CHAPTER 12

Content and Change

Content is powerful. Done right, it can be useful, lovable, and memorable—even when it’s being repurposed, reused, and reconfigured in countless ways. It can communicate critical information, share stories, and build connections. It can drive sales and increase customer satisfaction.

But it can also be powerful in a way you might not have yet considered: At its best, content can change organizations.

If you want to break content free from pages and documents and accept that your users will share and shift it in ways you can’t control, you must also break it free from the organizational silos and roadblocks that put it in those fixed, inflexible formats in the first place: closed-off departments; top-down, anti-collaborative thinking; and me-first mentalities. Because you can’t rally your entire organization around efficient, multichannel, reusable content if each department is still operating like it’s everyone for herself. You’ll always be stuck.

Being stuck is only getting more and more dangerous. The more rapidly the world embraces new platforms and your audiences embrace new communication tools, the less your organization can afford to cling to the past or stay in its comfort zone. You need to get nimble if you want to keep up.

That is, shifting for mobile is great. But it’s only enough to get by right now. For a more sustainable future—one where you can embrace, not fear, the many ways your audiences want to consume your content—your organization needs to not just change. It needs to become an organization that is adept at change—and can do it time and time again.

Why You? Why Now?

That’s where you come in. When you work in IA, UX, and content strategy, it’s easy to stay mired in the details, thinking about individual interaction problems or teasing out ways to improve individual processes. But because you’ve taken time to unravel your snarled ball of content and start thinking about its structure, relationships, and future, you’re poised to turn that work into something greater.

How much time have you already invested in making your content more future-ready and flexible? How much more will it take once you’re done reading this book? The fact is, if you want all that time to be truly worth it, you have to be willing to get out of the details and into making broad, far-reaching change—to get your organization to think and act differently.

If you don’t focus your energy toward change, even the best-planned publishing program and perfectly structured CMS won’t fix your problems. Marketing will still think its content is the only stuff that counts; the PR department will still insist on publishing endless PDFs of the same old press releases no one reads; and the IT team will still dictate tools that don’t make sense for the skill sets and priorities of the people who’ll be using them. And your users? Well, they couldn’t care less about any of that. They simply want the information they need in a format that works for them.

For your content to go everywhere your customers demand, you must become a linchpin, as Seth Godin calls them: a person dedicated to change who can help your organization pivot and embrace practices that are truly customer focused, human, and sustainable. You have to begin to change the course of business as usual.

So how can you—as a content strategist, information architect, UX consultant, writer, editor, or whatever role you’re playing—help make this happen? How should you fight for lively, lovable, usable content that crosses not just devices and channels, but departments and politics-as-usual as well?

In this chapter, we’ll explore ways to get started.

Rethinking Content, Revealing Fracture

We’ve all heard a lot the past few years about honesty and transparency in business—about human-centered, customer-focused products and practices. And yet, so many organizations simply hire a social media manager to communicate directly with customers on Twitter and call it a day.

That doesn’t cut it.

Being human in business is about much more than replying to fans’ comments. It’s about making every aspect of how you operate focused on helping your customers or users get things done and live better lives. If that’s not at the core, there’s no social media campaign that can make your organization human, believable, or—perhaps most important—capable of adapting and shifting.

Take, for example, the U.S. government and its digital initiatives, which we explored in Chapter 10, “Reusable Content.” One of the strongest forces behind its push for more API-driven, cross-department, cross-device digital content was to simply make government accessible—in other words, to publish content in the name of the people, not the name of the agency that happens to produce it, as the Digital Government report explains:

The Federal Government needs to change to a culture of customer service. A key part of that shift is the need to start absorbing the complexity of the Government on behalf of the citizen. As one participant wrote, “Customers don’t know—and don’t care to know—how government is organized. So why make them go from agency [website] to agency [website] to get the full picture of what gov’t has to offer on any subject?”¹

It’s too soon to tell how well the U.S. government can pull this off—and how their efforts will fare as the political winds shift and the powers that be change. It’s got a lot of years of bureaucracy holding it back, after all. But the spirit of the initiative and the focus on achievable milestones guided by a central, multidisciplined team? Those are right on track.

As the federal government is learning, you can’t get ready for the future while you operate the same as you always have. You have to start thinking across divides, be they organizational, departmental, functional, or political. And if you aren’t, it’ll show: content will stay siloed in a single website. Responsive designs will remain skin deep. Different groups will publish nearly the same content, each working independently—and wasting countless hours doing so. Users will continue to have trouble finding information, or reach dead ends rather than connections for further reading.

Making Change Stick

If you’ve read this far, chances are you’re ready to make change—that you’re willing to do things differently, even when it seems difficult at first. After all, taking unstructured content, breaking it down, and building structures that will let it go further isn’t exactly a relaxing weekend by the beach. Now, you also need to lend that spirit toward driving change in your organization, or convincing your client that change is worth working toward.

What does it actually take to make this flexible, adaptable approach to content an organizational reality—one that can be supported and sustained over time? What are the traits you should be looking for and encouraging others to value?

The larger and more complicated your organization is, the more effort will be required—because the more people you’ll need to coordinate with, and the more kinks you’ll need to work out. But no matter the size of your organization or the time it will take to get there, at the most basic level, you need three ingredients: clear vision, customer focus, and collaboration.

Clear Vision

What’s your organization’s or your client’s vision? Do you know? If the official answer starts with “to be the premier firm in...,” then there’s a problem—namely, you haven’t actually got one.

When you have vision, you have a reason for existing—a reason that transcends revenue streams and, typically, specific products or services. It’s a vision built on the role you’ll play in your customers’ or users’ lives.

How do you know when vision is lacking? Once you start looking, it’s actually pretty easy to spot: emphasis on the “bottom line” rather than on product or service quality, endlessly chasing after new clients or markets, departmental infighting over budgets and priorities, and disagreement over who your audience is—or the desire to have “everyone” as a customer.

All these things indicate a major problem: that no one has a clear idea of what’s important—which clients or customers to go after, which products or services to build next, which information needs to be communicated most. Every initiative turns into a short-term game in the name of revenue rather than sustainability.

Without vision, you’ll find it’s impossible to get individual departments to work together—because if they don’t know where the organization is headed, why should they invest in collaborating to help it get there? You’ll also have a hell of a time making decisions about where you should be publishing and which channels are worth extra manual care, versus which should be handled in as automated a way as possible. When you don’t know where you’re going, it’s pretty impossible to tell what’s going to help you get there.

But take heart. Even if your organization’s vision needs some help, it may not be in dire straits. It might just need a hearty shove in the right direction—and there might be no better shove than showing your management team how locked up, inaccessible, and useless their content is on mobile devices.

Yet vision can’t be built on fear alone. While stats about mobile proliferation and the percentage of users visiting your content from non-desktop machines can be telling, your conversation can’t end with your CEO in a panic attack.

That’s where this book can help. Not only do you know how to start preparing your content and the things you should consider, but you also have a variety of examples to share with your team—like NPR’s COPE model, the federal government’s API-driven initiatives, or the BBC’s incredible SEO results.

Customer Focus

We’ve talked more about content than customers in this book, but don’t let that mislead you. Preparing your content to go everywhere is actually, more than anything, about caring for your users—because it’s all about getting your content onto all the platforms and places they want it.

Whether you’re thinking about adapting for mobile, allowing users to create personal collections of content, improving their ability to find information, or any of the other things we’ve discussed in this book, the only reason to do any of it is to be where your customers are, rather than expecting them to always come to you. Like we talked about in Chapter 11, “Transportable Content,” we’re quickly approaching a time when users expect to be at the center, with collections of content that orbit them—rather than them orbiting around your organization’s content.

When you’re customer focused at the core of your organization, the prospect of allowing your content to go wherever your users take it stops seeming outlandish and starts seemingly like the only sensible course of action.

In other words, when you’re truly thinking about your customer, you don’t care about the device or platform. You don’t want to put all your eggs in the desktop basket—or the iPhone app basket, for that matter. Instead, you put your business where your customers are—which must necessarily transcend all that.

So how can you tell if your organization is struggling with customer centricity? There are a few telltale signs that it’s slipping away. One big one is if folks insist on asking new customers for excessive personal data because the “organization needs it.” Others are defaulting opt-in checkboxes on a sign-up form to pre-selected, forcing your users to remember to opt out if they don’t want to get spammed, or organizing a website around your internal organizational structure, rather than around your users’ needs and mental model.

Another example of organization-first thinking that hurts users (and, one could argue, ultimately hurts the organizations that engage in it, too) is spending time and money on SEO tactics that attempt to game the system with endless amounts of low-quality content or cheap link-bait, rather than simply focusing efforts on creating the content your users want, delivering it in terms that fit their natural language, and using clean code to do it.

If your organization values these sorts of customer-unfriendly tactics above the customers themselves—talking more about lead generation than lead satisfaction—then it’s going to be difficult to turn it into a future-thinking, adaptable business. After all, if you’re too busy thinking about yourself, how can you make time to care about what others want?

What’s a future-focused, customer-centric person like you to do? For starters, it’s time to reframe your organization’s internal conversation from one that’s centered on the business and its desires to one that emphasizes users’ goals and how the business can help them get there.

It also takes a concerted effort (and more than you alone) to break down silos, getting rid of the interdepartmental squabbles or inabilities to communicate that keep IT operating in complete ignorance of marketing; PR publishing content totally unaware of product reviews on social sites; and vice presidents demanding new documentation for initiatives that are seconds from becoming obsolete. After all, none of these communication challenges is actually about solving your customers’ problems; instead, they’re all about your organization’s internal issues.

Ultimately, being customer-focused means being adaptable, and building business models that don’t depend on a single piece of technology or a single department. It means happily giving users access to high-quality, easy-to-understand information—not controlling their experience with it. And it means expecting that users’ expectations will change, and building a business that enables you to change with it.

After all, if you don’t serve your customers, how can you expect them to stick around?

Collaboration

Lack of collaboration takes many forms. Groups practice one-upmanship or seek to take all the credit for a joint effort. Interdepartmental meetings are painful, not productive. One discipline disparages the other, even when they can’t actually function without them: “IT doesn’t understand anything about our customers!” “You know how designers are, they just can’t understand business.”

Without a collaborative spirit, it’s impossible to plan for and be successful at publishing content that works across devices and channels. After all, IT needs content folks to weigh in on CMS selection; IAs need technical teams to implement content models; and developers need folks to help them understand what the API needs to accomplish. The list could go on and on.

Thankfully, if you can get your organization to think about its customers, you can go a long way in solving the collaboration problem, too—because collaboration and customer centricity are really two sides of the same coin. That is, as you push your organization toward thinking about the customer in everything it does, those involved will naturally start working together more often, and with fewer failures to see eye to eye—because all parties will have the same focal point in mind: the customer.

Vision, customer focus, collaboration: Look carefully and you‘ll see that all three of these things really go hand in hand. At its core, the organization of the future must embrace the humans with whom it’s trying to do business and give them the content they need to get things done. When an organization is ready to do that, then they’ll do what it takes to make a change.

Building a Team

If you’re leading a group tasked with content-related work, you’re in luck. Even if your organization is struggling to coalesce around a vision, collaborate, or consider its customers, you still have the opportunity to start making change happen—simply by the way you organize your team and approach your project.

Just look at what the U.S. government has done. While the president can make a mandate, it’s not as if the White House can dictate every decision from the top down. The government is far too big and complex for that to work, and the administration has a few too many other issues on its plate.

Instead, a collaborative team from multiple agencies created the Digital Services Innovation Center, which is serving as a guide for the initiative, turning the big-picture vision into smaller, more manageable projects that can serve as examples and inspiration for further efforts—like the FCC’s content API already has.

In so doing, the government isn’t trying to tear down bureaucracy overnight; that would cause far too much disruption at once. Instead, it’s building Web services like APIs that allow its content to transcend that bureaucracy—so the content can bridge the gaps between agencies, even if the agencies themselves are still siloed.

If you’re trying to get your organization to start working more collaboratively, this might be your best approach. Rather than thinking of your team as needing to belong to one department, like “marketing” or “user experience,” look for opportunities to make it more cross-functional and interdepartmental, pulling in people from different places. And even if your leadership isn’t talking about customer-centric, open content, it probably can’t avoid talking about things like mobile—and you can use that to your advantage in getting a team together. If you can make strides toward content that crosses departmental divides, it’s only a matter of time before some of those siloes start breaking down, too.

This approach will also empower your team to bring the benefits of their content work to whatever part of the organization they’re from—so small changes, perhaps even just to a single kind of content, can get noticed and built upon by other groups, creating the demand for further organizational change.

In this way, your goal probably isn’t to dictate exactly how content models will get implemented and structured content stored across the whole organization. Rather, it’s to be a role model and a resource for creating a foundation for adaptable, flexible content. It’s to enable others to experiment—and get them excited about the possibilities.

If your team can do that, you’ve already succeeded. Because when people are excited, bigger changes are sure to come.

Being on the Outside

This chapter has been especially focused on the inside of organizations, but that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook if you work in an agency or as a consultant. I’ve spent all the parts of my career that matter outside the bounds of a big organization. After many years of client meetings and trainings and recommendation documents, I know firsthand how difficult it can be to get an organization to adopt lasting change when you’re presenting it from an external perspective. No matter what you know or how carefully you’ve researched, you’re still a hired hand. And at some point, you’ll go home.

If you’re working on a client project—whether it’s a website build, a CMS integration, a content audit, or a brand and messaging exercise—you can still start that client on a path toward change. But it might take a shakeup to the way you’re used to selling your services.

Outside parties often come into an organization acting like suitors: You sweep the client off his feet, whisper in his ear, and tell him everything’s going to be OK. In short, you make the sale because you make it sound easy for the client—like all he has to do is hire you and his messy content problems will go away. Poof.

Of course, they won’t—not unless the organization also invests in the process of working with you to break down its chaotic business issues and rebuild an internal workflow that actually works for its content’s future.

In short, your work to future-proof your clients’ content will only be as successful as they choose to make it. And you can’t expect them to make it so if you’ve sold them on a bright, shiny solution (like...ahem...a CMS), rather than on a process of change.

It’s time for those of us who provide services to clients to stop with the flashy pitches and grand unveilings and start selling our work as what it is: outside perspective, practical expertise, and a commitment to helping them navigate the challenges of change.

Dealing with Fear

If agencies and consultants get more honest about the often brain-crunching, time-consuming work required to make content...well...work, it’ll scare off some potential clients. They won’t be ready to break the status quo and invest in change, and the prospect of doing so will make them shut down.

Those organizations will hire an agency that will sell them on a solution, rather than one that admits how much work they’ll have to put in. Accept this. Be thankful for this.

You don’t want that client, because you can’t actually help that client.

An organization that won’t take a good, hard look at itself—yes, even that one with the really good brand name or the really cool product—isn’t prepared for authentic, human, direct communication. It won’t be ready to adapt itself to content that’s unfixed and, in a sense, out of its control. It can’t collaborate around a single vision for its future, because it’s too busy worrying about the past.

Not every organization will make it, but don’t despair. You now have the skills to help the worthy ones get there, and the tools to tell who is ready and who isn’t.

Putting People First

Whatever your organization’s content challenges are, you can’t solve them without putting people first—creating content that’s for real humans, and that helps in real ways. Whenever that truth is forgotten or pushed aside because of departmental politics or short-term sales goals, your custom-ers—and your organization—lose.

When you can work to align your organization around its customers, making them the “gravitation center” of your content, as Cameron Koczon called it in Chapter 11, you’ll find it’s a lot easier to make any future-facing content strategy get implemented better and engrained deeper.

As we’ll talk about in our last chapter, staying human is also what will allow you to avoid some of the common pitfalls of modular, reusable, flexible content: becoming robotic, mechanical, and cold—pitfalls that could otherwise leave you just as stuck as before.