The scarcest, rarest, and most valuable resource in the world today is wisdom.
—
“…The countries, companies, and people that possess it will prosper. In many ways, wisdom is the opposite of strategy — and today, it is strategy, bought by the dozen from legions of besuited, back-slapping consultants, that is cheap, abundant, and worth little.”
-Umair Haque, The Wisdom Manifesto
The Global Lives Project
This sounds very cool. I’d love to see it.
Last Friday evening, Long Now joined the Global Lives Project in celebrating their world premiere opening at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Through a huge volunteer effort, Global Lives has produced ten films – each 24 hours long – that visually capture the everyday life of ten people around the planet. And on Friday we could view them all, at the same time, in the same room. Ten huge screens hung from the ceiling of the Yerba Buena Forum and around a thousand people throughout the evening ambled around and under them, listening as voices emerged — Kai Lu, from Anren China speaking to his wife in a village dialect of Sichuan Yi, young Edith Kaphuka from Ngwale Village, Malawi code-switching with her friends on the playground between Chichewa and Chiyao, James Bullock of San Francisco chatting up the tourists on his cable car in West Coast American English. Some screens showed people working, others playing, some eating, others sleeping — a glimpse into one human day on planet earth.
Would like to go there… but it’s in Croatia!
Forensic science and computer simulations are just a couple of the high tech tools used to explain one branch of the evolutionary tree at a new museum in Croatia. The Neanderthal Museum opened last week and was built on the site where scientists have found the greatest concentration in Europe of Neanderthal remains, the bones, skulls, tools and other effects of an extinct offshoot of mankind who inhabited parts of Asia and Europe until 30,000 years ago. The museum’s concept — which sums up evolution in a 24-hour period displayed on a winding track along the museum’s two floors — highlights the late starting time of 23:52 for the first appearance of any of mankind’s relations.
When it comes to creating content for the web, many often confusestrategy with tactics. I think that Wikipedia’s definition of strategy will help to clear this up a bit:
“A strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. The word strategy has military connotations, because it derives from the Greek word for general. Strategy is distinct from tactics. In military terms, tactics is concerned with the conduct of an engagement while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked. In other words, how a battle is fought is a matter of tactics: the terms that it is fought on and whether it should be fought at all is a matter of strategy. Military strategy is the overarching, long-term plan of operations that will achieve the political objectives of the nation. It is part of the four levels of warfare: political goals, strategy, operations, and tactics.”
A web strategy, then, is a “master” plan to achieve particular objectives, whether focused on user engagement, marketing or sales, that identifies who the audience is, and what types of content will be most effective. In other words, it’s the conceptual planning that needs to happen before you actually do any content creation. However, the act of creating any particular type of content, or the how—whether newsletter articles, blogs, whitepapers, or the like—is tactical. The tactical issues are the necessary practical steps that will enable the success or failure of your strategy.
Ideally, much of the planning that will determine your content strategy will happen in a planning phase well in advance of the website going live. However, that doesn’t mean that the strategy won’t ever change. It’s very common for our clients to gain more clarity or new insight into their strategic direction once the site is live, has been used, and has gathered feedback. It’s at this point that those who manage the site may regroup and repeat—often in abbreviated terms—some of the initial planning steps like persona development. We’ve already written quite a bit on the subject of planning that I encourage you to read through if this applies to you: If you are clear on the objectives and the intended audience of your website, then the next step is identifying the particular types of content that are most appropriate to use. Written content, of course, will enable your site to gain the most traction from users coming in through search engines. The more written and indexable content on your site, the more accurately search engines can determine what your site is about and connect searchers (those looking for your material but not yet aware of it) to your site. But identifying content conducive to search engine optimization is only part of your strategy. The other part of your strategy is identifying content that will actually speak to users in the most direct and satisfying way while reinforcing your brand as well. For many consumer products, blogs and video are the most user-friendly content types that can easily connect users to your brand and facilitate their engagement with you. However, for more technical products like software and hardware, additional types of content, like user and customer support forums, can be a great way of continuing the engagement beyond purchase, letting happy customers vouch for your brand and unhappy customers vent and receive help all in a setting you control. For business services, on the other hand, more in-depth and informative resources, like newsletters, webinars, or whitepapers, may be the most appropriate way to educate prospects. Whatever the choice, it should be made on the basis of what type of content is most appropriate to your message and intended audience, not what seems the most trendy at the moment. Keep in mind that no system alone will support your strategy. Everyone, from the top down, must be committed to the goal and the work required to achieve it. Creating content, whether writing blogs or newsletters or producing videos or webinars, takes a lot of time, so your editorial calendar needs to take this into account. If you are just starting out, consider a conservative publishing schedule (e.g. blogging a few times a week, writing a newsletter once a month, and producing a webinar quarterly) so that you can actually sustain the work your plan requires beyond the initial weeks of excitement around it.Conceptual Planning
For more information on planning and web content strategy, check out our newsletters on Who Are You Speaking To?, The Web Development Planning Process, How Much Work is a Website?, and Developing an Effective Content Strategy.
Practical Planning
Once you have identified the types of content that you will be producing, you’ll need to get serious about your plan to produce. The best system for this is an editorial calendar that specifies who is responsible for creating each type of content, how often it will be published, and even the particular subjects that each piece will cover. This kind of structure allows you to think in advance about how to communicate your expertise over time,who on your team is best suited for specific subjects and/or methods, and provides accountability for everyone involved.
The web—the entire web, including every individual website in it, even yours—is a work in progress. Once the initial planning, design, development and testing of a website is complete, there’s actually plenty more to be done. So before you schedule that vacation, make sure you’ve taken into account the content entry and go-live process, as well as the schedule you plan to follow moving forward with your website content strategy. Content entry? Go live? Content Strategy? If you’re hearing this for the first time, then stick around. This article is for you.
Last month, I began our short series on How a Website is Built by covering those initial planning and production phases, describing in detail how we prototype, design, build and test a website. This month, I’ll finish up the series by covering the last steps that occur before a site is launched and then some thoughts on the ongoing life of your website. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get right to it…
This design by Project Project for this year’s Whitney Biennial catalog combines several things I like: the Whitney Biennial, time-travel, and infinity. This spread also features the year of my birth…
This past week was a blur, during which I found myself burning the candle from both ends and generally stressed out. Don’t try this at home. I did keep notes for each day, which, this time around, I’ll simplify to topics instead…
Work in Development: We’ve got a strong pipeline right now with some interesting potential projects in it. Mark and I also spent some time speaking with a former client who has moved on to a new venture and is hoping to work with us to build the website and application through which it will operate. Though this one isn’t quite yet “in the pipe,” it was encouraging to have a strong lead come in purely on the basis of work we’d already done. Another current client is planning for a major redesign. It will be great to see that one take shape as it’s been almost five years since their last design was created. Work Completed (for now): On Tuesday, one of Jason and Sarah’s projects, Quebrada Baking Company, went live. We worked with ThomasBoston Advertising on this project, which was beautifully designed by Justin. Also, I finally finished up this month’s newsletter, the second part of our series on How a Website is Built, which will be published tomorrow. Work in Progress: Mark and I have been planning for our winter company retreat, which will be this Thursday. Unlike our Fall retreats, which are several days in the mountains, this is a one-day gathering nearby where we spend a few hours talking about business and then the rest of the evening eating grilled pizza and enjoying each other’s company. Jim is flying down from Rhode Island today to spend the week working with us on site. Justin will be arriving on Wednesday evening by train, and Steve will arrive on Thursday morning by plane. I’m very excited to have us all in one place for a bit and am looking forward to our discussions on Thursday. Meanwhile, I spent some time with Nolan, Mike and Dave to check in on our mobile site project. We got to preview the mobile version of our analytics dashboard that Nolan has been working on, which was exciting to see. Things are looking good so far…
Other Threads: We had a lot of conversations this week about mobile technology and our ideas for how to integrate mobile development into our process. I also found myself talking about blogging several times with our Project Managers—discussing which of our clients are blogging well, common blogging concerns, and how they could do better. Don’t be surprised if a future newsletter revisits business blogging. Also, I received a robot watch in the mail (pictured).If you’re unfamiliar with weeknotes, check out theWeeknotes website or my first weeknote, which explains why we started at 741.
Very cool use of holographic projection for music performance. (via BERG)
via GOOD:
A New Zealand outfit called Martin Aircraft Company is going to start selling commercial jetpacks for about $75,000. They’re 200-horsepower dual-propeller packs that can “reach heights of up to 2,400 metres and top speeds of 60mph” and don’t require a pilot’s license. Look for pill food and robot butlers soon.
Read more: http://www.good.is/post/jetpacks-for-sale#ixzz0gf1Yu9CT
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
Avoiding a Digital Dark Age →
Data longevity depends on both the storage medium and the ability to decipher the information…
