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?

Quick & easy whiteboard template for a website content workshop

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.

User Goals + Business Goals = Content Requirements.

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?

I’m not normally a fan of music on a website. I think it can be annoying, impact download speed and feel a little pretentious. Particularly if it’s a corporate website and I’m just trying to get a phone number. But on this site it works. Sigur Ros, Philip Glass and Brian Eno’s tracks all have that etheral, watery quality that supports the site’s topic matter, but also has the added effect of pulling at the ole heart strings.

This watery quality extends to the homepage interactive feature, a fluid animation of images representing each of the different ways the lakes have been affected. Check it out yourself, the screenshot doesn’t do it justice. It reminds me of a couple of Jonathan Harris’s websites – We Feel Fine and The Whale Hunt.

The audio features don’t stop with music. Each content page has a sound bite or two overlaid over the music. Each one comes from people who are touched by the changes there – from commercial fishermen and local residents (“people are saying “pray for me”, I have cancer”) to activists and businessmen.

They have also used video footage as background for text content, and added whimsical animations to the page layout.

The copy works hard too – “the commercial fishermen are noticing it, as are those who simply take solace in a tranquil day out on the dock – the fish are disappearing, one by one.” And I’m a big fan of how they’ve used headlines to intro a section of the site (while it quietly loads in the background).

So I’m pretty much a convert – but how do I act? I search the site and finally spot a small link at the bottom of the page for “Resources / Community Action”. It takes me to a boring list of different community groups.

Disappointing! How cool would it be to have a tool that finds out the best way for you to get involved? In other words, I don’t want to have to trawl through all these community sites myself to find out if they have any way I can get involved considering who I am, where I live and what I have to offer these groups. Build me a tool that does and I will gladly give you my email address so you can keep me updated on the cause (and charge me with the passion to make a difference).

I think one of the big opportunities online marketing has to offer is the facilitation of a brand journey. A campaign or site doesn’t have to limit it’s objectives to awareness raising. Use that awareness immediately. I’m at the site, I know what issues the Great Lakes are experiencing now, and I want to do something about it. Faciliate the next step for me.

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:

• The left column menu has been souped-up into what Facebook refers to as a ‘dashboard’ which makes it much easier for users to find and access content, applications, pages and groups. (You may recall that in the last iteration this was accessed via a menu hidden in the far left side of the bottom toolbar.)
• The global navigation puts a more prominent emphasis on notifications, new friend requests and messages. (But, you mightn’t notice this unless there’s something new for you to see, in which case the button is highlighted). The search input box is huge! …And sits front and centre.

The last redesign was all about the stream; as Facebook’s response to Twitter, it highlighted the latest content in real-time. However, there was major backlash (weird, that never happens) with the main gripes being clutter and lack of user-friendliness.

This latest layout seems to be more in line with traditional web design… could it be that 6 years of wisdom has taught Facebook to put more thought into good old fashioned usability than looking slick? A logical idea considering that baby boomers and seniors are Facebook’s fastest growing segments.

[...I guess that means I should probably take back the whole “vying for young’uns” part.]

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…

ZugSTAR (short for Zugara Streaming Augmented Reality), is the next stage of the app and allows multiple users to simultaneously access the flash stream. In short, a mother in North Dakota will be able to shop with her daughter in Perth… Get ready for it, Momma Vang.

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.

To give you a flavour of what can be done take a look at what the folks at Market United did for BankWest for a credit card campaign. They mashed prospect data (first name, last name) with images to create a highly personal HTML e-mail campaign where the prospect’s name appeared on the card.

So if you are thinking of new ways to personalise e-mail or landing pages then consider how you can mash pictures and words to add some wow.

“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.

And so, for this reason only,  I wasn’t expecting much when Karen Ganschow (Telstra’s Executive Director of Relationship Marketing) took the stage at the iMedia Summit to talk about customer relationship management. I couldn’t have been more wrong, ADMA’s Direct Marketer of the Year, Karen gave a frank, insightful presentation on Telstra’s strategies for using social media to listen to their market and facilitate conversations. For example  four Telstra staff:- Jase, Scott, Tristam & Paul power a twitter help desk @telstra and @bigpondteam that allows customers to request help without having to “press 3 for greenfields”. As Scott makes it his personal mission to sort out your problem, so a twitter conversation ensues and you get a feeling that the company (or at least Scott) is trying to help you. Just because it’s not over the phone (or face-to-face) doesn’t mean it’s not a conversation and Telstra’s strategic use of social media is making a very big company seem small and caring again.

So it is “good to talk” but it’s also good to listen and social media provides the  opportunity for business to do both and  resurrect the art of conversation. And, like I said, things do tend to happen when people have conversations.

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.

It’s about time the Australian/NZ online industry placed more value in user centred design improvement tools such as Tobii and FaceLab. Hopefully James’ company will be the catalyst to help bring about this change.