2015 content trends

It’s a new year, which means it’s time for Scriptorium to discuss—and wildly speculate about—the latest trends in content. Here’s what Bill Swallow, Gretyl Kinsey, and I had to say about 2015 content trends.

Content strategy driven by IT

flickr: ttarasiuk

Alan: Years ago, IT was brought in a little later in [content strategy projects], and there was also some adversarial positioning going on. I can remember one client saying, “Our IT department: they’re impossible to work with. We don’t like them.” The IT department turned out to be a really huge asset for them and really went to the mat to the help them get systems set up like they should have been.

More recently, I have seen cases where IT departments are the primary stakeholder and are the folks who are really instigating changes in content strategy because they see the overall bigger picture of how content is flowing across the company.

Gretyl: [One concern is] when your IT department is driving a project but then they are going to make a decision that works really well for them but makes things harder for content creators or doesn’t serve the organization as well as a whole.

Content as part of the customer journey

Gretyl: When someone is buying a product, they’re not just buying a product. They are buying an experience. It’s becoming a lot more important for content to be a major part of that experience of the customer journey. Marketing content will be what draws you in or educates you about the product.

And there is also some room for technical content to come into play here as well if you are looking for something that has a lot of technical information you need to know about before you can make a choice.

Bill: It seems to be a trend more on the customer side as an expectation. I think a lot of companies are really starting to pick up on this after the fact. What we’re seeing is people responding to improper information being posted online; we see a lot of complaining on social media. Pretty soon, the company is playing catch-up trying to save face.

Executive eye on content

flickr: Monsieur Gordon

Bill: For a while now, the idea of having an executive sponsor for a major project like a content strategy implementation was fairly commonplace. But more and more, we are seeing executives who have a firm investment in the project if not direct ownership over it—so much so that we are seeing more titles out in the field for a chief content officer. [The title] was traditionally reserved for a lot of broadcasting and media companies. But now we’re seeing it in lots of different consumer companies, software, hardware, manufacturing.

Alan: There’s a stereotype out there: executives know nothing about the real world. There are some people [for which] that is true, unfortunately. They’re a little out touch with what’s going on. But I have also seen the flip side of that very vividly where an executive basically says, “I don’t need all these metrics; I don’t need all these numbers. I can tell you exactly what is wrong with this part of the big picture. I know content is part of it. Fix it.” Sometimes, they have an uncanny ability to zero in on exactly what the problem is.

Accommodating experts as content contributors

Alan: I’ve really seen an increase in content creators wanting to be sure that subject matter experts, tool experts, [and] internal experts are able to contribute content easily to the process and to review content. More and more content creation systems are allowing people to actually get into the source—and not necessarily edit the source—but to suggest edits, and someone on the content creation side can approve it.

Gretyl: This goes along with the idea of getting more and more technologically inclined. That’s really helping our content strategy both inside and outside the organization. While we’ve talked a lot before about how [technology] is helping the customer; this is the flip side of that. If you’ve got content contributors that really don’t know anything about your actual [content] creation process—they just know about the subject they’re an expert in— this is using technology to your best advantage.

Cross-company focus in content strategy implementation

flickr: Frank Kovalchek

Gretyl: For me, this a trend mostly about breaking down silos. These groups don’t interact and collaborate—and if they do interact, it’s to say, “Don’t touch my stuff.” What this leads to is content that really doesn’t work well together, and that can hold your company back. One of the ways you can get rid of this idea of silos is to develop a content strategy that encompasses all your content, and that will be more effective than just developing a content strategy, for example, for one department and ignoring all the others.

Bill: The cross-company focus is definitely on the rise, but it comes back to, “People really love their silos.” Even if they don’t, and they do want to work outside the silo, a lot of times, there is so much embedded in the way they need to work, the channels they have to go through because of financial reasons or because of reporting structures, that it is going to hinder this cross-company focused growth.

“Old” social media platforms decline

Bill: The social media landscape is going to change—it has been changing—but there are some outliers there that have been around for quite a while. Even though they still seem new to many of us, according to my kids and my kids’ friends, these are all “Mom-and-Dad networks all the old people are using.” They want nothing to do with it. They maintain a Facebook page to talk to family, but a lot of their actual interactions with friends are done on private networks, which is kind of scary.

It speaks to a different way of looking at social applications, social networking, and sharing of information. We’re not going to see a lot of Facebook, Google Plus, blogging, and other resources used by the younger generation. So, our social media and social engagement strategies around content strategy are going to need to adapt.

Alan: I think this goes back to one of the oldest and best guidelines for any kind of writing—tech comm, marcom, whatever—and that is know your audience. That’s the most important thing here. I think we’ve all seen in social media and advertising [when] companies selling fairly traditional products [are] trying to play like they’re all hip. It’s painful, absolutely painful, to see.

We had fun during the event. You can see for yourself when you watch the recording:

You’ll probably enjoy my “Did I really say that?” moments a lot more than I did!