I recently returned from the annual SXSW Interactive festival, which brought 25,000 nerds of various stripes to Austin, Texas, for a week of learning and networking (and breakfast tacos). There were several highlights, but two things pleased me in particular: the strength of the panels on content-related topics and the significant number of higher education professionals in attendance. The great thing about SXSW is that, if you’re interested … [Read more...]
Some New Ways to Meet Content
February 14, 2012 by
It’s hard to believe that it’s almost been a year since we launched Meet Content. In that time, we’ve covered a wide array of topics — everything from inline links to infographics — and have had many enlightening and inspiring conversations with you about how we can keep making content better. To that end, we’d like to share a few new offerings from Meet Content that we hope will extend that conversation even further. A Newsletter Your … [Read more...]
The Fallacy of User-Centered Content
October 4, 2011 by
On Meet Content, we talk a lot about the importance of users’ needs. Last week Georgy discussed content as customer service, highlighting the need for our content to be helpful to users. Indeed, content is customer service! For web writing and content creation, I consider this the number one guideline: keep your audience in mind. What are their needs? Why are they visiting your website? Content can't be useful if you don't know why it's needed … [Read more...]
Six Months of Meet Content
September 27, 2011 by
This weekend at Podcamp Boston, one presenter made the point that monitoring social media won't give you all the answers, but it will give you some really good questions. Six months ago today, we started Meet Content to open a discussion about improving web content in higher education, and we've covered a lot of topics, ranging from infographics to contextual content delivery to crisis communications to editorial style. 33 blog posts and 41 On … [Read more...]
Liberate Your PDF Newsletter Content
September 20, 2011 by
We’ve all received them—heck, perhaps we’ve even had to (shudder) distribute them. You know what I’m talking about: PDF newsletters, sent as an email attachment to a distribution list or linked on a webpage. In some corners, they still lurk. I’m just going to say it: People use PDFs for a hundred different reasons, and about 97 of them are wrong. (Rick blogged about some of these content problems in April.) The wrongest of the wrong, however, … [Read more...]