Get your Digital Power Steps On

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Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute always make me think.  This week their thought-provoking notes overlapped with something that has been niggling at me for some time now: future planning.

I’m a firm believer that the most successful leaders continually plan for tomorrow.  However, they must equally deliver value and realise benefits as they go. To keep the dream alive, and keep people going.  This is really hard.  How do you create a plan that has a beginning, middle and an end?  Cue some solutions from NASA.

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The Connected Customer Journey

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Last week I had the good fortune to attend an unconference session run by Chris Satchell.  He’s ex-CTO of Nike. He understands customers. Now as Chief Product Officer over at Comcast, he led with this thought provoking one-liner:

Your brand is your customer journey.

Think about that for moment.

We’ve all heard that your brand is not what you say it is but how others perceive it.  Brand perception boils down to how your customers engage with you. The journeys you take them on.  It’s the sum total of all customer experiences – for better, for worse – across all touchpoints.  Your brand is your customer journey, but they must been connected.

 

 

The challenge lies in mapping out these interconnected customer journeys.  They are hard to create in the first place and really difficult to sustain ongoing success.  Continuously changing over time, connected customer journeys require so many people across the business to collaborate.   But that is exactly what success looks like for those companies building superior brands.  The ability to design and deliver connected customer journeys is a critical component of competitive advantage in digital today. No longer an optional, connected customer journeys are the new norm.

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Content Modelling Series – Update

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Short update.  It’s been a little bit hectic over here in the content modelling series.  To summarise what we did: Outlined the key elements of a content model: types, attributes, relationships, modules, items and packages. Explained the difference between content types and content items: content items are instances of content types. Introduced the notion of … Read more

Content Modelling Series – Rebooted

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ShaftShootingI’m currently sitting at home listening to the ‘Theme From Shaft’.  It soothes the soul. More importantly it has helped me make an important decision.   Let me explain.

I’m sitting on a shed load of content modelling material that will most likely never see the light of day.  Not to mention grow old, stagnate and ultimately become completely useless.  Gathered from project work, workshops, presentations, conferences, talking with smart people, and a even a book that I started but had to put down for work commitments.  Instead of taking another year to try and reshape it into something, why not practice what I preach, test and learn, and get some immediate feedback.  So I’m hoping what I share today will be useful to you tomorrow.  I promise to share little and often over the next few months through my content modeling series.  I think that makes sense.

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From Design Skimping to Design Thinking

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Mini CooperThis post has been on my mind, on and off, for about ten years now.  I know, I know; I’m slow.  It’s about the wide and numerous assumptions people make about design when creating digital products and services. I’ve been doing this for over twenty years now, and to sum it up, we just don’t spend enough time doing design.  We pay good lip service to design, but by and large, design is under valued, under sold and always under scrutiny.  This is blood boilingly crazy when clearly the likes of Apple, GE, Google, Tesla and Netflix are founded upon the results of great design. So why do the rest of us skimp on design?

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Grow Slow or Die Fast – Confab 2014

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Remember Blockbusters?  What about Kodak?  Popular dinner time talking points for digital blunders.  Then the ranting starts.  I ain’t going down like that.  Not me. No way.  No how. Not on my watch.  This kind of corporate fear fuels popular grow fast or die slow digital agendas so convincingly that common sense doesn’t get a … Read more

Fish out of water

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Ooooh, it’s all a bit different in here isn’t it? This seems to be a place about managing content yet this post is written by someone whose role isn’t about content management. My role is CONTEXT management. Let’s explain; Cleve has signed up for a Secret Santa blog post and I’m the post he gets. … Read more

No model survives first contact with real content

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At Content Strategy Forum 2013 in Helsinki, in a great presentation on “Deblobbing in the Real World”, Jeff Eaton said something that resonated deeply with me:

No model survives contact with real content.

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I whole-heartedly concur.  But, something was still not right.  A week later, all became clear.  I  needed to tweak the sentence, just a little, to make things right with the world again. So here goes:

No model survives first contact with real content.

Better. Definitely expand “first contact” to mean the first few encounters with real content, but it’s an important distinction to draw out for anyone designing structured content. Why you ask?

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Content Management: Back to Basics

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One of my clients is about to go-live with the first phase of their content management programme this Summer. It’s not called that of course, it never is, but that’s what it really is. I’m made up for them. And after three hard years defining, crafting, and defending their business case, it took only one … Read more

Content APIs: A is for Access

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Please watch this two minute video. It does an amazing job of describing the utility of APIs using a deck of playing cards.

Content APIs are on the rise because we need ubiquitous access to content.  For a while now, I’ve felt like our content management systems are being deployed as Roach Motels (see resources at the end), where content checks in, but it doesn’t check out. Forever locked into a single (web) channel with no easy way out.

A couple weeks backs, I explained why content APIs are becoming critical to those in the content business.  They help mitigate the Roach Motel problem.  The big guns are already reaping the rewards of their early investments in content APIs. Take Netflix, after just two years of deploying an API, it’s seeing a x37 increase in API usage, the majority of which is through internal consumption.

Today, let’s walkthrough through a couple of examples to drive home the point that APIs lower the bar to making content accessible: available to people, processes and products that potentially do not to contribute to the production or ongoing management of the content.

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