Gerry McGovern Masterclass — essential content for content managers (part two) | Brad Grier - Lifestyle Technology Blog | Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Part Two: Words, Carewords, and Focus

This is the second part of an interview with Krista Vieira, my co-worker and recent attendee of Gerry McGovern's Masterclass for web content professionals. Part one focused on knowing your audience (good advice for any communicator). In this part, Krista talks about carewords and focusing on the really important tasks.

Q:Gerry talks about Carewords, does that resonate with you?

Definitely. I prefer the term carewords to keywords. Carewords focus more on the audience and what the audience wants. Keywords is more about the organization and the words the organization wants it's audience to use; the words that are important to the president of a company or the head of the marketing/communications department.

Carewords ties in to the key messaging we received over the two days - get to know your audience. A website is built to reach a particular audience and whether the purpose is to communicate an idea or to sell a product, the purpose is still to reach an audience. If you donâ€™t use the words the intended audience uses, you risk not reaching them at all.

By focusing on carewords (the audience) and not keywords (the organization) I believe web professionals better remember who they are creating the website and the content for. Who the audience is and what they want should always be at the forefront of anything a web teams does.

Of all the concepts that Gerry spoke of over the two-day conference, what do you think will be the hardest for most content developers to implement? The easiest?

I think the hardest concept for most content developers to implement will be to get large organizations to focus on the top tasks of a website regardless of which department those tasks may come from. So often large organizations create large websites that are arranged in the classic organization-centric manner of departments. Each department is fighting for their position on the website and their portion of the revenue. It's all about them and not about the audience.

I think most content specialists would like to get large organizations to accept that an audience doesn't care which department a particular task or piece of information comes from; to them, the website represents the organization as a whole. Each department needs to work with the others to create a finished product that benefits the audience. By focusing on the audience and creating a user-centric website, the revenue will come, the brand will be recognized and the organizationâ€™s reputation will be established.

The easiest concept should be to start writing with the words the audience is using. This is at least one step in the right direction of focusing a website on the audience. Some organizations may not support user testing, but even small web teams can track their web stats and see which terms are being searched for most. They can then begin to use those search terms in their content and check the stats again to see if improvements have been made. This small step may help to support the need for further user testing. Itâ€™s a small step, but a first step non-the-less.