While looking for travel insurance I stumbled across this piece of content. The product is entitled “Repatriation of Remains Solution.”

What really caught my eye was the body copy (no pun intended). It translates to: “Insurance for burial in your country of origin!” Is the exclamation point really necessary? Is it supposed to lighten up what is already a rather solemn subject? Does it indicate that I should feel lucky that I bought the said insurance? It seems almost apologetic.

Turns out there are nine products on this page. Each has a one-sentence product description — and each description ends in an exclamation point. The copy may do the job when it comes to SEO, but did anybody think about how it reads? What is with this French obsession with exclamation points?

And if you look closely at the photo, it gets even weirder. What is it supposed to represent? Two people standing at a graveside? One person about to be hit by a falling tree? Again proof that there’s more to content than words.

Personal and professional projects are to blame for my latest spate of silence. I’m hopefully back in the saddle as of today.

As part of my unhealthy obsession with purpose-driven web sites and context, I’ve been trying to adopt a new mental model. I’ve been purposefully trying to put off thinking about content in terms of formats and containers for as long as possible during the creative process.

It hasn’t been easy, because the reflex is so ingrained. “I’ll write a blog post.” “Can you draft an article?” “How many pages are there on the site?” “This page needs some infographics.” “Let’s do a video.” These are all formats and containers.

By defaulting to formats too early in the creative process I think we straightjacket content. I also think that we underestimate and pigeonhole the audience, assuming that certain kinds of audiences want/will only accept certain content in certain formats.

So I’ve been forcing myself to think of content in terms of purpose. And in doing so I’ve come up with some broad categories.

Content as a persuasion
Seeks to influence opinion or perception. Most often found in, but no limited to, marketing and PR. Arguably it is the meta-purpose of all content.

Content as entertainment
Content designed to amuse. Can be seen as a subset of the former. Designed to elicit a chuckle or a tear with the hope that it will make the audience feel emotionally engaged with the product/brand.

Content as a service
Helps you to accomplish tasks. This is where content has the most utility. Sadly, it’s a kind of content often ignored by brands (but this might be changing).

Content as education
This is content that teaches, informs, clarifies. You come away from it smarter than when you arrived. Can be seen as a subset of service.

Content as conversation
Like primate grooming, this value of this kind of content resides less in the content itself and more in the interactions that it facilitates. Think Facebook.

Content as a product
This is content you buy. Ebooks, songs, movies, apps. The purpose of the content may be one of the above, but access to purpose requires a transaction of some kind.

Content as interface
This is content that helps you make the most out of using other kinds of content. Can also be thought of as a subset of service.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and if you can think of any other categories I’d love to hear from you.

Has it worked? Well it’s early days yet, but by forcing myself to steer clear of formats in the first stages of content strategy, it seems easier to zero in on business objectives on one hand and user requirements on the other. Your mileage may vary.

I’ll bet that if you scratch the surface of just about any content strategist you will find a writer underneath. I’m no exception. It’s no surprise then that a great deal of the talk among practitioners tends to revolve around words. Add to that the fact that text was the original content of the web (they called it HyperText Markup Language for a reason). By default, it seems that content strategy is biased towards the written word.

But five minutes on Facebook are enough to show that most of what gets shared by the other 99.99999% of the planet IS NOT text. Sure there are links to articles, but they’re nothing compared to videos, photos and games. We get all flushed about things like Flipboard, Instapaper and Readability, but I can’t name one friend or colleague outside of my line of work who’s mentioned any of them to me.

Unwrite thyself

So, I’ve had to face up to the fact that when it comes to content, text isn’t always king. For example, over the past few months I’ve been working on a project where the primary content is video. My writing responsibilities stretch from storyboards, scripts and text for onscreen animations to more traditional articles.

This and other experiences have forced me to realize that although I’m a writer at heart, not everyone is a reader. And it’s not just because people are writing more than ever that they have an innate love of the written word. Sobering. It has challenged me to imagine content in other formats. To reframe my storytelling to use the right format for the story being told and the audience (and not lazily indulge in my own personal penchant for words).

Now, when I start thinking about content creation, I try to leave my mind open as long as possible. I find myself consciously refusing the urge to think in terms of pages and paragraphs. The goal is to find the best format for the job. Here’s my current crib sheet of content formats, in no specific order. I keep it near at hand early on, when content strategy is at its most embryonic.

• Text (no, duh)
• Infographics
• Photography (I’m waging a private war against stock photography)
• Illustration (underused IMHO)
• Animation
• Video
• Audio
• Slideshows
• Apps
• Webinars
• Presentations (I’m really liking Prezi)
• PDFs (don’t scream, some people actually like them)
• Games/quizzes (serious and otherwise)

These kinds of content aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they are often most effective when combined. Think illustration and narration, think video and voiceovers. I like to call it hybrid content.

Writing myself out of a job?

I don’t think so. But I’ve had to evolve. When it comes to storytelling, I’m constantly on the lookout for new ways of achieving purpose. The inverted pyramid isn’t the only game in town. I’m increasingly intrigued by non-linear and contextual storytelling, for instance.

When it comes to content strategy, the plethora of formats has been a blessing and bane. A blessing because:

• More tools mean more ways to be engaging.
• It pushes content strategy in new directions.
• I can “densify” information value in a given space without adding to clutter (hence my battle with meaningless stock photography).
• Designers dig it.

A bane because clients aren’t always tooled to handle these new formats, either organizationally or technically.

I’m sure I’m neither the first nor the only person to have encountered these issues. What is your experience with other content formats in content strategy? I’d love to hear from you.

NOTE: I’ll be turning down the volume for the next couple weeks; I’ll be attending SXSW Interactive and making a swing through the Bay Area.

A while back I tweeted that one of the biggest problems with selling the virtues of content strategy within an organization is that the people on the other side of the table rarely use their own web sites. This is especially true the higher up the food chain you go. Senior execs rarely ever visit, let alone use, their company’s site.

Here’s a tactic I like to use. I call it the Content Card Game.

• Go to the organization’s website and put yourself in the shoes of the user.
• Imagine the kinds of common tasks users would try to accomplish on the website. (Variant: if SEO is an issue, imagine tasks involving search engines.)
• Imagine different kinds of users: Customers, prospects, job seekers, investors and journalists.
• Be nuanced. Picture the users in different contexts: a noob user vs. a power user. A happy customer vs. an angry customer.
• Identify the content trouble spots. Where the content encountered doesn’t help the user accomplish the task. Keep an eye out for ROT, lack of content, writing quality, off message, forms, navigation, etc.
• Matrix these trouble spots and task with the company’s business objectives.
• Next, write down each task on an index card until you have a sizeable deck of cards.
• At your next meeting, ask the representatives of the company to each pick a card. Then have them go online and try to accomplish the task in a set amount of time with no help from anyone in the room.
• One variant is to have people from one department pick cards related to parts of the website that are NOT their responsibility.
• When they’re done, pull out the matrix. The results are a great conversation starter.

Adapt and improve at will. Anyone have any quick and dirty tricks?

I keep reading that companies are drowning in content. But I often run across ones that don’t have enough of the stuff. We’ve all stumbled across these online ghost towns. Everything is stale, static and out of date.

Seen from the inside, these organizations often share similar traits.

• Lots of managers, no in-house content creators
• Organizational silos
• Understaffed communications department
• Thinks in terms of printed collateral first
• Unfriendly or nonexistent CMS
• No governance model for the web

It doesn’t have to be chronic

I’ve labeled this condition Content Deficiency Disorder, and it is one area where content strategy can generate results fast. Here’s a quick and dirty guide to how I do it. Your mileage may vary.

1. Pulse

I try to get a handle on how often the organization wants their website updated (daily, weekly, monthly). I also try to understand how much of the site’s total content needs refreshing over the course of a year. Oh, and figure out who is/will be responsible for the updates.

2. Temperature

Then I audit what I call “communication opportunities”. These are regular or occasional moments in the life of the organization that generate a need to communicate. Think product launches, new customers, opening new offices, upgrades, updates, events, press coverage, new hires, whatever. Make sure to ask the right kinds of questions.

3. Blood pressure

Next, I inventory what the organization already produces for its most common communication opportunities. A good example is a product launch. Maybe a company typically produces a new web page, a PowerPoint prez for the sales team, a press release and a brochure. All these elements must be ready on the day of the launch.

4. Lab work

I look at the processes required to generate these elements and hunt for lightweight, incremental ways to create new content. For example, if the person writing the press release is going to interview the CEO or the Product Manager, why not record the entire interview? The press release will use a couple quotes, but the full interview can be transformed into a written interview or even a podcast. Or maybe the charts and graphs in the PowerPoint can be turned into a slide show. Or the product photos in the brochure could be used to create a virtual tour of the product. You get the idea. The goal is to generate new content with minimal effort by capitalizing on existing content creation processes.

5. Prescription

Finally, together we create a content calendar for each communication opportunity. The trick here is to stagger the release of the content. Using the product launch example again, content is drip fed into the website.

We start by determining the critical mass of online content required on the day of the launch. Say the press release and the product page. Then the interview with the CEO is made available two days later. The slide show a week after that. A first review or article two weeks on. A first case study a month after that. And so on.

We then compile the content events for all the communication opportunities in a master calendar. The goal is to avoid periods with too much or not enough content.

Another rule is that no new content is added to the site without announcing or featuring it.

What about web design?

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned it up until now. That’s because it shouldn’t be started before completed at least the first four steps. By then you should have a pretty good idea of what needs to go where on the home page and in other sections/pages of the web site. Ditto for the CMS.

This is a challenge all by itself, because organizations are brainwashed into thinking that all communications projects start with pretty pictures, not audits. But that’s a whole other blog post.