ConFab highlights
ConFab is the biggest and often noted as being the best content strategy conference in the world. It certainly has an impressive line up of speakers, but Minneapolis is a pretty long way to go for most of us. Fortunately thanks to Twitter, various live streaming options and YouTube it’s almost like we were there. Here are a few of my highlights from various speakers, commentators and the Twitterverse.
You can also re-watch the live streams:
Kristina Halvorson, Founder, CEO, Brain Traffic
If you’re interested in it, then you’re a content strategist. Try to ignore the imposter syndrome and just go for it.
“Discipline means remembering what you want”
Focus on content that audiences want and works for them.
Everyone is more worried about what they’re wearing that what you’re wearing.
Partners for the content strategist from Richard Ingram:
Ahava Leibtag, Aha Media Group, LLC
I’m ok, you’re ok: Navigating challenging content strategy conversations
On the live stream here @ 01:30:00 (the sound starts a little later!)
Interesting talk looking at how brands make awful decisions about their content and branding and more importantly, how to stop them.
Design is seen as a solution, content is not yet. As such, design is critiqued as a group whilst content is much more of a back and forth. This removes the ability to discuss and doesn’t position content as the solution it should be.
Sometimes it’s really scary to say ‘this isn’t a good idea.’
“My job is to advocate for customer experience and protect the brand.” Therefore, it’s often the role of the content strategist to start the difficult conversation. Don’t be afraid of it. If you see something, you need to say something.
Tools that can help you to have these difficult conversations:
You have to establish the relationship first — don’t go straight in with the punch.
Understand the different cultures you’re working with and how you can bring them together. This will help you get to a point where you can create a good, collaborative relationship which feel like a team and not a service, allowing you to have trickier conversations more productively.
“Is my website bad?” is really asking whether my choices leading to that website were correct, which is a personal, emotional conversation. As such, you have to get really specific when asking for feedback to know what people are happy about discussing or being challenged on. “I do want to focus on this, i don’t want to focus on that” is a good way to start that conversation. Don’t start to address the global things and keep coming back to what was agreed.
When kicking off projects, start with the grand vision — what does great look like? Always be trying to get to ‘We basically need’ and then evaluate how close to that what you’re working on is.
These conversations increase the likelihood of someone putting their hand up and asking the difficult question or saying ‘this isn’t a good idea’.
REI, a large company in the US, encourage their teams to give anonymous feedback & questions on post its at the end of their town hall meetings. This helps them to tackle difficult topics right then and there rather than having them fester.
Be happy to ask, “does that best practice make sense in this particular situation?”
Find someone who can be a sounding board, who will help you to get better at these conversations through practice and reflection.
Mike Hastings — Director of Enhanced Content, Netflix
Better suggestions through tagging: How Netflix deconstructs Hollywood
On the live stream at 02:30
As people flick through channels they are evaluating hundreds of different signals subconsciously, whilst they decide what to watch.
“Common objects become strangely uncommon when removed from their context and ways of being seen”
Wayne Thiebaud
Netflix has 60–90 seconds to help people make up their mind on what they want to watch. They’re trying to replace channel surfing without replicating it. Have tried putting up long lists of ‘top picks’ and found that the overhead is too much for people to understand, given the lack of context that each suggestion comes with.
Unique challenge NetFlix has is getting personalised editorial to work at their scale. Editorial is now seen as the way to dress up what the algorithms will provide through machine learning. Their solution is to use human beings to tag their content, so that it can then be presented by machines. One of the challenges of this is getting their human taggers to be as objective as possible — so they use 120+ fields with various scales and values.
This approach allows them to come up with and then create some pretty complicated genres such as ‘Adrenaline Rush Race Against Time Action & Adventure’. They now have 50,000+ genres. They design, validate and then deploy the majority of these through user research methods.
Joscelin Cooper, Air BnB
Creating trust and belonging for onboarding
On the live stream at 3:35
“Writing is a design discipline and a technical skill”
“What’s the point of good design if there isn’t good content?”
Google’s view is that short beats good when it comes to user facing copy. Makes sense for the kind of experiences which they are trying to facilitate, largely around direct selling.
What makes good writing:
- It’s simple — there are no unnecessary words
- It’s got structure
- There’s flow — it doesn’t pain you to read it!
Kate Garklavs
Creating a content lab: Your best-kept resourcing secret
Anil Dash, Co-founder and CEO, ThinkUp
Toward humane tech
It is down to those of us building content on the web, to take responsibility for the behaviour of our users, as per his popular blog post on the subject, ‘If your website is full of assholes it’s your fault’.
Most of the choices and advances we have made in the digital space come with upsides and goodsides.
Americans spend 3 hours a day with their thumb on the glass of their smartphone.
Credit or blame isn’t routinely linked to those that build the digital products. This means that people are increasingly feeling distanced from the tools that they use. Anil’s concern is that this will create a backlash where people won’t trust technology and the benefits of it won’t be felt.
“You are the advocates of empathy”
If you can start by designing for the most vulnerable then you’re in a good place. You need to go further into who could be marginalised by your decisions. That way you can design technology which is truly humane.
