Is it soup yet?

Frank Chimero has a great post up entitled On Content, in which he explores serving bad soup in a fancy bowl. Content strategy anyone?

…and everyone is running around screaming “No one wants to buy our soup!” Then they start looking for different ways to distribute the soup. Do they buy new ladles? Would people like it if the ladles were fancier? “Let’s buy new bowls. People would enjoy the new bowls,” they say…. Would people want the soup if it came without a spoon? It could be called “undesigned” or “naked” soup.

In many of the organization I have worked with, design (or redesign) has been tried as a way to fix bad content. Even though design is hard, it’s still seems easier than fixing content (content is hard work). But it’s not effective. If you want good soup you need a good chef and good ingredients. Slurp.

Content strategy /

Wearing your underpants on the outside?

Not only is that a great headline, it’s also a great metaphor used by Brain Traffic’s Meghan Casey in her article, “4 Web project problems content strategy can solve“.

One of my biggest pet peeves is corporate websites that are designed around the company’s organizational structure, and influenced by internal politics. Casey calls this “underpants on the outside”.

When I see a website where the products are organized under “small cap verticals” or “solutions, broadcast” I know that company didn’t think of me, or other potential customers, once during the design process. Then it’s up to me to decipher their “code” to find what I want. This inside-out approach is practically an epidemic in larger companies. A smaller company, with fewer products, has an easier time of organizing their content around what their customers want to know.

As Casey points out, this type of non-user-centric approach leads to, “Lost opportunities … sales not made, relationships not built, brand not recognized.”

The article includes three other common problems as well (plus solutions!), and is definitely worth a read:

Great ideas, no content
The content broke my design
We thought you were creating the content
Underpants on the outside

Content strategy, Trends /

1001 content strategy links

Via content strat doyenne Kristina Halvorson — check out Firehead’s page with “1001” content strategy links. I just fell ‘way behind in my reading!

Credit: A List Apart

Content strategy, Trends /

Will the Apple iPad kill Farmville?

You can’t play Facebook games on the iPad.

The much anticipate Apple iPad everything-killer is coming, due to arrive in consumers’ hands this Saturday. Previews and reviews abound, and while there seems to be a lot to love about the iPad there are also a few complaints. One of the biggest gripes is the device’s lack of Flash support. Many, many websites run on flash, but Apple appears to be taking a firm stand against the ubiquitous technology. The reasons for their anti-Flash stance are plentiful, and alternatives seem scant. Apple is taking a gamble here.

Apple’s intended iPad customer is the casual computer user who wants to check email, listen to music, watch a movie, read the paper, and surf the web. But when these customers visit Facebook on their iPad, they are in for a shock. The majority of the popular social games run on Flash.

Farmville (and the other ‘ville games), Cafe World, Lexulous, Bejeweled Blitz, and many other games depend on your browser having Flash installed to work. So the question is, will iPad customers (and potential iPad customers) be willing to give up their virtual horse stables and imaginary restaurants?

In a move reminiscent of the mid-90s browser compatibility wars, Apple has compiled a list of “iPad-ready websites”. Seriously? The list does include heavy hitters such as CNN, The New York Times, and The White House. But Facebook is the second most visited site on the Internet after Google. That’s a lot of online farmers to alienate.

Maybe a better question is “will Farmville kill the iPad?” — or at least change Apple’s stance on Flash?

Content strategy, Tech Writing, Tools /

The myth of single-source documentation

In the last couple of months there has been some great discussion inspired by Michael Hiatt’s blog post about the “myth of single-source authoring”. I love Michael’s summation of the nearly 20-year history of single sourcing:

Single-source publishing is a zombie idea that revives itself periodically and refuses to stay dead. Its zombie supporters chant its purported benefits as a “write once, publish to many” promise and ploddingly follow it as their ultimate goal for mechanized authoring and machine translation. As an object-oriented writing methodology, it is as human as present-day robot technology—good only for conveyor belt assembly or specialized tasks, and always very expensive to implement. Single-source publishing lacks purpose in today’s world of information turnover and the dynamic nature of the Web 2.0 moving to Web 3.0 landscape.

In my experience at companies large and small, I have never seen a successful implementation of a single-source process. Like so much else in writing (and life) one size does not fit all. Sure, single-sourcing has its place and can be a great tool for some types of information delivery. But different audiences need different communications channels, and different channels need their own approach to crafting information.

Also check out Tom Johnson’s podcast and interview with Michael at Tom’s blog, I’d rather Be Writing.