EPIC Content: How to build high impact content
… Or content your online communities will actually want to engage with.
This article outlines an online content strategy that has been in effect at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) for just over a year. I hope the practical examples will help you take back control of your institution’s online presence and enable you to deliver content that is relevant and practical to your communities.
The Online World is CROWDED
But first a little context. There is a ridiculous amount of content being uploaded, downloaded, shared, and interacted with every 60 seconds online. Competing online is difficult because people are overwhelmed with content. According to Neilsen’s Total Audience Report, American adults spend more than 11 hours a day with electronic media. We are a hyper-connected society. If a brand puts something online, it better be engaging and relevant, otherwise people will keep scrolling, searching, or clicking. All too often, digital content intended to create loyal customers just gets lost in the noise.
Last year I took a step back and looked at our online presence and I was not all that excited about what I found. I took some time and went down the rabbit hole of content strategy definitions, posts, templates around the internet. I also revisited Conxa Roda and Tiana Tasich’s MuseumNext 2015 Content Strategy workshop, which I attended in Geneva. Their slide deck is brimming with resources and content strategy theory. People have been talking about content strategy for years but before we go any further, let’s go over a few things we as museums are up against.
Museums need to think more like Media Companies
Our competition is greater and more cross-disciplinary than you might think.
Museums are in direct competition with every other media outlet and news organization on the planet.
Discovery, CNN, BBC, the History channel, IFL Science, even YouTube creators who accumulate millions of views and subscribers on a daily basis. Museums in the same city may compete for attendance dollars but online they are competing with media companies, brands, publishers, and creators.
Even if we were working together, tugging on the same rope in perfect unison museums still have a tough job. A content strategy helps your team line up and pull in the same direction.
It is time we start working smarter on content production because we have a MAJOR advantage over all of the media companies out there...STUFF and EXPERTISE. We have collections and the experts to provide the story! The majority of the other guys don’t and are looking at places like museums for content. We ARE the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and I Fucking Love Science. We need to start thinking and acting like a media company and making our content work for us.
Another form of competition is the attention span of people on the internet. The average web visit to our site is around 1.5 minutes. Think about that, on average people spend less time on our site than it takes to listen to the average song.
Even more incredible is the average page view time on the web in general. According to Hubspot, 55% of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on your website. In the time it took you to read these last two sentences, people have already decided to either move on from your content or stick with it. How often do you think people stick with our content or click over to a Buzzfeed quiz or the latest trending topic?
We need to ask WHY
To deliver digital content that makes people stop and interact, brands need to first focus on finding a powerful insight. Insight is the ability to maintain a deep, intuitive understanding of your community. Not just what our community does, but why they do what they do. Without insight, digital content is trial and error — a glorified effort to throw a bunch of content onto the internet and see what sticks.
The only way to make your content resonate is to leverage the power of insight. Sometimes it takes thorough market research to uncover an insight. Sometimes you can find it by simply asking “why?” over and over again until you get at the root of what motivates a person’s true behavior.
I don’t think museums ask this simple question all that often but we need to start, before we create content. Why are we doing this? Why will this benefit our community? Why will it benefit us?
Content Strategy
A year and a half ago we had no content strategy at the Royal Ontario Museum. We were not looking heavily at our data and we were just throwing content up online and hoping it would resonate with our community, we were guessing when we didn’t need too.
At MuseumNext 2015 in Geneva I attended a workshop on content strategy hosted by Conxa Roda and Tjana Tasich. In their workshop they introduced me to Content Strategy thought leaders like Kristina Halvorson, CEO of a digital content agency called Brain Trust.
Kristina is the co-author of the 2009 book “Content Strategy for the Web” and I think it is still valid today. In fact she’s now published multiple editions to her book. She says, “Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content …. the content strategy must work to define not only which content will be published, but why we’re publishing it in the first place. Otherwise, content strategy isn’t strategy at all: it’s just a glorified production line for content nobody really needs or wants.” More of Kristina’s brilliance can be found here.
Luckily, everything on the web is quantifiable and if you look there are many, many, studies that examine the psychology of sharing online content. We should be using this knowledge to our advantage, using this data we can start to get smarter about our content production. Not everything will go viral and that shouldn’t be the goal, but if we follow the below suggestions our content will be smarter, more efficient, more relevant, and more powerful.
Do you build Emotion into your online content?
You should. Good online content isn’t about re-purposing you’re print ads online. You need a powerful insight but you also need to feed into people’s emotions for online content to work for you. Igniting high energy emotions is proven to grab people’s attention and enable sharing.
Way back in 2009 researchers at the University of Pennsylvania did a study on the NY Times and how their content performed online. They analyzed over 500,000 online stories. What they found is that content that stirred emotions in readers was more likely to be shared. Stories that caused anxiety, awe, and anger in readers tended to be shared more and more.
Content that was surprising, piqued an interest and that had a practical utility for readers was also more likely to be shared. Museum content can do all of those things but many museums still treat social like a billboard.
Anger
I’m not saying we belittle or insult our community, I’m saying that we need to write about something that makes people passionate.
Anger is typically directed at the topic, not the author. This strategy requires some tolerance for dealing with controversial topics and I understand this is an area museums aren’t always comfortable with. But the truth is we’ve seen some great success already at the ROM. Controversial blog posts receive twice as many comments and page views on average than non-controversial ones. Now I’m not saying we need to be inciting anger on a daily basis, what we need to do is be aware of controversial topics and look at strategic ways to connect our collections and curatorial expertise.
We need to share content that taps into the topics that people are passionate about.
The news coming out of Iraq and Syria about the destruction of cultural heritage angered a lot of people in museums and the general public. There are many more examples of topics that we are in a unique position to not only comment on but lead the discussion because of our collections and curatorial expertise.
This post from March of last year reached almost 9,000 people and includes one image, 64 words and a link back to our website. On average posts of this nature on our Facebook page reach between 500–1,500 people. People were and are angry about this issue, so they clicked…and shared….and commented…and we raised awareness about the issue and our own reputation in the process. We didn’t make people angry, they were already, we just tapped into this emotion and steered it in a useful direction.
Shouldn’t we be encouraging good environmental practice by making people aware of our biodiversity research?
Shouldn’t we make people aware of the threat to humanity’s cultural heritage and offer ways to get involved?
Shouldn’t we offer people a place to learn more about the issues that the world is talking about NOW?
Whatever it is, we need to connect to emotions more effectively to ensure a response from our community. We need to make our collections and curatorial expertise relevant to what’s happening in the world around us and use it to encourage people to take an action.
Inspire Wonder
This emotion should be the number one priority for museums. Luckily, inspiring stories and wonder are woven throughout museums. Awe is a safer emotion to try to use, Awe is more than surprise, it’s the reason we can’t stop watching movies with big explosions and larger-than-life heroes. What’s the last thing you learned about and thought, “That’s amazing!” Was it something beautiful? Unlikely? Imaginative? Or gross?
Museums should be global leaders in the wonder business
We have millions of stories to tell and I would bet that the majority of them are filled with wonder. So let’s blow people’s minds on a regular basis! Instead of putting people to sleep, people should be saying WOW out loud after engaging with our content and itching to share it with their network.
This 26 second video was produced with an iPhone, no mic, no lighting, and no post production. It reached 3 million people organically and it is just a video of a leech having a snack, but it blew peoples’ minds and they shared it. The video now has over half a million views and keeps popping up in newsfeed because we tapped into people’s sense of wonder.
Humor
Humor can work, really, really well, if done right. Tongue and cheek is the best form of humor and like anger you have to be willing to the a risk or two from time to time. While people will take an action on content that angers them, they are almost as likely to share or comment on something that makes them laugh. People love a good t-rex joke. Our ROM selfie guide is another good example. It was relevant, people were talking about the Russian Safe selfie guide at the time. It was tongue and cheek and it connected selfies with the museum experience, something many of our visitors already do.
Last December we took a chance and photo-shopped some Star Wars imagery into some of our objects. We posted it on Buzzfeed and people loved it. It was funny and unexpected, and it connected the ROM to a huge global conversation.
Relevant Content — News-jacking
Let’s talk about relevant content for a second or content that relates to something that is happening in the world right now. Last November there were hundreds of thousands of ladybugs flying around Toronto during an unusual warm spell and our Entomology Technician did a quick blog post about it. Not only was it relevant, it was practically useful and Antonia’s blog got 1,305 page views on our website within the first 3 days of the post. That’s about quadruple our average blog post. Visitors spent an average of about 4 minutes on the page — most page views to the ROM website in general clock in at about 1 minute and 11 seconds!
When we posted it on Facebook it received 78 comments and they show that this post was useful to people. Antonia, our Entomology Technician even used her personal Facebook account to respond to questions in the comments.
The ROM’s Online Content Strategy
The ROM aims to deliver high impact content that is multi-platform, relevant, community & data driven
Our content needs to be all of these things for it to work and have the most impact:
- High Impact content: Content that stirs the emotions of our community and encourages an action, inspires our community, and has a practical impact on their lives
- Relevant: Content that makes a connection between our research, exhibitions, collections, and news/pop culture
- Data-driven: Analyze metrics to deliver content that repeats successes and learns from failures. We don’t need to guess
- Multi-Platform: Content that can be published on multiple platforms. A healthy mix of text, images, and video with an eye on limits
We want high impact content, things that stir the emotions of our community and that have a practical impact on their lives. We also want to make connections to the real world whenever possible. We are keeping a closer eye on our data, repeating successes and learning for our mistakes. We are now also producing content once and spreading it widely, keeping an eye on limits and best practices from across the web.
The ROM Content Checklist
Last year when I was coming up with our content strategy I realized that we do not fully think about our content before we start producing it. We were wasting a lot of time when we could have been smarter about our content production with all of the data we have. There are many who still treat their online presence like a billboard, and that is a shame, because it is so much more.
So now that we have a new content strategy, based on the data behind our online presence and the psychology of sharing, I made a content checklist for staff. If the content we are producing does not meet a majority (5 out of 7) of these factors, I encourage our staff to rethink it.
When deciding on content to produce, we should first ask, “What’s the point?” and “Who cares?” — The Why and What’s the value to us and the communities we are trying to reach.
We don’t control the game
Why is all of this important? Because Zuckerberg controls the game.
A few months ago Facebook changed its algorithm, again, to increasingly prioritize posts in newsfeed that come from users’ friends and family members. Posts made by brands and organizations, especially content publishers, is decreasing.
The motivation for this update brings Facebook back to its original goals and intentions. Facebook never set out to be a provider or distributor of content; instead, it was meant to connect people to each other. This update is a way to get back to its roots, and provide more content from friends and family, while decreasing content reach from brands and publishers.
It is important now more than ever that you know why people interact with content and provide them with content they want to interact with. A share from one of your community members is worth more now than it ever was.
Unless you have a vault of gold coins stashed away somewhere to prop up your online presence. The world’s biggest brands only post 2 to 3 times per week on Facebook. With Scrooge McDuck sized coin vaults they can afford to pay to have their content reach their audience where we have to rely on organic reach more often. That means we have to be smarter about our content production and use our data to our advantage.
Anyone can throw money around and be successful. As non-profits we need to be resourceful. We need to educate ourselves about all of the things I mentioned above to ensure our institutions are delivering high impact content. If we are, we will remain relevant to the world around us.
