 Okay, ready to start so people still coming in I think this is a good timing and the other two thousand people at Drupal con it's their loss and they can still see it online So welcome to the session where we're going to look into the value of content strategy I Tweeted this morning and I thought why didn't I put that in my presentation? What we're going to look into today is Not a question. Can I afford to do content strategy as part of my web project? But rather can I afford to not to do content strategy I Want to start with a couple of Security announcements So hey, you're into it now. It's too late Couple of things that strange accent you hear apart from a cold very obvious cold is Fact that my mother tongue is Dutch Why is that security announcement? Well, actually because I'm not the children in Dutch people in the room Okay, just to know who I'm offending I'm actually from Belgium Where we do speak the same language, but it's just good that we get out of the way So nobody comes up to me after talking says, oh, so you're from the Netherlands. That's always that awkward moment that I get about five times at every conference Um Somebody very near to me not to say my wife. She asked me not to tell you Says that we have a very strange sense of humor So it could be that it's if you don't get my sense of humor. It might be the most boring talk this week But don't tell me I didn't warn you and then the last one probably the most important one Now that I told you too late can't get out any more Most important one is that prior to joining a drip community? No I need to go through this again to trick to trigger happy Prior to joining a Drupal community three years ago, I used to work for this man. I assume everybody knows that's Rupert Murdoch So yeah, I used to be at the dark side Also mean that my brain is still conditioned to try to sell you stuff So all the things that we're going to talk about today We're actually selling but this is not supposed to be commercial talk anyway So those who made it to the keynote you might have got this bag of swag when you walked out Inside that there is a stretch ball Drupal con. Oh, yeah, here it is in case you just Hear me become commercial again. The Rupert Murdoch and me comes out Just throw that me no offense taken and you'll get it back at the end of the session Okay, I think now we're ready So I said we were going to talk about the value of common strategy But before we look into the value, let's start by looking into what it is really what is content strategy? It's a bit of a buzzword. It's been going on for a couple of years now, but do we really know? what it is and As Many of us work in making websites. That's how we describe it to people that don't really work in our industry Let's see. What are the typical common strategy decisions that? We come the strategist make which really affect our rep projects and your way around what technology decisions Do we make when we make websites that actually quite often limit? The things that we want to decide in our content strategy Then at the end when we've got through all that Boring stuff. We'll be able to talk about what value does content strategy now really bring what are the benefits and More importantly, how should I measure that? So common strategy, it's been Something that's been lingering out there for a couple of years now and everybody says yeah, we should do it But do you know what it is now? There's a million and one definitions out there And a lot of discussion even us common strategies don't agree really what it is Call strategy defines a strategic use of content. That's how I describe it, but I mean that's just Changing the order of the words. So that's not really very helpful It's a strategic use of content in order to do two things. That's very important to take that in mind We're trying to reach project goals organizational goals company goals by the use of content and at the same time and as important we are trying to Also satisfy user needs Now if you think about the old idea of communication where a company made a website or an organization and jail whatever We were just pushing information out there We were trying to communicate from the organization to the audience and that was one directional and number one objective was my company goals Then came UX And UX tried to flip that your way around and say you're not really going to be successful If you don't put your user at center, I think and several of my colleagues out here that might disagree But it's my turn now I think that content strategy tried to find the balance and actually tries to match those two It's not always easy, but we think that we're using content to actually fill bold things So we all want to create content which is really interesting for our users But we also only do so in order to meet some project objectives in other words a Nice video of kittens on your website Will be fun, but it's really going to help you That's not a good content strategy Okay, so another way of describing it is that we're basically using content We're putting on that use in order to our own benefit and at the same time also to the benefit of our consumers Is that something new? Did we need to invent a whole new? field of expertise for that or or people like me just trying to justify their own job By doing so. It's not new. It's not new at all We're just reinventing the wheel just that the context has changed in the Early 19th century in the UK. There used to be a habit of Giving gift books so when you were invited to a dinner to some important business partner or something You brought these gift books with you and you gave it often to the wife of the host Those those books are pieces of Content that nobody would call literature. It wasn't high quality It was more effort spent on making it a really nice cover It was really something something precious and he so the the creation of that content was only to create goodwill on the other side It wasn't really to provide them with a good, you know, literature experience similar thing in 1913 a newspaper the New York world I had a problem when they couldn't fill the pages and some advertiser withdraw their ad last minute and they say Okay, now what we do and this one journalist said, you know, I make these things in my free time called crosswords I don't know if they were called crosswords down Also don't know that conversation really went that way But they they filled it with a crossword first time was ever published and users really liked it But it's not the main goal of a newspaper to sell crosswords the main goal of newspapers to you know sell news inform people but they really worked and on Days where they did have more advertisement or more news they didn't put it in and readers started complaining because they were missing this Fun five minutes that they were spending on on the crossword That's not that different from common strategy. That's providing a piece of content which helps your users stay there It was just a newspaper and it's over 100 years ago But what has changed? Why is it then why have things become different? Why did we have to invent this whole content strategy stuff? This is a quote from Eric Smith used to be CEO of Google now he's the CEO of alphabet So he said in 2013 every single day we created five exabytes of content Equivalent of what mankind produced from its beginning until 2003. I've been using this quote for over a year now in my presentations Only to find out last month that it's not true Don't tell anyone Some scientists actually were triggered by this. They said let's let's investigate if it's actually true. It's not Eric Smith compared the amount of data that Google processes and he mistakenly Confused creation with data traffic. So somebody creates one piece of content and it's shared one million times He counted is just one million pieces created or the volume So a more scientific approach of it is actually that now in 2015 and that apparently is more scientifically correct We create in one day the same volume of content than we did over a whole year in 2002 That's still pretty amazing so in one day We generate the same amount of content that we used to do over a year only 13 years ago That's explosive. Okay, it's not that impressive as this quote. I still keep it up here, but it's still pretty amazing So let's take a look. I did a very very tour of analysis of what that web content was yesterday I just started browsing a little bit. Just can we still use that term? Large majority is porn of course as everybody knows kittens are the second week. They're really close to Winning first position social media creates a lot of content. Actually, it's not true. Email should be email is Really the biggest source of data traffic A lot of noise out there, but then there's a very small amount of content Which actually are interesting facts kind of stuff that we like to read about And that's where you want to be you want to be in those interesting content area and Interesting will be defined very differently for every user But for your audience you want to be in that one category unless if your audience is so many that we love skins so In order to get there. What does a content strategist do in their? day-to-day So we start by defining Where our audience is with our audience what content today? Do they need what content do we need to? Put out there. What are the channels that we are going to use to reach that audience? that's a first although it's not really waterfall project Then we're going to analyze. Let's analyze what content is already out there. Let's do content out Audits what content do we already do already have ourselves what content is our audience already consuming from our competitors or from In other areas what channels do they use what are the established? Communication methods for those channels. What's the tone when you're going to use social media? What's the tone when you're gonna use a white paper? Now we think about okay now that we know If we've defined we've analyzed we know what we're going to do. How are we going to organize that? The whole issue of governance who's going to create my content, you know with I I assume many people learned The crap acronym this week You know, I don't even know create was it She's even got and I'm supposed to be the content strategist It it's it defines like the foot the four actions that happen with content now I'm really sorry for the people that invented that quite smart acronym There are many more editorial actions and just creating proof reading Publishing and then deleting No So crap was create review Our current version It's there's so many more actions depending on the complexity of your organization this translation This update thing is reviewing without having to update this You can easily come up with like 15 different actions that you can do with content So it's a little bit more organized and we need to we need to think about roles and responsibilities Who is going to do each of every of those tasks? Once that's done And once my computer wakes up again We need to manage that so when we're live with our Website or whatever our channel is that we choose we need to manage that workflow We need to Measure very important. We need to measure is what I've done working and measuring is two things It's measuring the impact of your content So is the content actually effective of the goals that it wants to reach do I actually get the outputs that I want But it's also measuring my processes doesn't do my processes work or my tools Doing what they're expected to do or my people doing what they expected to do Maybe they're all do doing what they expected to do but still doesn't work. Do I need to change my process and that all Ties into the loop again, and we need to continue that process so Second part of the presentation as promised was let's take a look at some of the common common strategy decisions that really impact our web projects and Although only explain you five minutes ago. Let's still take it one step back So what we're saying is that content strategy really what it does is it answers this one question It answers it says how are we going to use what content? Through which channels to reach which audience? And depending on how you answer that question It's gonna have a very different impact on your web project so What are decisions what are fight there much many more than five, but what are five common decisions that impact? content modeling First of all Content modeling I assume that the big majority here are very familiar with Drupal So we all we are all familiar with the Drupal way of content types where you define a content type and you find fields You know an article content type for example might have a title introduction lead paragraph etc. Etc You can all read I've been told Then you might have another one an event one which have similar but not the same fields and then the relationships between them You know, maybe the taxonomy on one compares with the other Because they're using the same shared taxonomy, but there might also be a little bit less Evident one so imagine you have an article content type and event content type Maybe the author of the article coincides with one of the speakers Fields in the event type so that there are relationships there that that's the kind of thing that From a Drupal sense we might think of as a content model, but the content model now is more than that It should include this so relationships between content types and fields but it's but remember talking about content strategy not really about technology here, so Sorry, so what we're talking about is that a content model also describes What piece of my content is going to go to where so if I consume the same piece of content on a mobile device For example, I might decide not to include that piece of media because it's gonna create loading issues. It's gonna not render well And you want a quick experience for the user might decide not to include the lead paragraph You might have a little piece called social abstract Which is basically if somebody takes this piece of content and they shared on a social network We're gonna display a piece of content that isn't really displayed somewhere else So that's also a content model. How are my pieces of content gonna be rendered also? Maybe geographically is my is a piece of content going to be shared only in one region because it's not relevant to somebody else That leads perfectly a isn't that done nicely into content personalization. It's not a coincidence Content personalization is a really big thing for content strategist because we say if you really want to reach your audience If you don't use your you reach your user you need to make this experience unique for them and Instead of giving ever everything to everybody We really only want to show the really relevant stuff so that we get a better engagement rate rate problem with that in Drupal is that as you know Drupal Doesn't work that well with the concept of what doesn't work. It's not doesn't work Well, it doesn't work with the concept of pages. It Works with the concept already of these pieces of content every time you call a page It needs to assemble that page It's not a one file that brings up it actually some of that. So how can we make website quicker in Drupal while we use caching? Now the problem with content personalization is if you're going to make a unique front page for every user That front page cache doesn't work anymore. So every time somebody asks for that your home page and because of where they are because of their unique profile that that Pages is different is a little different. You need to wipe the cache and build it again and again and again And it just keeps going on and it makes your experience really slow It would be great if these two sentences would make sense Like the idea of waiting for something makes it more exciting or our willingness to wait Reveals the value we place on what we're waiting for but it's not true as we all know in the web world These are quite old studies actually, but we know that 37% of mobile users It just goes somewhere else that their page is loading within three seconds I couldn't find even a more recent study for desktops But in 2009 it was already 40% of people that would leave after Three seconds if the page was loaded and I'm pretty sure it's even more now I think people over time have become less patient. So content personalization great It can improve a lot user experience. It can improve a lot How people feel engaged with your content, but it has technical limits It means you'll probably have require higher budgets for load balancing scalability and that kind of issues three One of the things that I really hammer on with our clients is that our content needs to have objectives If we're gonna make a web project successful, we really need to Be able to measure that don't make content in a vacuum Tell up front to people that are making that content. What is the goal? What are you trying to achieve with that? But if you make those objectives measurable, then that might require a little bit of work at the backside as well In order to be able to measure that that's one of the hardest parts And we're actually gonna talk about that when we're talking about where the value is in Concentration how to measure it So I'm not going to go into this too deep but just one simple example Imagine you make piece of content on and you say this is going to be published on my blog But my real intention not to give my readers a nice time in reading this funny article I actually want to increase sales. So this is just another entry point so that people go to my web shop Depending on how that page is structured that might mean that you'll have to configure some custom events That means adding some scripts Get your hands dirty on code So that Google analytics can actually measure that in the right way So that that as well will require development work That's just one example another one might be I want this when I'm pushing out this content I want to use it so that I can gather data on my users So there might be a form sitting in front of the content where people just need to leave their email address that kind of stuff That all requires extra development work Editorial workflow It's the one piece. We always ignore on that project Clients don't want to pay money to customize editorial workflow in their CMS But our CMS should be ready to mimic the way that our clients organize their editorial workflow If it's a very small scale organization just a couple of users and everybody can publish on the site That's really easy to configure. Well, what if there are real very clear governance path? What if people are allowed to publish only on? Pages that are only for their area for their department that all starts to become a bit more complex and The more complex we made this editorial workflow the more work we will have to actually adapt our CMS to that Finally but not least content sharing content marketing options How many organizations now use third-party software for their content marketing efforts? They're very powerful though my very personal opinion. This is recorded, right? I might get trouble for this But my very personal opinion is that content marketing is very short-sighted quite often They don't think enough about the long-term goals. They're looking for very short Turbulence, but still it's a handy tool tools out there and Those require integration so if an organization decides that we really want to go for Increasing their effort in terms of content marketing and using external tools that will require integration Okay, so those are five decisions that we make on the complex strategy side that end up affecting our development work or Technology things like hosting What about the other side? What about things that we decide in our triple agency side? And that might limit our content strategy This one is a bit maybe a bit difficult to explain if you just see like that the nature of the project Is it a redesign Is a client coming to us and is already saying no we want to build something completely new or they say no we're using this piece of software already and You just need to build a new layer on top of that Those decisions or will we build something completely new will be work what we have How are we going to work in terms of project management that directly affects your content strategy because you're limiting things that you can or cannot cannot do Depending on technology that you're using is your hosting budget only one K a month and you have X amount of visitors forget about Personalization so the the the nature of the project in general like how you know size resources An approach it directly affects what you can or cannot do in terms of content strategy Search finability and taxonomies. Those are really important We'll talk about benefits of content strategy later, that's what you'll came for right one of the benefits is that We try to increase finability also within the organization to avoid People creating content already exists But it might exist somewhere in an internet that is only seen by the marketing department and customer service doesn't know So customer service starts creating that same content over and over again, even if it already exists somewhere else So we try to improve finability with a good content strategy within an organization as well Bring those people together so that there's a one streamlined process for content now Good luck if that piece of content is Stored somewhere inside your website, and you only have Drupal search. Sorry Cuz We know the weaknesses of Drupal search So depending on the decisions you make you're not gonna add a solar server or something like that depending on the way that information is classified You're not you're gonna miss out on that benefit of recreating not recreating content over and over again The flexibility of future content types and teams Who would have spoken two years ago about Apple Watch? Now you might have created pieces of content Two years ago that could be useful for Apple Watch or that that contain little elements pieces that could be useful for Apple Watch Is your content ready to be? Pushed to an application that goes to Apple Watch. Maybe not Maybe just by adding a little piece of metadata to that content You don't need to do it again. Just enhance it a little bit But is my Drupal website which could work as this content powerhouse where I'm creating all these pieces of content Is my Drupal website flexible enough? Does it allow for the easy creation of additional fields of additional metadata? The same same with teaming Sometimes we have this internal Discussion on projects where we see that you know this client is not He shouldn't be touching Anything on his side. He should just use it because we know that He will mess it up if you give him too many access So we make this very rigid system so that he can't break it. I'll break it anyway But we're trying to make it in such a way, but then maybe that rigid system will not allow Them to future-proof that platform it will not allow for new devices or New displays that might come up in the future customization of the admin interface is the technology technological equivalent of What we said about editorial workflow and actually I have very good news for you We are using Drupal, right? And Drupal can be customized in so many different different ways do it Customize it speak with your customers ask them How are you organized internally sit with an editor? sit with an editor and ask them, okay, how do you create a story currently and Review that work president and personalize the admin interface because it's really very simple If you make this great tool, but the editors hate it The site will be abandoned within one year and abandoned could be just creating every time less and less content Doesn't actually mean that you're gonna shut it down But if people don't use that side, they don't see that side as theirs as yeah, this is really my project I can really contribute to this if they it's that hateful thing that I have to use to push my content online It's not gonna work Even if everything else is fine. It's not going to work. So Use technology and we've already done Drupal that allows for customization of the admin interface And tell your clients set aside 10% of your development budget to customize your admin interface. They say no way say yes Because if not, it's not going to work 10% not nine and a half ten at least Finally information architecture, how are we going to organize the content on our site? Are we gonna organize it thinking about different departments within your organization? Are we going to be smarter think about? organizing it From the perspective of the people are actually using using the site or we're gonna use hard-coded menus So we can't add options later on Which has its arguments because if you keep everything open and people start adding things to the menu Which breaks down the design? But still those decisions do also affect what you can do from a content strategy perspective Are we gonna have an information architecture that starts, you know, that is designed with a bottom-up mentality So we first look at all different pieces of content that we have And then based on that we are trying to make some hierarchy that makes sense Or we're gonna use a top-down approach We are first like thinking more big teams what do people come for this site and then we're trying to match everything in there Depending on approach that we take that actually has consequences for content strategy Okay, that's five on five. So we're up to the next and right on time Well, we said that we were going to look for where the value is where's the value in content strategy? So you told me what this how these decisions impact and how this affect our web project So let's not do it at all then we just let technology run the whole thing and then we don't need to bother about that Right No because Spoiler alert you cannot afford not to do content strategy You really can't this just too many advantages that you're missing out by not doing it But if you want to measure The success of a good content strategy The first thing we need to do is define what success means and success doesn't mean I've increased my website traffic by 10% So what? Parade for you we did a redesign for our own site last year and Within a month we had increased our traffic by 90% and we were so happy look how smart we are we created this great website and Interesting content and people are consuming our our block more than they used to and you know, we were a bit too happy about the great work That we've done and we started to look at the numbers and what did we see all the Drupal e stuff that was Helping the community. How do I do this? How do you do that? This is how we approach this problem They were being very recognized and people like them, but they had an exit rate and a bounce rate of both over 90% So people search for a problem in Google find our solution went to the page and then left because They got what they came from they got what they came for. Sorry. So yeah, the content still serves purpose But from a company perspective that didn't really add any value to the company So it didn't really fulfill the second part our organizational goals because you don't want to just make a website to You know to Have people consume content without any engagement with the company whatsoever I mean, it's not totally true because it also helps us one of the company objectives that we have a nice Team of staff the fact that you starts looking for developers and then developers know Oh, yeah, I know code name because I went to their website and they've given me solutions for Some of my problems that already creates some good people are willing to work for you So it's not purely that it didn't work But but there was no real like commercial value if you want in that piece of content Another thing was that we create a whole section about common strategy highly recommended And what did we see well 85% of traffic on our common strategy stuff comes from the US because it's a really big thing in the US and as in May this year there were over 3,500 job postings in LinkedIn where they asked for Con the strategy skills 3,500. I think we're not even close to 100 in Europe right now But that says a lot about how big this issue is in in US, but as a company code name that doesn't do any business in US So our 90% increase in traffic when you start to segment the down it Did not add the value we first up So when we started segmenting the data we saw we were still doing a good job. We will having it but the initial You know great success was it was a success. It was still good, but it wasn't as good as it first seemed So we need to define success. Sorry. That was a long story. We need to define success. What does it mean for you? So in our case it means well, we want to engage with a local Market and You need to be able to measure that and measure that correctly don't get Too excited or too disappointed as well. Sometimes when you see the numbers So let's talk about benefits content strategy First thing we would recommend to an organization which is new to this is bring everybody that works with content in the same room That's a really hard thing to do because everybody comes in with their own agenda But the problem is that everybody creates content and some very similar content and We redo the exercise over and over again. So for organization, that's a nice way of Convincing why they should do it well It's gonna save you manners because you won't have two people in two different departments making exactly the same content What's gonna decrease your subcontractor cost if you streamline your approach That's directly measurable and the money is always a good argument to have in front of a client Secondary advantage, which is harder to measure getting people to work together from across the departmental teams It just improves You know staff happiness it really does if it's done in the right way So it can also improve staff retention. Now. You're not gonna hear me say that Organization should should contract content strategy services so that their staff retention increases, but it's a nice side effect Internal finability we've touched on that Previously IBM tried to quantify the number of hours that large organizations in the US Lose because their staff can't find the document that they're looking for and The numbers wouldn't fit on the screen. It's you know It's amazing It's hard to measure though But one of the metrics that we could find is how many duplicate content do we find? If there are much less now than they used to be then we're doing a good good job Productivity increases, but the problem with productivity is that it has so many different factors that it's hard to tell How much of that actually is due to content strategy? This one is quite obvious less conflicting information now I travel I travel quite a lot and I was looking for a good data package within within Spain I'm a local live here in Barcelona and For those who are not from here believe me This is the worst place in Europe for data traffic in terms of costs so One provider came at this great new product and you could take it with you everywhere And you had almost no data limit almost like in the rest of the civilized worlds and I Went to their to their website. I went to the shop and I said that's it I'm gonna I'm gonna you know leave what I have already because now I'm paying like Mobile cost and I'm paying the fixed connection. This is almost as good as my data connection at home I could just take it everywhere and get rid of what I'm paying here twice So it was this mobile router that could take with you And then when I was about to buy I read on this on this forum that somebody said yeah, but actually there are terms of service say You can't move it around it's mobile in that you can install it anywhere where you have a good 4g connection It's pain, but once you've set it in one place it hooks up with this antenna and If you take it away and you use it 100 kilometers further the provider's gonna say hey wait a minute That's not what it's intended for So you're moving it around. Yeah, but it's a mobile router. Yeah, but you need to use it in one place So I started looking into that and on their product page. They had hidden that information. It wasn't there on the campaign Site that I create only for that. It was somewhere there in small print And when he asked for it in the shop, they yeah, they confessed that that was indeed true But that's conflicting information. What does it do? Well, it's very clear that it's gonna take me years to go back to that provider So conflicting information makes people feel like they've been You know treated badly that you're trying to hide something in this case It was always I were trying to hide something for me But sometimes it's not intentionally and people still have that bad user experience like this organization cannot be trusted Very clear metric is people complain about that I complained about that many other people do so you can measure that how many Complaints does your customer service department get because information is incorrect or incomplete? How many times this content is being reviewed because if something is published and you need to review it all the time You need to update it all the time That probably means that there were some original mistakes So those are all things you can measure and you should as an organization And actually us as a service provider we could measure it for them Which would be a nice additional revenue stream Why say no to that a Reduced time to market. That's an obvious one when somebody asked for a piece of content Starting point when something get published. How long does it take? How many organizations only let the marketing director publish things on the website? And then I finished this great story Which is linked to an event which is happening and the marketing director is actually attending that event He doesn't really have time to push the button And then he publishes it the Monday after when nobody is interested in that anymore that happens all the time so Making a editorial workflow that is mimicked in your CMS, but also with the appropriate roles and responsibilities Significantly reduces the time to market time to live time to publication Increased user engagement is a typical goal for our content We want to make content which is shared more which reaches a broader public so That one is as well Is it's quite obvious? Just the problem here is that it might be easy to just use a bit too simple metrics. How many Facebook likes do I get how many? Retweets or favorites and Twitter do I get you need To come up with something a little more than that need to come up with something Okay, how many do I get and how many of these do actually lead to people coming back to my website? So in this case conversion rates rates click-through rates are more important than that pure volume Another thing that con strategy helps you with is improving consistency of tone and style That brings advantage to branding to authority to credibility And this one honestly, I wouldn't know how to measure Did I just confess that? Little example is I know it's very small print. So I'll try I can't even read on my own screen, but this is the website from the local government Barcelona government on the left is a new website There's no sorry and the two examples on the right or both one click away from the homepage They are conceived totally differently. So in the middle one work economy strategic planning department, they start with this introduction area of responsibility and they start with this very official Tone about who they are What their responsibilities is? I mean seriously if I go to your website and I go to the Department of Economy and strategic plan. I don't want to know all that. I mean, I know who you are If not, I wouldn't have gone to your to your website. I want to go to I want to probably do some task There's probably something I need to do some permit that I need That tone is is wrong. You're not in a political campaign anymore. You won the elections. Hooray. You have your job now Help me out here. I have something to do. Well, the second one is totally totally different. This is the one on the right that is a side which is dedicated to the Construction works which are happening in Placer as glorious and they first start very first thing is hey be aware sorry this pages exist in English So that's a white Spanish language example First thing they do is they say if you're a user of our city network Know that from that day to that day these streets will be blocked and that speaks directly to the user But it's a very different tone. Also that the three pages I said they're all one click away from each other There's very little consistency apart from the logo maybe so one uses Navigation bar somewhere in the middle Above the fold The other one uses it at top colors are very different. They either you know in one in one thing here in Spanish when I use Actualidad, which is like, you know, does it is there an equivalent in English and then on the other one They use the equivalent for news. It's exactly the same thing. Be consistent use the same labels because it's the same thing And that confuses people why does this one? I mean, this is quite obvious people can still understand But be consistent about about labels. Why do you call things? tasks on one side from the City and on the on the next page you call them procedures Well, actually they're both about same things about helping civilians getting something done with the Local government so that consistency in improves your your credibility improves your trust in your organization if I go through this Sorry, but if I go to this middle guy, I don't even know what political party that guy is from But if he wants to be so problem telling all the stuff that he does He said he has already lost my trust Might even be possible. I voted for him. I don't know Come on strategy further helps a lot about Prior prioritization Why did I put a word like that in my presentation? That's just stupid for a non-English native like me Priority of change requests of Features of development if we all know that it's a it's a pain now ask your clients To link each and every of their user stories to one of their side objectives Also them to tell why does this carousel on the home page? Sorry, everybody uses that example. Why is that going to help you improve your brand awareness? If you think that that's what it's linked to And they might have a good answer I doubt it, but for all the features that might have a good answer and Why not share that information with your developer because it's a very different thing if the developer makes a video page for the website Then if they make the video page because they understand why that video page is so important for the client What are they trying to make even if the task of a developer is just or a designer just to design a page or to develop that functionality? But if they understand the underlying reasoning that's gonna Make it easier actually jump to the next slide, but they are very into interlinked It also helps you to have conversation with the client when they come with yet another change request to say This change request does not make sense Sorry to say so, but you obviously told that This were the objectives that change request is gonna push other work down the road Which are gonna help you much more to obtain your objectives, and this is not really helping Helping you so you can have that conversation on a much more equal level even if they pay Those there's a big example is forget who the company is there was a big example in the in a large us company They had on their website above the fold on the right. It's it's like an organization with over 5,000 people of staff They had a map of the headquarters Above the fold first thing you saw on the right-hand side a map of where to find a headquarters so It's actually an example used by another content strategist and he asked why When they were doing the redesign, why do you have that there? Oh, that's a direct request from the CEO office because the CEO says that he's such a busy man And he's so angry that sometimes his schedule gets Messed up because people arrive late at meetings that he wanted that information to be very prominent So if somebody comes for a meeting they're gonna be there on time. Sorry, that's a bad reasoning Even if it's the CEO that doesn't work you need to be able to use those arguments No, your website is not the tool that way you could still make sure that they can find that information But it shouldn't be the first thing you see when you go to that website because the main Definition of success of the website is this that and it's not make sure that All the points of your CEO or on time So because your developers understand what their requirements are for what the requirements that they're developing What is the use what's the idea behind it because they understand it you're gonna have less rework How many times have we developed according to a brief exactly what was asked? We give it to the client and the client says no, that's not why I asked and then we started our argument Yes, no. Yes. No look you said you wanted this user story. Yeah, but it doesn't really solve my problem It's important for developers. I know that that's a controversial opinion Some people say no just let developers do their job. They shouldn't be involved in that kind of stuff It's just distracting them. They should be able to focus on technical solution. I think that they should they should understand what a User story is linked to why is it important to to client and it will result in less rework It will maybe take them a little bit longer because they need to go through documentation or they need to sit in on Some meetings when we are doing sprint planning But it will help them understand a project and over the over a longer time period It will actually reduce the risk of a wrong interpretation of user story And that's it Now if you seriously think that after all these you can afford to Not have all these advantages Because there are many the problem with it is from a common strategy perspective is that Almost all of these are value and benefits that you have over a long term period so it takes Over a year probably to start to get a return on investment if you want to do well And that's a hard thing when most of our clients have internal reporting cycles Which are 12 months so they make planning and they need to be able to show So there's a little bit work there to to be done so I think the biggest Improvement although for me it's not the most valuable one But the biggest improvement is that they can save cost on content creation quite quickly and that could be your food in the door To start convince a client that it should start to to invest in it But all the other benefits they were definitely as important if not even even more in the long run So that's it any questions Well, we were a traditional Drupal agency a couple of years ago and now we moved into a bit more holistic approach Not that we didn't do so before we just weren't vocal about it So what we've done is we changed the information architecture as well to to show On our side to show that we actually do the whole process So don't come to us just because you want to host your site while we still do but we understand the full process So from the planning I like to think about content strategy as a sprint minus one Or include in spring in spring zero So it's still fine if people from Drupal community come to our site and just solve their problem and they leave That's still fine. But for the other stuff. We made it quite Clear how it integrates with the other with the other pieces of content on the side By changing our information architecture and making it a bit more visible about what the process is that we Think should be ideal Yeah Okay, so for the recording the question was what do I think about sign site ownership and Organization where that is not clearly fine about who the owner of the site is I Think personally a site owner needs or a site need needs owners by Different types of responsibilities. So one site owner if it's a quite a large organization I think it's not a good idea because somebody can't be an expert in both the technical side as a communication side if you want so I think it's a good idea to have a site owner from a content perspective So content owner of a site and somebody else takes care of the more technical stuff But a content owner on a site is not the same thing as the one person that has The permission to publish so we should definitely not Make that mistake. Don't make one content owner Being that bottleneck which will slow everything Everything down Also, that's not the person needs to approve things. It's just the person responsible to keep an eye on that Degree standards the style guides are being used that The right types of content are being Generated that helps out that you can go to if you need training because there's a thing you want to do You don't really know how to do it that one person. So I would have a one technical site owner and One content site owner and of course it's important that those two work Well together and that's definitely not not a given There might be tension there but then you call in A consultant like me and I solve it and that's when you need to throw The ball Come on nobody I haven't been commercial enough if nobody talks anything More questions Okay, that means I must have explained it so well. It was extremely boring. I warned you from the beginning One more important thing actually to they asked me to recommend Everybody to go to the sprints Tomorrow and even more if you want the extended sprint Let me add one thing to that if you see me touching one line of code Kick me out of the room or Drupal 8 will never get released And another thing which is quite important for us speakers is please Do tell us what you think There is a an official way to do so over at the Event website where you can actually leave your comments and that that could be anything could be about The tone of the presentation or I missed this. I would have loved to hear more about XYZ We like flattering comments as well But also don't be afraid to give any constructive feedback even if it's something that wasn't good We probably need that feedback even more Just don't do it on twitter, please That's it. Thanks for attending