Colleen Jones: The Content Advantage – Episode 47

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Colleen Jones is a Jedi Master of content effectiveness. She helps organizations plan, create, and improve operations that produce user-focused content.

Colleen and I talked about:

• her return to consulting after 9 months leading the content team at Mailchimp
• content effectiveness – how it’s a needed new way of measuring content succcess that fits conceptually between content quantity measures and ROI calculations
• how the six dimensions of her content effectiveness framework work in different business contexts, like marketing and product experience and support
• each of the six dimensions of content effectiveness:
  1. discoverability or findability – how easy it is for customers or users to actually find and consume content
  2. polish – whether customers or users perceive the content format and the style appropriate for the experience, channel, or touchpoint
  3. accuracy – whether the content is correct, current, up-to-date
  4. usefulness – how easy it is to use the content
  5. relevance – how well the content actually addresses the user’s concerns
  6. influence – whether the content inspires the user to take action
• examples of how going into detail can help users – “the more specific, the more terrific”
• how easy it is now to quickly get data about the impact of content
• content intelligence – a systematic way of using data about interactions with your content to inform your content strategy
• how the game of content intelligence is more like poker (constantly making decisions with partial information) than chess (where all info is out in the open)
• how content is a long-play game, like poker
• content operations – “the work of actually getting the content done, of actually making content strategy part of how a business does things”
• how established content disciplines like journalism and media offer a lot to draw on when creating operations
• how establishing content operations in an enterprise can both shift writers and editors into content strategy positions and create new roles, like content engineering and content analyst
• Colleen’s upcoming appearance at the Content Strategy Seattle meetup

Colleen’s Bio

A content expert and Star Wars fan, Colleen Jones is the author of The Content Advantage and founder of Content Science, a content strategy and intelligence firm where she has advised or trained hundreds of the world’s leading organizations to become Jedi Masters of digital content. She also is the former head of content at Mailchimp, the small business marketing platform recognized by Inc. as 2017 Company of the Year.

Colleen has earned recognition as one of the Top 50 Most Influential Women in Content Marketing by a TopRank study, a Content Change Agent by Society of Technical Communication’s Intercom Magazine, and one of the Top 50 Most Influential Content Strategists by multiple organizations. Colleen is a member of Mensa and an active supporter of women in technology. Colleen speaks at conferences and corporate events around the world, from San Francisco to Sydney.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

As a content strategist, you need to show your peers, your boss, your clients how effective your work is. As a content professional, you want to be as smart as you can about how you plan and create content. And as a manager you want to build a content operation that integrates content strategy into your organization. Colleen Jones has some great insight into all of these challenges. We talk in this episode about content effectiveness, content intelligence, and content operations.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone, welcome to episode number 47 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I’m really delighted today to have with us Colleen Jones. Colleen is … She does a lot of stuff. So she’s the CEO of Content Science, which is a content strategy company. She’s the founder of Content WRX, which is a content effectiveness software company. She publishes the Content Science Review, which is an online content strategy magazine. She wrote about nine or 10 years ago Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content and she recently updated that book. It’s now called “The Content Advantage: The Science of Succeeding at Digital Business Through Effective Content.” Did I miss anything, Colleen? Tell me what you’re up to these days.

Colleen:
Yeah. You are spot on and what in addition I’m doing this days is really opening up consulting and professional services through Content Science. Again I took a brief hiatus from that while I was leading content at Mailchimp for about nine months and I’m really excited to get going on helping lots of other different types of companies and organizations in a more hands on way. And everything that you mentioned, Content Science Review, ContentWRX, online academy, Content Science Academy, all of that is still going strong as well. So lots of fun stuff happening.

Larry:
Never a dull moment. You know, so there’s a few things. There’s a lot that I would love to talk with you about, but we talked before. I want to make sure we get to at least the three kind of a top level look at three of the key concepts that I think you really worked over in your book and your work. This notion, first there’s the notion of content effectiveness. I think that’s a real interest to a lot of people. There’s this statistic I’ve seen two or three times, several times now that only a third of people measure their content effectiveness, a third of companies measure their content effectiveness and it just seems like, “Wow, we should all be better at that and better at understanding it.” So you can you tell me a little bit about how you conceive of content effectiveness and how you come to some conclusions about whether content is working or not?

Colleen:
Yeah, absolutely. I developed this notion with the Content Science team after seeing time after time kind of the reality of that stat you just mentioned. You know, seeing companies and content teams either not evaluate content at all or really struggle and become delayed and really slowed down by trying to come up with some way to assess or evaluate content on an ongoing basis. And so I’m really excited to have had the opportunity to share it in The Content Advantage because it’s something that we developed after I published Clout, the first edition of the book. And it’s a really solid approach because there’s a lot of data behind it, you know, just our data collection and working with lots of different companies and then a lot of experience, not just my experience, but experience of other people that had the pleasure of coming across and working with over the years. And so I came up with this notion of content effectiveness to delineate the space between two other spaces.

Colleen:
One space is, you know, content volume and quality. So how much content are you putting out, what’s the level of quality? Is it meeting certain standards like legal compliance or accessibility compliance or other kinds of standards that it might have to meet? And that’s all important. I find a lot of content teams measure that in some way because it’s easy or because they have to. But that doesn’t really tell you whether the content made is different to customers or users or to the business. And then this content effectiveness space also is different than things like content ROI or broader ROI of the product or the marketing that the content is a part of or even, you know, the support if the content is really focused on support.

Colleen:
So it’s really hard to, I think, get a really accurate understanding of things like ROI if you aren’t measuring content effectiveness in any way. If you aren’t really understanding the effectiveness and impact and I think because it’s been challenging for companies and organizations, especially the content teams within them, to assess content effectiveness, they’re really missing out on telling some great stories about the impact of their content. And so content effectiveness is essentially a framework of six dimensions and I’ve found that these dimensions work broadly across different companies and organizations and different contexts, like marketing and product experience and support. You know, it’s a framework of dimensions really intended to help someone get started with this quickly and a particular company or organization can always tweak them or adjust them to fit what makes sense for what they’re trying to accomplish, but it’s a lot faster usually to treat something existing than to try and come up with it from scratch.

Colleen:
And then, you know, really wanted to have an offer and share something credible that a lot of people could draw upon and get buy into a bit more quickly than just having to try and come up with something from scratch as well. And so those six dimensions are, I’ll just mention each of them super quickly, are discoverability or findability of content. This is all about whether the content is easy for customers or users to actually find and consume. Another dimension is polish, you know, whether customers or users perceive the content format and the style as appropriate for the experience or the channel or the touchpoint. And just a quick comment there, broadly most companies and organizations do this pretty well, you know, get their content to a certain level of polish.

Colleen:
And yeah, it seems to be something that they probably spend two months time worrying about and there are a lot of other areas of content effectiveness where I think they could get more bang for their buck.

Larry:
Got it.

Colleen:
So and then the other areas are accuracy, which is all about whether customers perceive the content as correct, current, up-to-date. And notice I say perceive there.

Larry:
Right.

Colleen:
Because, you know, even if it’s actually up to date, but there’s some question in the customers mind for some reason, which is something I’ve seen quite a lot, it might as well not be accurate because it’s going to undermine the trust that customers and users have in it. Then two other dimensions of content effectiveness are usefulness and relevance. And those might sound similar and they do go hand in hand, but they’re distinct. Something that I see quite a lot is content that appears to be useful, it’s in the right kind of approach, it’s got really chunked, very scannable content. It’s got a good style or voice, but it’s not actually pertinent to the specific question and means that the customer is trying to use the content or experiencing. It’s not relevant. And if I had a penny for every time I’ve seen that, I would be quite rich.

Larry:
Yeah. So all those things you just mentioned, I’m just curious …

Colleen:
Yeah.

Larry:
I know in Content WRX, you’ve done research to show that you’ve shown how with research how well content is meeting these marks, but I’m curious. A lot of people, you know, we’re all notoriously overworked in this profession. Are there any, not shortcuts, but heuristics or ways to tighten up? Like when you’re talking about polish, we all, people who come from an editorial background kind of know it when they see it. You kind of know when the content is ready to go, but I’m just wondering if there are ways short of a full blown research team to measure content effectiveness. Like, kind of basic criteria you can apply to each of those.

Colleen:
Yeah. Absolutely, so with … I’ll just call out a couple different ones and, you know, happy to cover others or dig into more wherever you would like, but I’ll talk a little bit more about usefulness and relevance. So we dug into this quite a lot because I think this is probably the biggest opportunity from a strategy standpoint for a lot of companies and organizations. So something that I see a lot is covering the same topic for the same types of people at the same level of sophistication over and over and over and over again and not coming up with something that’s more substantive, more specific to key customer sentiments or to customers in particular use-cases or contexts where the content can really be very, very relevant and useful.

Colleen:
And so, you know, rule of thumb based on what I have been seeing is the more specific, the more terrific. You know, think about how you can cover the topics or interests that your customers or users have in a compelling way, a more sophisticated way, a deeper way, a way that’s more relevant to the specific context that you already know about. And that doesn’t necessarily have to take a bunch of research. You know, just take some empathy, some putting yourself in the shoes of your customers and having the … Getting the support to cover something that’s a little bit different than what others are covering or the way that they’re covering it. You know, doing something that’s similar to what a competitor is doing or to what others are doing feels safe and sometimes can be a little bit easier to get support for, but that just isn’t going to be a super effective strategy.

Colleen:
And so some industries where I see this a lot are the financial stage, covering the same kinds of tips and guidance and insight around personal finances, other types of finances. You know, surely there are other ways of meeting the needs or meeting new needs, meeting deeper needs, meeting more detailed, sophisticated kinds of questions. See it in the technology space as well. A lot in other types of industries where offering education as part of the content strategy is key. So, you know [crosstalk 00:14:59]

Larry:
A lot of what you were just talking about there.

Colleen:
Yeah. Yeah.

Larry:
I love what you said about that you don’t necessarily need research to make those decisions, but it seems like, you know, just a little imagination and a little empathy can go a long ways. But then after the fact, you can go like, “Oh, wow. That was a worthwhile experiment. We’re getting a lot better traction with that piece of content than with the boring old same thing about how to run a budget.”

Colleen:
Yeah.

Larry:
Yeah.

Colleen:
Exactly, exactly, absolutely. And, you know, you might not have the luxury of lots of in-depth, qualitative research before you launch every single piece of content, but it is easier and faster than ever now to get some kind of data about the impact of your content after it’s out there in the world and that we can really take advantage of to kind of validate the imagination, as you said, and ideas and theories that we developed based on empathy we have for a customer and users really are spot on. And we can learn quickly if they’re not.

Larry:
Right.

Colleen:
And move onto the next idea.

Larry:
And that kind of gets to the next idea I wanted to talk to you about, which is this notion of content intelligence. I love that phrase and I think that’s kind of what you’re getting at right there, right? This notion of from effectiveness to intelligence. Tell me about the difference between those two ideas, between content effectiveness and content intelligence.

Colleen:
Yeah, absolutely. So content effectiveness is a framework to kind of help us do a variety of different things: plan content that will be effective, it’s a framework that can be useful in analysis and auditing to inform content strategy. So you can look at the content you already have as well as competitor content in that framework. I also look at it from other perspectives too. I’m not saying it’s the only way to analyze and audit, but it’s something that can be helpful as part of analyzing or auditing content as you develop the content strategy before you put content out there. And then content effectiveness is a framework that can be one part of an overall system of content intelligence and can be a framework to help you decide what feedback from customers, as well as other data, you might want to focus on to understand whether your content is in fact findable or discoverable and useful and relevant and all of these good things.

Colleen:
And content intelligence I really think of as a system. You know, it doesn’t necessarily have to be fancy or sophisticated at first, but if you’re planning from the outset to have some kind of content intelligence in place, you can really set yourself up for success. And I think of content intelligence as really broader than content effectiveness and it’s all about figuring out what data you can gain from the interactions people have with your content and their perspective on the content and the different ways you can use that data to inform your content strategy, as well inform other content-related decisions you might make and beyond. So it’s all about making the most of the same passive data we can get from people interacting with our content.

Larry:
Right. Hey, you were just reminding me of I love this analogy that you used in the book where you talked about the content intelligence, it’s more like … I can’t remember the exact context you brought it up in, but this is more like poker than chess. In chess, everything is known and out in public. Anybody who’s watching the game can see what’s going on. In poker, you know, there’s more strategy involved and more inference happening. Tell me a little bit about that and how that applies.

Colleen:
Yeah, absolutely. So to your point earlier, we don’t have the luxury of conducting in-depth research with every bit of content that we produce and put out there and so we are, as content strategists and other content professionals, constantly making decisions with partial information. And that is just the way it will always be. And so I was really struck by reading a book by Annie Duke, who is a poker champion as well as a psychologist. She got as far as completing her PhD coursework, didn’t complete the dissertation, but she is a smart woman and she made the observation in this book that life is like poker because you’re constantly making decisions with partial information. Life is not like chess because chess, there is always a clear way to win, no matter what point you are at in the game. There are only so many moves that can be made and after each move someone makes, you know, the available options in turns of moves change, but there are always a finite set of moves that you can make. There’s always a way to win.

Colleen:
With poker, you’re dealing with partial information and so a big advantage that you can gain with poker is to make decisions when you have the most available information. It’s not going to be all the available information, but there are ways in poker that you can position yourself to play a hand, make a decision at a time where you had more information than less. And so I was thinking about that in terms of content and the idea that we are constantly forced to make decisions with partial information, but within that, we can really make the most of the information or data, in this case, that we have. And, you know, that’s where content intelligence comes into play and if we’re smart and we really consciously collect data about the impact of our content, if we turn lessons learned into best practices for particular companies and organizations, if we use our data to learn not just about whether our content is effective, but also learn more about our customers and their preferences around content, their interests around content, and grow our ability to be more empathetic with them and put ourselves in their shoes even more easily, we really make everything about doing content well much easier.

Colleen:
And we’re not going to win every content effort that we put out there. Not every piece of content we put out to our customers and users is necessarily going to be exactly on point, but over time, more and more of the content that we put out there will be a fit for our customers’ needs, will be effective, will help them accomplish the goals that they’re trying to accomplish, which means that over time our approach to content will be winning. It will be really enabling our customers and users and it will be achieving the goals that our business or organization has. And it’s kind of a long play, the way poker is kind of a long game play, but it really does work and as someone who’s been in and around content for many, many years, the more I thought about the comparisons between content and poker, the more I realized, “Wow, this is really is quite a useful analogy.” So that’s where that came from.

Larry:
That seems like an important one too in terms of communicating with … A lot of people seem to have the notion that, “Well, everything is completely measurable now, completely knowable.” And it’s like, “Nah, it’s still more like poker than chess.” And you know I think that’s a … I’m gonna steal that analogy because I’ve had many conversations where that could have helped me. Hey, Colleen, I just noticed we’re coming up on time. This always goes so fast. I always give my guests, before we wrap up, is there anything last, anything that I haven’t brought up or that hasn’t come up in our conversation about content strategy or content in general or just anything that’s on your mind that you’d like to share with our folks?

Colleen:
Yeah. Will just mention something briefly about another related area that benefits from thinking about content effectiveness and content intelligence and that’s content operations and, you know, with frameworks like content effectiveness and a system of content intelligence in place or at least starting to think about getting that kind of system in place, content operations, which is all the work of actually getting the content done, actually making content strategy part of how a business does things, that becomes a lot easier as well because you’ve got some frameworks that help speed up starting to evaluate content. You’ve got insights that you can draw upon that make decisions faster and easier. And I’m really excited about spending more time and attention around content operations because it really makes or breaks the implementation of content strategy and without solid content operations, content strategy is just a nice idea.

Larry:
Right. No, and I love the way you just phrased, you said something a second ago, “It’s not just about getting the content through and done, but it’s integrating content strategy as a part of your general, your overall business practice.” I think we’d all love to see that done more broadly.

Colleen:
Absolutely, yeah. And I’m really excited about making that happen. I think there’s been a lot of progress over the past several years and as content becomes even more important to business as they become even more digital, we’ll see even more progress. So there’s going to be a lot of opportunity there.

Larry:
Yeah. Hey, can you give one quick success story there? Because I think people often grasp for examples because content ops is such, it’s like a new thing and there’s not … Is there anybody that you’re aware of who’s really doing it well?

Colleen:
Yeah. So content ops, in a way is new, but in a way to me it’s not just because a lot of the work around the editorial side of content, like in journalism and media, as well as technical communication, you know there’s a lot to draw upon from those areas. And I think that honestly content is more conscious of and aware of and has more to draw upon in terms of operations than say design. And I know design ops is a thing that is valuable. I think it’s a really good, interesting space, but I there’s even more of a history behind and related to content around operations and I think that we should feel super confident and excited about that. In terms of examples, one interesting example is a large telecommunications company that I worked with and I can’t say the name, unfortunately, but large telecommunications company with multiple content-related teams that had capabilities, including content strategy. And they recognized a couple years ago that they needed to think about how they were structured as a team, what kinds of roles they had on their team.

Colleen:
And they actually moved from having the majority of their teams be a few content strategists and mostly writer/editors to having more content strategists, as well as shifting some writer/editors into something specialized content roles, like content analyst and content engineer. And the content engineer is really getting at kind of the architecture or structural side of content. And it was really tough, as you might imagine with any large company, organization getting change and momentum in place can be really tough, but they were able to do it through a combination of training, putting together a really solid case, and really tying the evolution of their content operations to changes that the business was making, significant changes. And it definitely took time, persistence. I’m not saying that it was, you know, super smooth and happened overnight, but it happened. And I think that’s a great example because it’s very real, realistic, and it’s also very much about thinking of how you’re going to sustain content strategy and implementation for the long term.

Colleen:
It really does take thinking through the operations piece and the people, process, and technology around it.

Larry:
And I love one thing about that, just that example, is that I think we all kind of have ideas about the roles that are emerging and in a big organization like that, they can be articulated very clearly, like, “Oh yeah. We need a content analyst and we need a content engineer.” But then I like one of my big things these days is democratizing this whole profession and trying to make it accessible to everyone so I think that even smaller organizations, I think it’s going to benefit them to think, “Oh yeah. We need to be thinking that I don’t have a content engineer on staff, but we need to think through that part of our operations.”

Colleen:
Yes, absolutely, absolutely.

Larry:
Well, good. Well, we’re running out of time, Colleen. Thanks so much for coming on. This was great catching up with you and I just got to tell everybody, just for folks in the Seattle area, Colleen’s going to be here in Seattle next month. She’s going to speak to the content strategy meetup. So looking forward to meeting you in person there.

Colleen:
I am too, Larry. I can’t thank you enough for inviting me to join your lovely podcast. I really enjoyed the chat and I’m super excited to meet you in person next month and say hello to the wonderful folks in Seattle. We’re going to have some fun.

Larry:
Yes, it’s going to be fun. You’ll like our folks and yeah, looking forward to having you out here. Well, thanks again, Colleen.

Colleen:
Thank you, Larry.

Larry:
Cheers.