Content Strategy: What Draw Something Has Taught this Writer

I blame my husband’s cousin who lives in Israel for getting me addicted to Draw Something, an electronic form of Pictionary. You draw pictures based on a choice of three words the game offers.

For example, you have a choice of fan, Superman and Ringo.  It’s up to your skill as an artist—and as a communicator—how well you can translate through drawing the word of choice. If your opponent—or in this case, your collaborator—guesses the correct word, based on the picture and letters the game offers, then each of you earns a certain amount of coins.

You can use these coins to purchase more colors for your drawing palette or for bombs. The bombs allow you to eliminate letters when you’re guessing in case you’re stuck.

How Language Changes Us
What’s amazing about this game is that you can play it with any friend anywhere in the world.  You can also play with strangers—and this is where it gets fascinating. I currently have 14 turns in with HeatherH. I have no idea who this woman is, where she lives, or what she finds interesting.  I think she lives in Canada, because when she drew bleach, she drew a bottle with a label I didn’t recognize.  Based on the letters and the shape of the bottle, I was able to infer it was bleach.

What also makes Draw Something very individual is what your primary goal is when you play. For example, the aforementioned cousin is a graphic designer and an incredibly talented artist. When she draws something, it’s like a Picasso. When I draw something, it looks like napkin scrawl. However, I understand that the point of the game is not to create a work of art—it’s to communicate enough of an idea to the other person so that they can guess the picture. She feels differently—which is why she hates playing with me.

All of this Draw Something has also reignited my passion about language. When I was drawing a fan for my sister-in-law, I drew a Chinese fan—the type that you get handed at summer parties. But when I drew the word “fans” for my husband, I drew a stadium and the stands to show fans. Context is so critically important, and Draw Something has made me rethink those decisions about word choices.

As digital marketers, writers and strategists, our responsibility lies in communicating with our users. Using the right choices of words—and not just keywords or keyphrases—but words that will resonate and help our customers pick our brands is all about context. For me, Draw Something has reinforced that WHO you are writing and creating content for is ALWAYS where digital communications starts.

I’m sure about this, because once I started playing Draw Something with my 11-year old niece, I’m more careful about which words I pick. “Will she know what this word means?” Ringo will have no cultural resonance for her. I’m pretty sure she knows who Superman is, though.

Start with the Who
The start of every project is: who will read this, who will use it, who will share it, who will care about it. Persona development is so important to all of your projects, so make sure that you are engaging in it at the beginning of each project, using your overall institutional personas as starting points.  If you need more information about creating personas, read these other articles about persona development:

• The Foundation of a Great User Experience (UX Magazine)
• Five Factors for Successful Persona Projects (User Interface Engineering)
• Develop Personas (Usability.gov)
• Mobile Content Strategy: Creating User Scenarios (CMS Wire)

Have you played Draw Something? Has it inspired any changes in the way you think about language?

Content Strategy: 3 Questions You Need to Be Able to Answer Now

At Content Marketing World 2011, Sally Hogshead gave a brilliant keynote where she talked about digital content and storytelling.  One of the things she said was that you can’t be comfortable and innovative at the same time.

That conference was in September 2011, and since then I’ve thought about that statement a lot.  I think Sally has an excellent point—most of the time in life it’s very difficult to be try new things and feel safe at the same time.

However, I think when we’re talking about digital content, there might be a way to do it. The key is knowing the answers to 3 very important questions—special thanks to Larry Freed, of Foresee Results for this framework.

You should always be able to answer these 3 questions:
1. Performance: How are we doing?
2. Allocating Resources: What should we be doing?
3. Knowing the Facts: Why should we do it?

Performance: How are we doing?
Measurement is a critical part of content strategy, and yet it is missed so often. We often focus on planning and creating content, but the lonely stepsisters publish and governance are neglected.

There is yet another step after governance: measurement. Measuring our content, its performance, our engagement, conversions, all that stuff the numbers people love to crunch is imperative. Those results let you know if you’re comfortable.  If you’re doing well, and those numbers are good, then you are on the right path.

Allocating Resources: What should we be doing?
If you can answer how you are doing, then you the next step is the innovation—what should you be doing?  Based on your numbers, if you’re performing well, then you have the comfort to be innovative.  Try new things—maybe make a humorous video for a stuffier brand.  Try a content marketing campaign that won’t directly generate revenue, but is important for brand awareness.

You can afford to be innovative because you’re already measuring and tracking your performance. And most importantly, those measurements are informing your decisions.

Knowing the Facts: Why should we do it?
So how do you know when it’s time to be innovative, instead of safe? The answer is that you are paying attention to what your customers are saying, in every feedback arena you have. Or maybe you aren’t comfortable, because you’re not doing well.

Even then, it’s time to take a good look at your analytics—what you are measuring—and listen to those. Are your conversions really high on one campagin, but really low on another? Look at the whys—different audiences? Different creative? Whatever the differences are, pay careful attention to those, because that’s where you’ll find some of your answers.

If you’re comfortable in your measurements, then you’ll be able to be innovative with your content.  The goal of storytelling is to engage your customers and keep them coming back for more.  In truth, it’s convincing them to be comfortable with your brand, and also feel your brand has something new to share with them.  The best of both worlds.

What do you think? Can you be comfortable and innovative at the same time? And do you have any examples of when you did so?

5 Key Tips for Writing Effective Website Copy

So you have a group of talented, strong writers on your marketing team. That doesn’t mean they are prepared to write your website copy – at least not yet. Strong, solid writers can become very skilled and effective web writers, but they need proper training to understand some crucial differences.

You may be wondering why I’m blogging on this topic, as it has been covered hundreds of times before. However, I have found that even though we’ve been talking about better digital writing for at least 10 years, and books like “Letting Go of the Words” cover it excellently, writers are still not trained to write for digital spaces.

Some learn on the fly, which is great, but always, better preparation and training will make for better copy. And, learning to sell better writing within your own organization is a critical part of not letting your stakeholders compromise the effectiveness of your marketing materials. That's why at Aha Media Group, we conduct digital and Web writing workshops, so we can educate and train writers to create effective web copy on a daily basis.

Web vs. Print Writing

Not all writing is created equal. The same essay format we all mastered in high school may earn an A in print, but it would make a disastrous blog entry. How come? Too long, too dense, no links, not user friendly. And Google – every website’s best friend – would barely notice it.

The same happens when organizations attempt to take print marketing copy and put it online, known as brochureware. Or, when they ask their unprepared print writers to create web content.  The result is dull, dense writing that turns off the readers you are trying to attract as prospective customers. It causes confusion and frustration, and even worse, makes your website difficult to search and find.

Great Web Writing: 5 Key Tips

1. Know your audience: Again, this may not sound like a new concept to marketers. But if you don’t understand and know your audience well, how can you possibly craft copy for them?   Create personas, conduct market research and analyze traffic so you understand what your audience really cares about.
2. Choose your words carefully: Web writing doesn’t mean using dumbed-down, super-casual language. It is, after all, still representative of your brand. But it does have to be concise. Good web writing uses active, not passive, voice. It uses reader-friendly language, not complex jargon. You want short, quick sentences that pack a lot of punch in plain language geared for your audience. 
3. Forget the prose: There are no extra points awarded for length on the web. The best web writers understand how readers view a page: They skim instead of reading every word. That means the best possible constructed paragraph can’t compete with an effective, bulleted list of key points. 
4. Program interactivity: Webpages are full of hyperlinks that take readers to other pages on the site, or to new websites. They are a great way to encourage readers to interact with your site, but they can’t be an afterthought to the writing process. This is one of the most commons errors print writers make. Web writers should plan and write pages with the links in mind so they are part of an overall strategy. 
5. Use keywords or keyphrases:  Every marketer knows to choose his or her words carefully.  This skill takes on new meaning in the web world. Web writers need  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) training to understand how Google and other search engines search for and rank websites. Keywords matter—in the text, in the page headers (called h2 tags) and in the page title. Learning how to use keywords effectively is important—but more important is understanding how your customers use keywords—how they find and consume your content through those phrases.

Training Digital Writers 

Solid writers transition well into the online world –with the right skills. Training your team in web writing and digital strategy is the best way to improve your website and get results. We offer digital writing workshops that explain the fundamentals of web writing, including:

• Researching your audience and crafting engaging content for them
• Understanding how search engines crawl through your site and the back end code that influences writing choices
• Learning about content strategy and digital publishing
• Following developing best practices

Learn more about how our digital and Web writing workshops and how they can be tailored to your industry.