 Well, good morning. It seems we have quite a tight schedule today, so I'm going to get started It's great to see a content track at a content marketing contents management system conference. Whatever next? So thank you all for coming in the next 60 seconds Over 500 hours of content will be published to YouTube over half a million tweets will be tweeted over 65,000 photos posted to Instagram and around three and a half million Facebook posts Bloody hell. What a lot of content Getting bigger every year My name is Mike Averton and I do content strategy at Facebook We will circle back to my employer a little bit later But what I want to talk to you today about is a is about a practical way from marketing and content and Design to all come together To deliver the right content to the right people at the right time And that comes under the banner of content strategy, which has been described as putting the focus on useful and Usable content and it's a response to this kind of content overload that we've seen and a discipline that takes a very Customer-focused approach to what gets published it online But I got to tell you I speak at a lot of content marketing events and the content strategy community can get a bit sniffy about that They hear the words content marketing and they think of things like you know out brain or any other player in the kind of the bottom Half of the of the internet That's not really fair. Is it useful and usable content shouldn't be incompatible with marketing certainly not content marketing Marketing these days is pretty much about Relationship building and when self Seth Godin said the content market is the only marketing left He was talking about reaching and engaging people with quality content That happens all the time like Airbnb with their city guides which show off their passion for travel or Mail chimp with their guides to better email marketing or intercom With their books on effective customer service in all these cases these brands established trust and authority By showing us that they care about the things that we care about They build a kind of relationship through genuinely useful and usable content. So, you know content strategy content marketing was the difference Gone are the days Where we would just say content is king and use that as an excuse to empty out a filing cabinet full of PDFs onto the internet a Whole bunch of custom microsites to build to and hope that people would stop by There's just too much content now and the balance of power is arguably shifted from first-party Siloed websites to distributed third-party platforms in other words People are less likely to get your content from your own website than they are to get it from YouTube or Facebook So creating useful content is really only half the job the other half is making it easy to find and easy to make sense of and actually easy to Redistribute anywhere and for that we need structure Because structure creates meaning Understanding how things relates one another. It's how we make sense of the world. It's how we learn now in linear media like Television or prompt print we can sort of force a structure of that learning We can force a narrative structure because people only experience a story in one direction But of course with digital information that journey starts Anywhere and everywhere people follow links from Facebook. They type their searches into Google and they arrive right into the middle of your Content and wherever they land usually a specific page of content rather than a sort of Index home page or anything you got just a couple of seconds to reassure them that they're in the right place This is the droid they're looking for and that they understand that how the thing that they're looking at connects to that bigger structural picture But often it's not really there that often that structure that wider context is actually only implied By the way that the pages of a site or an app or a range something like this the good old-fashioned hierarchical site map Links and classification they come from the navigation that's been added to the UI But there's no explicit connections Inherent within the actual Elements of content if you see what I mean no connection for example between the new and used variants of a three-door mini Even though they're cognitively the same thing All of the structure is on the page, but it isn't in the content By contrast when those structural connections are inherent to the content well then any and every interface will do When we see these sidebars in our Google results, of course They're constructed automatically by a computer and that's possible Because all of these little bits of content actually from a bunch of different places around the web have all explicitly Asserted through their metadata that they refer to a specific TV show in this case, Portlandia So I wrote a book about all this stuff recently with my friend Carrie Hain It's called designing connected content and it's based on work that we've done Well for BBC for ASC for British Parliament and others It's a practical guide to what we see as better content management But what's connected content well, I like to think of it as content with built-in context on A human level. It's connected to the things that matter to people. It's broken down according to how people think and on a technical level it has a sort of richly Interwoven very granular structure. It scales up without breaking because that rigid hierarchy We that we usually impose through our site maps and the like Rather than doing that we recognize that reality is sort of far more tangled and wibbly wobbly and it sort of resists constraint and Most importantly of all the both the content and the structure are stored outside of any specific interface They're not pages, but they're chunks of content that can be used to compose page templates We shouldn't be news at a Drupal conference But these set this separation of resources content chunks and the representations that the interfaces in which they appear Makes your content ready. Well for any interface even those that are yet to be invented So I'd like to share this process with you now, but it begins with an inconvenient truth about your content Which is that? Nobody really cares about your content. Sorry But it's true. I mean no matter how glossy the production values The content is really just a means to an end So what is it that people do care about? Well, they care about stuff They care about celebrities and cars and theme parks and movies and bands and recipes and pension plans and landmarks Whenever somebody is engaging with your content, it's because they have a niche to scratch there They're buying a house or they're planning a pension or they're considering a new car And that's where content becomes useful content provides information about the world around us It describes and defines and discusses and even debates things and ideas Concepts and people and places it furnishes us with facts So it's not your content that's important What really matters are the things that your content is about now? That's a subtle distinction, but it's a very important one to make Compelling content. We need to figure out the specific types of things within a subject area and then make content about each of those things So let's go find some things. Well to do that. We need to focus on a subject What subject shall we have maybe music like Spotify like outdoor pursuits like REI small business management like fresh books? Well, if it were music, well, what does a music audience talk about when they talk about music? Well, it's things like the bands and the artists and the songs and the recordings and the albums and the record labels and the tours So to make content to support a subject make content specifically about the things in that subject What is it that your customers truly care about? That's your subject domain Now in the book we use a fairly simple subject domain the world of conferences much like this one Carrie and I led the content strategy for the IA summit now the IA conference Which is a 20 year old annual community conference about information architecture rock and roll, huh? Now it attracts some very high value session content Which actually stays relevant for years and years and years because it's kind of a bit sudy and a bit like infrastructural But as an event it's kind of scrappy It's kind of a low-budget event that's run by volunteers and get this year after year When it came to their website a volunteer would would come in the volunteer crew would come in build the one-off website for that year's event And then when it was over they would throw it all away and the next bunch of volunteers would come in and build the next year's website Which is madness, but perhaps not entirely unfamiliar to anyone who's been through a corporate redesign We wanted to change all that we wanted a once and for all digital presence for the entire brand distinct from particular annual events and able to accommodate every annual event Into the future as part of a larger structure So we spoke to some people close to the event and figured out You know what the most important things were what was it that people wanted to to know about and they told us They want to know who's speaking and what they're speaking about They want to know when and where the conference is and how far away is it from the city and it turns out that while they're at the Conference they want to use the website on their phones as a portable timetable with details Of when and where each session is held and on some conferences that can be quite a challenge And as any conference planner will tell you all that information about sessions and speakers and times and dates Can and will change up to and beyond the last minute Now all of this might sound very obvious But as we know without a plan It's far too easy for brands and organizations to start to lose their way and start crowding out all the good stuff with all kinds of Relevant vanity junk about their brand story and their sort of values and things that are of no interest to anybody but themselves so instead we to try and stay focused we did a lot of interviews of which this is a fictional transcript And we listened out for the things that people were talking about when they were telling us about the event What were the most important things and whenever they threw out a noun or a verb We leapt on it and we questioned like what is it that you meant? How is a conference event different to the conference what is a lightning talk a type of talk? What are the other types of talk speakers and keynotes? Okay, are they two different classes of participant? Sessions and social events is a social event. Is that a session or is it not is a different kind of thing? Volunteers how do they fit into the whole big picture sponsors? What can they sponsor they sponsor the entire then are they are sponsoring sessions? How does it all work? And so we listed these things out people wanted stuff about as I say about each person each session each event and then some other things like the Thematic track and the format of each session which would help the other things make more sense These would be the building blocks of our content strategy and it keeps the focus on that useful and usable content So we've located the lack of the points of interest But now we need a map to figure out how to travel from one to the other Organizing information actually creates new information of its own how something is classified or named affects how we interpret it Content marketing as far as I'm concerned is supposed to be educational more so than promotional and therefore the learning comes from the links between Items of content if we make the connections between the stuff in our domain our domain entities Make those match up how they match up and interrelate in reality The structure itself then does the hard work of helping a visitor make sense of how the everything fits together Learning in the links. What do I mean by that? Well, if you think back to the Oscars And the connection between Bohemian Rhapsody and the best picture Oscar. Well, it was a nominee Whereas green but by the other you know same kind of entities different kind of relationship this time it was a winner Well, there's need to Snow White often thought of as the director actually the producer So there's an important information that is contained within the link between two different concepts This comes together in a technique called domain modeling Which is stolen from software engineering and has no place in a content marketing track But hopefully it does a domain model is a logical concept model of how a subject hangs together Now these connections they might look a little bit wibbly wobbly But that's all right because each connection has that named description of its own Showing us for example that each event is part of the master brand that a person can be assigned a role Say a speaker or a keynote or a volunteer And there's a connection making it clear that what a sponsor could be associated with an entire event or just an Individual session of which it has a subtype social session such as the karaoke or the happy hour and that kind of thing It takes a bit of getting used to for sure But actually it's a fairly simple model and yet it's powerful and reusable enough to hold true for that conference and arguably any conference Now and into the future So whatever your subject area you can express its subject as a domain model well something like restaurants Or indeed live music Or indeed my favorite theme parks Getting it right is very much a team effort, but once you've got it It's a super useful shared picture something that your designers developers Content creation people can all refer to it's a common language and a common understanding of how your world joins up But how do we go from this? Abstract model on paper to truly connected digital content That's where we face up to the content management system and the inconvenient truth number two Everybody hates that content management system. What a thing to say at Drupal come my goodness All happy CMSs are alike, but all unhappy ones are unhappy in different ways Like when you're given this so-called whizzy wig editor with a box to enter the name of your page and another box For everything else This is how the ISO summit used to manage session pages from their conference all the relevant information is there But it's only really there to the human eye You can see the names and the faces of the session host Karl and Christina here But there's nothing going on behind the scenes to tell you or to tell the CMS that these are Specific people holding the role of speaker at this specific event Their names are linked presumably to their profile pages, but again, it's all done by hand We see when and where the session takes place But again, it's like it's static text that's all done by hand And if anything how to change about this session different people different title different room or anything All of those changes would have to be made everywhere that this information has been created and stored So the content is good, but it lacks structure. It's not connected now Fortunately, we've you've guessed it We have a model that maps out exactly how those things should connect all we need to do is teach that model to the computer And thankfully things like Drupal and other headless CMS products like contentful and a whole bunch Have become a bit more evolved. So rather than thinking in a series of complete pages They help you manage individual content chunks and a chunk can represent something In our model a chunk for a person or a chunk for a session or so on Actually those chunks are a little bit too chunky so we can we can break them down even more Yes, we can like a person who has a name and a face and in our world They have a job title in a bio and some contact information and we can link The person to the role that they hold at the event and if that role is a speaking role We can link them to each session that they present And these smaller granular chunks are a lot more useful we can use them as ingredients For any kind of view that we can imagine So what do we got we've got a model for our content that's based on a deep understanding of our subject domain We can configure our CMS to allow the entry of each content chunk and with that configuration also Handling how the chunks relate to one another Now our CMS can look something like this, which was actually an early build of Drupal 8 Unlike the old way all that body information is now broken broken down into separate Chunks some of them even readable by the computer like for example the session star and end times and if we associate this Session with a presenter. We're just making a connection between This sort of session object over here and that person object over there And if we need to sort of change the presenter for any reason or change their name which happens all the time We can do so without breaking with the relationship To the session if they present more sessions at this event or in the future ones We can just pick them again from the roster and add them to the new talk Which has a built the added advantage of building up a useful picture of their speaking career And it doesn't matter if we have one session or a thousand sessions or one event or 50 events the structural Integrity holds because it's based on those real-world relationships So with a CMS all set up adding content now becomes pretty easy We we know exactly what piece of content each piece of content should be about Right down to the last chunk and through the model We've agreed what's most useful to our audience if it's an object in the model We should have some content to support it if it isn't we shouldn't pretty simple The content has become truly connected within the CMS and not just on the page All of these chunks of content can be remixed and reused endlessly Like this schedule plate page for example Well, we just need to use a few of those chunks for those fields For each listing and in fact as we pointed out before because the computer knows when and what? Each session starts and ends it can compile this schedule list automatically and if session times change the list will be Reordered automatically as well Or this speaker page where people who are assigned the role of keynote get a slightly bigger slightly more important headshot at the top of the list Because of that little metadata flag that's been told computer that they're a keynote and not just a regular speaker This page isn't laid out by hand therefore. It's sort of powered by the magic that comes in the model With your world of structured content already in place Content becomes therefore a design material You're richly linked Structure it represents a real world area of interest now we can and so now we can think of each interface Be it mobile desktop Google sidebar or whatever as a window that looks through onto that same world of structured content beneath And I think that's much better why it's much better to do interface design sort of after all that structural work Starting content strategy from a UI wireframe Well, it's a bit like writing a novel by starting at the bookbinding or taking a scatter cushion first approach to architecture wireframes crushed together so many different concerns of content and navigation and decoration before Often before we've even really had chances to think of any of them separately Wireframes also often deal with like ideal world content with that big hero image It looks fantastic when it's a big celebrity close-up, but pretty bad on slow days when you've got a business stock photo instead But having to invested in our structural designer from all these architectural decisions are effectively already made and Already agreed with the team So each interface now becomes a series of templates recipes that are made up from the ingredients of our content chunks and These carry of course connections to the related chunks which weaves that content more and more tightly together And if the content actually is already in place in your CMS by the time you're getting to these this sort of interface design Any good UI designer can use live actual content to power their their prototype templates Here's the BBC food sites. I worked on many years ago now, but now develop using this sort of tech Connected content idea the model had things like recipe Chef diets ingredient TV show all of which you can record starts to see these Represented in the in the main navigation But actually all of these are just exploring the same database of recipe content through a different lens Each chef object has a name and a photo and a bio and it's associated one or more recipes on the mobile UI by contrast They had to make a different design choice Only showing the name of each chef Following Nigella here returns all of her recipes a recipe a list of course that's kept up to date automatically But these are the resources that get the most traffic This is where people are jumping through from Google to specific recipe pages when somebody lands here Of course, they've got to see not only the content that they've come for but also the surrounding context that gives it meaning Once again the content and its structural relationships are stored outside of this UI this page So HTML web pages are just one possible output If you really want to get technical about it You could send your structured content output it as say a JSON file and it's cheap and easy to send that same content To a smartphone or a smartwatch app to digital signage To voice your eyes like the echo or even to third party platforms like Google or indeed Facebook For each interface you can actually make different design choices about which content Chunks to include and how to display them Something that we do in Facebook instant articles a little word from my sponsor The Facebook developers site has got all the information that you need to set up The CMS set of Drupal in this case for publishing content Directly to the Facebook platform as an instant article It's really just a case of pacing a bit of code into a template head here and you're all ready to to reach two billion users Now structure content is of course not new but Sometimes the design of that structure Can happen without due consideration As and as we've seen the structure actually drives the rest of the design Jared spool the UX guy Talked calls design the rendering of intent now our intent is to build an audience through useful and usable content But the stuff that makes it useful and usable isn't only in the content. It's also in the structure Some of the learning is it is in how the content is in is broken down and Connected so that it follows that human mental model and it maps to the things that people are searching for the way people think So to sum up content Connected content helps brand alignment No more random acts of marketing You can make the most of what you've already got by freeing it from an Interface and weaving it into a useful non-linear narrative you can improve efficiency by making Content only for the things that are in the model because all of the things that you're constantly that your audience are telling you They're interested in you can make your next redesign a little bit less painful Because when your contents all connects it under the hood a UI refresh is really just that And you can be nice to your customers by giving the right information on every touch points Even those platforms that you don't control whether it's Facebook or Google or Twitter or phones or watches or Internet fridges which used to be a thing you can put your content where the audience is And you can manage it centrally and share it broadly You know, you'll be more places at once while still keeping control of your brand So remember find the things that matter to your audience Map that world and reflect it back to them use it to connect all of your content chunks and then spread it far and wide to create And all the interfaces that you like it's all powered by the same content and importantly the same connective tissue Let's face it. We're all selling something But people care about what they care about and you have a better shot at reaching them If you can show that you care about that too Connect your content and then use it to connect with your customers Thank you very much for more of this my book do not designing connected content is available everywhere and for your time today Thank you