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

photo cred­it: Thomas Hawk

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 don’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 organization’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. It’s a small step, but a first step non-the-less.

In part three, Krista will look at the role of the content manager / developer.