[pre]designwebsite research, strategy & architecture

I recently came across Clinton Forry’s inaugural post at the Brain Traffic blog, Content strategy, or, Let’s make a mix tape.   I LOVED it (and wish I had thought of it myself. ) You should go read it.

Here’s the gist… Clinton had been digging through his box of cassette tapes (odd behavior for a content strategist—why weren’t they neatly organized in tidy Case Logic containers like mine?) when he had an epiphany.  Content strategy and mix tapes are “shockingly” similar!

OK, you younger kids out there who grew up in the high tech world of CDs and MP3s are probably wondering what a mix tape is. Here’s how Clinton defined it. A mix tape:

• Is a compilation of songs (just as websites are collections of content)
• Created for a specific someone (consider your audience)
• Communicates a specific message (in service of business objectives)
• Should elicit a particular response (meet user needs/assist in task completion)

I immediately thought of this brilliant number from the hit Broadway puppet show, Avenue Q.  Have a listen to experience how a simple compilation of songs created for someone sends a specific message, eliciting a particular response:

I recall that making a mix tape was hard: thinking of just the right songs; calling the radio station to request them and waiting for hours with your finger on the record button; dubbing them on the dual-cassette deck; making the hand-decorated case insert.

Goodbye mix tape, hello iTunes

Today, instead of mix tapes, we have iTunes genius mixes. No effort is required. You can find any song you want on-demand and download it. If there’s enough information about each of the songs in your library, iTunes will magically make a mix for you. Just like Amazon always recommends the perfect books… sorta. It’s not quite the same as a real person’s personal touch.

Content in Motion

About five years ago I was inspired by an article written by Piet Niederhausen at Georgetown University, Content in Motion: What iTunes Can Teach Us About Managing Web Content. In the article, Piet described how iTunes allowed music listeners to “liberate” their music from the confines of an album, allowing for countless playlists. He then related this idea to web content:

“An increasing number of Web sites are liberating their content from the confines of the Web page. We are creating structured content, tagging it with metadata, and letting each piece of content roam. We are sorting and grouping our content and creating containers where relevant content appears automatically. (Many of those containers are dynamic Web pages, but others include RSS feeds and Web services). Our content, abstracted from its presentation and encoded according to standards, is portable to different devices and can be shared between applications. We can adapt our content to create the experiences we want our users to have. Our content is in motion.”

I’ve since used this analogy countless times in presentations and with clients to move them away from their static, print-focused content mentality and better understand concepts of content reuse and syndication. It was a pretty effective tactic, but often set-up a false expectation that their new CMS technology would magically make this happen.

The technology is not the problem

Looking back, I realize too many of my clients weren’t ready for that yet. They were still wrestling with how to create useful and thoughtful content, regardless of what their CMS could do. I was so enthusiastic about the possibilities that I missed the clients’ limitations.

But even in those cases where they were ready for such an endeavor and could successfully implement and manage a complex system of content structures, relationships and tags, the end result was a dynamic site of loosely related mediocre content that collectively failed to tell the organization’s story.

Why was that? Had I known then what I know now, I might have recognized that this failure arose from a lack of content strategy. What they created was more genius playlist and less mix tape. There was no thought behind it. And that’s the KEY.

Remember, a mix tape was thoughtful. It was created for someone with an objective in mind. The songs were carefully chosen to send a particular message. You wouldn’t just create a tape of random songs and drop them off in any old locker at school hoping that somebody might be inspired by your musical prowess, would you?

The intersection of iTunes and mix tape

Imagine making an old-school mix tape (or a mix disk) with all of the current tools available to you. If you could remove all of the time-consuming technical barriers to making one, you could focus solely on the thoughtful part. The same can be true on your website.

Content management systems are, in fact, good tools and their ability to free your content to be reused and repurposed is amazing. Contrary to what some people think, the technology can make your job easier. It just won’t do your job for you.

A lot of folks these days are talking about content curation— the culling of carefully chosen pieces of content from across your domain to tell a story or reinforce your brand. Content curation is just like making a mix tape. If you want your audiences to know your organization is great at something, you can’t just say it. You have to build the case by presenting the evidence. Plan your strategy, gather the evidence, present your case, and let your website visitors be the judge.  A better strategy with better evidence presents a better case.

This won’t happen by itself. And it won’t happen if you don’t have good content to curate. And good content, the right content, all starts with a content strategy. You have to know who you’re creating content for and why, before you create it. It’s the thought that counts… and what differentiates a mix tape from a playlist.

J. Todd Bennett is the co-founder and managing partner of decimal152, providing website [pre]design for do-good organizations.