Last week, I was fortunate to represent Spyder Trap at Confab Central 2016, a fantastic conference designed to teach content and UX professionals “to create, deliver, and manage content that’s meaningful, adaptive, and measurable.” It delivered on that promise with amazing speakers from digital leaders including Netflix, Salesforce, Microsoft, Slack, Airbnb, and others. For two days, my brain was overloaded with interesting data, keen insights, and illuminating conversations focused around the creation of valuable content. In the spirit of creating and sharing valuable content about content (#meta), I thought I’d share my top three takeaways.
Takeaway 1: Great user experiences are like good stories.
The latest research suggests the human attention span is down from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds today. To put that in perspective, a goldfish is believed to have a 9 second attention span. That’s right – a goldfish can pay attention longer than we can.
When thinking about what content to put on our websites, we have such a short time to capture someone’s attention and convey the intended message. To do so, Joscelin Cooper of Airbnb recommends writing copy that is:
- Simple – web writing should convey no unnecessary words.
- Structured – all site copy should have context and rhythm so it’s clear why it says what it says.
- Sequential – site content should have a meaningful order where points flow together seamlessly.
In her excellent talk, Creating Trust and Belonging for Onboarding, Cooper explains how her team at Airbnb creates digital experiences that answer the user’s questions in a conversational, human manner across geographies, languages, and cultures. Their approach is based on the Freytag pyramid – the universal story structure you might remember from 3rd grade language arts.
When onboarding customers (in Airbnb’s world, either guests or hosts), they structure questions in a way that reflects a narrative structure. She calls this “meta notation” and thinks of it as the expression of an internal monologue users experience as they walk through their journey. She also explains how beneficial it is to design experiences that create rapport with users by starting simply, moving quickly, and then moving into more complex information and requests as they build trust and become more comfortable.
Takeaway 2: Research is more important than ever.
Our attention spans are shorter than goldfish and yet there’s more content to consume than ever. Back in 2010, Eric Schmidt famously said we create as much information in two days as we did from the dawn of man through 2003. Fast forward to 2016, we’re creating dramatically more content than we did back in 2003.
For marketers and anyone seeking to attract attention online, this influx of content means we’re competing on a massive scale for people’s very limited attention. If I’m a Toyota dealership, I’m not just competing with General Motors and Honda for attention – I’m competing with Buzzfeed, NBC, and the Kardashians. How does one stand out? The only way is to truly understand:
- Who your specific audience is - what do they care about? What keeps them awake at night? What annoys them? What delights them? Where do they live online? Who influences their decisions?
- What their journey to purchase looks like - where do they do research online? Who do they talk to about a potential purchase? Do they come to your site to do research multiple times before making a purchase? What pages on your site indicate readiness to buy?
- What change drivers move your target audience closer to purchase – what key messages resonate so strongly that they make key prospects interested in learning more and/or making a purchase?
If we understand these key audience insights, we can create content that’s more customer-centric and much more likely to win attention over other content creators
Takeaway 3: Personalization can be powerful, but also risky.
Another way to win attention and increase conversion with your content is by personalizing it to meet the unique needs of your target audience. For a few years now, we’ve seen brands like Netflix, Amazon, and others create personalized experiences that truly add value for their users.
As Collin Eagan noted in his Confab talk, Content Strategy for Personalization, we’ve also seen brands personalize experiences in ways that have been negative – even hurtful – for their users.
For example, you may remember Facebook’s 2014 “Year in Review” app that pulled users’ most liked photos into one place for them to reminisce and then share. Many Facebook members loved the feature and shared their 2014 highlights, but for some, memories from the year were less than positive.
When web development expert and author, Eric Meyer, went into the “Year in Review” app, he was saddened to see a photo of his six-year-old daughter who had passed away during 2014 surrounded by an illustration of people celebrating the new year.
He called the experience “inadvertent algorithmic cruelty” and wrote:
Algorithms are essentially thoughtless. They model certain decision flows, but once you run them, no more thought occurs. To call a person “thoughtless” is usually considered a slight, or an outright insult; and yet, we unleash so many literally thoughtless processes on our users, on our lives, on ourselves.
Where the human aspect fell short, at least with Facebook, was in not providing a way to opt out. The Year in Review ad keeps coming up in my feed, rotating through different fun-and-fabulous backgrounds, as if celebrating a death, and there is no obvious way to stop it. Yes, there’s the drop-down that lets me hide it, but knowing that is practically insider knowledge. How many people don’t know about it? Way more than you think.
Personalization can be great – another great Confab speaker, Tracy Playle, referenced a case study that resulted in a 760% increase in revenue from personalized campaigns. However as Meyer’s story illustrates, it’s risky to automate personalization like Facebook did. In his talk, Collin Eagan shared some strategies to help avoid these risks, which you can read about in a summary article he wrote here. Additionally, he shared his Targeted Content Model, which serves as a guide for marketers charged with delivering truly valuable personalization.
These were three of the biggest themes I heard at Confab Central, but there were so many more. If you were there, I’d love to hear your key takeaways or reactions to mine in the comments below or at . If not, check out the Confab website and look into attending one of their upcoming events. If you’re charged with creating digital experiences of any kind, you definitely won’t regret it.