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Introducing the Guiding Concept: Part 3

You’ve been introduced to the Guiding Concept as an important part of your web project, and you’ve adjusted your workflow to build it into your Content Strategy. Now you face the challenge of explaining and presenting the idea.

It may be your job to convince others that this “big idea” should indeed be the unifying concept that guides a project forward.

How can you package and explain your research and ideas in a way that’s memorable and meaningful? How will you persuade and influence the relevant stakeholders?

Here are 6 tips we use when presenting to our clients at Domain7:

1/ Simplify: Try to boil down the main idea to 2 or 3 key points. You can always supplement with more research beyond your presentation, but your goal here is to make yourself understood. Can you sum up the whole idea in a few key “pillars”?

2/ Make a screencast: We turn our Guiding Concept presentations into screencasts and share them privately on Vimeo. It means the...

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  • June 13, 2013
  • by Tim Booker
  • Client Strategy Lead
  • Process & Workflow

To Improvise or Standardize: Rethinking Process

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about process.

Last week I spent a day at Interlink’s Web Strategy, Creativity & Storytelling conference. 

Fantastic speakers (like Steph Hay and David Shea) covered a breadth of topics, but it became clear that what bound all their insights together was their effect on process.

Domain7 has been growing at a steady pace and our process has evolved organically. We’ve recently undertaken efforts to clarify and articulate our process internally—making it more agile, more multi-disciplinary, more collaborative with clients, and better documented (so we’ll learn from our triumphs and our mistakes). 

An unintended discovery through this exercise was the pushback whenever fellow employees sniffed a hint of standardization: it seems our team is naturally averse to factory-style, assembly-line repetition. We really like to...

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Introducing the Guiding Concept: Part 2

In content strategy it’s tempting to jump right into organizing a website. But there is some important thinking to do first—and it means thinking beyond just your site.

Don’t fall into the trap of seeing your corporate website as the centre of your online presence. It will be a useful hub but it’s just one channel. The first question to ask is not “What should we put on our website,” but rather, “What content does our audience need, and what is the best way to get it to them?”

The answer to that question will shape your Guiding Concept—the key idea that will guide all of your future-organizing work.

When we helped Arconas sell their iconic Bouloum chair, the Guiding Concept was this: inspire creatives to imagine themselves as chair-owners. Basically, sell it like a luxury car.

We didn’t start by collecting Arconas’ existing text and images. We wanted to tell a cohesive story—so we started researching the chair and how people used it in the real world. Then...

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Calling on the Chief Digital Officer

Imagine your CEO approached your Leadership Team with this challenge: "We need to cut costs, increase revenue, improve our product and create an amazing client experience."

Would you quit? Write it off as impossible? Accept the challenge but struggle with where to start?

I would give my Chief Digital Officer the charge.

Here’s the fact: Modern customers interact with organizations digitally. They expect the quality brand experience they’ve experienced in-person to transition to the web in an efficient, user-friendly, self-serve manner. It’s an opportunity for organizations to regain footing, clarify their priorities and lead a charge for business growth. The best person to tackle the problem has the marketing savvy of a CMO and the IT chops of a CIO. That’s the CDO.

Here's how the Chief Digital Officer would tackle this challenge.

1/ Simplification

What is the core of your business? Your product and service.

The survival of the modern company will depend on refocusing the business on the core of what you bring to market.

Over time, organizations tend to get bloated and distracted from their core offering. Staff are...

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Introducing the Guiding Concept: Part 1

When I first started reading content strategy books, I kept feeling like one thing was missing: where was the “big idea”?

There was plenty to guide content strategists through the details: organizing content, wrangling stakeholders, designing page tables. But where was the creative and strategic vision that would shape that detailed work? 

At Domain7 we introduced the Guiding Concept as a central feature of our content strategy. It occurs before we proceed to any other content strategy deliverables.

The Guiding Concept is about imagining the future your business (and customers) need, and laying aside all else to focus on achieving that vision.

It helps bring all those future-ideas into alignment as pillars we can come back to throughout the project. It becomes a “north star” we use to make sure we’re always on track.

The Guiding Concept yields extraordinary results. It injects focus and purpose into your work. It’s so vital we won’t even whisper about page tables or metadata until we’ve agreed on that clear, unified vision. Strategy first, content second.

It’s still surprising to me that many content strategists don’t...

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What MOOCs Mean for Digital Marketing: 5 ways to stand out in the new higher ed landscape

Disruption is rippling through the higher education community—spreading much excitement, fear and speculation about the future of the traditional university.

The main threat? MOOCs: Massive Open Online Courses. MOOCs are full-blown university courses, offered online, usually for free. Take any class—no need for prerequisites. Drop in and out. Customize your own learning track. (Some notable players: EdX, Coursera, Khan Academy, Udacity.)

Access to information used to be a college’s main product—now, that kind of access is open to anyone with a smartphone. So where does it leave the “traditional” university? If information is trending toward free, what is the value and the future of higher ed?

We believe MOOCs should not be seen as a threat, but as a great excuse for a college or university to return to their truly special...

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Run for Water Race Day Video

We've been proud sponsors of Run for Water for six years running—since this charity race first began.

It's an incredibly cool event that started in the same town we did :) Not only is Run for Water a Boston-qualifying marathon, all proceeds go directly to clean water projects in Ethiopia. 

This year our team volunteered our social media skills on race day and created this video of the fantastic (if a little rainy) event.

 

 

 

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