day hands-on course promises a practical introduction to key information architecture concepts and to deliver the knowledge needed so to apply the concepts to your most pressing information problems. The course is unique in the level of attention given to content type definition, taxonomy, and metadata. I seldom see these issues discussed in much detail, but knowing the folks at Earley as I do, I would imagine students will learn a lot more about these topics than they might imagine.

The course website says students will learn to:

• Develop a user-centric information architecture
• Determine how to derive and apply taxonomies for site structures
• Define metadata structures, content types, lists, views and libraries
• Leverage use cases and scenarios to optimize SharePoint
• Architect effective information management governance processes

The class takes place several times this spring, in the following cities:

• Boston, MA – May 2-4, 2012
• Philadelphia, PA – May 22-24, 2012
• Santa Clara, CA – June 6-8, 2012

And, classes are also planned later in Calgary, Alberta; Toronto, ON; Meadowlands, NJ; Arlington, VA; Dallas, TX; and, Tampa, FL.

According to Earley, the class is designed for information specialists, program managers, business process owners, SharePoint developers, taxonomists, library science specialists, intranet professionals and anyone who needs a stronger grounding in information architecture and guidance on how to configure SharePoint to meet business and user requirements.

Interestingly, the course also includes a free one year license of MetaVis Architect – a graphical design tool for the creation and deployment of your SharePoint taxonomy, content types and structure.

Check out the syllabus. Determine if the course is right for you. If so, consider registering today!

CHIEF & CHUCK is underwritten by CA Technologies and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at http://www.ca.com/cdit.

Content marketing. It’s a hot topic. It seems that everywhere you look, marketers are chatting up a storm about it. Content marketing this, content marketing strategy that. But, repeating the words over and over doesn’t make one a content marketing master. In this interview with Bill Flitter, CEO of dlvr.it, we chat about content marketing, content strategy, and the upcoming Content Marketing Strategies Conference.

TCW: Tell us a little about yourself and what you do for a living.

BF: Thanks, Scott. I’m Bill Flitter, CEO and Co-founder of dlvr.it. dlvr.it helps marketers, publishers and small-to-medium-sized businesses easily distribute content to earned, owned and paid media audiences. We service over 150,000 customers and deliver over 1 billion of their stories daily.

TCW: As you know, I am a conference organizer and strong proponent for in-person events that provide ways for attendees to mix, mingle, network and learn. Tell us a little about your upcoming event, the Content Marketing Strategies Conference.

BF: The Content Marketing Strategies Conference was created by dlvr.it to address the market need for information and education about the growing field of content marketing. We created the event as a crash course to help marketers and other content professionals learn from the successes and failures of both companies and industry thought leaders.

The content is structured to walk attendees through the content marketing lifecycle step-by-step: Strategize, Create, Curate, Manage, Distribute and Analyze. At the end of the event, the attendees will be armed with confidence and information they need to start a content marketing program or enhance an existing one.

Every year, it brings together over 100 senior level marketing decision makers, content strategists, PR professionals, from SMBs to the Fortune 500. This year the event takes place May 8th – 9th in Berkeley, CA at the Claremont Hotel Club and Spa.

TCW: For those who aren’t clear why such an event is needed, let’s start by defining a few terms.What is content strategy?

BF: Content strategy is the planning, development, and management of informational content.

TCW: That’s pretty straightforward. So, what is content marketing?

BF: Content Marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a targeted audience.

TCW: What is a content marketing strategy?

BF: Content Marketing Strategy is having a clear understanding of your customer and marketing goals and applying the right marketing tactics and measurement practices for your inventory of content. A content marketing strategizes assembles the content marketing life cycle: Strategize, Create, Curate, Manage, Distribute and Analyze, into a cohesive plan.

TCW: Since content marketing occurs in all part of an organization, it’s not limited to marketing professionals. Who should attend the event?

BF: The conference attracts a wide variety of titles from the marketing discipline. Aside from the obvious — content marketers and content strategists — you’re just as likely to meet vice presidents in charge of advertising, marketing, pubic relations and social media as you are chief officers in charge or marketing, information, business development, digital media and the like. Basically, it’s a conference for anyone who is — or should be involved — in the formation and implementation of content marketing strategy.

TCW: What does it cost to attend and where do we get tickets?

BF: The two day event costs $695 but if you use the code “contentwrangler” when you register you will save yourself $100.

TCW: Well, it looks like we are out of time. I look forward to participating in this year’s event. I’ll see you in Berkeley.

BF: Thanks, Scott. I hope to see you — and the other “wranglers” at the show.

“Yet,” Fishburne writes in his popular blog filled with comical ‘marketoons’, “marketers are quicker to PowerPoint than to prototype. We spend more time on two-by-two matrixes and venn diagrams talking about ideas than actually making ideas happen.”

Read the entire post and then check out Fishburne’s Marketoon Studios. You might find marketoons are an excellent way for you to communicate your message.

In our latest installment of The Content Wrangler Interviews we chat with freelance writer Barbara Saunders about content strategy, content “screen shots”, and why she has some problems with the idea that content assets can be improved by better management. As usual, we’d love to know what you think. Give it a quick read, then share your views in the comments section.

TCW: Hey, Barbara. Thanks for spending some time with us today. Tell us a little about yourself and what you do for a living.

BS: I’m a creative writer with a commercial practice. I write, edit, and teach effective writing practices.

TCW: You’ve been working in marketing and PR communications. What got you interested in content strategy?

BS: I began my career as production editor at a software company. For many years, I cobbled together a work life including editorial positions, freelance journalism, and direct client service like coaching, fitness training, and youth development. I’m a typical creative-writer type, in that way – curious about different worlds. I ended up as an analyst at a company that used a natural language search tool to manage corporate records for litigation, compliance, and governance. There I was exposed to ontologies, taxonomies, tagging, and the basics of how search engines work. I was intrigued by the idea of applying these techniques to other editorial projects in businesses.

TCW: How did that change the way you approach your work and your career?

BS: Attending the Intelligent Content Conference in 2011 was my way to learn more about this new domain. The conference fired me up. I bought (and read) a textbook about XML. I started exploring technical writing gigs. I applied some of the “intelligence” frameworks I’d learned to my work in marketing communications. With my clients, I don’t have a say about tools; I send them text in Microsoft Word – or even email. What I was best able to transfer from the content strategy world was introducing the idea of a comprehensive planning to create, store, and organize modular chunks of content that will be used for different customers and through different delivery mechanisms.

TCW: Do you identify now as a content strategist?

BS: Yes, I do. Before I could take on the title, though, I had to work through a nagging dilemma. As I sat through the sessions at Intelligent Content Conference this past February (2012), I became more and more uncomfortable with the idea of content as foremost an asset that can be improved by better management. Before it has value as an asset, content has to be a functional vessel for the ideas it intends to communicate. Most of the poor content I encounter as a customer fails that basic test. No amount of organization after the fact can fix that. There still seems to be a gap between content strategy and how creating happens. I came to the conclusion that, most of those reasons have to do with expecting business people to stand in for professional writers and training writers to think like business managers. This stands in really stark contrast to the way businesses treat visual designers and engineers.

TCW: Can you tell me more about the distinction, and why you think it’s important?

BS: Successful writers combine the visual artist’s ability to evoke sensory experience with the engineer’s ability to generate models. People with managerial talents and preferences (though they may also be good writers) tend to use verbal communication as an adjunct or extension to speaking and relating in real time. That’s why I think writers are being pushed to be more “conversational” and to integrate their verbal skills deeper into the workflow and collaboration processes. As a result, their social impulses are redirected from the reader to the work group – often to the detriment of both the content creation process and its product.

TCW: Can you give me some examples?

BS: Like technical writers everywhere, I get a lot of raw content that doesn’t follow “basic” rules. For example, when writing a manual or documenting an application procedure, I wondered, why do my content authors so consistently make the error of writing a single, ordinal list that mixes steps the customer must take with steps the company would take in response? What the reader needs to know is “what I need to do.” The authors write “a list the things that have to happen, in order.” The problem is not a failure to know the rules; it’s a misplaced orientation.

When we learn to write in school, we write to show the teacher that we’ve grasped the material. So we get into the habit of taking a “screen capture” of what’s in our heads and shoving it into a form. A lot of ineffective business writing reflects that. Jargon, unexplained acronyms, and industry or company insider talk accurately capture thought. Customers? Last week, my client’s customer wrote in an email string, “Please tell me what XYZ, ABC, and DEF stand for. Us cave folk no understand.” Not good!

Often, my greatest value in the process is precisely that I am removed enough from the corporate team that I have the same perspective as the reader.

TCW: How does the direction content strategy is taking fall short of addressing this problem?

BS: I keep hearing about creating content that can be read by people and machines. But content needs to be sensible as well as comprehensible. That usually takes more solitary work than is fashionable these days. The standard procedure is to start the “writing” process way too early in the thinking process. At a large software company where I worked, one manager stated that he expected white papers to go through twenty or thirty drafts. Dozens of people paid hundreds of dollars a day formatted charts that would later be cut, polished paragraphs that would later be deemed irrelevant to the core messages, or tinkered with templates that could not serve the logical structure of the document.

The company was attempting to craft an ambitious service to let customers get specific business problems in front of product designers. Team members on site with customers would record findings in a document; my deliverable was a polished version. I was surprised at the questions I couldn’t get answers to: how people would access the document, who the audience was, and how they would use it. Eventually I learned that the intention was to put together a “well-written” data dump from which customer representatives, field consultants, and internal engineers were supposed to extract both meaning and purpose. This approach violates the basic covenant of writing, though.

The way I see my job as a writer, the heavy lifting for making sense of the material is mine, not the readers’.

TCW: That’s a great point. It is our responsibility. Far too many times we forget this. Well, although I could talk with you about these topics for hours, it looks like we’re out of time. Thanks for sharing a little bit about yourself with our readers. I really appreciate it.

BS: Thank you for inviting me.

Editor’s Note: If you’re looking to learn more about content strategy, consider attending The Content Strategy Workshop, brought to you by The Content Wrangler and Intentional Design, October 9-10, 2012 in Portland, Oregon. The event features two days of practical learning from some of the best content strategists around. Register today! Class size is limited to ensure successful learning experiences.