Adventures in Content Strategy
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." Benjamin Franklin
At Mad*Pow’s recent Financial Experience Design conference, I overheard a speaker say “people make easy choices, but not always good choices – like eating a chocolate croissant at a conference instead of going out to find fruit and yogurt.” She was referencing the challenge in motivational design. It may sound insulting, but it’s also true. It’s…
Did you know only five US states require a personal finance class for high school graduation? I remember being in high school. I complained to my parents that I was expected to learn calculus, but no one had ever taught me to balance a checkbook*. My parents were expected to teach me, but their own…
Conversational interfaces. What are they? At Phillip Hunter (Pulse Lab) focused on AI in his Confab talk. But a conversational interface goes far beyond artificial intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) (though NLP can certainly help!). There are AI assistants, chatbots, and even simple conversation-based UX writing. How do they differ? Did you find this…
Personalization. The very word strikes fear in the hearts of content strategy teams everywhere. Everyone wants it, but it seems like an awful lot of work. In a recent article on the Adobe blog by Senior & Strategic Editor Giselle Abramovich, she states: “Indeed, 67% of respondents said it’s important for brands to automatically adjust content…
How important is your unique website to your content marketing efforts? It turns out, it may not be important at all. You may not need a website. And maybe it doesn’t matter if you have a unique URL! It’s a whole new world. Your URL, Your Site, Your Content When you think of your site…
“The Talmud teaches that every person must say to himself “The world was created for me,” not as a statement of ultimate self-centeredness, rather out of a sense of unique responsibility for the world. This is my world and I’m its caretaker. If there’s a problem, I’ve got to do something about it.” –Rabbi Ken…
Reduce, reuse, recycle. It’s not just a way to save the Earth. When you reuse content your content team becomes more efficient, more effective, and more budget-friendly. But reusing content is easier said than done. You need to create content that is focused and valuable. Then you need to find a way to make it…
As much as you might want a content strategist to come fix things, your team may not love having the content strategist there. The reason is that many of us struggle to hear that we need to change. We hear “this needs to change” as “what you’re doing is wrong”. Or “your hard work isn’t…
If you haven’t yet used Alexa Skills, don’t worry. It’s coming. Alexa Skills is the equivalent of an app on any other device. When you download a Skill, it adds to Alexa’s knowledge. And if you’re a content strategist or content creator, chances are good that you’re going to be creating a Skill in the…
Brand is what people say about you when you leave the room. Another way of putting it is that your brand is your personality. A person’s personality is a part of who they are. Since an organization isn’t a living thing, it doesn’t have a personality in the same way. So we create one, by…
