I spoke at, and attended, the Content Strategy Applied 2017 conference last week. One of the keynote speakers, Madi Weland Solomon, explored what the impact of content has on users, and the trends that will inform content strategy in the near future.
She said one of the key challenges for organisations will be dealing with the loss of trust in information. She quoted a survey that stated over 50% of Americans have no trust in mainstream news. Her suggestions to fix this was to become more active at representing the public (and end users). Organisations should use more human-centric data and focus on helping users. Referring back to Dale Carnegie, Madi said being useful, and being seen to be an advocate for users, was vital. She suggested the law of reciprocity would play a part in users returning the favour of being helped by the company.
Help and other forms of user assistance meets this type of need. It is already seen at some of the most trustworthy content on the web, and it is useful. The should not be hidden about behind a firewall, but helping to build and sustain the trust between the organisation and the their users.
She also looked at which type of content is read the most: blog articles that have roughly a seven minute reading time. This fact is more problematic for technical communicators, as the trend is to write short chunks of information. Perhaps there is a need to rethink this style, in some situations.
Leave a Reply