 Anybody object if we start a little bit early since the room is full? I'll cover the boring parts first where I talk about myself for a couple of minutes This is content strategy in popular culture This is not going to be an advanced session But I am going to share with you some of the metaphors that I have used with actual clients to help them understand Content strategy a little bit better. I Am Brett Meyer. I am the chief strategy officer with think shout. It's a fantastic title gets to mean whatever I need it to mean Now it means that I lead our strategy engagements our UX team and some of our business development Actually 15 years ago. I was vice president of another web development company. We specialized in Financial sites we did sites for mortgage brokers. We did sites for giant derivatives traders At the same time my wife was working for a financial management firm So we were all about money all the time and we got tired of it at the same time We quit our jobs. We sold almost all of our things and we joined the Peace Corps That is a story for another time, but suffice to say it was very very hot. I Came back. I was lucky enough to get a job doing communications with the nonprofit technology network Eventually became the communications director there and during that time I had the opportunity to work with thousands and thousands of nonprofits Including things around content strategy and then I moved on to think shout In the time in between I've been a semi professional movie reviewer I've been a professional music reviewer and it is my dream when I retire someday to start a blog that reviews commercials So hopefully we can see some improvement there So I work at think shout think shout is a digital strategy and development agency We're based in Portland, Oregon And almost all of our work is with nonprofits and social good organizations very happy to be part of this team and Lucky enough to have had the opportunity to work with organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the humane Society of the United States Who happened to have a lot of content So I've been thinking about content a lot a lot over the last few years So content strategy At its basic level content strategy is just having a plan to fill up the websites that everybody here is building With things that are going to be useful to end users and also beneficial to the organization's end goals The definition that I tend to use is very dry This is from usability gov which actually does have a lot of great resources content strategy focuses on the planning Creation delivery and governance of content This is slightly different from the standard slide that people see at content strategy sessions from Christina Halverson She includes the words useful and usable. I feel that those are value judgments and when you are a content strategist Yes, you want to get the content to the state that it is useful and usable But in reality you are going to have to deal with a lot of legacy content that is neither of those things So for the purposes of the work you have to assume that the end goal is useful and usable But you're going to have a lot of work to do along the way and In practice that means you're going to be using a lot of spreadsheets and page templates content strategy at its basic level is really not Exciting But it is very necessary So I'm going to try to make it a little bit more exciting today because the reason that we build websites is the Content that is going to be going into it and that should not be a chore So we need to focus on the why of the content and when I talk about content. I'm not just talking about text This is the images. It's the videos. It's the animations. It's whatever you are putting on your website That is going to be useful to some human being in the world Your content is the connection between your organizational goals and your audience's motivations and Anytime a piece of content is added to the website It's because somebody somewhere at some point thought it was going to be useful It may not have turned out to be useful But I I hope that you so and nobody's just putting up content because it was their job And they had to get the blog post up for the day and so that's what they did But if you don't have a strategy and the bottom line is that if you don't have a strategy for the governance of Creation and updating of content your quest is probably doomed to fail So I've actually realized that My interest in content strategy goes back to my teenage years when I was a comic book collector I was collecting comic books at exactly the wrong time. It was the late 80s and Marvel and all of those things were using Chromium covers and pre-wrapping the comic books in plastic So you were destroying your investment if you actually wanted to read them. It was a little weird. Anyway, I Still love the comic books and I love them so much that I Built a flat file database and a way to access that on my Amiga 500 and I kept track of every single comic book I had I cross-referenced it with the supposed value from Wizard Magazine and Essentially what I had done was perform a content audit of all of my content books and I loved it And that's the thing content audits seem like a boring task But the content on your website if you love doing it, it's not a chore If you love doing it, it's going to be something that you want to do You want to make your content better on a daily basis and the tools that you build are going to be able to help You do that We love our own content and every organization we work with should be similarly invested in the content that they put on their sites So this is my favorite content audit template. It gets down to the brass tax There is the content users want there is the content the organization wants and there's the content that nobody wants this is from John McCrory and he makes a very simple case that The most important content is the content that the users want because at the end of the day Your content can be perfectly suited toward the goal that you're trying to achieve If it does not connect or resonate with the end users if nobody actually wants to use that content then that content has no value So there are some things that we need to know before we can start developing our content strategy At think shout we go through our discovery process that includes the content portion And we believe we need to understand three basic things when we are working with these nonprofit organizations We need to understand their goals we need to understand their audiences and Then we need to get into the content at that point since the content is the connection between those two things so goals There has to be a reason that you're putting stuff up on the internet You're not just doing it for fun. Maybe the goal is fun. If that's if that's your goal is just to have fun That's fine Actually, that's probably explains why cat videos dominate the internet It's they're fun but The clients that you're working with or even your own organizations you have goals You're trying to accomplish something with this content and you're trying to accomplish something in the world Nobody starts a company just for the heck of it I suppose there are probably a few people but generally if you start a company you want to do something like he wants to sell shoes Coca-Cola wants to make our teeth rot Not if the Southern Poverty Law Center wants to educate people about Hatred in the in the United States and talk about how that can be dealt with So at the high level you've got these goals and the content has to support the goals of the organization But then you've got the project goals and building a website as great as it can be is only a subset of the Organizations goals the website is a tool that is going to help the organization accomplish its goals It's become a central tool because it's the easiest way to get content out in the world But it's still a tool so when you embark on a project to Rebuild a website to build a website from scratch to improve it to treat the content in some way You're embarking on a project and you need to set the goals for what that project is going to accomplish So building the website. How is that going to help the organization? How is it going to help them achieve their goals and Then you've got your audiences Is anybody lucky enough in here to be working on a website that only has a single audience? Yeah, in reality Building a website full of content is difficult because you're trying to serve so many People and all of those people have different needs. They can be grouped into different buckets Generally, we talk with nonprofits. They've got departments and all of those departments want different things So the communications department wants names for the email list and the the founder the fundraising department Of course wants people to donate, but they've got all of these various folks coming to them. They might have students They might have teachers. They might have government employees. All of these folks are going to have Different reasons for coming to the website. So when you're thinking about audiences, you need to think about What are they trying to accomplish when they come visit your website? What is their motivation for seeking out your website? You've probably seen a lot of statistics around how much traffic is coming from search engines these days We have many many clients who have in excess of 60 percent of their traffic coming from Organic search and then a big chunk that's also coming from social media People don't come in through the homepage and then navigate through the path that we want them to navigate through They come in because they're looking for something Google is helping them shortcut all of your careful plays at information architecture and Getting them straight to the content that hopefully they want so you can take a look at your data And you can try to start to figure out well what do people want from us? What is the content that is resonating? How can we do more of that? You also have to take into account your audience's tolerance for digging to find the content that they want Say they click on a Google link and the first thing that they come up with is not what they were looking for How are you going to? Show them that maybe you have something else on your website that is going to be more useful to them And how much work are they we're going to be willing to do to fight your information architecture to find what they're looking for? And you also have to take into account their experience and this can mean all sorts of things it can mean How many times they've Interacted with your website before if they're a first-time user they probably have very different needs from somebody who has come Back to your site 10 15 times Understands your information architecture and can easily navigate your website to find just what their work with that what they want You can also think about it in terms of experience with technology I know that I have to take technical support calls from my parents at least once a month to help them do something with their computer It's I bet a lot of you have similar experiences in here But that's not the case with you and it's certainly not the case for the generation that's coming up behind us who have never known life without the internet and in the end What they're looking for is content that is going to be useful to them in their own lives They're generally not coming to your website simply because they think you are cool They're looking for something that is going to help them do something that they want to do in their own life So your content needs to prove to be useful to them So how do you bring this together? Content is the connection between your audience's motivations and the goals of the organization so Let's consider Marvel's extended universe here for a moment. Has anybody seen Captain America yet? Is it good? It doesn't follow the comic at all. Okay It did however have an amazing launch and does anybody remember when they first started kicking this off? Let's see if I can get this out here. Oh No, I don't know if the audio is gonna work anyway This is from the original Iron Man movie back in 2008 and This is the introduction of Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury agent of shield And this is where they first started teasing the Avengers 2008 now we're up here two thousand eight years later and they brought it first full circle They've made billions and billions in dollars off of this franchise and when I first saw this trailer I knew what they were leading up to and I thought there was no way I was going to work Mostly because I didn't like the Avengers when I was reading comic books, but But it did work and Marvel has been where'd my mouse go? Incredibly successful Marketing as project product. There is of course another comic book company out there. There's several more How many have seen this movie? How was that one? Yeah That's what I've been hearing about But let's break this down a little bit both of these Okay Both of these companies have goals that goal is basically to make money off of their intellectual property Of course, they want to maintain their brand in this case They want to make sure that they are putting out compelling content that is going to encourage you to come back when they do What are they doing secret wars? No Infinity war next so Marvel wants to make sure that they're building up to this big Comic book art that they did maybe ten years ago in print format Of course DC wants to do the same thing. They both have the same goals and they have a huge Library of legacy content. I mean this is stretching back decades and decades into the probably 40s or 50s for DC originally and Marvel was All right, all the way back to the 30s, so this this is a lot of content they have a huge content library and At a base level, I mean Batman versus Superman is doing okay It made eight hundred and seventy five million dollars or is on track to make eight hundred and seventy five million dollars worldwide That is not nearly as much money as people expected it to make It's got a twenty seven percent score on rotten tomatoes and a be on cinema score Which is apparently bad for an audience review We can talk about that later if you'd like civil war Launched much or like ten percent above that they're predicting that it's going to make one and a half billion dollars worldwide It's got ninety percent on rotten tomatoes and an a on cinema score Let me look at my stats here. So in Marvel's ten films since 2008 They've averaged two hundred and thirty seven million in production costs and they have an average worldwide ticket sale of seven hundred and fourteen million DC's made two hundred and six or cost two hundred and sixty five million per film and average only five hundred And sixty million so they're spending more and they're making less And if you take away Christopher Nolan's Batman movies, which were fantastic that number falls a lot so I would argue that in Considering their audience DC has largely lost track of their audience's motivations They want to have an enjoyable time at the theater from everything. I've heard Batman versus Superman was not an enjoyable time at the theater Okay, unless you like explosions you pretend it's not okay and They both have experience of the content, but DC has underestimated what it means or what they were looking for in terms of audience tolerance how Dark where the audience is willing going to go how far away from the character that some people knew from the 60s and 70s and May not have experienced Frank Miller's reboot in the late 80s when Batman did start to actually get dark But the DC movies are very very dark Marvel's movies are bright and sunny and funny and people like them They figured out what their audience wanted and they are reaping the benefits of it so Audience is very important Movies have a built-in advantage advantage when it comes to content structure. It's a fixed medium I mean when they're writing the screenplay they even traditionally stick with a three act narrative There is a very strict set of guidelines to writing a screenplay that you can take classes out If you think that you're going to be able to write something better than Batman versus Superman and please try But as Website builders, we're generally starting from the ground up Drupal gives us all of these amazing combinations of ways that we can Display and show various types of content including entire movies So I'm going to spend a little bit talking about the content model because this technical aspect of content strategy as is Often overlooked, but we as site builders know that we need a solid technical content model Defining the structures and boundaries of what we can create if we're going to be successful And it's not a problem. You need to websites How many people have made a diagram like this before something along the lines of delineating all of your content types and their various Fields and everything that's going to be displayed on the page All right. Let's talk about a video game Has anybody played Dragon Age Inquisition? Yep Two years ago I actually convinced my wife Melissa that I needed to buy a PlayStation specifically so I could see what the user interfaces was like and Turned out it was pretty good because they're doing some cool things there if you've played this role-playing game You know that it can be incredibly complex So and Stephanie, thank you for your help figuring this out If you want to create a mighty offense tonic That will provide damage bonus against the barrier You need to collect and combine 11 embryo 11 deep mushroom and two rash vine nettle and only the warrior class character can use it and There you know There are 15 potion types each with multiple variations and there are weapons and armor and on and on They have a content model that is running all of this When you are creating this potion it knows how much of each ingredient you have because it's being stored in separate Data structures when you combine it you put it into a new data structure and then you're able to use it in the game And it is pretty seamless once you have collected all of those things and made the potion You can use the potion when you are in combat The actual mechanics of the gameplay are pretty fantastic because you don't notice the underlying structure that is there You're just playing the game and using that potion to give you more health so or more power so that you can flick more damage Another one of my favorite examples is From Pearl Jam People visit their website. I mean they have some pretty clear motivation at this point They're making their money selling concert tickets and selling bootleg albums That they record themselves So there's a lot that's not to like about their website. It is not responsive It is not built on Drupal as far as I can tell But they have done some fantastic things with their content structure that enable them to meet their goals so this is a song page and Pretty much every song they have ever recorded or performed live has a place on the website And every song is structured exactly the same you can see it's got a title a release date the composer the artist the image in the lyrics That's it Everything on that page and much of the site is built through the application of structured data So here is an album It's a different content type if this was built in Drupal It's got a title a release date cover image links to purchase the album Of course and a little bit of text, but then it's got a song reference field We would probably use entity reference if we were building this in Drupal and the reference field is pretty key So every album is a collection of references to individual songs rather than a list built by hand and If you click on the song, of course, it takes you to the detail for that song It gets more interesting when you take a look at their set list Which is another type of structured content as I said they have somehow managed to keep track of every song They have ever played anywhere in the world dating back to I think 1990 or something like that So if you want to see all of the 662 times they've played Jeremy you can find that on your website But you'll see that the set list is similar. It's got the venue the location Link to the concert poster image Product links the bootleg and then the song reference field again. So again, they are building these lists of songs by referencing Extracurricular entities that are songs or they're building the set list by referencing all of these songs So when you are looking around the website and you're looking at all of those 662 times that they've played Jeremy It's getting you to this page and on that page is a link to buy the bootleg album So if you find oh, hey, they played they recorded that concert that I saw in Portland, Oregon I am encouraged just by exploring their site to buy the bootleg album so that I can reminisce about what a great concert that was The entire structure of their website is built to get you to these things So that you are encouraged to buy something or do something that takes advantage that is going to benefit Pearl Jam So not a great website great content model The truth of the matter though is that Your infrastructure needs to be invisible. We're building these content models. We're building the content types We're creating the fields. We're rendering them. We're Sending it over to the front-end engineers to make it look really good But at the end of the day if somebody comes to a website and says, oh, this is built in Drupal Then we've probably failed at something Take a look at what George Miller did with Mad Max that everybody see Mad Max. All right so this is actually a pre post production shot and When he was done with it it looked like that Similarly when the truck goes under that underpass that ends up collapsing This is what that looked like in real life But when you're watching the movie you don't see all of the architecture that went into making this such an experience You just see the finished product there You don't see the underlying infrastructure and that's what we need our websites to do We need people to come experience the content think this is a great experience and the technology should just work. I Will note that having perfect Infrastructure does not necessarily mean you are being entirely successful. I will put a pause for a moment so everybody can get the joke This is pretty funny Anyway, here is an example of what was pretty much perfect infrastructure that did not end up succeeding to its creators expectations The prequel movies were technological marvels I mean he did some amazing things with computer graphics with CGI which with making this universe look like it was much Bigger than it actually was but at the end of the day the trilogy looked a lot like a video game and people just didn't connect with it The way that people have connected with the original movies and more recently with the Force Awakens Everybody seen the Force Awakens. I thought this last lightsaber duel on What was a Starkiller base? Was pretty fantastic the little cross piece that was going to poke him aside You could hear the lightsaber buzzing you could hear when it hit the snow and if you saw it in a big th theater There were th thc theater thx theater Thx theater you could actually feel the weight of the fight It was a very physical thing much of the Force Awakens got back to what the original Trilogy was it felt like a real thing that you were watching there was there was this physicality to it The infrastructure was great. The content was great. The presentation was of it was great. And so it made like two billion dollars. Oh Yeah, this is an aside You are going to help yourselves Immensely if you build your websites with real content. Nobody should be using lorem ipsum at this point Nobody should be using any of the other ipsum generators which include hipster ipsum bacon ipsum We can go on and on with that that should if you need to use that for some early prototypes fine But when you're building the website, you need to be using real content The real content is often going to be different from whatever Guess you're taking at at the number of paragraphs and images somebody might want to put into a piece of content There are lots of ways that you can do this at think shout We have actually modified a Google Doc spreadsheet that we can import directly into all of the content types every time A site is built so it pulls the content from the spreadsheet and just throws it up on the site while we're building it So the clients can see what their real content type real content looks like in place There's sites like gather content where you can effectively build out your content types and then migrated over afterwards I think our technical team is discussing whether or not it makes sense to build out a base level Drupal 8 instance with just the structure of the content where the client can fill it in and then we can migrate it over to the build in progress Okay, it's just seeing if that was news to live So there are lots of ways to do that But you're going to have much more success building websites if you get the actual content into the build process Instead of waiting for some content staging phase right before you're going to launch If you do that you're probably going to need to bump your launch date out a couple of months because things are not going to Be the way the client expected them to be All right, let's talk a little bit about information architecture This is where Content strategy and I essentially bleed into each other if users can't find the content that they want on your website If the paths that benefit your organ organization are not well-defined and can't be tracked and measured Then the best written copy in the history of copy is not going to help you Does anybody ever had trouble finding information on a website somewhere on the internet? okay, I like to Think about it in terms of going to a cereal aisle at a new store say I wasn't Awaken time to go to the breakfast at Drupal con this morning And I wanted to go out to a grocery store to find some milk and cereal You've all been in the cereal aisle. I'm sure and when you go to a new one they've organized it differently and I have to navigate the seven kinds and three different sizes of Cheerios To find the golden grams because I want golden grams and I don't care about the rest of this But when you go into a store for the first time you have no idea how they've organized this information You just know that the cereal is hopefully grouped together and if you spend a long enough time Scanning the shelves. You're going to find what you want. It's very difficult. Let's go back to dragon age for a moment so The first thing that you notice about this game is how incredibly huge it is if you want to climb a mountain You can run over and climb a mountain. It doesn't have to do anything with the text I guess it can get too steep and jumping will only get you so far I'm not going to try to pronounce that word Stephanie So there is going to be a small number of people who want to explore every nook and cranny of this game And a lot of the other games that are coming out But they can't just rely on great content if you know Well, we'll see how successful some of the games coming out later this summer are going to be but If you're designing a game in the hopes that people are just going to run around and look at the pretty great graphics that you've created It's probably not going to compel them for very long. So in dragon age There is a lot of actual content. There are quests. There are written documents. It's all tied together To help you be more interested in the graphical world that they've created So the the world itself is the equivalent of the website and they've put all of this stuff in in terms of content And they've organized it so you can explore as much of it as you want But if you just want to go from quest to quest it is very very easy to do Now trying that on a website generally leads to those websites being very overloaded There there's a design trend that was in vogue for a long time You can still see it on like news sites the New York Times and CNN Where it's just a huge collection of links all they're trying to do is to get you to go to various types of Other stories without focusing on what you might be wanting to do so when you've got all of these blocks of Encouragement essentially to go to someplace other than you were hoping to go it largely gets in your way So I'm gonna quickly show this website although. This is not popular culture This is the somewhat recent amnesty international site and they have taken Their content organization to an extreme so they have a very limited. I a there's not many options in the navigation There are not many sub pages under that navigation So what they've done to get content out of the way of other content is build this Resource library you can see there that they have 40,000 28 results and pretty much the only way that you're going to get to that content through their website Except for a couple of places where they have related content blocks is to use the faceted search to find what you want Again, this is an extreme example. I'm not advocating that you put all of your content into a faceted search library I will note that it does help very advanced users find stuff very quickly As I said You are going to have to deal with legacy content at some point and there are ways that you can Architect your solution that is going to be helpful. So one of our clients is facing history in ourselves They are they essentially teach moral education or ethical education in schools And they provide a lot of great content to people around it. We started working with them About three and a half years ago. This is a shot of their Website when they when we first started working with them. This was on Drupal 6. We did not build it and We actually inherited a set of designs from another firm and we were told to to build out the new site You can see and I've intentionally chosen a very simple piece of content to demonstrate this concept You can see this is a really simple thing It doesn't have a lot of information people going into this are probably going to read that and they're probably going to leave The same was true when we rebuilt that site In part because we were not given a design for what the teaching strategy content type should be and So we just put the content up on the page But if somebody finds this on Google they're going to go to the page and they're going to read the content and they're Going to leave so we recently had an opportunity to redo this piece of legacy content again This is pretty much exactly the same. They have not changed the words in this content for three years So what we helped them do was make sure they had a robust taxonomy in place That allowed them to put related content blocks and calls to action and associated in association with that content So without actually touching that content we made it more useful That related content block that you see there can be either automatically generated based on taxonomy Or they can create something that looks exactly the same and Exactly reference the content that they want on that page and then place that block if they want to spend the time They can also change out those calls to action down at the bottom If they have specific calls to action that they think are going to be more useful for that particular piece of content So the wrappers that you are putting around content on your websites can actually take Make a lot of strategic sense when you know that your clients are not going to go back to that and touch that piece of content That they built ten years ago that they're just not going to give up on But as I've been saying and I'm going to continue to say your actual content has to remain central to the user's experience of it and At think shout we've generally recommended streamlining all the information that's around it How many site how many times you go to sites where there are pop-ups that are encouraging you to do something else? What they're doing is getting in the way of what you are actually trying to do in the first place and that's why it's so annoying Now there are times when that makes sense But we work with nonprofits in December the last two weeks of December You can make in a reasonable assumption that somebody is coming to the website to donate because as Americans We procrastinate and we don't do our tax write-offs until the last two days of the year I know this to be true because I have seen the actual data at this point like a good 35 40% of some nonprofit donations come in on December 31st So when that's happening, it's reasonable to say okay, I'm going to put a pop-up up You're coming to donate just click this button get them to it in that case You are working with their motivations instead of making them fight against what it is that you want to do to get To what they want to do And if you want to think about it in terms of dragon age some of them may want to explore your entire world Most of them do not don't make it hard for either one of them So as you plan your content structures, you need to keep in mind the navigational elements the related content blocks the search filters And the calls to action that are going to transform the user's delight that you gave them this great piece of content To nudge them in a direction that is going to be useful to your organization or to the clients that you're working with So is your goal to convince visitors to sign up for an email list? That's a pretty easy one highlight that call to action minimize everything else that you're asking them to do Don't try to get them to go read other blog posts at that point Don't try to get them to donate just focus on getting them to sign up for the email list Once you've captured the email list you do what Netflix you do what Facebook does and you send them occasional reminders saying hey Don't forget about us. We've still got all this great content come back and visit our website So that's kind of a roundabout saying a way of saying that I Find advertising very annoying Advertising's entire existence is to convince us that we are not doing what we should be doing at that very moment If you're reading a magazine, you've got an advertisement. That's trying to catch your attention to buy a watch You're trying to watch your favorite television show and you have to watch the muscle-bound Geico guys pumping iron in the gym. I actually kind of like this one. It's cute, but Commercials get in the way of what you're trying to do. You're trying to watch daredevil You're trying to watch whatever show it is that you're trying to watch and the advertisements are interrupting that and trying to get you to Think about or do something else Some advertisements are trying to get you to crash your car Billboards are there to make you look up from what you're supposed to be doing Driving safely down the road to convince you that maybe you need a new pair of shoes at that very moment and Of course websites are not immune ESPN is trying to distract me from the reality that Stefan Curry is going to tear the heart out of my beloved trailblazers tonight To buy me to buy her to get me to buy some crown Royal to drown my sorrows Advertising is trying to get people to do something other than what they want to do So why would we build websites that encourage that we have the control We have the power to just offer a few options that are highly tailored to the content that they're interested in To encourage them to do what we want without saying hey Maybe you want to do this and this and this and this so that they're overwhelmed with options and ultimately decide to do none of them That's the reason that Netflix has been incredibly successful Even with back to the DVD thing you could get the DVDs in the mail You could watch the DVD and you had no commercials their original programming They have no commercials when you're paying ten dollars a month You can download the most recent episodes of your favorite Netflix show you can watch them all in a weekend that you want There are no distractions along the way In fact, they've built their app so that the next episode will start playing pretty much immediately because they're assuming that's what you want They're not trying to get you some to do something else. They're trying to say this is our great content We want you to experience it we're going to put such great content out there that you are going to continue to pay ten dollars a month and We're going to be fine with that. We're not going to try to do anything else HBO is doing something similar although the HBO go interface annoys me for for some reason and But you can watch their shows without commercial interruption and that's why HBO is being incredibly successful at this point too So I've spent a long time talking about the technical side of things We should probably talk a little bit about the content itself and when I say written word I'm also including of course images and videos and all of the other content that you are filling your websites up with First of all It takes time to make great content You can make some content very quickly. You can throw it up on the web It's probably not going to be super useful if you want to get something that's going to Resonate with your audience that's going to be useful to your audience Then you have to spend time planning it and getting it up there Let's talk about Mad Max again George Miller first tried to make Mad Max Fury Road back in 2001 He took it up again in 2011 and he wrapped he didn't wrap photography until 2013 That means the movie didn't come out until two years later typically Hollywood calls that development hell and Is anybody in here seeing Ishtar? Oh a couple yeah, but there's a reason that not a lot of people have seen that but a lot of people have seen Mad Max George Miller took a lot of time Making Mad Max be exactly what he wanted to be and because he did that it resonated with his audience I need to stop using the word resonate. Sorry anybody got a something else that no, okay Connected okay, thank you and you can see that in a bunch of the other movies that have come out The Lego movie was in production for four years. I thought it was going to be terrible. It was adorable I love the Lego movie movie. How about boyhood? Have you seen boyhood? Everybody knows how long that took he spent 12 years making that movie and it was a movie about people living their lives And it was fantastic. It was amazing So it's clear that with the right people involved movies benefit from allowing the directors to realize their vision You can expand that into books and movies Books and music very difficult outside of some punk albums that I can think of To just go into the studio to go sit in a corner write a great novel and come up with something that is really going to be timeless The same is true for content that we're putting on your websites I'm not saying that you should be like James Joyce and obsess over every single word I am encouraging you to spend time making sure that you are thinking about the goals of your organization The goals of your website and what your audiences want as you are creating that content Let me assure you that people do read on the internet. There is this meme Started a long time ago by people who did eye test studies that people don't read I will wager that the content that they gave these folks for the eye test studies was not interesting How many people have not read an article through to completion on the internet? Oh One person in the back really, okay Well, I I know that there are some great sites the New Yorker The New York Times has some fast fantastic long-form content ESPN has long-form content And I will read every word of that because I'm interested in it people read content that they are interested in People skip and scan and leave content when they are not interested in it So you your goal as content strategist as content authors as website developers is to come up with the content that people Want to read and you don't have to get everybody to read it Everybody is not your target audience if you've gone through the work of defining who your audiences are It's much easier to define what the content is that you should be putting up on the website And you're going to know what is going to be interesting to them Briefly, it's okay to repeat yourself and this is a big task Especially with Google pretty much rewarding sites that freshen their content up and add new content all the time This is easier than on an email than it is on websites like for something like Drupal con I know when I was doing marketing for a conference site We would reuse words from the year before and customize it to meet the needs of this year's conference if that's Content that's probably going to be applicable to your website to the Drupal Association does Drupal con every year certain aspects of Drupal Con are going to be the same every year so you can reuse some of that content Hopefully your a b testing it so you can make it a little bit better every year And you can just change the dressing around it because you already know that it's compelling Anybody think of an example of a movie that reused a lot of content from an earlier time and was very successful for him it I Hope I'm not spoiling anything. It's still fun You should go see it Ultimately though you need to stay true to your vision. You need to stay true to your audience When you think about it empirically Fury road should not have succeeded with mainstream audiences. It's a two-hour chase scene That's all it is the hero's face is obscured for half the movie Except that Furios is the real hero of the movie as we all know It's daylight or its nighttime scenes were filmed in daylight and it prominently features a tanker truck full of breast milk but it grossed almost 500 million dollars worldwide and Fury roads exceeded because it stayed true to George Miller's vision He created something that was unique that was great And he was not the only one who wanted to see as it turned out because he stayed true to what he wanted to put on the screen it connected with people. Thank you for that and and He cut down Just to the bare elements of what he needed for that movie So they storyboarded the entire thing before they started filming. They largely worked without a script and He put just a few words into the script Google tells me that fury road had roughly 3600 spoken words across its two-hour running time You can consider an even a mediocre movie like Jupiter ascending also an action movie Has nearly 9,000 words because it is burdened by the presumed need to explain what's going on Here's a quote Your planet is just now entering its genetic age You understand very little about something which is a vital part of our reality in our world genes have an almost spiritual Significance they are the seeds of you are immortality when the exact same genes reappear in the same order It is for us, which you would call reincarnation I'm not entirely convinced that we needed to hear that Fury road doesn't care about telling us what's going on Because it doesn't matter. Why doesn't Furiosa have an arm? That's backstory. You just accept it How did a Morton Joe come to control all the water? Well, he just does he's a very bad man You know, he's the bad guy and It doesn't matter because it's a two-hour chase scene all he did was cut away all of the backstory that was unnecessary to the story he wanted to tell and Put in just what he wanted to he cut the movie to its barest bones and that fitted hit fit his vision perfectly Our clients as nonprofits have a built-in advantage because they have their mission their values and their vision as their touchstones They know the backstory of the organization and why they do the work so that can inform the content that they're producing You don't need to retell your entire story every time you're putting up your content on your website It needs to be focused it needs to accomplish a goal and it needs to be what your audience is going to find useful Because in the end Content has to matter If I don't know if you have to work with nonprofits to have heard about the ladder of engagement It's everybody familiar with this concept But you're going to get people to slowly climb the rungs Through a small action all the way up to being what the nonprofit ultimately wants So maybe the first thing you do is come to the website and read a piece of content. That's the first rung They said okay, that was great. I'm gonna go back I remember this website and the second time they go they find three more pieces of content and they say You know, this was really good I'm gonna give you my email address and you can continue to get in touch with me climbing the ladder To the point where they're going to donate and in every nonprofits a dream Someday leave a legacy bequest when they pass away and give the nonprofit everything that they owned This is not how it works in real life. I Prefer to think of it as a game of shoots and ladders now This is really neither here nor there but three members of my immediate family were diagnosed with some form of cancer in the past year and If you have had this experience or really almost any real experience in life You know that life gets in the way of any perfect system that we're trying to design People do not move linearly from giving you an email address to eventually giving you everything they ever ever owned They're going to have setbacks They're going to be times when they don't visit your website for things that are going on in their own lives We have to take that into account. We are providing Content we're providing information that is supposed to be valuable to the end user At Dries's keynote yesterday. He was talking about Developers as an audience and he was talking about Site builders essentially and content editors as an audience and then you had the people who were using the website Well, think about that in real numbers. How many folks are actually building Drupal? Thousands several thousand maybe a couple of tens of thousands How many people are using Drupal websites to add content or to build these websites? Probably in the hundred thousands into the low millions. How many people are using Drupal websites? Tens of millions of people are using websites. We are building websites to fulfill the promise of the internet the promise of the internet that is that people can find Information that they need that is going to be useful to them in some way in their lives without any Encumberance everybody is going to be able to find the same information I could do a whole net about or rant about network neutrality that I'm going to skip for now The point of building a website is to put content on it that people are going to find useful But we can't assume that they that users are going to do what we want We have to do our best as content creators to figure out what it is that they want and make sure that that Content is going to be waiting for them when they are ready to engage with it That is the slides that I have prepared and I'm hoping that you have questions because that's really my favorite part of this There is a microphone in the front if you want to ask a question This is being recorded. So if you want to just yell it out for the back I can repeat it for the recording and posterity. I see a question in the back I can cheat because I was an email marketer and I learned how to segment people by activity. So You know list churn happens. I mean people are just going to drop off But there are folks who are not reading their emails regularly because of something that's going on in there in their own life So I always just segmented those fuck those folks off into a separate list of inactives and When we had a singularly great piece of content that we were trying to push people through That's when I would try to reactivate them So you don't want to just keep pushing it in their face all the time you want to accept that okay Maybe they are not interested in this right now. Let's wait until we have something that they We really think they're going to be interested in and try to recapture their attention at that point Yep So, yeah, I mean that's that's where we start we do start with the data We do try to figure out what it is. I mean on thankshouts own blog We have a blog post from I think 2010 that Sean Larkin wrote about Some technology that I don't even remember at this point It is not useful to us as an organization right now, but it's clearly sitting up there at the top of our analytics But yeah, you start with the data you try to find what it is you do the audience work We do a lot of work around creating personas and then we try to map the content that exists to the personas and what their Motivations are try to figure out. Well, okay, are they not reading this content because it's not meeting their motivations How do we improve it so the data is a big part of it? We also do work interviewing representative users We do surveys where we take what we learn from the interviews We figure out what questions are to fill in the gaps in our in our knowledge. We send the surveys out It's a pretty long process At the end of the day You want to put some metrics around what success means to you in terms of that content and it's going to be different for every content type Is that helpful? Okay, yep Yes, well, hopefully it has relevance for users then because it's still popping up at that point I try to you definitely don't want to put that sort of content in any kind of navigation system It's okay for it to live somewhere. It just needs to be out of the way And when you do have good SEO when people are coming to find that content that has passed its shelf life I found it helpful to put a unique call to action on that page like on Sean's blog post You just put a little block somewhere that says we know that this information is out of date You might be more interested in this article. So yes, that's that's what I do with Drupal Yeah Any more questions? Yeah Great the question is about a government agency when they have lots of types of content And it's spread out over multiple pages and you want to make sure that people are going to read it Are these is this information PDF sometimes? No, okay. Well, that's good. That's a good start Government information is difficult because it's dry often But Theoretically the people who are working for the agency should have a vested interest in doing it I don't think that there's any way that you can Force people to read content that they're not interested in you can work with the design to make it more appealing So you accept that if they're not interested in it, then maybe they are going to scam the content So break it up with white space break it up with bullet points break it up into multiple pages If you want to see if they're reading it and you have the authority to say hey I know that you didn't click the link to see the next thing. Well, you can certainly do that I don't know if I would encourage it. I'd probably focus on the the design And making sure that the presentation of the content is going to make it as easy as possible to help people read stuff That they're not otherwise inclined to read Do I think images help break up the content? Yes, I would absolutely encourage you to use images It's a it's like a page turn. It's a visual pause So, you know people are used to reading magazines and books and that's why we have columns and magazines because people only scan So many words across the page You get a break your brain gets a break when you turn a page in a book and Websites that are just presenting like 20 pages of text all in a line without any break It's going to be much Well, users are going to be much less willing to read all of that And if you just put a nice image maybe a caption to distract their attention for a moment It gives their brain that that visual pause that they need to be able to continue going on to the rest of it Yes Yep, you have stakeholders who are wedded to content that Maybe nobody else is at this point and probably lots of legacy content again. I go back to the data I've got a trick that I use where I recreate a site's current site map And I lay the analytics data over the top of it and it almost always shows that nobody is using the navigation structure as people thought That they were going to be doing but it really comes down to setting the goals and understanding your audiences if you are able to say not just well, nobody's reading this content, but Nobody's reading this content because it does not reflect back to what we're trying to achieve as an organization or what we're trying to achieve with this website and it's not Written for any of our identified audiences Then you can make a case that they either need to go back and update it to make it more useful or just cut it from the website In the end what usually happens is something like Amnesty International did and you throw some tags on it And you put it into a faceted research or research library or faceted search library So that the people who are interested in it usually your own staff can find it very quickly But it is pushed out of the way of everything else that you're trying to accomplish That is useful for the folks who say I just need a URL for this piece of content They're not trying hard enough and you should encourage them to try harder Okay, I Please if you are a developer of any sort join for the sprints on Friday They're going to be here at the convention center. They are a lot of fun and also, please remember to Review this session. This is a new talk for me. So if you have any feedback good or bad I would love to hear it. So all of the future people who may hear this are going to be better served than all of you were sorry Anyway, thank you very much