Jun

18

Gerry McGovern Masterclass — essential content for content managers (part three)

Filed Under Doing, How to, Web 

Welcome! You appear to be new here (or you've reset your cookies recently). If you're new here, you may want to browse around a bit and find out what the site is about. I encourage you to register for the RSS feed or to receive updates through email. Thanks for visiting!



The Novelist
Creative Commons License photo credit: iDream_in_Infrared

Part three: The good, the bad, and the content developer.

This is the third part of an interview with Krista Vieira, my co-worker and recent attendee of Gerry McGovern’s Masterclass for content professionals. Part one focuses on knowing your . Part two is about keywords, carewords and focus. In this part, Krista speaks about the role of the content manager / developer.

Q: You’ve worked as a content developer and professional for quite a few years now, was there anything at the masterclass that shocked or surprised you?

I wasn’t so much surprised as disappointed by the number of that don’t focus on the . Obviously I am aware of this, but it really sunk in seeing example after example after example. This is not just a North American problem it’s global.

Gerry has a knack for pointing out the absurd on a website and getting participants to see the page with new eyes (along with showing us it’s OK to laugh at ourselves). I found it interesting that in each example he sited, the organization completely missed the mark when it spent to much time focusing on them and not enough time focusing on the . Each website that made improvements did so by focusing on what their particular wanted.

I find it funny that in traditional advertising, marketers take the time to get to know the demographic they are selling to. They find out what motivates a particular group, then build an ad campaign around what will best speak to the they are trying to reach. People seem to forget that the is really just another marketing tool. Marketers forget that they still need to focus on the and deliver a message in a way that will reach the people they are trying to reach.

For some reason I have still not figured out, a lot of people working on the take it really personally. They create something and it becomes all about them, so it’s difficult at times to recommend changes or improvements.

The is a really fun place to work, but at the end of the day it’s not about the team or the organization the website if built for, but the . Something not working on the does not automatically translate to being a poor communicator or being bad at your job. I think of it like a teacher. When you become an educator you learn that people have different learning styles. Some people respond better to hands-on learning, while others respond better to textbook or traditional lecture style learning. A good educator understands the need to teach to all styles of learning during class time. Each class will be different, so the teacher needs to identify the learning styles of each class then adapt their teaching to suite the students’ needs.

As communicators, we need to understand that our may not behave on the as we intend. We need to take the time to learn how they are using our website, what’s working for them and what isn’t, so we can adjust our style to best suite their behaviour.

It should be obvious but it isn’t. As communicators, we are producing a product for a particular . How is it we even need to spend any time discussing the importance of finding out who a particular is and what their needs are?

Q: Gerry spoke for two days, and there was a lot of information delivered, but if you could have a second part to the masterclass, what additional information would you like to have heard, or explored in even more detail, if any?

I would like to have a hands-on session that gets participants to start analyzing to see what is working and what isn’t. As I mentioned earlier, Gerry has a knack for pointing out the absurd on a website, things we may notice about a site, but be blind to on our own.

I think it would be beneficial to analyze and break down what makes them good and what makes them bad. At the end, participants could be required to analyze their own . The fresh perspective may allow professionals to step back and clearly see their for what they are. I think as professionals we need to be able to maintain a distance from the we support, so we can continue to see it the way our does.

In the final part of this series, we’ll review key learnings from Gerry McGovern’s Masterclass for Content Managers.

Creative Commons License
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Related posts:

  1. Gerry McGovern Masterclass — essential content for content managers (part two) photo credit: Thomas HawkPart Two: Words, Carewords, and FocusThis...
  2. Gerry McGovern Masterclass — essential content for content managers (part one) photo credit: David AscherRecently a colleague attended the Gerry...
  3. Key Messages from the Gerry McGovern Masterclass, Ottawa, May 5-6, 2008 photo credit: dandy_fsj To wrap up this interview series...
  4. Content Management Solutions: Upcoming series on Gerry McGovern’s web writing masterclass photo credit: visualpanic*** Update *** Oversite on my part,...
  5. Merging domains — important things to consider when you feel the urge to merge photo credit: Kevin Steele A friend recently asked me...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Comments

Leave a Reply




Comments may not be visible immediately due to Server caching...please be patient.

Comments for this post will be closed on 13 February 2009.

Tags:
Separate individual tags by commas