5 key elements of successful content and platforms for ensuring consistency.

Hello and welcome to Speak PR. My name is Jim James. This is a podcast for you if you've got value locked up in your organization and you're just looking for some low-cost and effective ways to communicate that to the various stakeholders. I've been running my own international public relations agency since 1995. I've also been an entrepreneur on 3 continents, so I know what does work for clients and for my own companies. And that's what I want to share with you on this Speak PR podcast. Now today, I'd like to look at content. We have at ESOS PR the Speak PR program, and it has Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and To Know. So Engage is all about engaging with content. Now content is actually a very sophisticated, although simple, part of anybody's plan. And the old adage is that content is king. And that's never been more true with social media. So we're going to look today at some of the issues that are facing companies and company owners when it comes to creating content. And we'll look at just the heart of what makes great content and what you can use as a simple device to determine whether you're creating compelling content that's likely to be shared or dull content that's unbearable and is going to be deleted. So first of all, let's just look at what content is. Content is the material that we provide to the various audience groups across all the different channels. It can be text, it can be images, it can be video, it can be audio, or any derivation of those 4. And in terms of the platforms, it could be on social media, it could be a broadcast, it could be on print, it could be signage in store, or it could be in the announcements that you give out in store, or when people are waiting on hold on the phone line. So content is really how we package up the information that we've got that we'd like to share with our audiences. Now, content creation and the content creation strategy actually takes some thinking about, especially as the organization gets larger. And especially if you move across languages. Now, I've been lucky enough to have lived in Singapore and in China, also in Africa and America, and I can tell you that the movie is absolutely right. A lot of things get lost in translation. So one of the aspects of content is that we must look at the audiences that we're going to be sharing that with, not just thinking about them by who we employ, but— or who we're selling to, but their cultural differences, the education level differences, for example. So let's look at the 5 elements of content first, and then we can drill down into some other research about content. So content, first of all, must be consistent. It must be consistent because there is information being shared across multiple platforms And if it is not saying the same thing across all these different platforms and moving in time and in sequence, in coordination, then either the same person reading inconsistent information will be lost, or different people reading information about the same company which reads differently will have different impressions of the company. So inconsistencies can affect practical issues. For example, it could be an inconsistency about signage which maybe leads people to a different part of the store, but it can also affect the company's brand recognition but also the reputation. So being consistent is a key part of the messaging and the content creation strategy. The second part is that it must be readable. So when we create content, nothing's more important than making it easy to understand. Now, understandable, when we talk about Weyl's Law, which has 9 different impacts on miscommunication, they say that anything that can be misunderstood will be misunderstood. So the readability of a piece of content, the viewing or the interpretation of a graphic, will be shaped by many factors internally. But also it will be received by the different audience groups in different ways. So we have to bear in mind that in some countries, white, for example, is for weddings, and in others it's for funerals. So thinking about our content, that it's readable, means it needs to be simple if it's going to be used and read or watched in other cultures. How do those images or words play out when they're either translated or just seen? Use of jargon, terminology, spelling, grammar, sentence structure— all of these will impact readability. Or in the case of viewability, looking at signage, how large, for example, the text is, what color background they're on, for example. So consistency, readability. The next element is the engagement. How engaging is the content? Is it going to be factual or is it going to be emotional? I talked about this on an earlier podcast about the difference in content between content that's appealing to the emotional response of the audience and information that is strictly factual and is applying to the logical side. So deciding what's the objective of the content, or of the particular passage of the content, or the particular video or vignette, is really key because we need to be thinking about whether it's engaging. And if it's too cold but it's supposed to be an engaging message, it's likely to fail. If it's too discursive and too floral but it's supposed to be a factual piece of information, it may confuse. How concisely and precisely and how lively is our writing? And how easy is it for someone to read and quickly understand the meaning? A 4th element is for content to be findable. So we now know that, of course, all marketing really online starts with search. Everybody that doesn't know what they're looking for starts at a website search engine. So your content must be, if it's long-form content, with SEO-friendly terms. You can use a, a platform like Yoast, for example, that will actually review your content before you publish it. Many sites have SEO trackers built in, especially into WordPress, for example. So you can start to look at your content as though you are the eyes of a search engine. Now, and as we've seen with new image search, this is starting to become important also for the images. Because images within video or standalone will become part of the search dynamic. So making sure that then your logo, for example, is consistent, that the iconography within your graphics and your infographics is consistent, will start to impact how easily found your website or other promotional items are— Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, or your own offline social media platforms. And the 5th element is whether content will carry. Will it travel? Can it be translated? I mentioned that I've been lucky enough to have lived in China for 13 years and in, uh, in Singapore for 12. And global trade now means that countries like China and India and Southeast Asia or Latin America will often receive the same information online that the people in, for example, the originating markets will see it. So the impact of the internet means that people can see things globally, but the impact of global trade means that they might receive packaging which has been produced in one country and is destined for another. So we have to think about the content that we write. If we're going to localize it, how simple will it be? Absolutely, I can share with you the challenges of translating from English into Mandarin. It'll be the same into any language like Cyrillic-based for the Middle East, for example, as well. Which is a Sanskrit— so because their alphabet is different and their characters are different, so they don't translate in the same way we do for the Latin languages. This means that sentences need to be shorter, examples need to be clearer, less use of metaphor and simile, for example, less use of humor which would be culturally sensitive. So if you're not going to localize the language by writing it in-country, make the language that you are using as easy to translate and as safe from mistranslation as you possibly can. I'd like to just talk then about the use of jargon as well. Often companies like to write content which is full of jargon because it makes them seem like authorities. Now, there was a study done in America, the results of which came out in February of this year by The Ohio State University. And what's interesting about this survey is that it shows that the use of jargon can actually be negative in terms of the impact on not only the company that writes it, but actually even on the subject matter about which that jargonesque is written. Professor Hilary Schulman, who's the lead author of this study, explained. She says the use of difficult specialized words are a signal that tells people that they don't belong. You can tell them what that term means, but it doesn't matter. They already feel like this message isn't for them. So as we're trying to build a brand that is inclusive, if we're writing with lots of jargon, actually it can be having the opposite effect. Interestingly enough, she went on to say that in this study, exposure to jargon led people to report things like, I'm not really good at science, I'm not interested in learning about science, And I'm not well qualified to participate in science discussions. In other words, when people were fed jargon, not only did they turn away from the specific purveyor of that information, they actually turned away from the topic in general. So maybe this is something that we can all think about when it comes to things, for example, like COVID or climate change. Creating barriers to understanding in an attempt to sound like an authority is actually doing just what creating an authority does, which is to create a barrier, but not one which then creates a position of influence, but ironically enough, one of distance. So we can think about the use of jargon and start to remove it from our copy. Now, I'd like, if I may, just to draw in your mind a diagram that I've developed here based on some content from a website called contently.com. And I have basically 4 quadrants. I'd like you to think about maybe a Battenberg cake, for example. So across the top I have novelty, and across the vertical axis I have readability. Now the premise here, of course, is that in order to get anything published or to be read or even then to be shared, something needs to be novel, it needs to be news. But the other element to this is that it needs to be easy to read. So what we have in our bottom left corner is we have content that is low novelty factor and low readability. In the top left box, we have content which is low novelty but is easy to read. In our bottom right-hand corner, we have content that has low readability but high novelty. And in the top right-hand corner, where we normally have, for example, the shooting stars in the Boston Consulting Group matrix, for example, we have content which is highly novel and is highly readable. Now, the content in the top right is going to be the most likely to be read and to be shared, and that's what we really want. The content that is in the top left, which is low novelty but easy to read, is possibly going to be shared because it's easy to read, not very interesting, but if I've got time, I might share it. The content in the bottom right, which is very novel but is very complicated to read, will possibly be shared probably only amongst those people who really are on the inside of that, people that like the jargon, or people that are maybe in a niche group. And in my bottom left, I have content that is not new and it's not easy to read, and that's not going to be shared. In fact, it's just going to be unbearable. So this is a very simple 4-way matrix, like a Battenberg cake or a square window. We're aiming for content to be in the top right-hand corner, which is highly readable, highly shareable. For that, very simple needs to be novel and easy to read. Makes sense, doesn't it, really? And then it needs to be consistent, it needs to be easy for people to translate, and it needs to be content that has been written to be engaging. It also needs to be consistent across all the organization. And this becomes a bigger and bigger problem with the more offices that a company has and the more and more pieces of information being shared. And there are some companies now that are helping to solve this with AI. One of them is called Acrolinx, and Acrolinx has a software which basically starts to create some templates starts to create through AI, through AI analysis, some guidance and some what they call anchoring environments. So for technical documentation documents, for sales brochures, for website, for press releases, there's certain terminology that the whole company can adopt. I find this is certainly the case when you write a press release for a company and And you find that the technical department has specific phrases they like to use, but the marketing department doesn't necessarily have those within its own directory and glossary, which as an aside actually is an opportunity that a company called Quantel leveraged back in the 1990s where they produced a glossary for the industry of the digitalization of television production. So Companies like Siemens, for example, which is using this Acrolinx content creation platform, are aspiring to have consistent content which is organization-wide. And that's important because if you're giving out different messages to different parts of the organization, then different customer groups will be getting different information as well. But synchronizing that organization-wide has become a bigger and bigger challenge. It used to be, back when I started, that we would write a brochure and technical documents, and there would only be one issue, and it'd be printed and photocopied. And until there was a new issue, that was the issue. But of course, now with digitalization of content production and distribution, documents are being revised all the time, and it's not necessarily the case that you have the latest version. So tools like Acrolinx can really help with that. So for most of us, tools like Acrylics are way bigger than what we really need. So I just want to leave you with this very simple idea about content and content creation. And if you're looking at this from a public relations point of view and sending it to the media or across social media, the first question to answer is, is this news? The second is, is this simple to understand? And the third is, will it make a difference? If it doesn't meet all 3 of those criteria, then wait until you have something that you can say that people will want to read and to share. Thank you for letting me share with you today my tips and my thoughts on content creation. Hope this has been of value to you. My name is Jim James. If you like this, please do come to the speakpr.co website. We have a mastermind which covers the Speak PR program. We also have a newsletter which you can subscribe to for free. In the meantime, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on creating some compelling content.