Content Strategy

Weekly Roundup: 4/13/12

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Content Strategy, Marketing Operations

Welcome to the Projectline Weekly Roundup. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend!

Weekly Roundup

Content Strategy
Infographics Discussion—As part of the weekly #MMchat Twitter chat, Projectline and many others participated in a discussion about infographics. This is the transcript of the session. If infographics are something you have an interest in, this transcript is worth your time. Project scope, data validation, timeline, and lots of other aspects were covered.

Show Me the Content Strategy—This post talks about the preliminary conversations that need to happen before embarking on a content strategy project. First things first, it’s imperative to define terms and align expectations around substance, structure, workflow, and governance. Read on to find out more.

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Playing in Our Own Sand Box

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Content Strategy, Marketing Musings

Crazy-low budgets, tight deadlines, and scope creep. These three specters haunt many projects large and small, but they are a given when it comes to one of the most challenging projects of all. I’m talking here about the inside job: refreshing the company website.

But taking a busman’s holiday can also provide an opportunity to try new approaches and take risks. So when we set out to refresh the Projectline website, we decided to test-drive some new practices. Here’s what we sampled and tried—and what we found out along the way.

Messaging Architecture Really Works. We wanted our new website to showcase all that Projectline has to offer, but before we could tell a cohesive story, we needed to get on the same page—literally. Taking a cue from Margot Bloomstein’s Confab 2011 presentation about messaging architecture, “Message Matters,” Projectline stakeholders participated in a card-sorting exercise that led us to identify and prioritize five key values. We then used this list of principles as a litmus test at every critical juncture, from first draft and wireframe to final editorial and design decisions, to ensure we were all headed in the same direction.

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Weekly Roundup: 2/24/12

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Content Strategy, Marketing Musings

Welcome to the Weekly Roundup, a new feature of the Projectline blog. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend!

Customer Engagement
The Hidden Power of Satisfaction Surveys—  When done right, customer satisfaction surveys can increase customer engagement by enabling customers to affirm positive service experiences, voice complaints, and recommend product improvements.

How to Keep Your Super Fans Happy— Nurturing fervent brand loyalty takes work, especially when it comes to meeting the expectations of your most ardent followers. But showing love for your ‘super fans’ can help generate enormous returns in the form of positive word-of-mouth marketing.

Social Media
Social Media Takes Center Stage at the Oscar’s— Based on recent tallies of the number of tweets during prime time events, like the Super Bowl, the promoters of the Academy Awards have decided to expand their social media strategy. Organizers have embraced a new Oscar’s App and broadcasters will use social media utilities like Twitter and Facebook to interact with viewers during the event.

Marketing Take-Aways From Whole Foods’ Use of Pinterest
Companies across a number of industries are scrambling to figure out ways to leverage Pinterest. Marketers can learn important lessons from Whole Foods’ use of this platform to engage with customers and promote its brand.

Content Strategy
Why User Experience Matters More Than Ever—  Instead of racing to stake out beachheads in new media channels, companies will do well to focus less on mere ‘presence’ and more on providing memorable and rewarding experiences. This article describes how UX is the Rx for keeping customers coming back.

Projectline Posts
Time.Time. Facebook Timeline is on My Side— In this post, Projectliner and social media maven Brian Johnson talks about Facebook Timeline and the potential business-to-business implications of this new feature.

What’s in a Name?— Content Strategist Ann Naumann provides a list of questions to help define the audience and ultimately the format for any marketing deliverable so that it meets client needs.

 

 

Weekly Roundup: 2/10/12

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Content Strategy, Marketing Musings

Welcome to the Weekly Roundup, a new feature of the Projectline blog. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend! Continue reading →

Learning to Curate: How to Become a Modern-Day Trader in a Lost Art

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Content Strategy, Marketing Musings, Social Media

Remember back in your college days when one of your friends was always listening to the latest local bands or piecing together new and interesting outfits? Well, in their own way, they were curators. You may think of museums when you think of curation, but the truth is everybody curates in some way.

Creator vs. Curator
In our digital world, you’ll sometimes see people refer to themselves as a creator or a curator. Some people do both and some prefer to do one or the other. Creators are people who make videos, write blogs, take photos, write reports, comment on blogs, actively tweet their thoughts, etc. Curators spend time finding interesting content to share with others or to use as a reference for later. They are more concerned with sharing good content and being part of the action of developing stories in the social media world. Of those people online, nearly everybody does both, but a few tend toward one or the other.

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Bedazzle This Email, Please: Three Things to Think About When Working with Designers

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Design Services, Marketing Musings

Have you ever asked a graphic designer to bedazzle an email template? I have (jokingly, of course). The designer’s response was several seconds of silence followed by, “You’re kidding, right?”

It’s good to use colorful language when communicating with our creative genius friends. It can definitely add levity to a stressful project. More importantly, through good communication, you and the designer can collaborate to create something that makes you both proud, delights your client, and secures a relatively stress-free existence for yourself as a project manager. As Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite says, “All of your wildest dreams will come true.”

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Writing Case Studies: The Hard Part

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Content Development, Customer Evidence, Marketing Musings

Writing a case study is kind of like being Santiago, the aging fisherman in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. It takes days to catch an 18-foot marlin, and then once you manage it, the sharks eat it. (That is, your case study goes through a rigorous editing and review process). But you get some sleep and live to write another case study.

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