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

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 web con­tent pro­fes­sion­als. Part one focuses on know­ing your audi­ence. 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 web 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 web­sites that don’t focus on the audi­ence. 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 web 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 audi­ence. Each web­site that made improve­ments did so by focus­ing on what their par­tic­u­lar audi­ence 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 audi­ence they are try­ing to reach. People seem to for­get that the web is really just another mar­ket­ing tool. Mar­keters for­get that they still need to focus on the audi­ence 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 web 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 web is a really fun place to work, but at the end of the day it’s not about the web team or the organ­iz­a­tion the web­site if built for, but the audi­ence. Some­thing not work­ing on the web 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 web com­mu­nic­at­ors, we need to under­stand that our audi­ence may not behave on the web 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 com­mu­nic­a­tion style to best suite their online behaviour.

It should be obvi­ous but it isn’t. As web com­mu­nic­at­ors, we are pro­du­cing a product for a par­tic­u­lar audi­ence. How is it we even need to spend any time dis­cuss­ing the import­ance of find­ing out who a par­tic­u­lar web audi­ence 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 web­sites 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 web­sites and break down what makes them good and what makes them bad. At the end, par­ti­cipants could be required to ana­lyze their own web­sites. The fresh per­spect­ive may allow web pro­fes­sion­als to step back and clearly see their web­sites for what they are. I think as web pro­fes­sion­als we need to be able to main­tain a dis­tance from the web­sites we sup­port, so we can con­tinue to see it the way our audi­ence does.

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