Sessions at Content Strategy Forum 2011 on Wednesday 7th September

We're the only 2011 event to offer this workshop based on Colleen Jones' new book, Clout. This intermediate session will explain key principles of influence, and offer a practical approach to content evaluation. You'll apply lessons learned with exercises inspired by Colleen's years in the trenches. By the end of the 3 hour session, you'll:

• Understand how to assess context quickly.
• Know four principles of rhetoric and be able to apply them to web content.
• Understand the difference between a data-driven and data-informed approach to evaluating content.
• Ask the right evaluation questions and answer them with the right evaluation methods.

How can we create meaningful communication platforms that are also workable? There are tools that can help.

The conversion map and matrix are tools that content strategists can use to create and maintain successful communications platforms. These tools define a way of drafting testable, tunable, correctly-paced and engaging communication.

This hands-on workshop will introduce participants to a fictional client and guide them through planning for persuasive content for the company, using these tools. You'll draft a plan for content creation, using a matrix of possible forms, audience goals, and staffing requirements. At the end, you'll have a document that you can use to create persuasive content for any occasion.

What you'll learn:
1. What the existing communication platforms are and how they work.
2. The tools that supplement communication strategies.
3. A persuasive content checklist.

How can you be sure your content reaches the largest audience possible? By designing content for all contexts, that will reach your audience via any device, any phone, any laptop, anywhere.

This workshop will discuss how to create a content strategy for narrative content. We'll explore how to tailor your content, as well as your editorial workflows, for different devices and audiences. We'll use Treesaver, an open-source content layout framework to illustrate narrative content principles.

Publishing usually comes at the end of your content strategy, but by orchestrating your process for narrative content, you can ensure your stories, news, product descriptions, and more will be tailored for your audience wherever they are.

What you'll learn:
1. How to optimise workflow, production, and deployment for narrative content.
2. How to use the technology behind narrative content.
3. How to customise content for different contexts.

Technology implements content. But often, there's a rivalry between them. There shouldn't be: if we want better content, we must create better technology that improves the creation and maintenance of it.

Content strategists must be involved in the technology conversations: how can we create tools that improve, not hinder, our work? There are many possibilities: what if the future CMS has an in-built library? Searched for topics you haven't covered in a while? Empowered your readers to join your creative process?

In this workshop, we'll discuss existing global CMS and content technologies and how they work. In groups, we'll innovate content technologies: CMS, social media platforms, mobile applications, tablets and more. Then we'll evaluate, discuss and test them. We'll even discuss in practical terms, how to bring these new ideas from the workshop into the real world.

What you'll learn:
1. The latest content technologies around the world.
2. How to innovate new content technology ideas, and how to evaluate them.
3. How to bring a content technology innovation through the planning stages.