It’s something that makes it way to the front of the thought queue every couple of weeks but got a boost a few days ago when I was sent the infographic below off the back of my post about women and ambition.

The infographic shows that girls are smarter than boys but perform worse when asked to actively think about their gender. Some of the figures are pretty shocking although no surprise.

Even in the non-techy bits of digital I tend to see there are definitely more men than women (although it’s an unfair representation of society in a number of other ways as well.

Putting aside the ratio of men to women for a moment what about this stat: “One fifth of female computer science students questioned whether they belonged there”. If it’s something you’re interested in, good at and have chosen should you ever have to question whether you should do something based on gender?

Created by: Engineering Degree

There’s been a couple of other interesting conversations I’ve seen this week about women in tech. One about sexism in tech being one of the reasons women don’t go into the field or stay there. The discussion came off the back of this piece.

And then today I noticed a conversation on Twitter between LouLouK, Adrian Short and Phil Rumens about whether Wired UK is too male-focused or whether it is that way because their readership is predominantly male.

The conversation covered some interesting points in a short number of tweets including what ‘geek’ actually means now. Is it a label which is being corrupted by advertisers? Who identifies with this term?

Aside from recognising the issues here what is / could be done in a practical sense to move forward? Even if the number of women working or attracted to the many disciplines in the tech field grows slowly how can we help the women already working their feel they belong?

Related posts:

1. Mike Saunt

This week we launched the Digital Content Strategy group on the Knowledge Hub and we’re hoping this will be a good starting point to build a community. share knowledge and files, have discussions and bring together blog posts on the subject.

Over the last couple of months we’ve tried out a couple of different online spaces to try and make what we envisioned a reality but, for now, KHub seems to be closest fit and the place where most practitioners can access and are happy to share stuff.

While we’re intending to focus the group on content strategy in local government the group is open and so if you feel it would be a good place to learn and share from your own work in or around the sector please do join us. You can get started by joining the KHub and then joining the group.

Carl and I will be facilitating the group but if you’d like to join us then just drop one of us a line.

Let’s get the Digital Content Strategy in local gov conversations underway…

Related posts:

1. Content strategy WTF? session at UKGC12
2. Content strategy linkapaloosa
3. Content strategy in local government

Are some of your web pages a bit slow? Do they make you moan or wail in despair when you see them? Are they a bit grey and possibly have words flapping loose? Do you have nightmares about them and fear they want to suck the living will from you?

*whispers* You might have an infestation of zombie content on your website.

That is to say your website might be a bit bloated because it’s carrying a lot of dead weight. Pages which have outstayed their welcome and which fail to serve any purpose at the end of their useful lifespan.

The information might be out of date, the campaign might have long since passed. The pages could be the unwitting victims of vanity publishing or a page that was once vital but the user or business need which spawned it has now disappeared.

This zombie content, pages that should have gone to their grave (or at least the archive) but haven’t are still hanging around your website. While they’re doing that they’re getting in the way of your visitors. Do I need to tell you that’s not good? Well, it’s not, not good at all.

Creating content, publishing content, even promoting that content are all pretty common activities and whether we get them right or not there’s a whole load of people busily getting on with these activities. Content management though, that’s got to include taking care of your content when it comes to the end of its life.

Stages of digital content lifecycle

There are a few different theories about how many stages content goes through in its lifecycle. Gerry McGovern proposes there are three – creation, editing, publishing and Bob Boiko argues in a similar vein in the Content Management Bible.

Others make cases for up to seven stages in lifecycle, with this longer cradle-to-grave pathway proposed by Bob Doyle recognising that there is an end to a piece of content’s useful life and action should be taken to actively manage this end point (he calls this archives).

You could infact make the chain even longer by getting tighter on activities within each point of the lifecycle. Kristina Halvorson suggested 15 steps to the cycle in Content Strategy for the Web – audit, analyse, strategise, categorise, structure, create, revise, revise, revise, approve, tag, format, publish, update, archive. This takes into account that getting content right isn’t an easy or quick process but also that the current way of working online requires more than just writing and publishing the right words – you need to make your content findable (tag).

Not all content lives forever

To my mind the number of phases in the lifecycle will depend on the piece of content – a tweet will have a different lifecycle to an organisation’s contact page on their website to a personal Facebook status update to a news report published on YouTube.

Self-publishing for pleasure or vanity (and perhaps this blog falls into both!) will likely have less phases than something official for an organisation’s website just because there are less people involved. This blog post, for example, will have the following lifecycle – created,edited, published, active (being promoted, visited and commented on),archived. That last bit – the archive, well that happens pretty automatically on a blog as newer content knocks it back and eventually it finds eternal peace in a month by month archive. You may need a more hands on process for your organisation’s web content though.

For a typical organisation web page I’d suggest the following lifecycle:

1. Creation – this could be curation of existing content from other sources, original work or collaboration. I’d say that this first step can include gathering many content types together to form a page (words, images, documents, links) and also should include tagging and addition of any metadata.
2. Editing – this may be done as part of the next step or may be done before. It may loop around between steps 2 and 3 a lot before moving to its next phase.
3. Approval – possible two-step between an offline approval through organisation hierarchy and online through workflow processes.
4. Active – like the blog this will be when you content is useful, in use, being promoted, visited, shared and talked about. During the active phase there should be several loops where the content is checked and possibly revised (so briefly revisting steps 2 and 3 again). At some point one of these visits will end with you moving to step 5.
5. Archive or removal – this is the point at which your content has stopped being useful or in use. You may need it to remain in public view but it needs to be marked as out of date, linked to its successor and be embalmed – change its metadata to stop it getting in a users way when they search. You may be able to remove it from your website altogether however as a whole page or its component parts it may need to be stored somewhere to meet your organisation’s record management needs.
6. Reanimation – your content may need to come back from the dead. Seasonal content in particular could be retrieved from your archive and start it’s lifecycle at step 2 again.

Lots of people are excelling at steps 1-4 and while they think of themselves as ‘content managers’ they’re really ‘content creators’. To be a content manager you need to see past your content’s hey day and plan for it’s demise, and be willing to take action at the appropriate point. Don’t allow zombie content to flourish on your website through failure to work out the right lifecycle and manage the content through all the phases.

*If your problem isn’t with zombie content but with actual zombies then I believe removing the head or destroying the brain is the way to go. Good luck.

Photo credit

Image by aeviin of Zombie Walk Warsaw 2008 published under a creative commons licence on Flickr.

Related posts:

1. Content strategy in local government
2. Content strategy linkapaloosa
3. Getting to know you

Hosted at DCLG, the day had a practical bent as after some initial background information was given we broke into groups and focused on re-working a user task to come up with an ideal wireframe for the journey. In the morning sessions we looked at tasks a citizen may be carrying out while the afternoon tried to focus more on services for businesses.

It was a great way to tackle the problem and get everyone involved and trying to think in the GDS way – putting the user at the heart of it all, simplifying the journeys and making savings for Government.

I joined the team working on ‘disruption to services caused by severe weather’ in the morning and ‘complaining about the council’ in the afternoon (other topics included planning applications, paying business rates, school term dates. getting a license for a street party and registering to vote).

Here’s five things I took away from the day…

The creation of simplicity is a complex process

What came out of both the journeys I looked at was that to create the GovUK level of simplicity on these tasks is going to be incredibly complicated, mainly because of the number of tiers in local government and involvement of other agencies. Not to in any way undermine what GDS has achieved (because it is a massive shift) but this, I think, is more complicated that what they’ve done so far which is typically one question / task with information from one department. They’ve made massive leaps in the way that’s presented but it’s (usually) and A to B journey.

However, it’s not going to be A to B with services from local government. It’s going to be A to B, or C, or B and C, and D. This came up pretty quickly with the severe weather topic. A user probably wouldn’t start from ‘severe weather disruption’ but the main service they’re interested in disruption of – school closures, road gritting, bin collections. Severe weather disruption could be a lot of different services from a lot of different organisations and sign posting to the right one at the right time is going to be a doozy.

The quality of information they’re signposting to is yet another potential issue with no easy answer. Anyone worth their salt working in digital will know what they should be doing in terms of content quality and user experience but whether they’re able to implement that against their organisation’s culture, technology and current offering is a different thing altogether.

Your culture is not our culture – yet

The question baking my noodle throughout the day was ‘how is the GDS culture and direction going to get embedded in local government?’. The simple fact is that the Government Digital Service has been specifically created to do this (massive) task for central government and empowered to make it happen. They can’t force that on local government but they’re going to need to persuade them to follow suit if this is really going to work.

But at the moment Agile is alien, UX is theory more than practice and digital by default has yet to reach the provinces. Of course this is a generalisation. There is massive innovation in local government, bags of passion (also pockets of apathy and resistance to change).

The people there today, and at things like GovCamp, are generally the impassioned and engaged, who want the change and are willing to do it by stealth as much as persuasion. But at the end of the day central government has been tasked and empowered to turn the digital supertanker in a way that local gov (mostly) has not.

The LocalDirectGov database is the key

It’s also been the secret. It’s been recent news to me that the way GovUK is linking to local services is via the listings councils upload through the LocalDirectGov database. I’m willing to accept I might be the last person to learn of this but I suspect I’m not.

Someone needs to do some sustained leaning on councils to take their info really seriously, get on top of their uploads and sort out their 200/404 error pages.Someone needs to tell them it’s going to be doing this job and communicate the benefit to them of getting on board.

Keep it super simple for citizens

The basic premise is that the average citizen doesn’t know which organisation delivers which of their services, they don’t care and to be frank, why the heck should they? Keep it simple, let them use words that make sense to them and get them to the info they need or through the process as simply and efficiently as possible without troubling them with trifles like who’s delivering it and how that fits in the bigger picture of society.

I don’t disagree with this approach in general, it’s a blunt way of expressing the need and desire for world class UX. However, that doesn’t mean I’m entirely comfortable with it. On some level is Government not making it ok for people to stop being engaged citizens? Is there a happy medium here?

When are we going to tackle the tough stuff?

While there was complexity in all the journeys looked at today they are, pretty much, ‘light touch’ contact. While we need to improve the digital journey they’re almost the easy wins because they absolutely can be done digitally and contact can be avoided.

So, when are we going to tackle the tough stuff? When are we going to look at digital’s role in social care referrals or child protection? I doubt that can be wireframed in an hour long session round a flip chart. And the stakes for getting it wrong are much higher. But we need to do it and I think we need to do it soon.

Final thoughts

Today was brilliant; it got me thinking and I met lots of localgov folk that I hadn’t had chance to before. I hope there are more Really Useful Days (perhaps even outside of London) and central and local can work together to really make digital fly. It would be great if as a first step GDS/LocalDirectGov thought about their communication channels with localgov – not enough people knew this day was happening and I think they really, really need to.

Related posts:

1. Content strategy in local government
2. A little light reading
3. The mind-bending brilliance of UKGovCamp12

A few days ago, in conversation, someone called me ambitious. She was not being unkind and yet my instinctual reaction was to recoil in horror from the tag.

I do not think of myself as ambitious and that’s because in my internal thesaurus the word is interchangeable with ‘ruthless’, ‘isolated’ and ‘power-hungry’. I do not like to think I am any of those things although I concede I am competitive in petty things, despite it not being one of my best traits.

No, ‘amitious’ was a dangerous and unwanted quality. It was Lady Macbeth, the Iron Lady, power shoulders and making a million before 9am. It’s drop-kicking kittens on your endless pursuit of getting to the top. It’s shunning femininity and motherhood and being unkind. It is a prison of your own making that cuts you off from others and locks you onto a set course.

As my denials of ambition derailed the conversation it was explained she meant I was ‘career focused’ and yet this too, seemed to be negative to my ears. Why? Surely recognising that someone is dedicated to their work, passionate about their path and (mostly) joyful in their job it is a compliment?

As I’ve thought about this remark over the last few days it’s occured to me that ‘ambitious’ bothers me on a personal level too. It seems, in my mind, completely divorced from being a wife and mother and suggests that those roles, those people, are less important to me than a career (which they’re not, it’s just a different part of my life, of me). This thought often ends up on the merry-go-round of ‘can women really have it all’.

Why do I associate ‘ambition’ with ‘isolation’? Again, because it feels like I shouldn’t do well in a career as well as have a happy family life so I am either isolated from my husband and children or from my peers. Because it feels as if by being ambitious I would lose friends, or be screwing over the sisterhood or being somehow less of a woman…

In trying to settle my mind on why it bothered me so much I turn, as usual, to the interwebs for solace, to not feel I am alone in my discomfort with the label.

I read this wonderful article on Brainstorm about Ambitious Women and recognised my feelings in many of the words and I found this quote from John D Rockerfeller which sums up my approach to work-life:

““I had no ambition to make a fortune. Mere money-making has never been my goal, I had an ambition to build. ”

Between these two I’ve actually managed to stop feeling ‘ambitious’ is such a bad label. Today, I sort of rejoice. The very fact I can be seen as ambitious means I am free. I am not constrained by my gender as my female ancesters would have been, or as other women around the world still are because of the regime they live under. No, my birthplace, my generation, my family, my upbringing, and my education all make me free ( alas, my generation also makes a small voice at the back of my mind throw up the victory sign and shriek ‘girl power’ at this point).

I’m working on re-writing my internal thesaurus so ‘ambitious’ becomes interchangeable with ‘determination’, ‘freedom’ and ‘learning’, an altogether more positive way to view the label.

* I’m a little early but I’ve tagged this post with ‘International Womens Day‘ which is on 8 March this year. It seemed to fit better with that than anything else!

Related posts:

1. Where did all the girl Devs go?
2. Always on my mind

Partly this follows on from the presentation I gave at Epic Social Media for the Public Sector in Exeter a couple of weeks ago, partly it’s from conversations which have passed through my Twitter timeline, partly the content strategy stuff and partly because I’m questioning absolutely everything at the moment.

What’s really bothering my brain cells at the moment is I feel there is a general assumption that people want to engage with local government online. This can be stretched out to assume that they don’t just want to engage with us online, they want to do it on their social network of choice.

So, let’s roll out some magic numbers to which we can tether the assumptions:

• 30.1 million adults in the UK accessed the internet every day, or nearly every day, during 2010. This is about 60% of the population.
• 73% of households had internet access.
• Around 9 million internet users connected using a mobile phone.
• Adults aged 65 and over made up 64% of those who had never accessed the internet.
• Forty-three per cent of these internet users posted messages to social networking sites, chat sites, blogs or used instant messaging.

You can see the full detail of these stats on the Office of National Statistics website.

What does this tell us? Well, if we want to delve no deeper it tells us that lots of people are online, a growing number of them are using mobiles as their main internet device and that lots of them are using social media of one kind or another.

Do they want us to be there engaging with them? We don’t know. So, let’s try and find some more information that might help us with that question. Let’s take Facebook – because I don’t talk about it much and the assumption is that everyone is there.

• In March 2011 Facebook announced they had 30 million users in the UK. That’s half the population.
• About half of them check Facebook everyday – in fact one third of women aged 18-34 say they check Facebook first thing when they wake up.
• Users have an average of 130 friends in their network.

So, where are we now? Sixty per cent of the population accesses the Internet everyday, about the same number have Facebook accounts and half of those look at the network daily.

Does this make the case clear cut for local government jumping on board and putting effort into creating content there and trying to engage (an assumption there of my own, that local government strives to engage online not just broadcast messages *slaps wrist*)? It certainly goes someway toward that.

But (yes, there’s a but), what are those 15 million people doing on Facebook everyday? Whatever it is might not necessarily include your council’s page.

Take this little nugget thrown out by Jeremy Waite on twitter during Social Media Week London (February 2012).

95% of people who “like” a brand page, only ever visit that page once. How does THAT change your engagement strategy?? #smwldn — Jeremy W

Of course, you might not want them to go to your page but just to like it once and then endeavour to have your posts show up in their newsfeed. But it’s a challenge to the assumption and I like that.

And, what of the other 15 million who don’t visit everyday? How often do they visit? Do they visit at all. The problem of fake and dormant accounts inflating user figures is one which is becoming more widely recognised.

Take this September 2011 article in Time which reveals that only half of Twitter’s accounts are active (about 100,000,000); 40% of that number only log in to consume and don’t produce anything (not a huge problem in itself) but what twitter doesn’t reveal is how many of the active number are genuine people and how many are spambots.

I made the point in my presentation that huge numbers of friends, followers and fans don’t automatically equal huge success and this just goes to illustrate that statement. You can’t just take the headline figure and expect it to inform you completely. To really understand you need to delve deeper, question more.

This article by Tom Foremski on ZDNet expands on this and gives some interesting examples of academic study into the issue.

What other assumptions are lurking in here? There’s a biggie. Can you see it? Go on, have a look and I’ll give you a minute…no? How do you know from what’s pulled together here that these stats are representative of your council’s area?

The ONS gives us a starting point. They state that London has the highest rate of internet use (no real shock there I wouldn’t have thought) and that the north east of England has the lowest. I’d hope, but won’t assume, that your organisation has some data for their area or are at least working on getting some.

What it comes back to time and again for me is the need to ask questions. The need to ask a lot more questions than seem to be asked at the moment. The need for critical thinking as much as common sense. The utterly essential need to know your users (residents / citizens / audience / whatever you want to call them).

See if your organisation is already asking them whether they are online, how often and from what device. See what your website analytics tell you and marry this to your population stats or other data.

Most of all, for what you can’t piece together think about the direct route and ask them. And don’t just ask them the basics of are you, when are you, how are you, where are you? Be brave, ask them – do you want us to be online with you, what do you want us for, where do you want us?

Know your audience, your users and know, really start to know, whether your effort is in the right place in the right way. Accept that a number, no matter how big, how enticing, how ‘right’ it feels will never tell you the whole story.

Above all, assume nothing, question everything.

Related posts:

1. Epic Social Media for the Public Sector – South West
2. Answer me this…
3. ReallyUsefulDay – GDS meets localgov

I thought I’d just share some of the reading I’ve been doing recently and see if anyone else wanted to share what they’ve found useful (or, I suppose what they’ve found hasn’t been worth the time and effort).

So, in terms of non-fiction reading I’ve recently been getting my eyes around:

• Clout: The art and science of influential web content (Colleen Jones)
• Undercover User Experience Design (Cennydd Bowles and James Box)

Both these books are from the New Riders Voices That Matter series and are not only interesting and in many ways inter-linked but are in a format that’s easily digestable and quick to go back to.

I’m part way through both books at the moment but I think Clout is raising some interesting questions for me in terms of content and engagement strategy as well as strengthing some of the ideas I’ve been pursuing with Carl Haggerty about making content multi-platform and purpose.

Undercover UX had me right from the start as it sets out that ‘forgiveness is easier than permission’ and recognises the culture change needed within organisations before this stuff can be embedded. I think it’s important to keep that in mind with frustration at (lack of) progress rears its head.

Is anyone else reading either of these and using any of the suggestions in a localgov setting? Or are you reading something else (to do with UX, content strategy or performance, or social media as a channel) that you would recommend?

Related posts:

1. Reading list
2. Content strategy linkapaloosa
3. ReallyUsefulDay – GDS meets localgov

Magic Numbers: Measuring the Quality and Quantity of your Social Media Activity

This presentation was really a basic introduction to measurement and evaluation and hopefully fitted with the other presentations around strategy and practical tactics in the channel.

I proposed a six point plan to dealing with measurement:

1. Why measure? What is your definition of success?
   This is the bit that fits with devising your strategy and objectives (either generally or for a campaign)
2. What to measure. Setting your Key Performance Indicators.
   I suggested thinking of KPIs as questions you want answered about your objectives and maybe having a couple per objective.
3. Choosing your tools.
   I briefly covered some of the tools you might already have but aren’t using for this purpose (like Google Analytics or a media monitoring tool), platform analytics like Facebook Insights and other things you could tap into like TweetReach.
4. Crunching numbers – gathering and evaluating quantitative data
   I covered the pros and cons of measuring with numbers and counts of friends, followers and fans. I stressed the point that huge numbers of followers don’t equal huge success and banged on (perhaps too much) about making sure your numbers aren’t a skewed vision (knowing how many of your followers are real, how many of the real followers are active, and how many of your real and active followers engage with what you say).
5. Telling stories – gathering and evaluating qualitative data
   Again, it was the pros and cons of measuring this way and what sort of data you might be looking at capturing. I talked briefly about sentiment measurement (which could probably stand a 25 minute discussion of its own) as well as taking conversations and using them in your evaluation to tell a story.
6. Evaluate, learn and adjust.
   I briefly introduced this step at the end to try and show that measurement is a cycle and that you need to adjust as you go along. The internet, social media, the way people use the them both and what you want to achieve are all likely to change over time and so your measurement should adapt too.

There was a lot to pack in and I know that this can be a dry subject for many people but I’m hoping people found it interesting, not too patronising and are able to take something useful away from what I said. The slides will probably be on the Public Sector Web Network website at some point!

My view of the rest of the day

One of the things I love most about being asked to speak at a conference like this is that I also get to attend and hear great presentations from people I admire and am regularly inspired by in the sector. This was a great part of yesterday for me with presentations by Al Smith, Dan Slee, Carl Haggerty and an interesting talk by Looking Local (all ably chaired by Ben Proctor).

I really enjoyed the round table discussions during the afternoon as well. It was great to meet a lot of new people who are all doing exciting things, or want to, in order to make local government a bit better (particualarly in a digital way).

Al and I were part of the table discussing digital comms and approaches to winter service and through the three sessions this conversation covered a lot of ground, not all of it snowy! We spoke about winter service and examples of how social media can support the communication and customer service effort during this period as well as how it can be managed within an organisation.

We also spoke about crisis comms; the relationship between those in service areas and any corporate comms team; opening up your data and letting other people fix it and do interesting / useful stuff with it; and, pleasingly for me, content strategy.

In fact, what I felt through the whole day was that most of what we were talking about came back to content strategy – creation, curation, delivery and governance. We were talking specifically about content destined for the social media channel but it was content strategy none-the-less. People aren’t calling it content strategy and I don’t think we all realise that this is what we’re talking about most of the time (content strategy: it comes in many guises and by many different names!) but we are and that’s good.

Not only that but we seem to be talking about user-centred, evidence-based content strategy which is even better (and a Full House on Buzzword Bingo)!

I’ve learnt a lot and heard many interesting things from people down in the south west and I’m really excited to see how they put what they learnt and heard yesterday into action.

Thanks to Public Sector Web Network and Kind of Digital for inviting me to speak and organisation.

Content strategy for local government

In case you didn’t know, Carl Haggerty and I are setting up an online community space for discussions and knowledge sharing about content strategy in local government (with the support of PSWN and Kind of Digital).

We’re currently running a survey which we hope will lead to some of the discussions when we open the community space up later this month. It’s only a few questions long and it doesn’t matter whether you think you know what content strategy is or not – if you are interested in digital in local gov then please do fill it in!

You can find the survey here – thanks!

Related posts:

1. Epic Social Media for the Public Sector – Scotland
2. Is there anybody out there?
3. Public Sector Forums present PSF Buzz North East

Does this mean anything to you or is it just another ‘buzz’ phase you’ve heard floating around? Is it something you’ve been working on for ages but you call it your ‘website strategy’? Is it something you think you should have but don’t know where to start?

Well, as part of our ongoing quest to establish the level of content strategy in place in local government and Carl Haggerty and I have put together a little survey to find out a bit more about what people know, what they’re doing and what they’d be able to share (if anything)!

As they always say with these things, it will only take a few minutes to fill in but your responses will provide Carl and I with many more hours of chin stroking, deep thinking, inspiration and excitement on the subject. Not only that but we’re hopeful what we learn from you all will help kick-start the content strategy community we’re currently pulling an online space together for.

So, over to you, let us in on your thoughts on content strategy in local government* We’ll keep the survey open until the end of February to give you a chance to fill it in and pass the link round. I, for one, am really looking forward to finding out where everyone else is at with this!

Oh, and of course, thanks in advance!

Click here to take survey

*And if you don’t work in local gov fill in the suvey anyway – your information will also be helpful to us!

Related posts:

1. Content strategy linkapaloosa
2. Content strategy WTF? session at UKGC12
3. Epic Social Media for the Public Sector – South West

Our session on Friday afternoon was a good chance to explain the work we’d both been doing and our thinking about content strategy (Carl is working on a content strategy for Devon County Council and I looked at content strategy in this sector for my MA dissertation last year).

In trying to think how we’d pitch this session we’d sort of ended up with the title of  ‘content strategy…WTF?’ as this seems to summarise nicely where we were and also the response when we tried to explain to other people.

In the end we had a busy session, well attended and with some great discussion which I certainly found useful and throught-provoking.

I think, as a group, we covered:

• What do we mean by content strategy and what the heck is Carl going on about when he says web strategy is dead.
• The roles within an organisation needed for content management
• Models of content governance (devolved authorships, workflows, responsibility)
• Content standards
• Turning the current accepted content strategy on its head: no more following the eGov mandate of 2005 with publishing absolutely everything onto one website in an inherited structure like the LGCL (whether we subsequently organise by top tasks or not) but defining common standards so content can be presented in the space most relevant to the audience, whether that be the corporate website, MumsNet or Facebook.
  And no more measuring only quantitatively – increasing the number of visitors to your corporate site is not a valid measure on its own!
• Evalutating the organisation’s digital footprint – content audit and mapping to get a hold on ‘where you are now’ in order to know your starting point on the road map to ‘where we want to be’.
• Content strategy means lots of things to lots of people, will look different for each organisation but there are common elements and there was interest in sharing knowledge and practice around these.

The Saturday session was supposed to be more practical (as were all sessions on the second day) but as it was mostly different people to the Friday session some of the discussion was along the same lines. This was still useful to me – it wasn’t repeating the same for a different audience but let a few different questions and discussions surface for consideration.

As well as what we discussed on Friday our discussions in the second session also covered behavioural marketing, evaluating success through quantitative and qualitative means, using existing surveys etc for audience analysis and what the units which make up a content strategy might be.

The practical outcome of this session? Well, in both sessions it was clear that there are lots of people working on content strategy type stuff even if they aren’t calling it that or writing it down yet. What they do want is somewhere to ask questions, share knowledge and learing and perhaps even collaboratively come to a sort of content strategy checklist for local government over time. In short we need to find an online home for the Content Strategy Community.

And Carl and I are committed to doing just that – we’ve had a suggestion via Twitter that Google+ might be a good space for this but we’re open to ideas and want to try and find somewhere that most people can access from work.

Would you like to be a part of this community? Where would be the best place in your opinion? Leave us a comment or contact myself and/or Carl on Twitter and we’ll try and get something up and running asap!

Related posts:

1. Content strategy linkapaloosa
2. Digital Content Strategy KHub group
3. Content strategy in local government