The Long, Slow Rise of Content

“Content” is how everything an organization does is manifested in the world: its offerings (products, programs, services, information, resources, and tools), events, social media conversation, sharing, promotions, and more. It takes many forms: text, documents, social media postings, videos, audios, publications, events, etc.

But that wasn’t always the case — or, more precisely, organizations didn’t always understand that it was.

Back in the early days of the Internet, websites were cool add-ons to an organization’s “real” work of communicating with and promoting to various audiences. In the mid-1990s, let’s face it, companies had websites because it was cool to have one. While the earliest websites were straightforward text on a gray background, pretty quickly, they became focused on flashy graphics.

I think it was in late 1995 that my son, age 8 at the time, started keeping a notebook of URLs that started cropping up in TV commercials and other ads. It became clear to me that the Web had arrived. At the time, I lived in NYC and had spent years working as an editor for various women’s and consumer magazines, and was a copywriter for Avon Products. When one of my colleagues picked up and moved to Portland, Oregon to “design home pages,” he had to explain to us what the heck he was talking about.

I wanted to be part of the new world of the Internet. I attended an enormous expo and offered my services to some catalog vendors, but with no luck. I joined email lists of people creating websites, but no one was talking about content. I attended a Webgrrls conference, where the founders of iVillage discussed their recent decision to stop paying for content.

Finally, I found an opportunity to work with a designer on a volunteer basis to create the content for a nonprofit organization’s website. Then, returning to my editorial roots, I started writing for Internet World Magazine about various websites’ business models. None of those websites really understood that what they were offering was content.

I started writing essays for a website that targeted women age 21 to 35 — the site was called T-Lounge, and it was created by a brand-spanking-new, ultra-hip design firm and featured headlines scrolling in waves across the bottom of the screen. At the center was a group of women sitting in a circle, and you could change the background so it became a campfire, a café or a living room. The women “talked” via a series of essays, and I was one of about a half-dozen contributors. I got $75 per essay, and if I submitted the essay with a typo, it was published with a typo. Interesting statement about the priority of content for this site, don’t you think?

When I moved to Chicago in 1997, I learned that I had more experience than most people with the web. I got a job with R.R. Donnelley, where I kept their corporate website updated (HTML by hand), led the effort to redesign their website, and created their first intranet, all while writing and producing an employee newsletter every two weeks. Again, this is indicative of the relatively low priority given to the Web and, in particular, the content, to their business.

I left Donnelley after a year to join BeautyJungle, an e-commerce startup that sold makeup and really learned that we were making it up as we went along. There were a handful of other cosmetics websites that sprung up around the same time. Since there were no fixed protocols for where navigation belonged on a website, these sites were experimenting — one of them had the “left nav” bar shifted in about 25 percent, so they could promote products along the far left-side bar of the site.

The other content folks at the startup had come from a major beauty magazine, and they were tasked with creating a taxonomy structure for the products (I’m sure they didn’t call it that, though) — this resulted in a search for “red lipstick” returned no results, because the search didn’t account for any red color variations, such as crimson, carmine, raven, etc. Part of my role was to write the customer service copy — aka, come up with customer service policies and then write them down, working with the warehouse people to ensure that they could meet those policies. This was a lesson in the fact that communication needs sometimes precede and dictate programs and products.

Was content functional or strategic? Did it follow or lead the development of products, programs, and services? The answer for me, at the time, was “yes” to all — but I felt extremely alone in that effort.

Just before I started at BeautyJungle, I attended a conference in San Francisco called Web99. At one session, Molly Wright Steenson mentioned the term “content strategy,” explaining that it meant applying the processes and practices from the publishing world to creating and maintaining websites. At the time, she was practicing content strategy at Netscape. That was a “eureka” moment for me — I had found my calling, and have been learning about, practicing, speaking about, and evangelizing for content strategy ever since.

Within six months after that conference, I was building and leading a team of content strategists at Sapient, an e-business consulting firm. In early 2001, the tech bubble burst, and I opened my own consultancy. I worked on consumer-facing sites and intranets, primarily for large corporations, as well as some foundations and nonprofit organizations.

In 2001, organizations were still more based in paper than online. Different divisions created materials such as brochures and newsletters, and distributed them individually to their specific targeted audiences. These communications materials may have been inconsistent in their design, voice and tone, or in the way they depicted the organization, but it didn’t matter.

With the advent of the Web, suddenly it started to matter. Everyone’s marketing materials and communications — newsletters, press releases, biographies, product descriptions, program information, etc — now appeared on the same website, side by side. Inconsistencies and redundancies created embarrassment for the organization.

Now, in 2014, some of these things have changed, but many have not. And that’s because even though organizations want a different result, they have not been willing to make the larger internal changes to their overall structure, staffing, and processes to alter the end results. In order for a website to portray an organization as a unified entity with a unified voice, the organization needs to actually be that. Fundamental changes like this can’t happen overnight, so it’s not surprising that they haven’t.

Rise of the customer

In 2000, a groundbreaking work appeared on the Web called the Cluetrain Manifesto. This work was an open treatise about how the Web would transform organizations and their relationships with their customers. Led by internet pioneers Doc Searls, David Weingerber, Rick Levine, and Christopher Locke, it foretold the increasing role that audiences would play in shaping conversations with organizations, and laid out what organizations would need to do in order to transform one-way communications into dialogs. The primary thing they would need to do, according to Cluetrain, was stop speaking corporate-speak and start talking like human beings. Talk about enormous change!

And everything the Cluetrain Manifesto predicted has, indeed come to pass. Customers have changed their expectations about customer service, about the nature of products and services, and about their relationships with the brands and organizations they support and patronize. This is all expressed via content.

Marketers have seen this and have started adapting age-old communications practices to exploit this shift — storytelling, content marketing, and tactics to attract and engage audiences. It’s old stuff in a new skin, of course, with ad-based contests, advertising, and the like. But it’s all now online. And again, it’s content.

In 2014, organizations are not online because it’s cool, they’re online because that is how they do business. And when they do business online, they do it using content. Lots and lots of content. According to Webopedia, in 2011 we created 1.8 trillion GBs of data. Every day, we create more than 204 million email messages, more than 2 million Google searches, 48 hours of new YouTube video, more than 100,000 tweets, and share 684,000 bits of content on Facebook.

Content needs a strategy

The need for content is greater than ever. On the other hand, people are inundated with too much information and can’t possibly process everything that they come into contact with daily. There’s a new expression to describe this information overload — “content shock.”

So how can organizations make sure that they are producing the right content that their audiences want and need, expressed in a way that will resonate with them and, thus, help the organization meet its business goals. The answer is two words: Content strategy.

Content strategy spells out the who, what, when, where, why, and how of content, answering numerous foundational questions:

· Who is it for?

· Who is creating it?

· What content are they creating?

· When/how often are they creating content?

· Where is it being promoted?

· Why? The most important question of all

· How will it be surfaced, aggregated, curated, grouped, and stored?

There are also two additional components in defining content strategy:

· A statement acknowledging that the organization is, indeed, using content to meet its audience’s goals and thereby meet its business goals, and stating how they’ll use it.

· And finally, the people, processes and power to execute the statement.

Every organization needs a content strategy. Without one, they can’t know the purpose of their content, how to create it with a consistent voice and tone, how to prioritize it, how to promote it, and when to remove it.

Change is hard, but FOMO

From 2005 to 2011 I worked at the National Association of Realtors (NAR) as managing director of their member website. When I started working there, the website was the primary destination for the country’s 1+ million Realtors to learn about the national organization that represented them. When I left, NAR had dozens of social media presences and multiple websites. We created policies and guidelines for how and when to set up a new profile/presence and how to use them effectively.

NAR runs like a well-oiled machine. There is large core group of volunteers who staff and chair committees and working groups, and there is a core of 20+-year staff members who know the best ways of working with their particular groups. The member committees regularly suggest new ideas, often involving a tool, platform, or website that they want the association to do participate in.

The organization’s entry into social media started with a blog called “NAR Wisdom,” created by a member to express his extreme frustration with the organization. The blog caught the eye of the organization’s top executives, and they needed to decide whether and how to respond. After some thought and discussion, the CEO posted a comment to the blog responding to one of the complaints. That dialog led in time to the blog’s demise, since its author realized that the organization wasn’t quite as closed to change as he had thought. For the organization, that watershed moment led them to realize that they needed to prepare for similar types of unsolicited input from members who expected to be heard. In response, my boss, Pamela Kabati, and I created a white paper for the board called “Moving from Monologue to Dialogue,” and got approval to hire a social media manager.

The organization’s social media presences altered how it communicated with members and other target audiences. You may call the experience “tailored” or you can call it “fragmented” — both are true. But then Facebook wasn’t enough, Twitter wasn’t enough, we needed to think about Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, not to mention specific real estate social and blog networks — an endless stream of channels, all for “Fear of Missing Out.”

Content is the stuff going on on a website, as well as in social media. Organizations create and consume it, audiences create and consume it. So it’s got to be smart and sound and purposeful and strategic. It’s taken a long time to make even this much progress, but we are far from finished. Change is hard and doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s worth it anyway.

What comes next

I wonder whether true organizational change — the kind that will enable everyone inside an organizational change to understand the ways in which their jobs involve content — just needs more time. Maybe it’s a generational thing, that only when Baby Boomers retire will the degree of change that is really required will happen.

And content strategists will be there helping make it so. By my estimate, there are no more than 2,000 content strategy practitioners (as distinct from content marketers, copywriters, SEO specialists, etc., etc.). We speak at events, write books and blog posts, and advise clients or colleagues about how to make their content more findable, usable, and useful. We follow each other on Twitter, cite each other’s material, and we are starting to teach undergraduate and graduate courses. Together we are creating a new discipline. We’re helping organizations make sense of what they have and how they deliver information so they can cut through the clutter and reach their audiences effectively.

(This essay was originally written for a book looking back at the history of the internet; the book project has now been shelved.)