The post Risk Management for Content Creation appeared first on Content Harmony®.
Here’s the slides and a few key graphics from my presentation at LavaCon today on “Risk Management for Content Creation”. I’ve included a complete transcript of what I’m saying on stage down below as well.
Slide URL: http://www.slideshare.net/kanejamison/lavacon-risk-management-for-content-creation
INTRODUCTION
We’re going to do a couple fun things in the next 45 minutes.
We’re going to learn some basic risk management concepts that I promise will be fascinating.
Then we’re going to look at how to apply these concepts to content projects, and your organization’s broader content portfolio.
Finally, to keeps things exciting – we – meaning all of you here in the physical audience and the virtual audience as well – are going to collaborate on a creating a live piece of content – right here in this room. So, I’m especially excited for that.
So here’s the deal… If we’re going to pitch content as an investment for a brand, we need to treat it like a true investment. Specifically, we need to use established risk management concepts to maximize overall investment return.
Naturally we want to go into almost every project with the expectation that it will succeed, but there’s a chance with any project we take on that any number of things could go wrong – that chance is risk, and there’s an entire industry of risk management already dedicated to identifying and managing the chance that things go wrong.
Risk management in content creation isn’t anything new – most people just call it project management.
But, as an untrained project manager suddenly facing the prospect of managing a variety of ongoing projects, I learn best by comparing things I don’t understand to things I do understand.
I’ve found that going back to basic risk management concepts I learned in Finance courses has helped me create a mental framework for the types of risks we face with each project we work on.
The goal of this presentation is to share that framework for risk management for content creation based upon existing risk management concepts.
I’m hoping that even project-management certified members of the audience can take away something valuable from what I’ve come up with.
Overview:
We’re going to cover 3 segments today:
Basic risk management concepts
Risk management at a portfolio level.
Risk management at a project level.
Caveats, disclaimers, biases, definitions, and other things that give me wiggle room…
I’m a content marketer, not a content strategist. So I’ll talk a lot in terms of the customer lifecycle and sales funnel, and about content performance for marketing and sales, because that’s what I care about. Don’t let it distract you too much if you’re working on content for another purpose, like internal training documentation. Fundamentally it’s not that different, you simply measure success in a different manner.
I’ll often say clients because that’s how I think working in an agency. Just think stakeholders everytime I say client and you’ll be OK. Similarly, I might talk about “you” in terms of you the agency or consultant. If you’re in-house don’t get too caught up in that, because you still need to be managing risk of the projects you engage internally in a company – think of it as career risk management.
RISK MANAGEMENT BASICS
The first thing you should know about risk management is that it has a broad process.
You’ll find small variations across industries and scenarios, but overall they look like this:
Identify the risk
Determine source and magnitude of the risk
Manage the risk using the framework we’ll discuss in a moment.
Monitor & report
The second thing you should know is that the magnitude & nature of a risk determine the appropriate way to manage it:
We measure the magnitude of a risk in two ways:
the likelihood that it could happen
the potential damage if it did happen
The third thing you should know is that there are actually 4 ways to manage risk:
1 – Risk Avoidance
Eliminate the potential cause of the risk from the project scope, and potentially withdraw entirely from the project.
The easiest way to win a fight is to not be involved in the first place.
Refuse to take on projects that are simply to risky, or work with stakeholders on that project to understand the risk and remove it from the scope in some manner.
2 – Risk Reduction (optimize – mitigate)
Aside from not taking on projects that are doomed to fail, this is the most common method of risk management that we use in project management.
I’d say the most common method of risk reduction and mitigation is process development. Once we can build out projects in a repeatable manner and move down the learning curve, reducing risk is much easier.
3 – Risk Transfer (transfer, outsource, insure)
Transfer the risk to someone else.
This is the basic premise of all insurance and surety.
It gets more complicated when you’re talking about content creation.
Pulling in expert third parties to handle portions of the project scope that are the riskiest for you is one start. But, ideally you want to transfer it in a way that reduces the chances of failure, too, otherwise you’re just covering your own ass.
4 – Risk Retention (accept and budget)
Identify the risk and own it.
Some things can’t be reduced, avoided, or transferred. That’s OK. Your job is to make sure you’ve taken every feasible step in those methods before simply taking on the risk.
You can’t identify risks without determining what constitutes success or failure.
To do that, you need to establish your goals for a project.
The first step in deciding what could make content succeed or fail is to pin down the purpose and goals of that piece of content.
To keep things simple, I break this down into 4 options. You content can exist in 1 or more of these categories, and in rare occurrences you’ll have a piece of “full-funnel content” that has potential to succeed in all 4 areas.
Visibility and Awareness – Is this piece of content intended to drive brand awareness with your target audience?
Engagement – Is this piece of content intended to educate and engage sales prospects and move them closer to conversion
Conversion – Is this piece of content intended to elicit a revenue-generating action?
Retention – Is this piece of content intended to help you delight existing customer and generate recurring or repeat purchases, or generate referrals or reviews?
If a piece of marketing content isn’t meant to satisfy any of these criteria, then you should seriously reconsider why you’re doing it.
Risk comes in lots of forms.
With your entire portfolio of content projects, the most appropriate analogy is to approach risk management the same way an investment portfolio manager would. So, we’re going to largely talk about diversification.
With large content projects, the best analogy I use is that big content projects are like building a skyscraper. You can’t break it down into smaller projects that are successful on their own. Here we’re going to get into project level concepts.
“Risks can come from uncertainty in financial markets, threats from project failures (at any phase in design, development, production, or sustainment life-cycles), legal liabilities, credit risk, accidents, natural causes and disasters as well as deliberate attack from an adversary, or events of uncertain or unpredictable root-cause.”
When it comes to content creation, I like to think about risks in two ways: risk for your entire portfolio of content projects, and risk for large content projects.
For the rest of this presentation we’re going to focus on these two analogies in more depth.
Risk Management at a Content Portfolio Level
Your portfolio of content is simply your entire body of content across your organization. You’ve put a lot of money and time into your content, and you need to manage it like any portfolio of investments
What Types of Risk Are We Facing?
With individual content projects, we’re looking failure in terms of what might make a project fall flat. With portfolio content, we’re looking at failure in terms of what could go wrong at an organizational level.
Risk management at the portfolio level boils down to 2 things:
Diversification, much like an investment portfolio
Quality control, much like the set of standards and requirements that an active investment manager would apply across all of their positions.
Diversification 101:
I don’t want to spend too much time on the math behind diversification, but I will share my favorite analogy, which is from A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel, which is a classic book on investing and portfolio theory.
Imagine a completely hypothetical scenario where you can only invest your money in local companies on the island you live on.
There’s a long rainy season, so you invest in an umbrella company. You make 50% profits when it’s rainy season, and lose 25% when it’s sunny season. Across a year where each season is equal, you’ll end up making 12.5% profits.
But, let’s say you encounter an unseasonably dry year. Your rainy season only lasts 3 months, and now you’re looking at a -6.25% loss for the year. That’s a heck of a risk.
Now, let’s imagine that you decide to diversify by investing an equal amount in a beach resort.
When it’s sunny, the resort makes 50% profits, but when rainy season comes around, it loses 25%. So again, during a year with equal seasons, our expected gain is still 12.5%.
But, now that we own a stake in two companies that completely straddle the seasonal weather risk that we used to face. If it rains an entire year, we make 12.5%, and if it’s sunny the entire year, we still make 12.5%.
In this example, we’ve reduced seasonal risk by 100% without any loss in our expected return.
At this stage, you’re wondering why I’ve been talking about rainy seasons when it comes to your content.
Your content portfolio faces many of the same types of risks, and diversification is the solution.
First, you need to diversify across the entire sales funnel and customer lifecycle.
Second, you need to diversify between different customer segments.
Third, you need to diversify across your topical universe.
Fourth, you need to diversify across content formats.
Fifth, you need to diversify across content styles.
Sixth, you need to diversify across marketing channels and content distribution methods.
Seventh, you need to diversify across languages.
So that’s 7. There are others. Identify them for your organization’s content program and work on fixing your weak spots.
In all of these examples, I’d suggest taking a 70-20-10 approach.
When you’ve devoted your entire editorial calendar to your most profitable product line and a market disruption kills off the search volume that you relied on for incoming traffic, you’re going to have to scramble to replace that with the new hot trend.
This might sound unreasonable, but what happens when your entire market gets dominated by one newcomer.
It happened to pedometers when Fitbit launched.
It happened to vacation rentals when VRBO took over the market’s vocabulary.
Then it happened to VRBO when Airbnb did the same.
These are branded examples that are really difficult to compete against, so they’re on the extreme end of what can happen, but the flavor of the year effect happens on unbranded terms, too.
So, taking a step back where are the major areas we need to diversify across our content portfolio?
Across the Customer Lifecycle and Sales Funnel
What are customers looking for when they’re just finding out that a product or solution exists?
What are customers looking for when they’re researching an upcoming purchase?
What are customers looking for when they’re about to convert?
What are customers looking for when they’re enjoying that new product or service and looking to learn how to use it or make a second purchase, or whatever?
Across Customer Segments:
If REI produced hiking content that only spoke in terms of 6-day backcountry trips, they’d be alienating their casual day hiking audience and vice versa. Meanwhile they have entire audiences of cyclists that could care less about hiking.
It’s rare that a business only has 1 topic to cover that can’t be broken into a range of subtopics. Get outside your niche in order to pull in related audiences and cast a broader net.
Some users learn from reading. Some users learn from watching video. Others from listening to podcasts. If I have the choice of looking at your product pages with text and photos, and identical product pages on your competitor’s website that have product videos showing more information about the product
We break down content marketing into Educational content that empowers our audience, and Aspirational content that inspires or delights our audience. Most companies lean more heavily on one than the other, but every company can benefit from using both formats.
It’s not a factor of dedicating budget to every social channel. It’s about making sure no individual traffic or promotion source represents a major risk for your incoming sales. Organic search traffic is going to be the most common example. If your traffic is 70% organic search, that’s a major risk for your business and needs to be balanced over time with email, social, referral, paid, offline content, etc.
This obviously applies to international companies, but it isn’t just a geographic play. In 2011 the US Census reported that 60.6 million Americans spoke a language other than English at home (http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acs-22.pdf), 62% of which was Spanish. That 60 million represents 21% of the American population at the time. Are you going to alienate them because your competitors are willing to republish content in this audience’s preferred language and you’re not?
Lots of people have covered this as it applies to content, but Coca Cola’s content marketing video is the first I’m aware of:
http://www.contentharmony.com/videos/coca-colas-content-marketing-videos/
The concept here is that 70% of your content investment goes towards core business areas, 20% goes to experimental stuff related to your core business, and 10% is the really experimental stuff.
“They adhere to a 70/20/10 content model, where 70% of their concept should appeal to a large audience, 20% should innovate off ideas that already work – engaging more deeply with a specific audience. Last, but not least, they expect 10% of their content to be high risk content, brand new ideas that will become tomorrow’s bread and butter.”
Apply this to the areas we just covered. 70-20-10 on the topics you talk about. 70-20-10 on the formats you use. 70-20-10 on the promotional channels you use.
Structure your experimentation as a reasonable percentage of your content budget. It will improve your core 70% time and identify new opportunities for you on an ongoing basis.
Quality assurance is the other major set of risks we need to look at at a portfolio level.
How do we ensure similar content quality standards are being met across 20 freelance writers?
How do we ensure that all content pieces are relevant to one of our target audiences?
How do we ensure that we’ll be able to meet our goals in terms of editorial frequency?
How do we measure content performance at an asset level as well as a portfolio level?
Risk Management at a Big Content Project Level
What do I mean by big content?
To a small company, the thought of writing an e-book is an ambitious project to tackle.
To a large company, Big Content might mean an entire branded content domain with a million-dollar annual promotion budget and daily editorial calendar, and personalized email marketing program based upon user interests.
You don’t have to build a 16-person, 6-month piece of flagship content like Snow Fall for the NYT to qualify, although that particular project certainly does qualify.
If it feels like a stretch for your budget and resources, and project failure would really hurt, then that’s how we’ll define big content.
For risk management at the project level, I’m going to focus on big content projects, not your average blog post or whatever. But, the concept of Big Content is a bit ambiguous, so let’s define that.
Big Content is a lot like Big Construction Management
Large-scale real estate development projects – like building a skyscraper – are the perfect analogy.
You think the magnitude of failure when nobody shares your content project is high? Imagine the magnitude of risk if the building you assembled falls apart in an earthquake. I love marketing but there’s way less on the line for my projects than there is for a project of that nature.
These developers working on skyscrapers have their project management cut out for them. And they handle it by planning these projects out to the man-hour.
“Raising a tall building is an exercise in compromise and negotiation, a choreographed clash of disciplines intended to make the project better or safer — and economical.”
-Thomas Curwen, http://graphics.latimes.com/wilshire-grand-skylight/
What Types of Risk Are We Facing?
Take it back to your goals.
I’d argue that big content projects are almost always a visibility and awareness play. There’s exceptions, but if you spend an enormous amount of effort on a project, you typically want it to be seen by as many people in your target audience as possible.
What if we put this together and promote it, and noone cares?
What if we think this is going to take 200 hours, and it takes 400?
What if the person we hired to code this thing does a mediocre job, and we can’t afford to redo it?
What if, on the other end of the spectrum, this project does exactly what we want, and is so successful that it crashes our servers?
What if this thing costs as much to maintain as it does to build it in the first place?
Live Content Experiment:
I can come up with a handful of risks for big content projects and how to approach them with our risk management hat on, and I’ll do that in a moment, but I think we as a group can do a heck of a better job coming up with potential risks that I can alone.
So, together, we’re going to build a risk inventory for big content projects. We’re going to identify as many possible things that could go wrong as we can.
So, what I’d like everyone to do is pick up your phone or laptop and go to this URL: http://hmny.co/lavaconriskmgmt
I want you to answer 3 simple questions. Pull from your own experience of things going badly, or whatever comes to your mind first:
Enter your email. It won’t be public and we won’t add you to our mailing list, that’s just how we’ll send you a copy of this completed project.
1 – What is a potential risk on a big content project?
2 – What stage of the project does it normally occur? Pick one or more.
3 – What is a potential solution for the risk? Is it avoidance, reduction, transfer, or acceptance?
Hit submit.
These answers should automatically be pushed to a public Google docs spreadsheet at this URL: http://hmny.co/contentriskinventory
So, we’re going to have a public copy of this, and then my team is going to take that and clean it up so we can share a prettified version with all of you.
Lets Apply Our Risk Management Framework to Big Content Problems
Risk: Over Budget.
Scenario: New project type that we’ve never handled. Scope of multiple components is uncertain.
Avoidance: Can we break this into smaller projects so we can better estimate scope on later?
Reduction: Let’s review scope in deep detail and pull in individual contributors to estimate their own contributions at high/low levels to provide an estimate range and get preapproval from stakeholders to stay within that budget.
Transfer: Can we outsource any component of this project to someone else in a manner that limits our responsibility if that portion of the project goes over budget?
Acceptance: Despite all reduction efforts, we’ll always face roadblocks from the unknown. We’ll accept those because the project is still valuable enough to proceed on.
Risk: Outreach Failure.
Scenario: Project success weighs heavily on pickup by journalists and other outlets.
Avoidance: Can we pivot the focus of the project in a way that adds other successful outcomes into the project that make earned media a non-concern?
Reduction: Can we pre-sell this project to specific journalists in our industry in a way that guarantees coverage, and reduces likelihood of outreach failure?
Transfer: Can we pull in any partners on this project who can share the promotional burden and broaden our potential reach?
Acceptance: If we can guarantee a minimum level of expected coverage, are we OK with the risk between minimum level and successful levels?
Risk: Servers crash.
Scenario: We’re too successful. Promotion goes better than planned. We increase website traffic 80x average that day – mostly within a 6 hour period.
Avoidance: Simply not an option – this risk is tied to our largest success expectations so let’s keep going:
Reduction: Have we taken the proper technical steps to handle a significant increase in server load? Optimized page load times? Static assets on a CDN? Server, Database, and Browser level caching running? Javascript and CSS Minification? Optimized Image sizes? Tag management running correctly? GZIP compression enabled? Splines reticulated?
Transfer: Can we put some of the server burden on someone else? CDN is the primary option here, and reduces the magnitude of the risk by transferring the server load.
Acceptance: Assuming we’ve taken all potential steps to reduce the likelihood of a failure, we’ll gladly accept the rest of the risk. I have no problem explaining to stakeholders that we were so darn successful that we broke every failsafe that we put in place.
Leave your thoughts in the comments!
The post Risk Management for Content Creation appeared first on Content Harmony®.