Sara Zailskas, a content strategist with Realtors.org, tells us why it takes more than intuition or seriousness of purpose to consistently deliver engaging content.

I recently took a job as a Web content strategist for an association’s Web site after four years in editorial with a group of housing industry trade publications.

When I shared my new-job news with colleagues in the publishing world, 99 percent of the time I had to explain what content strategy is.

And fair enough! I had only discovered the term a little over a year ago, which is shocking because it’s essential. Content strategy is important, and if we all employed it, we’d be more efficient and more successful.

What is content strategy?

Content strategy is determining the best way to present information to your audience so that it’s valuable and makes them want to come back for more.

Sounds like what you do, right? Probably to a degree. But as an editor, my team and I got so caught up producing and editing copy it was easy to forget to plan for it beyond the basics.

As a content strategist, I ask our content producers (read: writers and editors) questions like these:

• What’s the goal of publishing this? What are you trying to accomplish?
• Who are your trying to reach?
• Is this the best format (Q&A? List? Video interview?) for this information?
• What related content is in the pipeline?

I take a look at the content and ask myself how Joe User would react to the information. I consider where Joe would expect to find it. I think about whether Joe would find it useful. And I assess the likelihood Joe would return to – or better yet, refer to -- us as a resource.

In the middle of discussions or debates, my supervisors will always come back to our guiding questions: what’s best for our audience and what makes the most sense. And isn’t that what all businesses want for their customers?

Why you should care

If you give people useful information, they’ll come back for more. And if they’re coming back from more, that means your traffic, audience feedback and audience loyalty are going up – which hopefully means more money in the bank.

Of course, caring isn’t enough: you need to back up your strategy with metrics. Start with one piece of content. Come up with strategy, employ it, track the numbers, tweak what’s necessary, and keep that top of mind for the future.

Hiccups and how to get rid of them

Content strategy can be tricky. Here are just a few challenges you might face and solutions:

• Time to plan. You’ll have to make it part of your planning routine. If you need to post a list of content strategy questions next to your computer to ask yourself, do it.

• Resources. You likely don’t have a content strategy team to turn to for help and thus are your own content strategist. This isn’t a bad thing! Consider the payoff for your business and for your career.

• Team or management buy in. The fact you’ll have to do a lot of educating about the topic means it’ll take longer for folks to wrap their heads around the concept – and devote money to it. Have patience.

• Silo’ed thinking. Cross-promotion is a buzzword among us content strategists, but that’s difficult to grasp if you have a specific beat or focus to your work. Keep Joe User’s perspective in mind throughout.

• Knee-Jerk publishing. The urge to “file away” information or “just get it out there” as opposed to optimizing it. Don’t stop at the first answer you think of.

If you have a content strategist, have discussions with him or her. And if you don’t, I challenge you to become one to elevate your content. Hopefully your traffic, audience loyalty, advertising and other important measures of success will rise too.

Sara Zailskas loves her job the National Association of Realtors as a content strategist for Realtor.org and relies on her editorial background every day.

Labels: Editing, editorial

by Howard Rauch, President, Editorial Solutions, Inc.

What is the key mission of today’s B2B editors? Obviously, the current emphasis on digital editing expertise is overwhelming. We are caught up in the excitement of delivering content to our readership in a host of new formats. And the web has facilitated our ability to be timely, as evidenced by our reliance on social media potential and increased frequency of e-newsletter delivery.

But in the course of putting finishing touches on an ASBPE editorial performance webinar presentation, I became aware of a consistent cautionary note expressed by my sources. That is … we are doing a great job quantitatively; however, this achievement is dimmed by an accompanying qualitative shortfall.

In fact, several editors have expressed this concern during the past year. There’s not enough time to engage in thorough research. Squeezed travel budgets have put a damper on our ability to expand our industry knowledge via productive field trips. There’s no time to adequately train new recruits so that they become star performers quickly.

Labels: editorial, Howard Rauch, Tests

By Howard Rauch, President, Editorial Solutions, Inc.

In competitive analysis focusing on e-news delivery, what’s the likelihood that outsourced articles usually will win out when the opposition’s content is staff-written? The answer is “not always” … but often enough, especially when it comes to basic editing practice.

For the purposes of this discussion, “outsourced” e-news pertains to those sites where, say, aggragated blurbs link directly to articles published in dailies. Other times, the source material may be provided by wire services. And then (argh!!!) there are cases where articles actually are press announcements reproduced in their entirety.

Right now, in a follow-up study that will involve 50 sites when finished, I’ve evaluated 31 sites. (Note: Findings of an initial 50-site Editorial Solutions e-news study were reviewed in the November/December 2009 issue of ASBPE’S Editor’s Notes publication — 556K PDF; available to ASBPE members only.)

Prior to launching the Phase II project, I handled a few competitive analysis projects where my client’s staff-written e-news came up short vs. the opposition’s outsourced content. My current study has evaluated several sites where outsourced articles confirm five strengths I found especially troublesome in the past:

(1) Enterprise level is considerably higher. Local reporters often obtain direct quotes from well-placed end-user sources that enhance article credibility.

(2) Visitors don’t get bogged down in foggy writing. Parades of incredibly long sentences are rare. On-target Fog Index Levels are the rule rather than the exception.

(3) Average scores are 15 to 30 points higher than those achieved by staff-written e-news packages, in most cases where articles are evaluated using my eight-factor scoring system.

(4) Executed correctly, provided e-news consistently addresses content of highest impact. Packages are not weighed down with rewrites of standard PR announcements.

(5) Staff does not have to spend time gathering material. That time probably is unavailable in the first place. This has to be a key consideration for the surprising number of sites – where the magazine has a monthly frequency – that are churning out daily and sometimes twice daily e-newsletter alerts.

Of course, there are many cases where staff-written B2B news packages can meet or exceed the standard set by sites featuring outsourced content. However, when that is true, most of the time it is because one or more dedicated on-line editors are part of the e-news team. It’s also true that sometimes, even given the advantage of a dedicated on-line crew, the resulting news stream is less than the best.

Now … how about those situations where all magazines serving a given industry rely totally on outsourced e-news? If you manage one of the sites in such a group, how do you prove – in the competitive analysis arena – that your package is the best? I’ve just begun considering possible factors to use in upcoming projects. The preliminary list includes number of items run per issue, exclusives (really hard to prove, it seems), scoops, quality of sources quoted, diversified formats and geographic scope. Another conceivable strength is the inclusion of exclusive information or editorial comment in the aggragated blurbs.

Despite the apparent advantages outsourced news may provide, we need to have more e-news sections dominated by high-enterprise, self-generated articles. However, of the 31 e-news packages reviewed to date in my Phase II study, only nine are star performers (average score = 60 or higher out of a possible 100 points). Of the 358 articles posted:

• 185 — 51.7% — did not reflect enterprise reporting.
• 136 —37.7% — were burdened by high Fog Index (grade levels exceeding 13.0).
• 110 — 30.7% — fielded average sentence lengths exceeding 25 words; too many parades of 30- and 40-word sentences were observed.

Look for another survey update late next month. Meantime, for ongoing commentary of various B2B editorial issues, follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/editorialtype.

Labels: e-news, editorial, Howard Rauch, study