This week, @dhh from @37signals published an article on the insufficiency of the term “content” to mean…well…content. I understand. It’s like how I love the container label “resources” or “tools” to hold all sorts of items: People always seems to suggest them for labels, yet when you turn it around and ask, “So…what would you expect to find in a drawer with that label?” The only possible answer is “Resources.” So helpful.

“Content” is in many respects an unhelpful label because it’s often expanded as “everything on your website.” While it can be useful to distinguish the “stuff” on your site from the “design” of your site, or its “architecture,” “content” doesn’t tell you anything about what kind of content you envision there, nor what that content is supposed to do.

Why “content” isn’t enough

There are practical ramifications to the term’s generality. When “content owners” are talking about what they own and want to convey, they themselves are rarely able to put it into specific buckets, let alone craft the contents of those buckets to succeed for their intended audience. Recently, I was working with an HR group that wanted to “update” their content. I suggested that they “explain” the HR processes and policies, which hadn’t necessarily changed, and so didn’t need to be updated. It caused a big fright, though, because no one had ever undertaken to “explain” how it all works, and suddenly it was all at risk of being revealed and clear. They weren’t sure they wanted to go there.

So I have been considering trying to classify content, literally into “classes,” according to what those classes “do” or “intend.” These content classes differ fundamentally from content “models.” A content model is the encoding of a parcel for a content management system, comprising the metadata and components that bring it to live on the web page. Content classes are more like your content goals. For example, you have a paragraph of text on a web page (or a video, or a photo, or a chart). That content is sitting there trying with all its might to do something. What is that something? Is it a description? Is it an explanation? Is it an opinion? Is it a sales pitch? If you don’t know what that content is trying to do, how can you tell whether it has succeeded? The answer will be specific to that class.

For exmple, an “explanation” intends to make something clear to the reader, or at least to answer the reader’s question. Has the reader understood the explanation? At least we know the right question to judge its effectiveness. Another example: An “overview” intends to give the user a good sense of all the material covered in a particular area. Can the user, after having read or watched the overview, describe the general layout of the material about to be covered?

A Taxonomy of Content

I offer this first attempt to classify to engender conversation in the Content Strategy community. I’ve just brainstormed it into existence today. I want to highlight that these classes are irrespective of “medium.” A block of text, a video, or a drawing might all be intending to accomplish the same goal. So while you might think of text initially as you read these classes, try to think also of other media for doing the same thing.

As I’ll explore later on, these classes and subclasses can then be combined into compound and complex systems of content.

Exposition

Most content is just straight out “expository.” It relates some topic, it teaches something, it expands an idea, or it conveys a series of facts or ideas in prose. Some of the sub-classes of exposition might include:

• Definition
• Explanation
• Instruction
• Description
• Biography
• Story
• Demonstration
• Interpretation
• Exploration
• Comment
• Analysis
• Theory
• Framework
• Translation

Evaluation

Content often offers an evaluation of something, whether a product, a vacation, an idea, or a candidate. There are many types of evaluations on the web, from blog rants to customer reviews. These include:

• Recommendation
• Critique
• Review
• Report
• Comparison
• Opinion
• Rating
• Complaint

Summary

A summary is different from an exposition because it reduces content into a more focused, compact form. We use them all the time:

• Overview
• Introduction
• Background
• Context
• Abstract
• Conclusion
• Bullet
• Update
• Profile
• Message

Persuasion

There are many kinds of persuasive content, much of it marketing, but sometimes it’s just trying to win over people’s views or call them to action. We might think of:

• Advertisement
• Case
• Position
• Slogan
• Call
• Invitation

Announcement

Communities rely on brief bits of information that call attention to things. I call these announcements, but they also include all the practical messaging on the website:

• Warning
• Notice
• Error Message
• Alert
• Reminder

Boundary

Content that draws the line around a topic or field of endeavor indicates a boundary. Lots of web content is specifically intended to draw lines around thing, like the terms of service, or the return policy.

• Rule
• Priority
• Specification
• Standard
• Guideline
• Policy
• Protocol
• Procedure
• Terms

Inquiry

Any effort to gather information, whether practical or rhetorical, fits into the inquiry class.

• Question
• Survey
• Request

List

Web pages are full of lists, of all kinds. A list is a fundamental content class, and includes any simple collection of items:

• Gallery
• Sequence
• Inventory

Reference

Reference content simply points to other content somewhere else. Like in a paper when sources are listed at the bottom, or when one article points to another, related article. These include:

• Link
• Citation
• Source
• Date

Enrollment

Every form to sign up for something, and any shopping cart to buy something, and any commitment to receive e-mail blasts fits within the enrollment class.

• Registration
• Subscription
• Purchase
• Application

Location

Location content just helps in wayfinding. It includes signs and signals, maps, breadcrumbs, navigational links, and menus.

• Map
• Position
• Path
• Coordinates
• Directions
• Navigation

Plan

Content that makes the expected course of action clear is a plan. Conference programs, educational curricula, and menus of options might go here. I’d also include processes.

• Agenda
• Process
• Curriculum
• Menu

Identification

A lot of the content on websites serves to identify things, like product names, company logos, intended audiences, authors, article titles, list headings, and even deep in the code, the “class” assigned to html elements.

• Name (Title)
• Target
• Logo
• Icon
• Label
• Heading
• Example
• Class

Data and Visualization

When we publish data, we often include some sort of visualization. Among this class you might find:

• Schematic
• Chart
• Table
• Dataset
• Model
• Fact
• Statistic
• Illustration
• Photograph
• Organization chart

How content classes become content types

OK, so if my ideas are helpful, if you were looking to build a new kind of content for your website, you could use these classes to make sure that you ended up with a full content type. Taking the example from my previous writing about content modeling, if you were launching a cooking site, each recipe might draw upon a whole series of classes:

Recipe

• Description of the dish and its origins
• List of ingredients, and perhaps of the tools required
• Instruction in the preparation of the dish
• Demonstration of the more obscure, technical steps
• Specifications for the quality of ingredients, the times to cook, and the temperatures.
• Illustration of particular steps and the final product.
• Recommendations for serving, or for adjustments from other cooks’ commentaries
• Plan for a complete menu to accompany this dish, and perhaps a schedule for make-ahead preparations
• Ratings from other cooks who have made this dish

Just the beginning…

In conclusion, I think of this sort of taxonomic exercise as important both to combat overly-general labels and to provide some way to evaluate content effectiveness. If you find this kind of approach helpful, let’s see whether we can’t build it out into some useful framework.

A couple of weeks ago, Kristina @Halvorson raised a twitter-storm over e-zines and conferences that feature white men exclusively. In their defense, and judging from their apology, I think probably they didn’t plan to exclude women (or other perspectives). It probably somehow just sort of happened that way. They wanted to feature the best, most interesting figures they could, and those just seemed to end up white guys.

This sort of thing—that white men show up at the head firms, on the attendee lists, on the presentation line-up, on the bookshelves—happens all the time, and I believe it is, as @halvorson and others have said, an issue of diversity and inclusion. I am stepping off of the topic of content strategy for this post because I have some experience in being part of diverse community, and because I believe it absolutely essential that our community—that any community—learn what diversity and inclusion mean, why they’re important, and how to nourish them.

Something about my background

When I was in college, I studied French in Tours, France, which taught me first-hand about culture shock and the power of learning to live in someone else’s culture. I recommend this experience to every human being for gaining perspective on one’s own culture: You cannot understand yourself until you understand someone else. You can only understand being in the “majority” when you have experienced being in the “minority.”

I began facilitating “diversity workshops” back in the 90s, when I was an Employee Relations Rep in Rochester, NY. If you work for a corporation, you’ve probably been through a hundred versions of such workshops. They generally include activities and information to highlight several, important truths:

1. Diversity is not exclusively about women and African Americans, nor about Equal Employment Opportunity laws, although it does indeed address these aspects, but encompasses all the ways in which people differ from one another.
2. We all bring our biases, which are largely invisible to us, to new encounters with people who differ from us. We tend to trust and therefore favor those who are most like us and to have different expectations (often higher) of those who are least like us.
3. Diversity is not about tokenism or being politically correct. We cannot point to one person of color in a room full of white people and say, “See? We’re not all white.” Nor can we learn the “right way” to talk about things, so that the issue goes away. Diversity is about seeing lots of people of all kinds in the group, and learning to talk with them (more than about them) in terms that they choose for themselves.
4. We are all complex and multifaceted, and the goal of “diversity” is to create a working environment in which everyone can contribute her/his best work, which is known as “inclusion.”
5. Diverse teams are harder to manage, but they produce better work.
6. Stereotypes are not the same thing as generalizations. It’s all in how you use them. “Stereotypes” reduce people to a few characteristics, so that we don’t have to go any deeper to understand them, while “generalizations” identify characteristics as guides for understanding differences.

When I worked for Ernst & Young, my last project was managing the development of an online course in cross-cultural communication, which really is just another form of diversity education.

When my partner moved from Tuscaloosa to Cleveland to be with me—from the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama to the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio—we were, I believe, the first gay couple to be invited to the “new clergy weekend” at the time, and we have been open in the diocese from the beginning.

Since 2000, my partner, an Episcopal priest, has been working with St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, which ten years after our start, has grown into a vibrant and fully diverse Christian community, and its growth continues to accelerate. We attribute our diversity, and how we live into it, as one primary driver of that growth.

What we mean by “diversity” and “inclusion”

“Diversity” and “inclusion” are often spoken together, especially in business organizations. One could get the impression that they’re the same thing, but there are important distinctions. Diversity is a prerequisite for inclusion because an organization can be diverse without being at all inclusive. Diversity is hard, and inclusion harder.

Diversity: Who’s here, and who isn’t?

Diversity is about the composition of your community. A homogenous community is made up people who are all very much alike in important respects. A homogenous community is comfortable because its members can communicate with one another without a lot of misunderstanding borne of differences. Of course, no community can be completely “homogenous,” as every human being is unique, but the more homogenous the community, the harder it is for its members to have perspective on their own identity, their own biases, and their own values.

Inclusion: Who holds the power?

Even in diverse communities, it may be similar people who make the decisions, who enjoy prestige, who are chosen for leadership, or who feel most a part of the group, even when they are not the most numerous in the group. “Majority” isn’t always about quantity, but it’s always about influence. It is the “majority” culture that prevails in the seats of power, wealth, and influence, whether the people in those seats represent a majority of the population.

Inclusion is about the diversity of those who hold the power and esteem in the community. This distinction is critical and germaine to the conversation on Twitter because while a community must first tell itself the truth about its basic composition (who’s not here), it can only benefit from diversity if it can tell the truth about its inclusiveness.

Questions to assess inclusive diversity

I don’t believe that communities achieve real, inclusive diversity very often, nor that inclusive diversity just “happens” to a community. Inclusive diversity requires intention and care. Inclusive diversity requires learning to live in new ways. And inclusive diversity requires doing things that don’t seem logical, in order to get it started and let it take root.

Here are a few questions that can help us get outside our own perspective to begin the journey.

Who’s here?

A community must actively nurture diversity by learning to see “absence.” When a community is homogenous, it seems perfectly normal to recognize one another. Seeing who’s not here requires tuning into the humanity missing from your group. It’s easiest to begin with sex, color, and other outwardly visible characteristics. Are we all men? Are we all white? Are we all about the same age? Are we all straight? Do we all dress alike?

It’s important, however, to move quickly into deeper realms of difference. Do we live and work in major metropolises? Do we live in the same kinds of neighborhoods? Do we use the same slang? Do all have similar education from similar institutions?

Once we’ve built a sense of who’s not “in the room,” we can begin to explore the impact of homogeneity by assessing who holds the power.

Whose voice is heard?

Another way to assess the diversity of a community is to look at who’s authoring the books and articles that people get to read, who’s invited to present at conferences, whose names are most recognized, and who shapes the opinions throughout the community. If the people who get to hold the microphone are all alike in some way, then the community is deprived of new voices, different voices, dissenting voices, and perhaps startling voices.

Who’s making money?

I hesitate—almost—to say it, but the competitive spirit of business is probably in direct conflict with inclusion.

Capitalism generally values getting the business by beating out other people who could have it. But when a particular kind of person seems to hold the microphone, to get the business, to publish the books, and to make the innovations, one must as a matter of conscious suspect that other factors are at work in addition to those folks’ innate intelligence and their hard work.

Becoming an inclusive community requires a conscious effort to “make space” for people who are absent. That means sometimes standing aside on the platform, on the shelf, in leadership, and if we’re very committed to it, in business. Many organizations are working to make space under the banner of “supplier diversity,” signaling that they are willing to give special consideration to bids from minority-owned businesses. In order to ensure that minority-owned business get a fair shot, (and I won’t go into what constitutes a “fair shot” here), the organizations must ensure that they are somewhere in the pool of bidders.

Who leads?

But there’s more. Inclusion means working to share authority and power. Diversity in leadership is at least as important as diversity in membership, and at a certain point, it’s important for leadership to “turn over,” and for different sorts of people to lead. If you look at the agency partners, if you look at the elected government, if you look at the C-Suite, and they’re all white guys—except for the HR director, who’s a woman, and the diversity officer, who’s African American—then there is a lot of work to do. Those who hold the power to promote must not allow themselves to fall into the “we’re just hiring the best person for the job” trap. As above, if all the “best” candidates seem to look alike, then there’s something else going on.

So what? Why should we worry about any of this?

The decision to work toward diversity and inclusion in any community is hard, and the journey is fraught with change. After all, the goal of diversity and inclusion is not just to look different for its own sake, but to be changed, and no one likes that. To become a diverse and inclusive community means that we will all be changed in ways that we cannot predict or control, and certainly, no one likes that. But we must.

Diversity is safer

When you watch catastrophes of society or economy unfold, look for sameness in those at the epicenter. Homogenous groups are prone to look inward and to agree on decisions quickly. They can overlook things that lead into crisis. In diverse communities, we have to learn to accommodate different points of view and work to involve more people in decisions, which are powerful, crisis-preventing skills. Over time, we all develop broader perspectives—on ourselves, as well as on others. Diversity is safer because we learn to look more outside our own interests for the good of the community.

Diversity is richer

When the people of influence are all alike, in the end they can fall into the trap of thinking that they’ve learned all they can from others. Inclusive diversity ensures that no matter how much you learn, there’s always someone new who’s going to shake things up and make you revise your whole picture, which is great, once you get the hang of it. In a community that prizes experts, this can be especially disconcerting, and we don’t generally have the skills to say, “You know, I now have to reconsider everything I’ve ever believed about this…” But that’s the way forward. We always need new voices of widely different perspectives, so that together, we get to a greater truth.

Diversity is good

In the end, I believe that the greatest good for all of humanity can only be achieved through diversity. As we come more and more into contact with people who differ most from us, we need to have built the skills to make space for them in our own circles: listening, questioning, welcoming, and changing.

So yes, we need to consider seriously who’s on our brochures. We need to consider whose voices we’re hearing. We need to pay money to see and hear people we’ve never heard of. We need to decide to bring new perspectives into our workplaces. And we need to make space for others to stand beside us. It’s hard, but it’s the only way to the best.

It’s only recently that I’ve come to appreciate a hard truth about myself: I’m a content geek. I know I’m not the only one. If you’re reading this post, you’re probably a content geek, too. But if you’re like me, the realization that you might be fundamentally different from the normal people around you has been a long time in coming, and it’s only after years of stripping the formatting out of other people’s documents and spending more hours in “code view” than in WYSIWYG that it becomes clear: Not everyone can do what we do.

And as a content manager, I have a terrible choice to make: Do I apply my content geek powers toward crafting web content myself, or do I hand the keys of my CMS over to the content owners, who say that if only they had access, they’d create and maintain all their own content?

This is a timely question of content strategy because not only does a content strategy shape the form and substance of your web content, but it also specifies how it gets designed and produced. So who’s going to do it: The geeks or the owners? Two recent blog posts make the case very well:

Seth Gottlieb at Content Here debunks the “Myth of the Occasional CMS User,” and calls all organizations not to believe the promises:

“Often, one of the big justifications for a CMS is removing the webmaster bottleneck and delegating content entry to the people who have the information. The implicit assumption is that everyone wants to directly maintain their portion of the website but technology is standing in the way. But if you visit a CMS customer a while after implementation you are likely to find that the responsibility of adding content is still concentrated in a relatively small proportion of the employee population.”

Jeff Cram at The CMS Myth expands on Gottlieb’s post and advises that you “Stop Letting People Use Your CMS.”

“So, I’ll take it one step further than Seth. Stop letting people use your CMS unless they are an integrated part of your web and editorial team and need to be in it on a regular basis. Even then, they may not need to be in the tool.”

What is Content Craft?

Being a content geek—at least for me— means that I see the crafting of content through insect-like, multifaceted eyes:

First, there’s the substance of the content. What is it? For whom is it intended? What’s its underlying message? What are we expecting it to accomplish?

Second, there’s the fashioning of it. Have we chosen the right language, the right images, the right arrangement, the right granularity, and the right length to accomplish our goals?

So far, so good. Any good writer can do as much.

But then, there’s the structure of the content. Not in the sense of how the piece is composed, but of the technical aspects of the headings, the various kinds of paragraphs, the selection of appropriate keywords for linking to other content, and it’s position within the website.

THEN, there are the content modeling and metadata. How is this class of content the same as or different from other classes? Into which section of the site does this content go? How will it be tagged so that it comes up in the right places or at the tops of searches? Can I really build this specific set of attributes into my CMS templates?

And finally, there’s the markup. What HTML elements are we using (and NOT using)? How have we chosen identifiers and classes for the CSS code, so that it reads like Ibsen in the source view?

Content geeks can manage all these facets like playing with Legos. We have an instinctive compass that points true north: We connect the pieces across web space and keep the links consisent.

Subject Matter Experts, Not Content Experts

Once upon a time, I was all about empowering my content owners. I tried to teach them the difference between “bold” and a “heading.” I tried to teach them to use “styles” in MS Word, rather than formatting each piece on top of “normal.” I showed them how beautiful and consistent content could be when you paid attention to these simple details, how you could instantly reshape the whole piece by shifting templates. Their eyes would just glaze over, or they would simply decide that it was far too much work. Now, I’ve decided that for the really important stuff, I do it myself, and with pride.

In the end, there is a profound difference between subject matter expertise and content crafting skill. Every now and then, the two can coincide in a single human being. For the most part, however, when content owners pour their subject matter expertise into web pages, someone else ends up going through it to “clean it up,” not out of a pathological need for beautiful code, but because the whole user experience will be best served by clean, consistent, well-crafted content. And isn’t our website really there to serve the visitors?

The Bottleneck is the Real Work

When your CMS sales rep sings the praises of the system you’re evaluating, and especially how content owners’ creativity and productivity will be unleashed because they won’t need any “technical skill” to build web pages, don’t you believe the bull. Publishing web content takes technical skill and time, no matter what system or tools you use, and just as in every other professional endeavor, it is best entrusted to web content gee…er…professionals like you and I.