Web 2.0 Expo: Day One
- Posted November 18th, 2009
- Filed under: Events/Presentation
I thought I’d share some quicklights from yesterday’s sessions at Web 2.0 Expo. I started at Kristina Halvorson‘s “Content First: Why Content Strategy Will Save the Web” (view her presentation here), where she talked about how crucially important your content is and how often it’s the last thing companies plan for or think about especially when coming up with a “social media strategy”.
We’re guilty of this ourselves when we make site changes: often I’ll get a design to review that includes placeholder text “words go here” or “blah blah blah”, which as a writer I’ve always found kind of funny. But words matter and should absolutely be part of your planning and design process and even your usability testing.
Halvorson also talked about how things like Facebook and Twitter and blogs are only tools, that what’s important are the words you’re putting out there, reflecting your brand. If you put something up in a social media space, she notes, you become a publisher. Halvorson should a couple examples of old YouTube sites for forgotten corporate contests and mentioned how, if you don’t maintain your content in all the places you rush out to add it, it lives on out there without you, reflecting your brand.
A key takeaway from this session for me was the importance of creating a content inventory, which simply lists all the places where your content lives so none of it gets forgotten and languishes. She suggested looking on Google for guidance on getting a content inventory set up.
