Content Strategy for Slow Experiences MIMA Summit 2013

October 15, 2013, 6:07 pm

≫ Next: Assertive Strategy: Content Amid Constraints at Content Strategy Applied

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Online experiences can be fast, efficient, easy and orderly, which sounds like a good thing, right? Surprisingly, sometimes, that’s a recipe for disaster. We click confirm too soon, confuse important details, or miss a key feature in a product description. Efficient isn’t always effective. Not all experiences need to be fast to be functional. In fact, some of the most memorable and profitable engagements are slow and messy—and that’s just right. Content strategy can identify and support opportunities to control the pace of user experience. We’ll discuss three key features that differentiate slow experiences and uncover the fundamental ways they help users. Presented at MIMA Summit 2013, October 15, 2013, #MIMASummit, in Minneapolis.

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Assertive Strategy: Content Amid Constraints at Content Strategy Applied

October 17, 2013, 5:52 am

≫ Next: Making Meaning in Content and Design (Bloomstein at HOW)

≪ Previous: Content Strategy for Slow Experiences MIMA Summit 2013

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We live in a world where people jump from Red Bull-branded satellites all in the name of good content. But is it really good—and is it right for our brands? Content strategy gives content marketing the tools to be sane and sustainable. Margot discusses how a more sustainable future means addressing the limits of budget, time, and creativity with content management, strategy, governance, and more. That’s the stuff that keeps logos off satellites and our content creators off high ledges. Presented at Content Strategy Applied, #CSAUSA / #CSA13, October 17, 2013, in San Jose at eBay.

Making Meaning in Content and Design (Bloomstein at HOW)

November 6, 2013, 2:15 am

≫ Next: Know thyself: Your school's message-driven content strategy

≪ Previous: Assertive Strategy: Content Amid Constraints at Content Strategy Applied

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How do you rally stakeholders around a unified user experience that’s consistent across design and content? That’s the challenge of a modern designer. Fortunately, content strategy is a powerful ally in that challenge. Amid constrained budgets, tight timelines, and unlimited interaction expectations, can you really add another tool to your toolkit? Can you afford to focus on content too? Yes—and you can’t afford to “let the client worry about it” any longer. We’ll discuss the value content strategy can add to your work and how it can help you streamline your process to save time and keep stakeholders happy. Then, we’ll discuss how to prioritize communication goals and develop a message architecture with a hands-on exercise—ideal whether you’re designing for the web, a mobile app, social media, or an offline experience. Finally, you’ll learn how to create consistency between copy, channels, and the typography and imagery you develop for those channels. There’s meaning in consistency, and you’ll explore how to master it in content and design. Presented at HOW Interactive Design Conference, #HIDC, November 6, 2013, in Chicago.

Know thyself: Your school's message-driven content strategy

November 12, 2013, 5:58 am

≫ Next: Content strategy for Slow Experiences at SearchLove

≪ Previous: Making Meaning in Content and Design (Bloomstein at HOW)

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Before you can determine content types and prioritize channels, consider the roots of communication--and education. Start at home. Start in Delphi, in ancient Greece. You’ll find instructions key to learning, communication, and brand-driven content strategy: know thyself. What does that mean in higher ed? Consider your communication goals and hierarchy of brand attributes. We’ll discuss how they drive style and tone, content types, and the look and feel of your content—and how a message architecture helps ensure your audit is more meaningful and content is more consistent. Presented at Confab Higher Ed, #ConfabEDU, November 12, 2013, in Atlanta.

Content strategy for Slow Experiences at SearchLove

April 8, 2014, 5:54 am

≫ Next: Content Strategy for Slow Experiences at Phoenix CS

≪ Previous: Know thyself: Your school's message-driven content strategy

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Online experiences can be fast, efficient, easy, orderly—and sometimes, that’s all wrong! Users click confirm too soon, miss important details, or don’t find content that aids conversion. In short, efficient isn’t always effective. Not all experiences need to be fast to be functional. In fact, some of the most memorable and profitable web engagements employ “slow content strategy,” content speed bumps, and surprising content types that aid interaction. We’ll examine examples of content strategy in action that demonstrates how to identify and control the pace of user experience, adding value for both our users and the businesses that engage them. Presented at SearchLove, April 8, 2014. #searchlove in Boston.

Content Strategy for Slow Experiences at Phoenix CS

April 29, 2014, 2:27 pm

≫ Next: Content Strategy Gets to Work at AIGA Maine

≪ Previous: Content strategy for Slow Experiences at SearchLove

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Online experiences can be fast, efficient, easy, orderly—and sometimes, that’s all wrong! Users click confirm too soon, miss important details, or don’t find content that aids conversion. In short, efficient isn’t always effective. Not all experiences need to be fast to be functional. In fact, some of the most memorable and profitable web engagements employ “slow content strategy,” content speed bumps, and surprising content types that aid interaction. We’ll examine examples of content strategy in action that demonstrates how to identify and control the pace of user experience, adding value for both our users and the businesses that engage them. Presented at Phoenix Content Strategy, April 29, 2014. #slowcs at #PHXCS

Content Strategy Gets to Work at AIGA Maine

May 2, 2014, 5:20 am

≫ Next: Establishing a Brand-Driven Message Architecture Workshop at HOW

≪ Previous: Content Strategy for Slow Experiences at Phoenix CS

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AIGA Maine hosted content strategist Margot Bloomstein, author of Content Strategy at Work: Real World Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project (Morgan Kaufmann 2012). Even if content strategy isn’t your job, content’s probably your problem—and probably more than you think. You or your business has a message you want to deliver, right? You can deliver that message through various channels and content types, from Tweets to testimonials and photo galleries galore, and your audience has just as many ways of engaging with it. So many ways, so much content… so where’s the problem? That IS the problem. And you can measure it in time, creativity, money, lost opportunity, and the sobs you hear equally from creative directors, designers, copywriters, project managers, and search engine marketing specialists. Content Strategy at Work offers an unparalleled collection of case studies and interviews from a range of industries and project times for real-world examples and approaches you can adopt, no matter your role on the team. Margot shared perspectives and brought some of those case studies to life in this talk. Presented at AIGA Maine at the Space Gallery April 1, 2014, in Portland Maine. More info: http://maine.aiga.org/aiga-maine-presents-margot-bloomstein/

Establishing a Brand-Driven Message Architecture Workshop at HOW

May 12, 2014, 11:35 am

≫ Next: Brand Driven Message Architecture Workshop UXLX

≪ Previous: Content Strategy Gets to Work at AIGA Maine

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Brand-driven content strategy complements user-centered design, and this workshop will help you get up to speed on the philosophy, questions, tools, and exercises to implement it. We’ll conduct a hands-on exercise to prioritize communication goals and develop a message architecture—ideal whether you design for the web, mobile apps, social media, or offline experiences. Eager for more efficient engagements? You’ll also discover how a brand attributes cardsort can help you identify potential pitfalls and points of disagreement while you improve organizational alignment. Then use this foundation to conduct a qualitative and quantitative content audit. We’ll discuss the content opportunities a gap analysis reveals when we use the message architecture as a metric of quality. Trying to manage scope creep? What about seagulling stakeholders? And what content matters most, anyhow? These questions and other challenges drive content strategy; they’re basic issues to any designer planning for content. But what if you’re not a content strategist? What if you need to empower a team, wrangle a client, and rally everyone around a common vocabulary for your primary navigation? No matter your title, it’s time to embrace content strategy, starting with the message architecture. You’ll leave with the savvy and experience to bring brand-driven content strategy techniques and thinking into your own work. Presented as two sold-out workshops at HOW Design Live, #HOWLive, May 12, 2014 in Boston.

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Brand Driven Message Architecture Workshop UXLX

June 5, 2014, 5:10 am

≫ Next: Content Strategy for Slow Experiences at UXLX

≪ Previous: Establishing a Brand-Driven Message Architecture Workshop at HOW

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Facing feature creep or disagreements among stakeholders? Get a grip on content, the people who make it, and the brand they want to establish. Enter brand-driven content strategy: learn how to develop a message architecture, discover how a brand attributes cardsort can help, and improve organizational alignment around your content. Then we’ll conduct a quantitative and qualitative content audit to reveal new content types and see... is your content even any good? Delivered at User Experience Lisbon, #uxlx, June 5, 2014, in Lisbon Portugal.

Content Strategy for Slow Experiences at UXLX

June 6, 2014, 3:52 am

≫ Next: Getting the content right: how we succeed together at Confab for Nonprofits

≪ Previous: Brand Driven Message Architecture Workshop UXLX

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Driving from Lisbon to Golega, we’ll look at the opportunity to design slow experiences. Online experiences can be fast, efficient, easy, orderly—and sometimes, that’s all wrong! Users click confirm too soon, miss important details, or don’t find content that aids conversion. In short, efficient isn’t always effective. Not all experiences need to be fast to be functional. In fact, some of the most memorable and profitable web engagements employ “slow content strategy,” content speed bumps, and surprising content types that aid interaction. We’ll examine examples of content strategy in action that demonstrates how to identify and control the pace of user experience, adding value for both our users and the businesses that engage them. Presented at User Experience Lisbon, #uxlx, 6 June 2014.

Getting the content right: how we succeed together at Confab for Nonprofits

June 16, 2014, 3:42 am

≫ Next: Content Strategy: Defining Our Profession, Defining Ourselves

≪ Previous: Content Strategy for Slow Experiences at UXLX

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Ready to overhaul your website, CMS, everything—or just tear out your hair about how your organization appears online? Treasure Coast Hospice, one of the largest nonprofit hospice and palliative care providers in the country, needed their website to better communicate services, reach donors, and engage volunteers. But they first needed to ask: What do we really need to communicate? What content is working well, and why? Sit in on a conversation between Michael Hallinan, Treasure Coast Hospice’s web strategist, and Margot Bloomstein, their content strategy consultant, as they recount how they developed a message architecture of the organization’s communication goals, conducted an all-hands-on-deck content audit to understand the value of their existing content, and then collaborated with a development team to build a “content first” website—all on a timeline and budget that can scale to the needs of any nonprofit organization. Presented together at Confab for Nonprofits, #confabnp, in Chicago on June 16, 2014

Content Strategy: Defining Our Profession, Defining Ourselves

August 19, 2014, 3:48 am

≫ Next: Content Strategy for Slow Experiences

≪ Previous: Getting the content right: how we succeed together at Confab for Nonprofits

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What’s in a name—and does it constrain or empower us? As “content strategy” evolves as an industry, so too do the areas of expertise individual practitioners offer and our clients expect. Is that a problem, or an opportunity? Can we grapple with our terminology to broaden the profession without losing its relevance? And do we run the risk of diluting the meaning? We’ll discuss the responsibility and opportunity in how we define our industry and the areas of specialty it can comprise. Presented at Environments for Humans Content Strategy Summit, #CSSummit, August 19, 2014.

Content Strategy for Slow Experiences

October 9, 2014, 6:58 am

≫ Next: Publishing and Expanding Our Expectations

≪ Previous: Content Strategy: Defining Our Profession, Defining Ourselves

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Content strategy can help our users focus, act with conviction, and learn. For some brands, users, and contexts, slow content strategy is key. Presented at Level Up Conference in Saratoga, NY, #levelupcon on October 9, 2014.

Publishing and Expanding Our Expectations

November 5, 2014, 7:01 am

≫ Next: Content strategy for deliberate discovery at CongresCM

≪ Previous: Content Strategy for Slow Experiences

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Content strategy champions and makes possible the idea that “everyone is a publisher.” But with challenges to net neutrality and inconsistent network connectivity in the developing world, do we need to limit our definition of “everyone” to just the white and wealthy world and the more cutting edge businesses it spawns? Maybe that’s the case today, but today is the mirror of realism. The future is the undefined outcome of optimism—and we have many reasons to be optimistic. Looking at emerging examples from modern business culture, Silicon Valley investment strategies, and communication trends beyond the United States, Margot Bloomstein will map out challenges and opportunities for publishing in the coming decades. The author of Content Strategy at Work: Real-world Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project, Bloomstein will explore how content strategy will work in the future to aid the changing face of publishing. Who will practice it? Will power align with technology, quality, perspective, or a combination of all three? And how will we define “publishing,” anyhow? Presented November 5, 2014 as part of the UX Futures Summit.

Content strategy for deliberate discovery at CongresCM

November 19, 2014, 10:31 pm

≫ Next: Base your content strategy on a message architecture CongresCM

≪ Previous: Publishing and Expanding Our Expectations

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Online experiences can be fast, easy, and orderly—and sometimes, that’s all wrong for both users and brands. Not all websites need to be efficient to be effective. Some of the most memorable and profitable web experiences help users slow down, engage in discovery, and learn by doing. Brands like IKEA use “slow content strategy” to encourage discovery and create a new level of brand engagement. Other companies such as outdoor specialist Patagonia and investment bank Fidelity use content types and editorial styles to help customers focus. Content strategist and author Margot Bloomstein explains how such a slow content strategy can pack a target audience for the brand and thus propel customer engagement to new heights. Presented at Congres Content Marketing & Webredactie, #congresCM on November 20, 2014 in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

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Base your content strategy on a message architecture CongresCM

November 19, 2014, 10:38 pm

≫ Next: Knowing Your Brand Amid Constraints

≪ Previous: Content strategy for deliberate discovery at CongresCM

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Before you can determine new content types, choose social media channels, and decide on an editorial style, take a step back. Marketers must first create a clear picture of what you need to communicate—and the hierarchy of those communication goals. We’ll look at how that works with a message architecture, looking at examples from a range of companies that all care about communicating consistently across channels and platforms. Presented at Congres Content Marketing & Webredactie, #congresCM on November 20, 2014 in Utrecht, the Netherlands

Knowing Your Brand Amid Constraints

April 30, 2015, 6:14 am

≫ Next: Content Strategy for Slow Experiences

≪ Previous: Base your content strategy on a message architecture CongresCM

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Arm yourself with personas, research, and KPIs. Look out at data you’re chasing. Then look in. What do you see? We spawn sites, create content, and chase new platforms without always knowing why. To keep up with competitors? To keep up with users? We know them better than we know ourselves, then burn resources racing toward questionable destinations and burn out in the process. That’s where content strategy can help. We’ll discuss forging a path from where you are and who you are. Learn how to allot constrained resources and engage your audience. Eager to reach them? To know them, first know yourself. Presented as keynote at Now What 2015, #NowWhat15, April 30, 2015, in Sioux Falls SD.

Content Strategy for Slow Experiences

May 4, 2015, 8:17 am

≫ Next: Defining Our Profession, Defining Ourselves

≪ Previous: Knowing Your Brand Amid Constraints

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Online experiences can be fast, efficient and easy—but sometimes, that’s all wrong! Users click Buy too soon, miss important details or don’t find content that aids conversion. Efficient isn’t always effective and fast isn’t always functional. In fact, some of the most memorable web engagements employ “slow content strategy” with design considerations and content types that aid stickiness and retention. Margot Bloomstein will lead you through examples from a range of industries to see how you can manage—and slow—the pace at which users move through your website designs to create experiences that aid learning, fuel anticipation and create memories.

Defining Our Profession, Defining Ourselves

May 22, 2015, 9:32 am

≫ Next: Content Strategy for Slow Experiences at Web Design Day

≪ Previous: Content Strategy for Slow Experiences

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What’s in a name—and does it constrain or empower us? As “content strategy” evolves as an industry, so too do the areas of expertise that we individually offer and that our clients expect. Is this a problem, or an opportunity? Do you really have to do it all? Can we grapple with our terminology to broaden the profession without losing its relevance? And do we run the risk of diluting the meaning? Looking at examples in a variety of industries, we’ll discuss the responsibility and opportunity in how we define our industry and the areas of specialty it can comprise. Delivered at Confab Central, #ConfabMN, May 22, 2015.

Content Strategy for Slow Experiences at Web Design Day

June 12, 2015, 8:38 am

≫ Next: Brand-driven Content Strategy: Developing a Message Architecture

≪ Previous: Defining Our Profession, Defining Ourselves

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Online experiences can be fast, efficient, easy, orderly—and sometimes, that’s a recipe for disaster. Users click confirm too soon, confuse important details, or miss a key feature in a product description. Efficient isn’t always effective. Not all experiences need to be fast to be functional. In fact, some of the most memorable and profitable engagements are slow and messy... and that’s just right. By designing for pace, we can intentionally help users focus on details and gain confidence in their choices. We can also encourage their sense of discovery and help them build stronger memories. Not all experiences need to be slower, but content strategy can help identify and support these outliers of user experience. We’ll look at REI, Target, Patagonia, Disney, and others for lessons you can apply to aid learning, retention, and user satisfaction. Help your audience soak up the journey or just engage with more certainty, all with more deliberate content strategy. Presented at Web Design Day in Pittsburgh, #WDD2015, June 12, 2015.