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

photo cred­it: Dav­id Ascher

Recently a col­league atten­ded the Gerry McGov­ern Mas­ter­class on web­site con­tent management.

For those of you not schooled in the eso­ter­ic yet not-so-obscure art of web­site con­tent man­age­ment, Gerry McGov­ern is an industry-lead­ing Guru. People tend to listen to what he has to say, even if they can­’t con­vince their organ­iz­a­tions to see the light.

Since I could­n’t attend, I thought the next best thing was to eat my col­league’s brains and steal her know­ledge, but then real­ized that would­n’t work, as I’d be left to do her work as well as my own. Closet Zom­bies are lazy.

So here’s the next-to-next best thing, an inter­view with Krista Vie­ira, my will­ing victim:

Part One: Getting to know your audience.

Q: In your mind, what was the strongest, most mean­ing­ful point Gerry made and why?

Get to know your audi­ence. He could­n’t stress that point enough. It was the most repeated mes­sage of the two days we spent with him.

As con­tent cre­at­ors, we need to know whom we’re writ­ing for. We may think we know who is com­ing to our web­site, but unless we actu­ally talk to those people, we won’t know for sure. We need to be famil­i­ar with our primary audi­ence as well as our sec­ond­ary audi­ence. Our first pri­or­ity should be to our primary audi­ence, but we need to be aware that a sec­ond­ary audi­ence — that we maybe did­n’t anti­cip­ate — exists so over time we can address their needs as well.

Get­ting to know our audi­ence will make it clear why they’re com­ing to our web­site, what tasks they are per­form­ing and how much time they spend using our site. As con­tent cre­at­ors we need to know if our audi­ence is access­ing our web­site dur­ing com­mer­cial breaks of their favour­ite TV show, or once the kids have been put to bed, the dishes have been washed, the bills have been paid and the garbage has been put out. After all of that, how much energy would that per­son have to spend on our web­site? Prob­ably not very much.

Know­ing our audi­ence makes it easi­er for your web team to know what to include on the site and what to remove. This know­ledge will focus the web­site and will enable the web team to main­tain that focus because feed­back will con­stantly be received about what is work­ing and what isn’t.

Doctors or moms?

Gerry cited an example of a phar­ma­ceut­ic­al com­pany that sold products to doc­tors. They cre­ated a web­site and wrote for the med­ic­al com­munity, using lan­guage under­stand­able to doc­tors. The prob­lem was, doc­tors wer­en’t using the site because a sales rep would come and see them. A large por­tion of the audi­ence turned out to be moth­ers. Now, the com­pany’s primary focal point is to sell to doc­tors, but patients are becom­ing more edu­cated and bet­ter informed about their health and often make sug­ges­tions to their doc­tors. This sec­ond­ary audi­ence was using the site so con­tent needed to be cre­ated to address their needs, presen­ted in a lan­guage they could under­stand. The com­pany decided they needed to include a sec­tion that addressed the needs of this par­tic­u­lar audience.

When deal­ing with two dis­tinct audi­ences, Gerry stresses to focus on the primary audi­ence first because that’s the bread and but­ter of the web­site. You def­in­itely want to include mes­saging for a sec­ond­ary audi­ence, but you would­n’t want to focus on that group so much that you ali­en­ate the primary audi­ence. By try­ing to sat­is­fy every­one you end up sat­is­fy­ing no one.

Managing the managers or defending your actions.

Get­ting to know our audi­ence also lends sup­port when mak­ing requests to man­age­ment or mak­ing decisions about the web­site. It’s harder for man­age­ment to steer the web­site in a par­tic­u­lar dir­ec­tion if web spe­cial­ists have con­clus­ive sup­port that the audi­ence does­n’t like a par­tic­u­lar fea­ture, etc. It also works in favour of the web team. By know­ing the audi­ence they can make sug­ges­tions to man­age­ment about what is work­ing with the web­site and what isn’t.

Tied into know­ing your audi­ence is the real­ity that the web isn’t an event, but a jour­ney. There is no quick fix for know­ing your audi­ence oth­er than tak­ing the time to get to know them. As web people, we need to talk to them and see them inter­act­ing with our web­site. Then, we make some changes to the web­site and find out how our audi­ence responds to the changes. The response may be good, mediocre, or poor; if improve­ments need to be made, we go back and tweak some more and gauge the response again.

The mis­con­cep­tion is there is a quick fix. Very often web teams think they know who the audi­ence is and they make assump­tions about what they want. But, to know what your audi­ence wants, web teams need to actu­ally get to know their audi­ence. I don’t believe any organ­iz­a­tion could spend too much time on user test­ing and it should be a reg­u­lar sched­uled event for any web team.

Coming up in Part Two: Carewords and other million dollar concepts.

…this multi-part inter­view con­tin­ues!