TAKE BACK TO WORK TOOLKIT

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit

Welcome to your Content Strategy Toolkit!

This resource is meant to help you apply your newly
garnered skills from this, the second Content Strategy
MOOC, to help propel your professional career forward.
Please feel free to share this resource with the people
across your organization.

John Lavine
Professor & Director,
Media Management Center

The Toolkit is a quick-reference resource for you to use

when you are back at work. It provides quick tips and
tricks for many of the topics addressed in the MOOC.
You can find a listing of all the topics in the Table of
Contents on the next page.
Thank you for participating in the MOOC and for
downloading this resource!
2

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit
Table of Contents
[5] John Lavine:
a) Put Strategy in Your Content Strategy
[6-7] Candy Lee:
a) Content Curation
b) A/B Testing
c) Professor Lees Trendy Content Checklist
[8-9] Randy Hlavac:
a) Social Networks
b) The ROI in Social
[10-11] Emily Withrow:
a) Tips for Designing with Interaction in Mind
b) Two Opportunities to Build Interactive Story

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit
Table of Contents Continued
[12-13] Zach Wise:
a) Gestalt Theory
b) Tips for Shooting Great Photos and Video
[14-15] Randy Hlavac:
a) Types of Social Communities
b) Methodologies to Engage a Community
[16-18] Rich Gordon:
a) Why its Important to Measure
b) Tracking Engagement

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit
Strategy
Strategy is a plan to achieve an organization's goals, usually over
a period of time.
What strategy does is say, if we're going to succeed at the
organizational level, at the division, at the department, at the
team, or even the personal level within it, everyone has got to be
working towards common goals.
You must communicate in a prioritized way, what are the two, or
three most important things I'm going to communicate from my
role in this organization that will contribute to that strategy.
John Lavine
Professor & Director,
Media Management Center

Have deep knowledge of your audiences both internal and

external and deliver your content to them in a way that they
want to receive it. Convenience is key for getting and keeping
their attention.
5

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit
Utilizing Content Trends in Your Organization
The Trend: Content Curation
How to Apply It? Curate Content from a number of different
sources across the web that relate to a topic important to your
audience.
Caution: This may drive traffic away from your site. Find a
balance between curated content and other types.

Candy Lee
Professor, Medill

The Trend: A/B Testing

How to Apply It? Testing in the digital space is just as
important as testing in analog. Apply A/B Testing to random
sampling for headlines, email subject lines and social messages.
Caution: Only test one variable at a time.

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit

Professor Lees Trendy Content Checklist

Design with links
Utilizing Content

Add multi-media (video and photography)

Trends in Your

Ask questions; encourage dialog

Organization

Use badging and leaderboards to reward user

generated comments
Feature popular content
Feature shared content

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit
Social Networks
We need content strategies which cut through the clutter to
our desired audiences to engage them in a long-term dialog.
An effective content strategy answers these 3 questions for a
defined audience:
1. How will we create value?
2. How will we deliver value?
3. How will we capture value?

Randy Hlavac
Lecturer, Medill

Knowledge of our audience defines the value they will

receive:
1. Identify topics the audience discusses.
2. Connect with the influencers.
3. Use advanced social monitoring tools to deeply
understand them.
8

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit
Where is the ROI in Social?

Social Networks

1. Login
Logins allow you to track behaviors on
your private social site.
Email links to your sales and marketing
system.
2. Profile
Profiles allow people to tell you more
about their needs, wants and desires.
It lets them tell community members, too.
Many uses for your organization.
3. Remember Engagement is multimedia!
Dont focus on specific media or media
defined roles.
Think about the mission you will play with
the audience.

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit
Interactivity and Gamification
Interactivity (n): An exchange between two things that influence
each other
between you and a device, person, or brand.

Tips for Designing with Interaction in Mind:

Emily Withrow
Assistant Professor, Medill

Design for mobile first, and then scale up.

Dont place unnecessary barriers between your audience
and your content.
Dont hide information from your audience. If its essential,
give it top billing.
Create an experience thats squarely centered on the
individual connecting with your brand.

10

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit
Two Opportunities to Build Interactive Story

Interactivity and
Gamification

1. Building user information into the story itself

Lean-back experience: Users are ready for you to guide
the experience, and be hands off.
2. Having users drive the narrative experience
Lean-forward experience: Users are engaged in the
material, primed for interaction with content.
Keep in Mind:
Tailor content to the individual. Demonstrate relevance.
Choose a platform that makes sense for your audience.
Know your audience and meet them where they are.

11

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit
Visual Communication
Visual messages become a language when read in the mind.
For pictures and words it is clear that the medium and the
message form one symbolic statement.

Zach Wise
Associate Professor, Medill

According to Gestalt Theory, visual perception is a result of

organizing sensory elements or forms into various groups:
Objects that look similar will be automatically grouped
together by the brain.
When we are made to look at something unfamiliar,
especially if it is a designed page, figure ground
relationship clues determine the success of our
experience.
A distinct shape and color palette can help us
immediately perceive information.
On the web, impression is reinforced by user experience:
similar elements should have a consistent behavior when
a cursor hovers over them.
12

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit
Tips for Shooting Great Photos and Video
Great photos use at least one, if not more, creative devices
such as silhouette, juxtaposition, or selective focus.

Visual
Communication

Hierarchy of good photography:

Informational
Graphically appealing
Emotional
Intimate
When shooting video:
Shoot sequences think of shooting video as a
patchwork quilt that has many different pieces of
tiny fabric.
Vary your focal length.
4-8-12, keep it short, keep it tight.
Lock it down, keep it steady.
When framing subjects, use the Rule of Thirds.
13

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit
Social Engagement
Consumers seek communities for two reasons:
1. Passions
Passion communities address topics we personally
care about.
Passion seekers want to hear the newest from the
influencers.
They also want to engage with peers to discuss their
opinions and input on community subjects.

Randy Hlavac
Lecturer, Medill

2. Trigger Events
Life stage changes drive us to seek communities
which can help us address them.
In a trigger event relationship, we want guidance
from experts NOT from our peers.
Trigger event communities have a start and a finish
to the relationship.
14

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit
Methodology to Engage a Community
(with thanks to Stanford Smith)

Social
Engagement

For your first community content,

use the experts to help you
establish your expertise.
Build on their expertise to
establish yours:
Find two articles by experts.
Can be complementary
or opposing.
Summarize the articles for
the readers.
Develop three action items for
the articles.

15

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit
Measuring Your Content
Why its important to measure:

Richard Gordon
Professor, Medill

Every organization is now a publisher media companies of

course, but also businesses, non-profit organizations and
government agencies.
Only way to tell if content is working is to measure
engagement.
The internet is the most measurable medium ever.
You can find out:
How often content is viewed.
How many people were exposed.
How much of a video or text article was consumed.
Whether users come back for more.

Remember In every category of content, only 1-2 big winners

in the competition for attention. Youd think that audience
attention would be dispersed more widely but its not!
16

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit
Track Engagement: Keep a Spreadsheet for Key Performance Indicators

Measuring Your
Content

For each DAY, a site manager should keep track of:

Time spent
Visitors
Pageviews
For different areas of the site
Pageviews generated by search engines
Pageviews and visits from different devices
iPhones, Android phones, tablets, etc.
For each MONTH, a site manager should keep track of:
Visitors
Visits
Visits per visitor
Pages per visit
Mobile vs. desktop visits
Visits for different types of devices
Then these metrics can be totaled up annually to compare them
over multiple years.
17

Content Strategy for Professionals 2:

Expanding Your Contents Impact and Reach Toolkit
Example Spreadsheet

Measuring Your
Content

18