Marc’s post about the “c-word” inspired me to share how I go about starting a content strategy when the client is in a hurry (which is often!).

1. Gather all ye faithful – 9am

Set up a workshop with “surrogate users” – people in your organisation who talk to real users, all the time AND your business thinkers – people in your organisation who can offer strategic insight on the fly. So you’re talking sales people, customer service reps, CEOs, divisional directors, senior managers. Also include some bods from your web team and ask them to swat up on their web stats regarding current popular content (top pages, searches and referral keywords).

How long you need depends on the strength of your will (to whip sideline discussions into shape) and the number of audience groups you have, but considering everyones eyes will typically glaze over in a couple of hours, allocate 2-3 hrs.

Tip – coffee helps…

2. Identify your key peeps – 9-10am

Whip out your whiteboard marker and ask a fundamental question, who are we talking to? Keep it broad at this stage, don’t get bogged down in too much detail. You want to know who the key groups are, what are the fundamental characteristics that define them and what is the key reason they are visiting your site.

Identify at this point if there is a high level user journey or series of site visits that applies to this group – for example a typical process for a shopping site is establishing initial site / brand awareness, product desire and consideration, purchase, service, repeat purchase and referral.

Tip – Draw a box in a corner of the whiteboard labelled “the carpark”. Use it to jot down any ideas or other thoughts that are going off tangent.

3. Drill down into each group – 10-12 noon

Okay, start with your primary audience group, in case you run out of time. Draw up on the whiteboard a big matrix, a bit like the table below. Include user journey steps if applicable. Then ask the group to tell you about what the user is looking for at each step – product information? contact details? company background?

Now the important bit – use the group to identify some business goals for each step. They may be key selling points to get across, acquisition/lead capture goals, or a proposition statement, whatever is most applicable at that stage.

Tip – Don’t bother with note-taking, use your camera phone to snap a pic of your whiteboard musings.

4. Chillax – 12 noon – 1pm

Get some fresh air, go for a walk, get some lunch. Think about what you’re cooking for dinner. DON’T think about content.

5. Empower your inner huddle to inspire you – 1-2pm

Have a think about what is going to be the hardest content to come up with, and charge your fellow web/marketing team with the responsibility of scouring the internet for examples of how others have done it. Look broader than your competitors, think laterally – what other companies have similar products to you? similar audiences?

Tip - Use award sites such as the Webbys and FWA to find the world’s top websites.

6. Headphones on! – 2-5pm

Right, turn off your phone, put your headphones on, and start mapping content to user and business goals. I literally draw an extra column after the business goal column on the whiteboard matrix entitled content and list content ideas that match.

Tip – I use a tool call SnagIT at this stage – a fancy screen capture tool that enables you to edit screenshots or pictures. You could do it in powerpoint or other picture editing software.

7. Vino – 5pm

Tools down, pour a glass of vino and let your content roadmap simmer over night. It gets better the longer you leave it – revisit every 24hrs or so.

I was indulging in one of my favourite lunchtime pastimes today – checking out websites which have won awards. Today’s site, Waterlife, was courtesy of the SXSW 2010 Web Awards.

Waterlife won the award for the Activism category, a sector I find seriously interesting for two reasons. Firstly, I am fascinated by the web’s ability to instill and express emotion, which any good activism website will do, and figuring out how they achieve that heart warming, skin tingling effect. Secondly, the idea a website can change the course of history by making people DO something about political or ethical concerns is simply awesome.

Considering Waterlife is raising awareness of the challenges The Great Lakes is facing in the States, a far cry from the streets of Freo, Western Australia, where I live, it surprised me to feel a lump in my throat as I surfed around the site. How did they achieve it?

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Wowza, Facebook just turned 6! That’s really old. It’s even older in the sense of social network years (whose ratio to calendar years must be something like 11:1). And, like any good cougar vying for young’uns, it celebrated the big day with a face lift to its homepage.

My account rolled over to the new homepage today; it’s all about navigation and accessibility this time around:

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One of the obvious challenges of pure-play e-tailing is making the intangible tangible. Think of the offline designer clothes shopping experience for a minute… exclusive boutiques, pampering sales staff, the beautiful packaging purchases are wrapped up in – it’s all in the attention to detail. Now layer in the fact that this is also very frequently a social activity and it seems damn near impossible to replicate this online.

However, there have been some valiant efforts: invite only shopping sites like Rue La La and Gilt mimic the air of exclusivity; ASOS offers round the clock customer service; and Net-a-Porter ships out orders in big black boxes filled with tissue paper and sealed with expertly tied bows.

And now Tobi has seriously upped the ante by integrating Fashionista, an augmented reality dressing room app into it’s website. Created by interactive marketing agency Zugara, the application enables shoppers to virtually try on clothes using their webcams and flash-based AR technology. Once ‘dressed’, the user can take a snapshot to be emailed or posted to Facebook. No, those pants don’t make your butt look big…

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Came across this thanks to Barb Dybwad over at Mashable. Although the application of spelling your own company name in images from Flickr is fun for about five seconds, the idea of mashing images with text in general has some cool campaign applications.

Given the idea of personalising HTML e-mail campaigns with “Dear <Firstname>” is now the rule, rather than the exception, marketers need to find new ways of delivering personalisation to achieve cut-through and the ability to mash in images on-the-fly offers a whole new range of creative opportunities.

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“It’s good to talk“, said Bob Hoskins in the British Telecom (BT) campaign of the mid 1990s.

Here we had the largest telco in the UK encouraging folks to talk more to each other. Great advice, as things do tend to happen when people have conversations. Shame they couldn’t apply some of this thinking in their own back yard instead of throwing dollars at “solutions” that prevented conversations. A decade on and we’ve been paid back with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Auto Attendant technology, technological gatekeepers to the  conversation. I haven’t witnessed such a relentless investment in technology, in spite of consumer needs, since the amphibious car.

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If, like me, you’ve been thinking about using eye-tracking studies to improve your user-centred design process but were unsure of where to start – well you’re in luck. I was fortunate enough to bump into James Breeze the CEO (his card has it as “Chief Experience Officer”) of Objective Digital at last weeks iMedia Summit. Objective Digital is the official Australian/New Zealand reseller of Tobii Eye Trackers well regarded as the world leader in eye-tracking hardware and software solutions.

James took the time to give me a one-to-one tutorial on the system and point out it’s less obvious benefits. I must admit I was surprised by how easy the system was to operate and how quick results were mapped. Now these machines aren’t cheap ($70,000 plus) but if you’re not sure it’s going to get enough use, then Objective offers them for hire (daily or monthly rates apply) and if you can choose to book them with or without an operating consultant.

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