Sessions at Content Strategy Forum 2011 matching your filters

Content without context is useless. Content works best when it accounts for user behaviours, situations and the world around them. But how can it do that?

We'l discuss the methods of context analysis: Personal-Behavioural Context, Personal-Situational Context, and Ambient Factors, and we'll learn how to implement this research, to create the basis for a context-rich content strategy.

What you'll learn:
1. Why context is essential to content strategy.
2. How to integrate context analysis into your content strategy.
3. The methods of context analysis.

Unless you're publishing blank HTML pages, you have content. But what's the value of your content? What content are you measuring, and is it achieving its goals? How are you allocating funding and resources for content, and why?

For many organisations these questions are answered by a "gut check" or worse—they aren't asked at all. Imagine what would happen if you knew that your images were outperforming your videos by 300%. What processes would you change? How would you reallocate funding? How much could you save on production and storage costs?

Marko will help you prove what content is and isn't working on your site by teaching a simple, proven, and repeatable process for understanding the goals of your content and creating easy-to-use success metrics.

What you'll learn:
1. Basic content measurement metrics.
2. How to align your messaging and measurement to your content goals.
3. How to set up a content measurement programme.

We all want the same things. From research to concepts to IA, nomenclature, design and development, we all want to create the best user experience possible.

Content is a constant in the design continuum, and with the rise of increasingly agile and cross-disciplinary UX design teams, we have a unique chance to demonstrate content's core value to UX: it's flexibility, granularity and ability to engage directly with the user.

Elizabeth will share her experience working with a developer and UX architect to improve both process and product - a major financial website redesign. Using Topic Maps, they build an information model that steamlined and managed UX deliverables and the scope and production of content.

What you'll learn:
1. How to integrate collaboratively with a UX team.
2. Tools and methods UX designers use relevant to content strategy and production.
3. How to use topic maps to develop and design the structure of large, complex websites.

Content is a critical business asset, but having too much content leads to disaster. Put your website on a diet—like Norwegian telco-giant Telenor, who reduced their content by 80%, resulting in increased sales, more self service, and improved customer satisfaction.

Ove will show how content-driven development drastically improves the quality of both the content itself, and the design and information architecture. He'll discuss why collaborating with information architects, interaction designers, and developers is crucial, and ask what lean and agile approaches can teach us about content strategy.

What you'll learn:
1. How to prioritise and define core content.
2. How to encourage learning and collaboration between writers in a big corporation.
3. Tools and tactics to avoid becoming an information dump for the rest of the organisation.

What do games have to do with content strategy? With business? More than you think.

Gamification is the use of game design, dynamics and mechanics (in non-gaming applications) to improve customer engagement, brand awareness and brand loyalty. Progressive companies are gamifying their websites and business applications and they've seen increased customer participation and employee productivity.

We'll explore Gamification: who's using it and how, what it means for our industry, and how to implement gamification into existing content strategy and design processes.

Are you game?

What you'll learn:
1. What gamification means and its impact on content strategy.
2. How gamifying your website could increase return visit by over 20%.
3. How participation using game mechanics improves your web presence.

We learn things every day, often without thinking about it. We explore, interact with each other and share ideas as we make decisions online.

Learning is at the heart of user experience; it’s behind almost all of the web's transactions, from ordering a book to booking a flight. And content is at the heart of learning.

We’ll look at research from the fields of psychology and education to better understand the learning process. Then we’ll delve into how we can turn this insight into practical design and content strategies.

What you'll learn:
1. What learning has to do with user experience.
2. The six stages of learning.
3. How to apply learning to design and content strategy.

In a perfect world, every company has a content strategist. But often, it's web designers, not content strategists, who must orchestrate content production and integration.

We'll discuss which tools and techniques are most useful to a small team working with clients who have little content expertise. Sophie will share lessons learned from integrating content strategy into her own design process on several projects and how she got web designers to help their clients produce great content.

What you'll learn:
1. Which content strategy tools and techniques are most useful to non content strategists.
2. How web designers can incorporate some content strategy into the design process.
3. How to benefit from content strategy if you aren't a content expert.

Content management professionals tend to dive into execution without properly considering strategy. Development starts with too many hidden assumptions about what users need and how the publishing system should work. Content management needs content strategy.

Bridging the gap between strategy and execution is challenging, but an approach called content architecture can help, by highlighting gaps in the way that we plan, deliver, and govern content. We’ll discuss how to define content structures, model user groups, capture authoring processes, outline publishing workflows, and map them onto publishing tools.

Cleve will relate his experiences building publishing platforms for global brands, presenting six heuristics for delivering better content management tools, and demonstrating how small changes can make a large impact.

What you'll learn:
1. How to build a content architecture to stabilise downstream activities and highlight gaps in upstream thinking.
2. Why content architecture is a valuable first step towards advocating content strategy.
3. How to use content architecture to publish key deliverables and educate stakeholders.

Web content needs to be useful and usable. We know this. But part of our role as content strategists is to make sure that it’s usable to every user. Good accessibility is not a restriction for good content, it's a vital part of it.

We need to make sure that there are plans in place for those users who struggle to see, hear, concentrate or move around the websites we shape. We must be aware of their situations, and implement failsafe solutions. We should lead by example, and empower disabled users to be privy to the high quality user experiences we all evangelise.

We’ll discuss what the law says about accessibility, how certain content affects certain disabled users and how to deal with it in the early stages of content planning.

What you'll learn:
1. How to plan for creating and maintaining accessible content.
2. What the law says about accessibility.
3. How disabled users perceive certain content.

People want great content. The question is: do they want it on your terms?

Users don’t always behave in the way we’d like them to, so we need to look beyond the spaces we control, to understand where relevant attention flows and what its appetites are. Only then can we design programmes that weigh-up the opportunities on- and off-site, and prioritise accordingly: content strategies for the social web.

In this session, we’ll consider how inputs like linguistic and network research and off-site content profiling can help reveal content opportunities. Charlie will outline how to apply this research to your content strategy, from discovery to implementation, discussing both the process and the team.

What you'll learn:
1. The nature of users’ attention through the web.
2. How to work with a cross-functional team to create platform-agnostic, wide reaching branded content.
3. How to implement a content strategy from a new kind of content analysis.

The tools of a content strategist can make content appear flat. Our meticulously-labelled Excel sheets, tree-structured CMS sidebars, and tabbed site maps squash each page, making contextual relationships invisible. But web content isn’t flat.

We'll consider an actual FAQ redesign project to demonstrate how easy it can be to underestimate the multi-dimensional facets of web content, as well how to avoid the pitfalls.

What you'll learn:
1. How to identify and think about the multi-dimensional aspects of your content.
2. What tools can help map, track, and manage multi-dimensional content.
3. Processes for using these tools in an actual content strategy project.