Marketing Environments

Marketing activities are fragmented; people just want to get their work done, so they don’t pay attention to the other departments. Transformations are undergoing great changes as traditional strategies like advertising are being shifted towards a digital frontier. There has been an emerging need to “fail faster”; i.e. don’t waste time with stuff that doesn’t work. This is especially important when 90% of all purchase decisions start with a search for content. What’s more 90% of HP products are sold on content alone, without the customer ever touching the product. It becomes the responsibility of marketing people to figure out how to get out in front of these people looking for help. Potential customers look for information everywhere, so the goal for marketers is to be found everywhere. This takes a great deal of effort. Images, videos, written content, blogs, social media, and even other customer’s opinions are all vehicles for communication. When trying to be “everywhere”, the same message needs to be presented with the same voice. But sometimes the message is delivered by the consumer. The hope is that consumers who will be vocal about your product are supporters of your product and reflect the same voice that you broadcast.

Business Goals

Brand consistency is a common business goal, but it is often overlooked by the higher-ups in a company. But it’s often difficult to explain the need for a consistent voice in content creation; web marketing is often like the Wild West: it’s being made up as we go along. Problems arise when inconsistencies proliferate across multiple fronts. An error can become reposted over and over again when the it is not caught at the source. In the end, the user is affected. They cannot correctly use the product they are using, and that creates a bad experience and possible loss of sale.

Content Quality Strategies

Lack of quality content affects all aspects of a business. Mediocre content affects time to market, slows down sales and hurts the business as a whole. Streamlining the content quality assurance strategy and catching problems before they expand can help the business run efficiently from top to bottom.

It’s surprising how many organizations fail to use language that matches their expensive marketing persona research. We know target customer personality profiles, where they live, how they live, but not necessarily how they talk. What words, phrases, tone or tenor should we use to show that we are members of the communities we’re selling to?

PayPal moved from “hip and trendy” language in its early days to the more formal language of a financial institution. It grew from a micro-payment app for Palm Pilots to banking to financial services. Its customer base broadened. It went global. It had to meet international regulatory guidelines. The more informal its language was the more difficult it was to operate globally.

Companies like PayPal who do match language with business and marketing strategy are in the minority. Even fewer are able to keep small armies of tech support, marketing and product writers consistently accurate and effective. And by extension, far fewer keep up with User Generated Content created by customers.

We also have to ask about search. Are you writing content in a way that lets people find you? How can you tell? How often do users talk, or search, in the same terms as your marketing department?

Consider Yankee Candle’s launch of “House Warmers.” A catchy name and a fully developed marketing concept. Candles, with light and scent, do warm a house. But no one was searching for “house warmers.” How did Yankee Candle improve sales? With adjustments to their content, people found the new products and sales rose. But how did they know why sales were stagnant? And which words would they need to change to fix the problem?

After more than a decade of linguistic research, we’ve learnt a lot about how the most successful communicators use words and language to the greatest business effect. What has evolved out of this is the notion of Content Strategy. It touches every department and every means of communications with customers – online, off-line, social media, sales, marketing, tech support, product literature, translation and yes, financial reporting. Over the next few weeks I’ll introduce the latest Content Strategies now being pioneered by both global titans and start-ups.

They include:
Goal setting for brand and content management.
Discovery of terms and language that move your business forward at the speed of your customers.
Validation – measuring the effectiveness of your content across communications channels, and adjusting your content based on market place feedback.
Deployment and upkeep of content over time.

Anyway, what was most interesting talking to people in the Marketing space, and especially SEO,  was how familiar the issues were to me. I kept hearing words like “shared vocabulary”, “establishing brand voice and style”, and *everyone* was talking about keywords and keyword research.

Once again I was struck by how important “words” are in all their guises, and difficult it is to get these groups who work with words talking to each other, especially when it comes to their language – the words they use. For a start, no one says they are doing “words”. Look at all the different ways people are collecting valuable words:

• Marketing is doing branding and thinking about the company’s differentiators. What is it the makes the product special and, by the way, what’s the product actually called (not easy to say if, like IBM or Cisco, you have thousands of them and keep buying new ones). This is usually just a list of words, but is often just “published” but not enforced outside the top 10 pages of the company website.
• Several groups in the company might be doing SEO work, a major part of which is keyword analysis. And in a global company this keyword analysis is being repeated in every market, usually without being connected in any way.
• To help with search, you might also start building taxonomies or even ontologies; apple is a kind of fruit, golden delicious is a kind of apple, etc. These knowledge bases, as they are sometimes called, are basically just words which a linked by simple relationships.
• Along with SEO – making sure your customers can find your products – you also want to know if they are happy and engaged once they become a customer. So people are looking at communities, forums, social media for trending topics and sentiments around them. Of course, trending topics are just words and phrases – usually a mix of your messaging and a folksonomy your customer community uses to talk about you.

These are all topics which involve collecting and maybe structuring words and phrases, and in most cases they would be “owned” by marketing. But of course there are other groups who are working on words too:

• translators need glossaries of terminology, including all the branding information, but also every little technical detail needs to be named, preferably consistently, so that it can be translated consistently. Small gaps and inconsistencies here will cost you for every new market you want to go to.
• product development: whether you are building software, nuclear power stations, tractors, or washing machines your products will use words to communicate with your customers (try using YouTube with no words). All the buttons need names, UI and console messages need to be consistent, and ideally would also reflect your branding and key differentiators (yes, I know you’re short of space!).

Without some way of developing consensus and transparency for this “word work”, companies tend to waste a huge amount of effort – at best constantly reinventing the wheel, at worst groups who should be working together end up working against each other.

The great cyber-visionary Doug Engelbart wrote in his book “Boosting our Collective IQ” that one of the keys to successful collaboration was the development of “a common vocabulary”. I talked in a previous post about sharing mindsets being critical to collaborating and communicating successfully, and ultimately this all comes down to the words that you use. Simple really – in principle. In practice, it means setting up dialogues between groups in the organisation who unfortunately rarely talk to each other.

Well, I think I can safely say what it is not. It isn’t a site map or even a web content plan of any kind. Neither is it a list of formats which we intend to publish to. It seems that we are running the risk of doing the same thing we did with Knowledge Management – which sounds great in theory, but nowadays generally means adding metadata to Word documents (I’m exaggerating only a little).

No, a content strategy worth it’s salt would encompass not just web content (by all means develop a web content strategy as part of your content strategy!), but all enterprise content – yes, really a strategy about which content your organization *as a whole* needs to create and how you are going to deliver it to your customers. In fact, come to think of it, it should just be your content but all the content which is relevant to you – even if you didn’t create it.

Spontaneously I can think of at least eight different dimensions to serious enterprise content strategy:

1. Engineering content standards (Impact of content on UX)
2. Information delivery plan (OK, so you do need to think about file formats in fact)
3. Web content strategy (which of our content is on the web, what is available to whom, etc.)
4. Localization strategy (what gets translated and, just as important, what how do customers find content that doesn’t get translated)
5. User Generated Content Strategy (our forums, third-party content about our products)
6. SEO Strategy (keyword research and content optimization, at least)
7. Marketing and Branding strategy (are you ensuring branding and key differentiators across all your content?)
8. Content risk management strategy (What are the risks? How are they mitigated?)

One could write a book about any one of these (people have), but my point is that unless you include all of these dimensions in a coordinated strategy, then you don’t really have a enterprise content strategy – you simply have one aspect of it. With a genuine enterprise view of things, the idea of a consistent high-quality user experience with your products can become a reality.

Collaboration means working together, which means working according to an agreed plan (of course you could just collaborate without a plan but we all know where that leads).

At the simplest level, collaboration is as trivial as one person writing something and have a second person “look it over” and make comments. But this kind of feature has been around for a decade or more in most tools for content creation. It doesn’t bring any massive gain in productivity because it’s still basically one person doing the creative part.

No, collaboration starts to get interesting when you consider collaboratively creating content. But in this case you don’t want just a patchwork quilt of content – you want it to read as if it was written by one person (in one sitting) even if in fact twenty people were involved in three time zones over two weeks. To achieve this you need to write down the key knowledge required for everyone to masquerade as the single virtual author of the content. Basically this means sharing mindsets; what Doug Engelbart called “boosting our collective IQ”.

In addition to working out what a particular piece of content is going to do and how to structure it. You also need to be able to share your mindset with your collaboration partners. A “mindset” sounds very abstract but really it just means an ontology (which basically just comes down to structured terminology).

On top of this if you want to pull off the trick of making the content look like it was written by one person, you had better also agree on some linguistic basics too, to avoid conspicuous differences in style, grammar, spelling – as well as things like units of measurement. The lesson of the Mars Climate Orbiter was that even simple differences in mindset can have a catastrophic effect on results. Even if you’re not building a space vehicle, you might still want your product or service to “land” safely in the market.

It seems to me that the assumption behind this claim is that there is a set of information in a company which can be regarded as independent of all the other information produced. An “end-to-end” solution for technical publications (including perhaps its translation) is actually a myth. The information created in technical publication departments is inextricably linked with, in fact partly based on, information which is created elsewhere – namely in the marketing and engineering departments. These departments start thinking about the product usually some time before it gets to tech pubs. Even in a really slick agile information development environment marketing should be ahead of the game.

So the front “end” of a typical content management system is not really an end at all, but actually a pretty porous interface in terms of the knowledge it needs to share with other applications – engineering applications or web content management systems, ERP systems, parts databases, and so on…

And then there is all the information which comes at the other “end”: after the customer has bought the product information continues to get created to meet after-sales, support and maintenance needs. Of course this isn’t really an end either, but should probably look more like a structured hand-over of responsibility for customer communication. In terms of the infrastructure, this most likely means that information needs to flow from a content management system (or even several of them) to a support database or issue-tracking system, or both. By the way, translation isn’t really an “end” either. Studies have shown that typically less than half of all content ever gets translated at all, and an even smaller proportion will be translated into more than a handful of languages.

The fact that there is no such thing as an “end-to-end solution” for product content has certain implications. For instance it should remind us of the importance of content standards in coordinating customer communication, and the importance of making those standards available across different technical platforms. The only way to ensure that is to demand open standards and interfaces everywhere, allowing information to flow wherever it is needed. There’s a great discussion of the role of standards in localization of on Kirti Vashee’s blog, but in fact information needs to flow between all the content repositories in the organization as well as in and out of localization. The beauty of web services is that the integration between system doesn’t have to complicated, as long as customers demand it upfront and don’t try to bolt it on as an afterthought.

Francis Tsang, Senior Director of Globalization at Adobe started the ball rolling a three weeks ago, in a great presentation he gave at the CNGL meeting we were attending together as members of the CNGL Advisory Board. Instead of talking about technology he devoted the entire talk to the customer and how Adobe is working on customer engagement.

The big issue here is that the community is becoming the most important resource for customers interacting with, wanting to find out, or complain about, your products. And the catch is that right now there is almost nothing you can do about it; the content is created by people who don’t work for you. It is no longer one-way traffic – with companies creating content about their products for consumers – but rather it’s a relationship. The community creates valuable content, which companies want to make available to as many of their customers as possible. Also at the CNGL meeting was Greg Oxton from the Consortium for Service Innovation – and he was talking about pretty much the same thing.

What does this mean for Information Quality? Well, some people say that IQ doesn’t matter to the community. But they are wrong; majorly wrong. Let’s just think about product forums for a moment: you want your forum content to be available to the community, not just to the person or people following a particular thread. So you need to make threads findable and comprehensible:

• Findable means that they can be indexed effectively for search (aka SEO), which ultimately comes down to tying your corporate terminology and taxonomy to the community jargon and folksonomy. Findable also means that you can find information in a language which is not your own.
• Comprehensible means that once you have found some information you can understand it, even if you are reading it in a language which is not your own. You will also, as a company, want to know what your Chinese user community knows, and what they think of you. You might even be thinking, like most high-tech companies are, of translating forum content on demand with MT. IQ is the critical enabler for MT.

For all of these reasons, IQ is critical to the success of a strategy of “embracing your user community”. But obviously the idea of controlling the content is not going to work. The best we can hope for is to nurture good content. In much the same way as marketing departments are learning to get beyond the idea of controlling their company’s message; the after-sales experience also needs to embrace the uncontrollability of the community.

This post is too long, I will write more about how I think you can nurture community IQ another day…

For the last 10 years or so, researchers have been telling us that SMT represented a revolution in machine translation; that there would be no more linguistics, no more rules, just data. “Give me enough data,” went their motto, “and we can work miracles!’. Well Google has enough data, but they still have their limitations. I tried some things out:

1. Ich will diesen Satz übersetzen
   Google says:  I want to translate this sentence

Perfect! If only we could always write like this…

1. Ich will nur dass diser Satz richtig übersetzt wird
   Google says:  I just want that images this sentence is translated correctly.
   Should be:     I just want this sentence to be translated correctly

This is not so great. It just doesn’t make sense – where did “images” come from? So what went wrong?

Well I made two simple mistakes. There should be a comma after “nur” and “diser” should be “dieser”. Let’s fix those issues and try again:

1. Ich will nur, dass dieser Satz richtig übersetzt wird.
   Google says: I only want that this sentence is translated correctly.

Much better, but sounds a bit funny to my (British) English ears. It’s not wrong, just a bit stilted.

Now let’s try something a bit more difficult (although by no means unusual):

1. Ich möchte bitte den Satz übersetzen lassen
   Google says: I would like to translate the sentence

Now this translation sounds good (if you don’t know German), but it’s actually *wrong*. It should be “I would like to have this sentence translated”. A subtle, but quite possibly technically significant, difference.

Now I am not Google-Translate-bashing here; SMT is a great technology; but it’s not magic. Errors in the input to these systems will always lead to unreliable results – yes, you still have to care about the quality of your source content.

You also, by the way, also still need to care about branding, compliance, and liability in your source content – these issues won’t not look after themselves by magic either.

Buy-In

Deploy

Control

Run and Optimize

The goal of all this is to achieve heijunka (平準化) (“production smoothing”) – to produce goods (or in our case, information) at a constant rate (avoiding mura (斑) and muri (無理) two kinds of waste).  A smooth production process means that processes become more predictable and subsequent processes, such as translation in the case of information development, can also be made more efficient and predictable.

All this leads to kaizen (改善) (“continuous improvement”), by which the organization learns to improve itself over time to constantly get better.

“Customer experience is the sum of the experience a customer has with a business, across all channels and touchpoints. An experience always exists and always generates an impression, but seldom by design. No wonder only 8% of customers report their experience with a given company was superior.

What’s the problem? A product is designed in R&D then thrown ‘over the wall’ to marketing whose focus is on promotion rather than education, integration, and refinement. Product information is too often seen as a necessary evil rather than part of the larger experience. The services and sales organizations gear up to sell and service the customer, creating their own content along the way, and often in ways that are inconsistent with the R&D and marketing impressions that have already been created. Too often this silo’d approach results in fragmented experiences and dissatisfied customers.

What would happen if all these groups saw themselves as collaborators working to create a content strategy designed to deliver a superior, holistic, customer experience across all customer touchpoints and all stages of the customer lifecycle? How can we get to this ideal end state?”