^{Truths: Portland has a generous, friendly, and fun Meetup scene. Also, I need a haircut.}

After some snacks and beer, McGrane kicked off her talk, even after speaking at a whole tour of events throughout the day in Portland.

That’s some dedication. Portland appreciates it!

McGrane emphasizes that, for many people, mobile IS the internet. This number looks like it will only grow. As mobile phone use and mobile internet access for people increase, there’s a mission to do mobile right– right from the start.

McGrane briefly discussed disruptive innovation: the practice of giving technology, service, or goods access to markets that never had any before. She used examples of technology over the last three decades and how each new player disrupted and trumped the old.

It may be an inferior product or service to major players, but the fact that it empowers an underserved, growing market makes it superior.

McGrane’s emphasis on disruptive technologies isn’t just a acknowledgement of mobile growth, but is also a battle cry that we can disrupt common content publishing and governance methodologies. The state of mobile publishing and content maintenance is horrid, where according to McGrane, roughly 16% of brands have a mobile strategy. This leaves a majority of organizations with a huge opportunity to improve not just their mobile content, but the way they publish and govern content in general.

An investment into content strategy, for mobile or as a whole, means your brand or organization can improve its methodology of teaching, supporting, informing your audiences via rich, meaningful content. This drives understanding, empowerment, and loyalty. Who doesn’t want that?

McGrane’s three big takeaways:

If you want to take steps toward improving the state of content at your organization, McGrane recommends the following:

Know the content workflow. Map out responsibilities, understand the processes that go into content creation and maintenance, and eliminate practices that take away from this mission. Things like forking content or loose CMS/publishing policies need to go.

Write better. Acknowledge that there’s no such thing as writing better for a particular platform. Just learn how or empower your team to write better. There are plenty of resources out there to help with this cause.

Structure your content. Channel your inner Rahel Bailie and start typing and modeling content to adapt to different scenarios. Truncating isn’t a solution. We need to create chunking methods and new content schemas so our audiences can consume ALL of the content that they need, however they need to. It’s not a battle between desktop users or mobile users– it’s just serving your users. Serve them all with the same love and attention.

Okay. Now we can build our mobile/desktop content. Let’s do this.

McGrane reminds us that disruptive technology eventually gets good. Or, the brand or entity redefines what good means for that market. That said, let’s disrupt the way we currently do content and do mobile, and the whole thing, right.

Big thanks to the @CS_PDX crew for making this happen. The next Content Strategy Portland event is June 13th, 6PM over at ISITE Design in NW Portland. See you there.

It had been a while since the group got together. I think the last time was for the Ann Rockley event back in 2012.

Last night, the crew got together over at ISITE Design to talk about user personas. The discussion panel consisted of:

From left to right:

• Isaac Szymanczyk, Senior Communications Strategist at Nike
• Ben Lloyd, President of Amplify Interactive
• Katherine Gray, Content Strategist at Babcock+Jenkins
• Robin Stevens, User Experience Lead at Experience Lab.
• Bryan Finke, Global Marketing Strategist at Yesmail

The panelists discussed their definitions of personas and how they use them to inform design decisions from web development to brand work, internal to global communications. By the end of the session, and after extensive Q&A by the crowd, the persona definition sounded a little something like:

“A fictional person of a user group or segment defined by goals, expectations, psychographics, and humanizing characteristics. It’s a method to describe a target audience or group in order to inform key communication design decisions.”

Even though these personas aren’t real people, they represent our users and audiences, giving organizations an idea of whom they serve and wish to connect with. This is well worth the research dollars during the discovery phase of any communications or content-related project.

I personally recommend it to be a main part of any discovery/alignment phase of your content strategy methodology, if it isn’t already.

Memorable nuggets of truth from our panelists included:

Bryan Finke: Personas will often identify key objectives of a user group or segment, a point of view of that group, and grant a more contextual idea of the audience in order for communicators to design experiences to influence behavior or better connect.

Isaac Szymanczyk: Personas humanize user experience: they’re not people with pockets filled with money. It’s an exercise that allows communicators to learn much more about their audiences and what they aspire to be and do.

Robin Stevens: Persona research isn’t a push-button solution. It’s a part of a larger methodology to fully realize a communications solution. This methodology doesn’t have to be an expensive research session. You can DIY your way to success and insights.

Ben Lloyd: User personas will always be a moving target– it takes research and resources to continue to know who you’re trying to be in the shoes of.

Katherine Gray: There’s no wrong way to create a persona, as long as it’s assisting in better understanding a particular user group and informing effective communications solutions. A brand manager will see a user persona much differently than a user experience specialist.

Did you miss out? There’s more!

It was great to hear that the CSPDX crew has some more events for the quarter.

Up next is an event featuring Karen McGrane and her book, Content Strategy for Mobile, on May 23rd. You can snag a copy of her book over at A Book Apart. I know I’ll be reading my copy to get ready for that talk.

Hope to see you all there!

InnoTech 2013 marked the 10th year of the conference. Along with IT and telecom speakers, there’s also a bit of digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) as well. It’s a solid mix of topics from the tech and digital communication realms.

Penguins and Pandas, what?

Ben Lloyd of Amplify Interactive, Matthew Brown of SEOMoz, and Michael Cottam of Visual Iteneraries kicked off a session on demystifying Google’s Panda and Penguin updates.

Ben’s commentary felt very resonant to some current web content challenges of mine:

• Build your links like a human being by providing valuable information to your user throughout their experience with your site.
• Another reminder that the get-rich-quick stuff that we see in our email spam folders is useless. These snake-oil organizations are getting “Penguin Slapped.” Don’t fall for it. Trust in your user research, content strategy, and your willingness to build great content and experiences.
• Invest in community-building and content strategy if you want a great foothold in the recent SEO game. Fuel, nurture, and trust these professionals.

Whurley demystifies innovation, shows off magical skateboard and shopping cart.

Lunch was hosted by EasyStreet and featured William “Whurley” Hurley of Chaotic Moon Studios. Whurley inspired the crowd, explaining how innovation is a cultural thing, not some kind of magical button that new talent can bring to an organization. Innovation is an initiative that begins at the core of an organization. Do you respect it, or not?

He emphasized that innovation is simpler than most believe it to be. It’s taking common, available parts and using them in new ways to solve problems and challenges. To prove it, he showed videos of a mind-controlled skateboard and a smart-shopping grocery cart. These products captured the attention of its audiences, and even scientific authority.

How’d they pull it off? Open minds, search engine knowledge, and commercially available parts. Raw innovation right there.

If you want to quantify innovation, Whurley suggests less looking at the bottom line and more observing the frequency and gravity in which we suspend the beliefs of audiences through the use of our products and services.

A look at competitive intelligence and its potential benefits.

After some meeting and greeting with all kinds of vendors in the information technology and telecommunications industries, I tuned in to Marshall Kirkpatrick’s (Founder, LittleBird) presentation on competitive intelligence. Marshall’s talk described applications of competitive intelligence and how these tools give professionals and easier path towards accessing insights from data.

Marshall focused on three tangible values of competitive intelligence:

• Saving time: Competitive intelligence tools are available to organizations of any size who want to leverage big data. Using these tools to quickly identify and deliver data to organizations saves immense amounts of time. Professionals can instead use this newly available time to do other operations.
• Facilitating new discoveries: Data visualization techniques and tools allow us to take overwhelming amounts of information and distill them into actionable insights. These new discoveries often fuel new initiatives that lead to new data. This process continues to derive immense amounts of value for the organization, if you have a staff that has the skill sets to manage and analyze data to an organization’s benefit.
• Accessing higher-order thinking: When organizations use competitive intelligence and data visualization tools to take “heavy lifting” off of their staff, these professionals spend less time understanding and remembering gobs of data and more time taking action with it. Marshall emphasizes that the goal is to get your staff into a mode of analysis, evaluation, and creation with data.

Overall, the event was a nice change of pace from the typical workweek. A quick hop onto the MAX to the convention center for some learning, beer, and solid conversation? No-brainer.

Big thanks to all of the speakers and vendors who made the event a great time. I’m looking forward to InnoTech 2014 for sure.

In Word Up!, Marcia Riefer Johnston reminds us that we can still play with language and that we can access word-crafting ingenuity and flexibility, even in this urgent world. She emphasizes empowering ourselves with language uncontrolled by rigid I/O rules of the digital tools that we use.

The chapters of Word Up! read at a blog-like cadence. Rich nuggets of writing wisdom are encased in stories and anecdotes. Some stories are reminders of key writing rules that we may have forgotten. Some are nudges to play and explore, to own language.

Word Up! enchants as much as it taps you on the shoulder to remind you of ways to supercharge writing, and to harness control of our always-on-the-move English language.

Whether you write for a living, or live to write, this is a book worth your time. Check her blog out, too.

The Portland State University’s Professional Development Center held another Digital Marketing Breakfast over at the lovely Smith building at PSU. The #PDXDMS crew created a panel comprised digital marketing, social media and data analysts from around the city who talked about their favorite tools. It was a quick refresher course as to what’s available for free, a small sum or a whole bunch of cash, to supercharge your business’ data analytics and operations.

It wasn’t the usual case study and lesson from a local pro, but it was a quick intro to a toolbox of great applications that can potential change the way we approach data at our day to day gigs.

Some notable moments:

Adam Ware of SwellPath recommended a handful of tools, like Google Tag Manager, SEM Rush, SEOmoz and other things, while reminding the crowd that we should always be focusing on three key steps when dealing with data:

1. Collecting the right data: Gathering the wrong stuff is a big waste of time and no one likes wastes of time– especially your manager or boss.
2. Analyzing the right data: Just because it’s all in front of your face doesn’t mean you have to analyze everything.
3. Making informed, key decisions from the right data: After completing Steps One and Two properly, this is the part that makes you look amazing, assuming you come up with great and actionable key insights from all that data.

Nate Angell of Little Bird amazed the audience with a sneak peek at some new Little Bird functionality. He explained the growing importance of thought leadership and authorship in search rankings and how Little Bird helps organizations quickly identify thought leaders, but also hone in on the content they enjoy.

You can start to skim the idea of what it’s like to get into your favorite professional, expert or entrepreneur’s mind and drive in 6th gear towards expertise. It’s like on the verge of hacking Gladwell’s 10,000 hours. Okay, maybe not. Still– a pretty cool tool, that Little Bird.

Parting thoughts…

Angell drew a paralel between why we enjoy the internet and our wiring as social human beings. We’re really hitting up the web to learn, understand and engage, just like we do with other folks in real life. Well, we do all that IRL at least with folks whom we enjoy spending time with. It’s a great point that I think a lot of people don’t acknowledge from day to day.

We aren’t really doing anything new on the web in terms of how we interact with people. We’re just doing it digitally. It reminds me a bit of Noirin Plunkett’s talk at Write the Docs. Plunkett’s a super English translator and beautiful human being who speaks about how our current method of digital communications, mainly text, lacks empathy.

As we replace many parts of real-life interaction, engagement and learning with the digital kind, we need to make sure we don’t lose the empathy that text inherently removes. As we rely more and more on tools to automate work, we can’t neglect the narrative flow, cognitive approaches, instinctive qualitative analysis and wholehearted love and empathy that a real flesh-and-blood human being brings to the table.