Although we expect nameless spam attached to email addresses like 1234abc99@hotmail.com, it always surprises me when a legitimate company uses spam tactics openly as though it is just another part of their marketing plan. I am even more surprised when real people who have invested time on the Internet buy into the strategy and effectively help them disseminate their spam.

Most recently I’ve experienced this in the form of Fast Company’s Influence Project. The premise of the website is that users create a profile and then are encouraged by Fast Company to share a personal link to their profile. When someone clicks through, Fast Company counts it as a vote for the individual who shared the link. The more votes you get, the more influential you are considered to be. Everyone who signs up for the project gets their picture in the November issue of Fast Company and pictures will be sized according to the number of votes each user received; the more votes you get, the bigger your picture.

At first read it sounds like a web app that might hold value for people who are concerned with proving their online clout. Where the site crosses the line into the territory of fake lottery emails and pyramid schemes is the method it encourages users employ in order to collect votes. Instead of Tweeting, Facebooking or sharing the project transparently, users almost unanimously chose to share the project in a way that tricks their contacts into unknowingly casting a vote for them.

The most common message: “Do you have influence?” was followed by a link to the personal profile of the user. After clicking through, a Fast Company page loads (ever so slowly)  thanking you for voting for the individual who posted the link. It also prompts you to create your own profile and promote it to measure your own influence.

Mekanism, the agency behind the Influence Project, is a shop well known for their ability to create ‘viral’ content. They were profiled in the May issue of Fast Company, and the magazine seems to have fallen under the spell of their ‘cowboy hipsters of the web’ veneer. In the article, various Mekanism employees are almost laughably described as though they are characters in a hybrid cross between a Wes Anderson film and a Douglas Coupland novel:  “… cuts her own hair and drives a convertible 1970 Chevy Impala”, “… an Atlanta native who sounds like Michael Stipe, looks like a young Jack Nicholson, and has killed a wild boar with his bare hands”, “… has the scruffy good looks of designer Tom Ford but with a trace of Tony Soprano aggression.” Really?

Bedazzled by the characters behind Mekanism and apparently desperate to join the club, Fast Company decided to let Mekanism create a viral campaign for them and in turn, Fast Company would document and promote the project. It was meant to be a test of whether Mekanism is as contagious as they like to think they are – an epic web-based pissing match. In their original proposal (available as a download on the Fast Company website), Mekanism suggested campaigns with catchy titles from Business Jesus to F*ck China, but everyone eventually settled on the Cover Project, which is what we now know of as the Influence Project.

Short Term Gain, Long Term Pain

Some people may argue that this project was a success. According to Fast Company over 30,000 people created profiles and it was broadcast widely on social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. From a brand perspective, it certainly made a lot more people familiar with Fast Company. This is the quantity argument.

But what about quality?

As someone who didn’t sign up for the campaign, my impression of it and of Fast Company was that they created a system that tricked me into casting a vote that I didn’t intend to cast. Lured in by my own ego to click on a link that promises to tell me about my influence, I instead found that I participated in an election without my consent. And what I feel more than anything isn’t warm and fuzzy about Fast Company or the ‘influencer’ who posted the link, but tricked. And that doesn’t make me want to buy a magazine or become a champion for you or your brand.

Fast Company’s level of success or failure with this campaign is one thing. What really surprises me is the number of people – many of whom claim to work in the web space – who volunteered to become spam bots so that they could have a tiny thumbnail image of their face in Fast Company. If I felt used by clicking on the teaser link, they should be furious that they were duped into participating in spamming followers and friends, and possibly risked decreasing the true measure of their influence – the trust of their contacts. It should be noted that very few real influencers actually participated in the project. As this post on SF Weekly points out, there is no Robert Scoble, Eric Schmidt, Mike Arrington or really anyone you would expect to see on a list of online influencers.

Not surprisingly, according to the original pitch by Mekanism, this project has nothing to do with meeting a need in the online community but is “an attention-getting, easy to participate in viral stunt that will result in lots of coverage and get Fast Company the attention it deserves.” Right, so spam. A stunt.

It’s also obviously a tool to increase sales: “If you’re on the cover of a magazine, you’ll probably buy that issue of the magazine. This idea is going to sell a lot of copies of Fast Company Magazine.” It will be interesting to look at the sales figures from the November issue and see if this played out the way they were hoping.

I received information about this campaign numerous times – about six times on LinkedIn, up to ten times on Twitter and once or twice on Facebook. In every single instance, the person who sent it through did so under false pretences – by attempting to fool me and their network into casting a vote to them. These people are now in a category I like to call ‘Untrustworthy’ and their poor judgement makes me unlikely to click on their links or share their content in future.

To these people: Is having your picture in Fast Company worth it? Don’t you feel like you’ve compromised your credibility? Do you realize that Mekanism and Fast Company used you to become viral and to sell copies of a magazine – that this campaign was never about your needs or online profile/influence?

Conclusion

Viral is about getting lots of eyeballs on your content quickly. Five years ago it was considered the new frontier in online marketing: cool, hip, edgy and attention grabbing. Today it’s kind of like Lindsay Lohan: well past its prime, tired and kind of annoying.

I come across numerous pieces of ‘viral’ content on a daily basis. Some of it is funny, some of it isn’t but as everyone becomes sick with the virus, we stop noticing it as much. Increasingly companies may have to consider that value-added, genuine content is more relevant to their consumers (the people who actually spend money) than the momentary shock and awe of the newest popular Youtube video. Spam is not a marketing strategy and it will only take your brand so far.

For those people who have spent the time and energy to build up their individual profile on the Internet, particularly those of you who rely on it to market yourself to prospective clients and partners: your influence isn’t measured by dishonest means and it isn’t measured by a thumbnail of your image in the November issue of Fast Company. If you are willing to become a spambot for such small rewards, perhaps you should look into a career sending emails about fake lottery tickets instead of cluttering up the rest of the online space.

Just saying.

When preparing a survey of customer satisfaction complaints on Twitter for their blog we were struck by how companies knowingly cause customer dissatisfaction through cost-savings in customer support, and how poor customer service has become almost expected. Many of us have come to accept the 30-45 minute wait and the outsourced, third-party service from people who are so far removed from the business that they can only answer pre-prepared, easily-identifiable issues.

Why is this? How can a telecommunications company get away with not addressing obvious dissatisfaction with customer service in the name of cost-savings, yet if they saved a similar amount of money by releasing a cell-phone whose 9 key began to falter after a month, there would be uproar?

It’s not like people don’t complain about customer service. As our survey data showed us, tens of thousands of people complain publically on Twitter every week about just this topic. And this matters. Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who knows a thing or two, believes that “the dominance of search will give way to recommendation technology” – i.e. digital recommendations will become more important than searching currently is. To repeat: online recommendations will likely become a more important system for finding and choosing services and products than searching. Customer support is not a cost: it is an investment.

With this in mind, we believe that it’s time for customer service to become an integral part of every business, not a necessary cost that should be minimized and marginalized.

These are the customer service policies that we’d like companies to adopt:

1. We will not charge existing customers to get in touch with us.
2. We will make customer support as easy and as accessible as possible, through publicized telephone numbers, email addresses, physical mail addresses, online support systems and social media channels.
3. We will provide equal quality of support through all channels where possible.
4. If a customer has to wait for more than 60 seconds to get through to us, we will offer to call them back as soon as possible.
5. Our customer service representatives use our product/service and have proven in-depth knowledge of it.
6. Our customer service representatives are given the necessary power to personally resolve most issues, including financial issues.
7. We will not advertise products or services through our customer support channels.
8. We will treat every customer with respect.
9. Our telephone customer service representatives will speak clearly and will posses excellent communication skills.
10. If we cannot resolve the issue immediately, it is our responsibility to keep the customer regularly informed about their issue
11. We will frequently assess customer service technology and processes, and make the necessary investment to increase our efficiency.
12. If our senior management are awarded bonuses, the figure will be partially linked to an audited measure of customer satisfaction.
13. We recognize that customer support is an integral part of our product/service offering, and therefore if we do not meet the quality guidelines set out here, we have broken our contract with you and you may opt for a refund.

It’s time to reverse cost-savings on customer support, and for businesses to put their money where their mouth is.

What policies would you add?

P.S. If you’re angry about a product, service or customer service experience with a company, you really should add a groubal. The great thing about groubal is that they actually take up popular complaints and fight on your behalf for answers and corporate change, so your complaint isn’t just a public moan: it’s a stepping-stone to fixing the problem.

Most of the survey respondents (32 people) charge $USD, which makes this currency the most interesting to analyze. We’ll also take a quick look at £UK and €EUR, though the few data points (5 and 3, respectively) for these currencies suggests you should treat the results accordingly.

Note that some content strategists charge by the hour; these were converted to day rates with an assumed 7.5 working hours per day.

The day rate ranges in $USD, grouped by years of experience, is shown in the graph below.

Across all experience and $USD day rates, the mean average is $939, the mode average is $1,000 and the median average is $640. When grouping by experience, those with under 5 years command a mean/median rate of $518/$490, and those with 10+ years command a mean/median rate of $1330/$800. (Here’s the difference between mean, median and mode, if you need it.)

Looking at the UK data, we need to use slightly different groupings because of the fewer data points. Here, we have three rates for content strategists of between 3 and 6 years, that charge a mean average day rate of £300. The two data points for 10-15 years experience produce a mean average of £852.

In Euros, we have a single result for under 5 years experience (€350) and two data points for 10-15 years experience, that produce a mean average of €700.

Finally, we received a single response for $Canadian ($400, 10+ years experience) and South African Rand (R2100, 5-10 years experience).

If you’d like a similar graphic about your industry, please get in touch.

In the last couple of weeks, some patterns have emerged in the website’s referrer keywords.

Two posts are receiving at least a few visits a day from Google searches: one on geek watches, and one on Japanese gore movies.

This tells me two things:

1. People are regularly looking for information about these topics.
2. There is very little competition for these topics, otherwise my insignificant website wouldn’t be ranking in the results.

A quick Google search shows that my lowly site currently ranks 7^th for “Japanese gore films” and 23^rd for “geek watches”. A rank of 23^rd is not particularly good, but the constant stream of referrers implies that the search term must be fairly high volume for the website to be picking up the small percentage of searchers who browse the third page of results.

We can quantify the number of searches for these topics with the Google Keyword Tool. Note that the “Competition” in the screenshot refers to AdWords competition, not organic search results, though there is usually some correlation.

The data shows that there are at least 900 searches a month related to “Japanese gore films”, 1,900 for “geek watches” and 8,100 for “geek watch”.

These may not be large numbers, but the terms are fairly high intent; people conducting these searches are more likely to make a purchase compared to people searching for low-intent terms like ‘free wordpress themes’ or ‘world cup’.

With a little effort, a website or webpage could be created with a superior ranking to Lame But Cool for each of these topics, to take advantage of what we know: they are high intent, decent volume and low competition keywords.

For example, a $15 DVD earns approximately $0.90 affiliate commission at Amazon. If a first-position search result attracts 50% of those 900 Japanese gore searches, and converted just 5% of them into a single DVD sale, that’s $20.25 revenue a month ($243 a year). Sure, it’s not much, but it makes a pretty good profit on the domain purchase.

Just to prove a point, I registered http://japanesegoremovies.com/ over the weekend and spent just a few hours setting it up (thanks, WordPress!). After only a couple of days, it already ranks on the first page of Google for many of the relevant search terms, and I haven’t even started off-page SEO tactics yet. And yes, it has recuperated some of the $9.99 domain price already.

If $243 doesn’t sound like much, think about the “geek watches” example. Even if you could only gain a good ranking for the easier plural term, it’s a much higher-value product. A quick estimate yields: 900 visits a month (50% of 1,800) * 0.05 (conversion rate) * $60 (average watch price) * 0.06 (affiliate percentage) = $162 a month ($1,944 a year). This figure is conservative, and doesn’t take into account the seasonality of purchases.

This isn’t just relevant to commercial topics, though.

By purposefully maintaining a low ranking site, which has good on-page SEO (titles and headings), you can create a regular stream of small posts relevant to your subject matter, without having to create extensive, high-effort articles that your site/brand is known for.

Of course, as a content strategist, I’m not advocating that you purposefully pollute the web with more noise; the posts need to exhibit quality and value. But by disassociating them from your brand, you’re free to explore topics and experiment more than you might on your main website.

Then, track the referrer keywords to find low-competition, high volume topics, and use these as the basis for more sophisticated content on your main website, where you’ve proven an unfulfilled need. Everyone wins.

I’ve started to use this technique to discover latent content strategy topics for the Contentini blog.

About a week ago, I set up The Content Strategist Blog, which is nothing more than a tumblelog of interesting content/language links that I find through my normal daily web browsing. I use the WordPress “Press This” bookmarklet to quickly post an extract from interesting articles; it takes less than 5 minutes a day to maintain (you could use the equally-quick Tumblr or Posterous too). It has attracted 25 RSS subscribers over the week, so hopefully that’s a sign that some people find it valuable, and it’s not just a public smoke-test tool.

I need to tweak my current approach to avoid the duplicate content wrath of Google, by altering the title of the original link to give my post a unique title, and adding a sentence-or-two of editorial around the quote in each post. As soon as Google starts to regularly crawl the site, I hope to find some great new topics to cover here in more depth.

On a final note, I found it a little amusing when Kristina Halvorson tweeted about the new Content Strategist Blog, and someone replied saying that the blog was just ‘an attempt to grab eyeballs’ and attract traffic. Actually, that’s the last thing I want – please don’t link to it! It needs to maintain a low ranking to serve its original purpose.

P.S. Yes, I registered geek-watches.com too.

More often than not, the purpose of content is to fullfil a need. This could be the need of the author (to make money, to gain reputation), the need of the reader (to be more productive, to be entertained), or preferably both.

I’ve written elsewhere about personal/consumer needs, but what about the needs of a business? If the author is writing on behalf of a business, or the reader is researching on behalf of a business, a different set of needs apply.

Some people have started to classify business needs, but not comprehensively. The content strategist in me really wants to create a… Taxonomy! Ontology! Classification system! Thesaurus! Whatever ominous word you want to use for it, I’d like to make a list (yes, that’s a better word) of the basic needs of business.

As you can see, I’ve made a start on it (click the image below for a larger version), but would greatly appreciate your input. I’ve gone into too much detail in places; for example, under Productivity I start to list solutions rather than needs. I’m not sure yet whether this will be feasible or not for all needs, but it would be useful for shaping specific content purpose (i.e. content that discusses Dashboards or Analytics addresses a known business need).

Leave a comment and I’ll update the list accordingly.

• Business Needs
  • Financial
    • Product / Service
      • Skills / Staff
      • Tools
      • Raw Materials / Suppliers
      • Innovation / Future Potential
      • Competitive Position
    • Sales
      • Distribution
      • Processing
      • Servicing Customers
      • Lead Management
      • Selling
      • Marketing
      • Market Research
    • Management
      • Productivity
        • Dashboards
        • Analytics
        • Reporting
        • Mining / Trends
        • BPM
        • Operations / Logistics
      • Facilities / Location
      • Licensing / Software
      • IPR
      • HR
        • Training
        • Recruitment
        • Communication
  • Ethical
  • Legal
    • Health and Safety
    • Accounting
    • HR
  • Infrastructural
    • Furniture / Equipment
    • Office / Warehouse
    • Services / Utilities

The politics of online commenting can be a big concern for web managers. If you don’t have any or many comments on your website, chances are you want more and are looking for new ways to encourage your visitors to weigh in. If you have them, you may be in the enviable position of trying to work out a strategy to manage them while still staying sane. Maybe you don’t allow commenting on your website, but you are re-examining whether this practice is working for you.

Particularly where blogs are concerned, people tend to feel passionately about the importance of conversation as enabled by on-site public commenting. Even corporate websites are increasingly including blog content and are beginning to dip their toes into the tepid waters of unmitigated reader feedback. Others are steadfast in their assertion of their right to keep their website noise free and disallow commenting altogether. The recent blog-off between techno bloggers John Gruber and Joe Wilcox is a good example of the strong feelings on both sides of this debate.

As a web manager, you need to decide whether you will allow commenting on your website and if you do, what method you will use to protect your pages from spam, personal attacks and even potential lawsuits. That’s right, lawsuits. Recently labourhome.org was successfully sued for libel in the UK after a user posted a comment that linked another individual to a German terrorist group. According to Zeta.net, although the site owner “did not write the comment or make it live, the fact that he actively moderated other areas of the website by exercising some editorial control on parts of the website and in particular on the homepage held him liable.”

The most important step when choosing how to moderate web comments is to make a decision rather than carry on in a reactive way until something nasty happens. To help with this process, we’ve created a roundup of strategies for managing web comments and have outlined the implications of each. As you read over each of these methods, ask yourself what your priorities are for your website and how you are going to balance your concern with user engagement and the reality of unwanted noise on your site with the resources you have on hand to manage your chosen strategy. At the bottom of this post, we put a link to a PDF that outlines these strategies in brief, cheat-sheet format.

Pre-Publish Comment Moderation Strategies

This set of strategies is for someone who wants more control; instead of checking comments once they’ve already appeared on your website, you would rather sign off on them pre-publication. If you find you are anxious about the kinds of comments you are receiving or you don’t have the time to properly moderate them in a timely manner, you may want to at least consider the extreme path of just disallowing comments on your website altogether.

That’s right, even with a blog, you have the right to decide that you do not want to allow commenting. As with all of these strategies, there are pros and cons. On the positive side, the unwanted noise on your website will be nil and you can spend the time you were previously devoting to comment moderation on creating new and better content. On the negative side, your readers may not be as engaged in your content and you are potentially shutting the door to new insights and ideas that could  add value to your site. You will also undoubtedly get some flack from people who believe very strongly that blogs are about having a conversation and unmitigated comments enable it to happen. In an article called Website Marketing Turnoffs, web guru Guy Kawasaki wrote,

Moderated comments is an oxymoron. If your company is trying to be a hip, myth-busting, hypocrisy-outing joint, it should let anyone comment. Also, many times I’ve started to leave a comment on a blog but stopped when I realized I’d have to register.

Kawasaki is not alone and, especially if you run a popular website, you should expect a fairly strong negative reaction to heavily moderating or disallowing comments.

If you are committed to enabling commenting on your website but want more control, there are a number of other tactics to consider:

• Moderate all comments and publish selectively based on quality or relevance: This is a difficult option and one that can create a number of problems. First of all, it is potentially time consuming to not only moderate but to also consider each comment based on merit, a measurement that should also be made transparent to your readership. Though it may result in less unwanted noise and more productive discussions, there is the potential for backlash as people may perceive that you are trying to censor or re-contextualize comments as a PR strategy.
• Moderate all comments and publish everything that doesn’t contravene your Commenting Policy (i.e. spam, personal attacks, obscenity etc.): This is a fairly obvious option and it’s the one most frequently employed by web managers who are trying to limit the noise on their site. It attempts to balance the elimination of unwanted noise with a desire for unfettered discussion and an engaged community of readers. The problem with this strategy is that it can be time consuming and moderation needs to happen quickly so that comments don’t become stale while sitting in the queue. I’ve worked with a number of clients who use this strategy but don’t actually have the time to adequately manage the task.
• Moderate all comments and post everything (except for spam) but do something to embarrass or undermine hateful commentors: Boing Boing occasionally uses the practice of ‘disemvowelling’ particularly vitriolic comments. According to Boing Boing founder Cory Doctorow, this method helps to “let the rest of the community know what kind of sentiment is not socially acceptable.” Although it’s an interesting idea, it still potentially allows for a lot of noise on your website – particularly if the focus of the discussion shifts from the topic of your content to the ‘funny’ way you’ve handled the inappropriate behavior. It’s also potentially a time consuming option unless you have someone who can create some code to help you automate the process.

Post-Publish Comment Moderation Strategies

As Kawasaki’s quote demonstrates, many people believe the web is a community and that a key role for any web manager is to find ways to enable and encourage conversations. If you want to have a blog, you should play by the blog rules and allow people to speak their mind – even if it means your site becomes a cesspool of spam links and flamers.

Sarcasm aside, there are some good arguments for allowing people to immediately publish comments to your website without moderation:

• It encourages a real-time debate/discussion and can result in greater engagement with your content.
• It can result in more comments, although quantity and quality are not always the same thing.
• It allows you to manage comments when you have time to make it a priority as opposed to dropping what you are doing whenever a new comment comes into the moderation queue.

If your website has an active community, you may want to include your readers in the process of moderating inappropriate or spam comments. Many websites have features that allow their readers to flag or report noisy comments, which can make your life a little bit easier; other, more sophisticated systems are used by websites like Hacker News and Slashdot, where readers use a voting system to filter out unproductive comments. Although this won’t get rid of spam and trolls entirely, it will discourage bad behavior as useless comments become less likely to be seen.

There are a number of post-publish comment moderation methods to consider, ranging from a completely free and open commenting system to others that put methods in place to weed out the noise. Note that all of the following methods require some post-publish moderation to delete spam and inappropriate content:

• Allow people to post anonymous comments directly to your website: This practice is becoming less and less common and websites that employ this tactic quite often become overcome with spam. A comment section littered with spam can be just as stifling to real, value-added would-be commentators as a website that doesn’t allow commenting at all. It’s like having a messy garden overrun with weeds and rubbish – it gives the appearance that you don’t really care about your house. Having a site overrun with spam comments can also impact your SEO; even if the spam comments don’t include links, if Google finds a lot of content that smells dirty, it can affect you in the long run. If you are going to go this route, be prepared for a very noisy website unless you plan to spend a great deal of time cleaning up after the fact. On the other hand, it is the most basic way to encourage unfettered reader feedback and participation.
• Allow people to post comments directly to your website, but force them to link their identity to what they say: There are a number of different ways to do this. Some websites only require that people leave a valid email address with their comment (that is only accessible to the web admin) and as long as the format is correct, the comment is posted. Other websites take it a step further and force you to verify your email address before you are able to post a comment. Although this method is unlikely to deter serious spammers or flamers, finding ways to make people own what they say on the web is one way to try to avoid the anonymous ranting that can sometimes occur online. As Facebook, Google, Twitter and Disqus continue to create systems that allow users to link their profile to third party sites, we will undoubtedly see more websites requiring commentators to link to a valid online social identity.
• Create an online community around your website and force people to register and verify their identity before being allowed to publish comments: This method seems to work for high traffic websites with a dedicated audience such as The Guardian and Dooce. Technically, it can be more challenging to set up, but once in place it provides a good platform with which to moderate comments and also stay connected to regular readers. The downside is that it might discourage casual commentators who find the process too time consuming and who don’t feel a close enough affinity with your site to bother setting up an account. The Guardian has an extensive community policy and based on the information they provide, it sounds like they have an entire team of people who moderate and check comments – this kind of resource is likely not in place for a smaller web team. According to their FAQ, if someone persistently or willfully posts inappropriate comments on The Guardian website, their posting privileges will be revoked. Both sites also occasionally create posts where comments are not allowed, particularly around overly personal (in Dooce’s case) or politically divisive (The Guardian) topics. Additionally, Guardian readers are encouraged to flag comments that are inappropriate.

As an add-on tactic, some websites, including The Guardian, also close commenting on articles after a certain amount of time has passed. This allows moderators to focus on the newest content rather than on policing every page on the site forever. The downside of this is that it can make the content appear dated, truncate conversations and doesn’t consider that new developments and innovations may be introduced long after something is initially posted.

What’s Next?

Once you’ve selected a strategy (or combination of strategies) that work for your organization, the next step is transparency – letting your readers know what your comment moderation policy is. In a follow up blog post, we’ll cover some of the key points you should include in your Website Comments Policy.

To make your life a little easier, you can download the Strategies for Website Comment Moderation cheat sheet (PDF).

Have we missed anything here? Please let us know in the comments so we can update our list. But please note, we moderate all comments. : )

In 2009, SEOmoz surveyed 72 experts to identify what the factors most likely are. Of the On-Page Keyword-Specific Ranking Factors, “Keyword Use Anywhere in the H1 Headline Tag” was ranked as the fourth most important factor. Yet the latest quantitative research by SEOmoz suggests that H1 tags are actually unimportant.

So where do we go from here? If SEO experts still aren’t sure, what hope is there for the average website author of getting SEO right?

Do The Bare Minimum

“The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort” – Eric Reis

The idea of getting the most output from the least effort can be applied to SEO too: Minimum Viable SEO (MVSEO). Rather than worrying about the hundreds of minor factors that might alter rankings by a fraction of a percent, let’s instead just focus on the one or two factors that will give us the most bang-for-buck.

The remainder of this article assumes that you’re applying these SEO techniques to a fairly standard, non-spammy website: you’ve got some content, and your pages link together fairly well.

From this foundation, the steps for MVSEO are:

1. Make sure that Google can access and spider your website content. Use Google Webmaster Tools to confirm. If not, update your website links or create a Sitemap file.
2. Focus on your page titles – these are the <title>s that appear in the <head> of each page. There’s plenty of advice on the web about how to optimize titles, but the basic rules are:
   1. Keep them under about 66 characters, so that they look good in Google search results pages.
   2. Use keywords and phrases in titles that you want to appear in searches for, preferably near the beginning of the title. They should of course relate to the content of the page, too.
   3. Avoid duplicate titles.
3. Create some quality ‘link bait’. This is the most difficult part: writing quality original content that attracts attention (and ultimately links) from a diverse set of websites. Together with well-crafted page <titles>, obtaining incoming links from a wide variety of websites is your top SEO priority. Note that for link bait articles, it’s not so important to include target keywords in the <title> – instead, focus on creating something enticing and descriptive (but still keep it under the 66 character limit).
4. Promote your link bait content (ethically) through social media.

That’s it.

Don’t worry about optimizing your <strong> and <alt> tags, your URL structure, meta tags, anchor text for external links, HTML validation, or anything else. Sure, they all matter, but they’re not high up on our list right now.

Our Results

Since we launched this website about six weeks ago, we haven’t had a huge amount of time to dedicate to it. All we’ve really done is follow the MVSEO approach: we’ve paid attention to our page titles, have written some good content, and managed to get some great incoming links to it.

We’ve gained links from trusted sources like Boing Boing and O’Reilly Radar, which in turn have prompted their readers to link to us too. We now appear on the first page of results for a content strategists search – our number one target phrase.

We’ll probably start to think about more advanced SEO tweaks in the coming weeks, but the MVSEO approach has given us a great start with a little bit of effort. And like the MVP method that it’s based on, we now also have a growing set of search referrer data on which to base better future SEO decisions.

A rather rare beast is the content strategist: at the time of writing, only 763 people on LinkedIn use the phrase in their current job title. Ironically, the reason for this low number may not be the relative youth of the professional title, but the words it comprises. Like management consultant, both words represent ambiguous, amorphous concepts:

“substantive information or creative material viewed in contrast to its actual or potential manner of presentation”
(content definition)

“an expert in strategy”
(strategist definition)

“a plan, method, or series of manoeuvres or stratagems for obtaining a specific goal or result”
(strategy definition)

With such an indefinite description, it’s understandable that companies might not perceive an identifiable gap in their competency for a content strategist, in the same way they do for a PHP Developer or Business Copywriter.

The title may also be a misnomer. The content strategist can be called on for more than strategy, getting their hands dirty with the entire content lifecycle: analyzing, planning, writing, editing, distributing, managing and monitoring content. For that matter, they must concern themselves with more than content (in the strictest definition) too: information architecture, delivery technologies, and anything else that affects the impact of content falls under the purview of the conscientious content strategist.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a step back.

Defining the Role

Like most roles in an organization, the raison d’être of the content strategist is to realize core business goals: in a commercial context, these are usually revenue and growth.

Project managers achieve this by overseeing processes and communications to bring projects in on budget. Developers and designers achieve this by producing output that can generate revenues or savings. Marketers achieve this by creating demand for the product or service.

Content Strategists achieve business goals by maximizing the commercial impact of content. I use the word ‘commercial’ loosely: if you’re a non-profit or an educational institution, tweak the meaning of ‘commercial’ to your liking, or just take it out.

What is ‘content’? For the content strategist, it is frequently web/digital information: web pages, blog posts, multimedia, social media conversations, email newsletters and RSS feeds. Often the scope can include physical/off-line content too. Content is a tricky concept to pin down because it continues to evolve, but generally anything that communicates on behalf of the organization – no matter how small – can be classified as content.

The skill, of course, comes in ‘maximizing impact’. To get the maximum business value out of content, the strategist must consider its purpose, management, production, delivery, measurement and re-use, taking into consideration the long-term capabilities and priorities of the organisation. There’s no point creating a grand multi-media, multi-channel content strategy if the organization relies on a part-time administrator to produce content.

And therein lies one of the great challenges. If the business only has a part-time administrator responsible for content, the strategist must make the most of these circumstances, developing tools and tactics that allow the business to get the most from its content.

But Really, What Does A Content Strategist Actually Do?

I should really stop beating around the bush. All this talk of maximizing impact and business goals; you just want to know what the actual day-to-day tasks of the role entails, don’t you?

Well, it depends. In larger organizations, a content strategist may be given the specific responsibility for strategic elements of online content (as you’d expect, from the name). They will draw on the business goals and user needs to audit existing content and create a comprehensive plan for future content: what needs to be created/edited/removed, how, when, by who, and where.

In smaller organizations, or where the strategist has been contracted for a specific task, the scope may cover any or all aspects of the content lifecycle:

• Pre-Production
  • Research
    • User Analysis / User Needs: Personas, Scenarios, Surveys
    • Content Inventory / Audit
    • Content Gap Analysis
    • Competitor Analysis
    • Search Engine Optimization Research
    • Content Aggregation / Data Sourcing
  • Editorial Strategy
    • Voice / Style / Brand Guidelines
    • Idea / Concept Development
    • Development of Themes / Messages / Topics
    • Establish Workflow: People, Ownership, Roles, Processes
    • Content Plan: What, When, How (Short/Long Term)
  • Management
    • Information Architecture
      • Establish Metadata Frameworks
      • Implement Taxonomies and Classification Schemes
      • Develop Site Structures
    • Content Management Tools and Practices
    • Content Migration
    • Content Conversion
    • Analytics Configuration
    • Establish Content Backup / Versioning / Archival Practices
• Production
  • Content Creation
    • Copywriting
    • Asset Production
    • Tagging / Classifying
  • Content Optimization
    • Search Engine Optimization
    • Accessibility Optimization
    • Proofreading / Editing / Fact Checking
  • Content Delivery
    • Encoding / Converting for Web
    • Distribution Processes and Tools
• Post-Production
  • Promotion
    • Monitoring / Reacting (e.g. Social Media, Comments, Moderation)
    • Social Media Submission / PR / Marketing / Syndication
  • Evaluation
    • Analytics Analysis
    • Success Evaluation and Learning

And there you have it. The definition isn’t as precise as I’d intended when I started this post, but that may be appropriate for the tangled, messy world of content strategy.

A long time ago, in an Internet far, far away, search engine optimization was a niche subject. A few curious people started to research ranking algorithms and calculate how various on-page factors subtlety influenced success. And it was worth it; people found that by tweaking their website code and content, they could improve their revenue.

Seeing the benefits for themselves, everyone wanted in, thinking that there were a few simple secrets that, once learned, allowed you to wear the ‘SEO consultant’ badge. Before you knew it, there were more SEO consultants than websites.

That was the mid-2000s. More recently, in the last couple of years, the same has happened for Social Media. You’ve probably witnessed first-hand the plague of ‘social media experts’, swarming around the crop of unsuspecting businesses with the rumbling insect-hum of ‘user engagement’ and ‘collaborative content creation’.

Before I go any further, let’s broach the elephant in the room: yes, we are a small new agency offering content strategy, social media and SEO services. Clearly, we are full of self-loathing.

The graph above shows Google searches for ‘SEO’ and ‘Social Media’ over the last six years and highlights the rise in popularity of these subjects. For social media, the 2009 ascendancy was dramatic.

These are now extremely competitive fields: the average Cost Per Click for a Google AdWord against the search term ‘search engine optimization’ is currently $10.89. It makes sense that everyone is now looking for the Next Big Thing.

It would seem that Content Strategy is it. Perhaps spurred on by the success of Kristina Halvorson’s influential Content Strategy for the Web book, published towards the end of 2009, the beginning of 2010 has witnessed a considerable increase in interest towards content strategy. Wait a minute – maybe it’s because of us! No? Oh. You’re probably right.

Even with this massive surge in interest (reinforced by the growth in number of web pages about the subject – see above), there still appears to be opportunity in the content strategy hills. The average Cost Per Click for the phrase is a healthier $2.60, although the number of US monthly searches (8,100) is nowhere near that for search engine optimization.

Perhaps more tellingly, the surge in interest for the discipline doesn’t seem to be matched by an increase in internal roles overseeing the discipline in organizations. We were talking to Sara Wachter-Boettcher recently, who is almost single-handedly spearheading the subject in the fifth largest city in the US. Even with a population of over a million people, she struggles to find relevant people to attend local content strategy meetups.

LinkedIn data supports this. In contrast to over 18,000 people with ‘social media’ in their job title, and over 22,000 with ‘SEO’ in their title, there are less than 2,000 users who identify with ‘content strategist’ or ‘content strategy’.

Of these, nearly 85% are located in North America. In web subjects, this figure can be seen as a measure of maturity: as the subject and role becomes more globally recognized, so the UK, India, and other countries will adopt it. This can be seen with SEO, where only 33% of matching LinkedIn users are located in North America.

Summary

Expect to see more Content Strategist roles in larger organizations, and a growing hatred towards the freelance content strategist as more people adopt the title. As the people who warned you about it, we hope your violent content strategist fantasies are a little less vivid when they involve us.