“Content Strategy For Mobile” Seeks To Help You Paddle With The Mobile Wave Instead Of Against It

"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.