Content strategy anyone?

At Episerver’s Customer and Partner day in London today I listened to a presentation by Catherine Toole from Sticky Content about the importance of website content. The presentation was called ”How good is your content anyway” and gave good examples both of how the importance of good web content could be measured in increased sales and decreased customer support emails and calls.

Focus on the content first

According to Catherine, content referred to pretty much everything on the website: the actual texts on the website, the interaction design, the navigation, the structure, the labelling etc. The key word here is content strategy, which I find very relevant. It should not be the channels, but the content and the message, that decides what to do and where to spend the money. The channels will need to be considered as well of course, but as a means to achieve what you want. And this is what a content strategy should be about, in relation to all of the other strategies of a company.

Is quantity more important than quality?

The presentation made me think of a question I got the other day – is quantity more important than quality? This was referring to discussions about the corporate website in combination with social media. It sometimes seems that you need to have lots of content in all channels – social networks, blogs, microblogs etc – rather than good content.

The challenge for the communications department

As I mentioned in a previous post, it isn’t easy to measure corporate communications. And even though you can SEE the results of good communication, it might be difficult to put relevant figures to it. This often leaves the corporate communications departments with limited resources to maintain more and more channels, which is a challenge by itself. Especially when the CEO for example is told by his kids what is ‘hot’ or perhaps see what other companies and competitors are doing, and want to do the same thing. As having an app. Or a mobile website. Or a really cool function on the website. Or a ‘myface’ page (quote from Catherine’s presentation). Without really knowing what for and how it should be maintained. This is left to communications people to solve with the same resources as before.

With this in mind, and together with the thoughts from the presentation about having a content strategy, the answer is quite easy – quality matters even more!

Helena

PS In the 1990s a big topic was how to handle information overload. What do we call it now?