"Writing this way isn't just good writing for mobile. It's
good writing for everyone."
For many companies,
navigating the treacherous waters of mobile marketing and responsive design can
be akin to tackling Bells Beach on a Boogie Board. Though “Content Strategy for
Mobile” would seem to describe a book of relatively narrow focus, Karen McGrane’s
work covers a lot of ground related to best practices in web writing. Taken as
a package, she delivers the board, wax, and leash necessary to at least be
competitive in the mobile swell.
Setting the tone early,
she highlights the distinction between users and readers right from the start. McGrane
points out that the user is unpredictable, while the reader “is us.” Most
importantly, she goes to great lengths to emphasize that mobile is not a trend
and can be ignored only at the risk of lost business. As a result, it’s simply
bad practice to identify desktop-only content.
"You are in the content publishing business. It is your
mission to get your content out, on whichever platform, in whichever format
your audience wants to consume it. Your users get to decide how, when, and
where they want to read your content. It is your challenge and your
responsibility to deliver a good experience to them."
As we’ve seen elsewhere,
McGrane argues for us to “stop thinking about ‘pages’ and start thinking about
‘packages,’” which facilitates the process of guiding the user to where they
want to go. In addition, many organizations conflate the words “content” and
“copy” to mean the same thing, so it’s important to remember the differences,
which this book points out.
The author delves into
ever-evolving user behavior, noting that it is difficult to draw conclusions
based on identifying someone as a mobile user; we simply don’t know for sure
how it changes their behavior. In essence, making the choice to use a smaller
screen doesn’t mean that the reader is adopting an expectation of inferior or
lesser content.
Personally, I wasn’t
aware of the demographic breakdown of Internet access—that billions of people
all over the world can only access the Internet through their mobile phones and
that nearly 90% of Americans without a high school diploma don’t have a
broadband Internet connection. McGrane points out that some companies actually
have a moral obligation to create a mobile experience in order to reach those
who need their services most.
The author advocates for
the pursuit of content parity (“the same content where it’s feasible, and
equivalent content where it’s not”) and a mobile-first strategy, as well as
both qualitative and quantitative assessments of content in the leadup to site
redesign. This is inevitably going to lead to some difficult conversations with
owners of existing content, who want to apply niche needs to the broader site.
"As with any evaluation process, the art of the content audit
is the art of persuasion."
“Your website structure shouldn't map to your org chart -- it
should map to how users think about their tasks and goals."
Easier said than done,
right? Indeed, content prioritization across platforms will necessitate a
streamlined and rigid editorial workflow. This is where McGrane advocates for
adaptive content, which allows for device and screen flexibility. This type of
content can also be repurposed and restructured with meaningful metadata, which
Jason Scott refers to as a “love note to the future.” By using metadata and categorization,
then structuring content into meaningful chunks, it can be reused in myriad
ways. In the author’s view, the ability to slice and dice your content—content modeling—is
the key to maintaining relevance now and into the future.
"If you care about providing great design and a user
experience that's appropriate for a given platform, you need to be thinking
about adaptive content."
"Develop a process and workflow that will support and enable
maximum content reuse with minimum additional effort. That's adaptive content: structured
content that's created so that it can be reused."
To create a good user
experience within any content management system (CMS), McGrane mentioned the
importance of ensuring all understand the message that content management is
“bigger than just the CMS.” She also made some interesting points about couple
vs. decoupled CMSs, and the impact each has on the potential of multi-channel
publishing. In pursuit of “future-friendly” content management, McGrane points
out, content creators have to be given the tools and ease of use needed to
facilitate flexible content reuse. In the same breath, she wrote that almost
60% of domains under development by American federal agencies aren’t being built
with a CMS, another fact that caught me off-guard.
"Too often, people wind up fulfilling the technology's needs,
as servants of their content management system, rather than having the tool
support and facilitate their needs. We force people to conform to the system's
needs as they fight their way through fields and dropdowns, rather than have
the technology do what it does best: handle routine tasks automatically."
The author spends little
time on the topic of using data gathering to influence content changes, as well
as SEO ramifications. However, she does point out that partial mobile
optimization that depends on linking to the desktop version is “going to break
search.” From an analytics standpoint, McGrane pointed out that content choices
often made based solely on gut feel, without being supported up by the metrics.
She does decry the importance of having a process for data collection and
analysis, as well as the positive SEO implications inherent in having no
differentiation between desktop, mobile, and tablet content.
"You can't do mobile content strategy correctly until you
define how you're going to measure and optimize performance."
In terms of tone,
McGrane favors a straightforward, no-nonsense style. I found the book somewhat
short on examples, and the author went to the well a few too many times on the
“forking” pun. However, there were a number of tremendous resources shared,
ranging from figures showing how to apply content inventory audits to acronym
usage (COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere is a particularly useful one).
For those who have had
the mobile wave pass them by and are caught between sets, “Content Strategy for
Mobile” offers the direction—and push—to catch the next ride to shore
sure success.
