Last Friday I took a day out and went to Story 2012. It’s not your usual kind of conference. It’s a mixed bag of brain food organised by Matt Locke from Channel 4, perfect for filling up on stuff-you-never-knew-you-wanted-to-know.

Nestled into the toasty Conway Hall, I noticed the phrase “To thine own self be true” painted over the top of the stage and wondered how the conference might joggle my sense of self in the world, if at all.

Here’s what I learned:

Lucy and Ben
Yes, you can open a shop called ‘Monster Supplies’ for the good of mankind.
Inspiration: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Lucy and Ben run Hoxton Street Monster Supplies as a shop front and source of funding for a project called The Ministry of Stories which gives kids the opportunity to “exercise the right to tell their stories and be heard”. They’re always looking for volunteers for both the Ministry of Stories and their Adventure Tourism Agency where children restructure their neighbourhoods using the power of their imagination.
@mini_stories
lucy@ministryofstories.org

Jeremy Deller
“Rub together two worlds”
Inspiration: 3 out of 5 stars

To me, Jeremy Deller’s talk was about the interesting effects you can create by switching contexts. In Jeremy’s case this was by organising the re-enacting (or bringing back into consciousness) of the miner’s strikes using a re-enactment society who aren’t normally used to this kind of subject matter. He was interested in bringing the lesser told histories of Britain back to life i.e. “looking at a wound and poking about rather than put a plaster over it”

Liz Henry
Weave intricate stories within stories and explore the phenomenon known as ‘sock-puppeting’
Inspiration: 3 out of 5 stars

In a sort of nutshell, Liz was talking about her investigatory role in identifying fake lesbian bloggers all over the internet. Liz’s story charted her investigation of how Amina, an Iranian lesbian caused a huge media furore when she went missing. Amina turned out not to be a real person, but instead she was the persona of a male blogger, and it turns out Amina was certainly not the only fake lesbian blogger on the internet.

The most inspiring thing about this talk for me was the strength of people being able to create personas through storytelling and almost live inside their characters (sock puppets) in order to weave an intricate web of lies (or stories).

Anthony Owen (Head of Magic at Objective Productions)
I am now also Head of Magic at The Copy House
Inspiration: 4 out of 5 stars

We seem to have an innate will as humans to want to believe something even if it is impossible, as often appears to be the case when it comes to magic. We want to be compelled by illusion. Anthony talked about this possible impossibility as a catharsis, and how the job of the magician is to take something very profound and make it trivial – sawing a beautiful woman in half, for example.

Anthony’s description of how you ‘brand’ a magic trick, or tell its story was fascinating. He said a magic trick needs to be a simple one-sentence description e.g ‘The trick where they saw a woman in half’.

He said “The secret stuff should be invisible and not get in the way of a really simple plot”.

That’s also how copywriting, storytelling and branding works – which makes my job a bit like being a magician. I like it!

Matthew Herbert
Imagine what the future sounds like
Inspiration: 3 out of 5 stars

“Mozart had the same instrument as Theolonius Monk but it took hundreds of years before it was made”. Matthew was talking about music as a way of interacting with the world – from recording the sounds of crabs on a ship in Vancouver, to a meal in a cafe in Vienna. He loves how sounds tell stories.

There were a couple of phrases he said that I liked:

“Something that sounds enormous to you sounds minor to someone else.” He was talking about eating an apple.
“You can always learn something by submitting yourself to the process.” He was talking about recording a pig giving birth for 12 hours, which is a surprisingly quiet process.

Scott Burnham
Trust people to enjoy and design their spaces
Inspiration 4.95 out of 5 stars

At the moment, public design doesn’t often involve what people want – it ‘needs waking up’. Scott wants to help us change our relationship with the things we share, namely our urban spaces and city furniture.

He’s interested in the stories:

• that people feel in cities
• people make with their hands and make them physically
• that contain memories of spaces
• that are assigned to locations
• that allow and encourage intervention

He asks people what they want from their spaces and feeds the stories back into them, whether they’re a child who ‘want a dinosaur which is also a chair’ – he give people what they wish for, no matter how crazy it is. He asks ‘What if?’

He told the most inspiring story of the day about giving 250,000 pennies to a group of people in Amsterdam to create an art work. The second phase of the project was “open up the process and let them rework it”. Things didn’t quite go as planned though, as he woke up one morning to find the whole thing had been taken away and ‘secured’ by the police.

One of the best sentences of the conference was “What we create will always go away, but it’s the story of what we do that will always last”

Ellie Harrison- Artist, activist, administrator
Engage in unashamed administration
Inspiration 3 out of 5 stars

Ellie went through a long period (of years) obsessively recording everything she ate. When she was bored of that, she started to record everything she did, logging all her activities on spreadsheet on log tables at the end of the day – producing beautiful and fascinating info graphics and sculptures.

The thing that I took away from Ellie’s talk is her sense of conviction for pursuing apparently crazy goals. A kind of limitless thinking. As well as this, I loved the way she used very businesslike language and formulae as a frame for her ideas e.g. a manual for use for her artworks.

My favourite phrases from her talk were:
“I use playful strategies to communicate with other people”
“Production of commodities for an cynical marketplace – creating a kind of guilt of production”

Karen Lubbock and Jeremy Leslie
You don’t always have to give people what they think they want to hear.
Inspiration: 3 out of 5 stars

Karen’s magazine ‘Karen’ is an interesting publication about ordinary things.

It contains curated images of every day life and day-to-day stories, or as she phrases it: “The fabric of the every day that isn’t noticed or profiled in mainstream media”.

I was interested to hear about her process – where she physically puts all her images and texts out on the floor and moves things around.

Danny O’Brian
Build your own island, no matter who you are.
Inspiration 4.5 out of 5 stars

I was compelled by Danny’s talk, principally because of this curiosity I have about the sense of conviction for tiny things. Interesting things he said included:

There’s a festival called Ephemerisle where you have to build your own island. I like the sound of that.

There is such a thing as an Anarchist Yacht Club.

If you’re on a mission to change the world, can you be sure you’re not doing something evil (and getting rich by mistake)?. Evil people rarely believe they’re becoming evil.

Tiny projects or ideas can explode and expand incredibly quickly if they have a world changing quality to them.

What I got was that it’s ok to go ahead and play ‘the stupid game’ and then go ahead to use that game to change the universe. He says “Don’t let anyone tell you your game is stupid.”

At the end of the conference my to-do list has these actions on it …hopefully to help me with the art of ‘to mine own self being true’:

• Write to the ministry of stories and volunteer to do a Not for the Faint Hearted session
• Run more Not for the Faint Hearted writing sessions
• Write more blog posts about small things that enthuse me
• Find more inspiring women presenters to watch for inspiration for my own business talks
• Find the extraordinary in the ordinary and point at it somehow – figure out how
• Have stupid ideas and follow them up – like making a Marabou puppet

1) Setting the context.

A couple of projects where I’ve been an instrumental part of the Content Strategy process include:
Working with Fortune Cookie and Fitness First on setting processes in place to audit, order, brand and write their content for their recent site re-juvenation.
On a smaller scale, giving the Ethical Tea Partnership everything they needed to write their own content and track the QA process successfully.

2) Let’s imagine that your online presence is a living, breathing thing. Like a dog.

Whether you’re a big company or a small company, or a one-man band, your dog needs ongoing care and attention. If you’re thinking of owning a dog, you’re going to have to put some serious thought into who’s going to look after it. You need a plan.

3) Prevention is less expensive than cure.

What can go wrong if you don’t have a strategy?

• It eats £1000s of your money and demands lots of your time
• It’s untrained and badly groomed
• It sits lifelessly and ignored in the back garden
• No-one wants to take responsibility for looking after it

Around 80% of the websites that design agencies and designers put out there don’t have any kind of content strategy. Replacing Lorem Ipsum with copy from a brochure is worse than feeding a dog on cat food. It’s a website killer.

4) How to innoculate an online presence from typical diseases.

The very best way to prevent these problems is to put your audience, their context and your content first. Build your content around your audience and their context, then build your website/ web presence around your content.

It’s all about being relevant to the person reading, at the time of them reading, in the place they’re reading, on the device they’re reading it.

5) What is content?

It’s way more than just copywriting.

Content can consist of your information architecture, user generated content, things people have written about you, it can be dynamic news, tweets, blogs, guides, pictures and even data. Even train times, bus times and ebay entries are content. This means that there’s a lot to take stock of – time to do an audit and think about how you want to curate this stuff. How are you going to make it most useful to people?

Just to repeat. It’s all about Relevance.

6) Let’s not get excited and start making stuff yet.

To start building a website without taking stock of your content is like buying a dog just for Christmas. You’ve got to get strategic (think pet training, kennels, walking rota), otherwise it’s going to be a pedigree website that’s dead in the water – no-one wants that.

So the next few points take us, step by step, through a very basic content strategy process.

7) Who is responsible?

You need someone to be an anchor for the process. You need:

• A single person who has sign-off
• A single person for editing
• A single person to keep momentum
• A single person who asks ‘why’

This person will be in control of your brand image, have a handle on the Style Guide, hold the reigns on the SEO enthusiasts and make sure it all ‘fits with the plan’.

8 ) Establish your objectives (You need to look at the slide that has the graph on it for this one – it’s adapted from Adaptive Path)

It might be easier to reach some of your objectives that are most important to you than others, but some of them might be more do-able than others. You need to work out which ones are most important and do-able.

This is an important prioritisation exercise that needs to happen when you first decide to embark on any web project. Hand these objectives to your anchor person and don’t let her let you forget them.

Examples: You want your website to take away phone enquiries (maybe with an FAQ?) or you want volunteers to feel a stronger sense of community (with blog posts about their good work?).

9) Audit and research

This is the greatest antidote to future shoehorning issues and other great common money-sucking disasters.

• Take a look at what you’ve got already/ what is successful?
• Is it good enough to re-use? Really?
• Check it against your mantra – Is it relevant to the audience in their context?
• Go out and speak to your audiences. What do they want from you?
• Look at their behaviour. How can their online behaviour complement what they already do?
• What do they need?
• What is their current perception of your brand?

10) and 11) Branding and Messaging

Well… I could go on about this until the cows return to the milking shed. There are lots of activities you can do to nail down what your brand is about. Of course I’d be happy to share them with you but you’ll have to ask me for them. For starters you need to work out:

• Your elevator pitch
• Your basic values (try to be a little more specific than Trustworthy, Accountable, Innovative ….we all are)
• Your personality traits (If you were a character on stage, how would you be?)
• Your brand promise (what would you want to be known for when all is said and done and the world was coming to an end? Think Steve Jobs)
• Your messaging and your benefits

12) Workflow

There is no end to your content production and maintenance. You need to keep it alive and keep looking after it. You therefore need to have:

• A schedule
• A Quality Assurance process
• An editorial policy
• Someone who organises the more dynamic content and keeps it fresh (to schedule)
• A strategy to stick to and morph as you go along
• Did I mention that it’s a bit of a chicken and egg thing?

So there we are. Content strategy, it never really ends. That’s the good news.

I hope that was useful. It was great to have the chance to talk about basic Content Strategy to the WP audience, but got the feeling I was preaching to converted for quite a few members of the audience already.

If you’ve got ways and means to convince the unconverted, I’d love to hear from you. Comments gratefully received. Thanks.

It was an honour to be given the opportunity to talk to the members of the Brighton Chamber of Commerce at Terre a Terre this morning. I was asked to give an overview of the virtues of collaboration and of working in a collaborative environment like The Skiff or The Werks. It was quite a gallop to get through all the things I wanted to say in 15 minutes so here are the notes from my talk.

Actually, The Chamber itself is a really, really good example of collaboration whose teams of volunteers work together with amazing momentum.

1. The Copy House and other collaborative projects

A couple of examples of collaborative projects I’ve been involved with of late:

• The Copy House UNISON project this year: Working with people who are theoretically sometimes my competitors and learning huge amounts from working with them.
• Working with a team of helpers making puppets for White Night and teaching what I know (which is not *all* that much) about making life-size puppets.

2. About Collaboration

Since I’ve been working in the digital industry world I’ve had this quote from Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita) rattling around my head as a metaphor for explaining how we collaborate.

“Does there not exist a high ridge where the mountainside of scientific knowledge joins the opposite slope of the artistic imagination?” (Review of Audubon’s Butterflies)

To me, this is how collaboration works, we’re all climbing our specialist sides of a mountain, sometimes we have to help each other out and cross over. When we get to the top, we’ve achieved something greater than the sum of our parts.

A bit of history: The coworking movement was spawned in San Francisco and has grown ever more popular over the last 5 years. It places emphasis on small businesses working together, helping each other out and sharing skills.

Some of the benefits of collaborating include:

• Getting stuff done for free
• Going out on a limb to develop entirely new products, services or skills
• Learning new skills, even from competitors
• Interesting experiments

3. What breed is your collaboration?

Skillswaps: Where you exchange skills rather than money. It’s important to be clear on the value of the exchange up front.
Testing ground: I once tried out new Brand Workshop skills on the VGROUP design team.
Learning exchange: I’m teaching people how to make puppets that I’ll be using for a performance.
Paid collaboration: Forming a team that pitches for a piece of work. This is becoming more and more commonplace.
Alchemy: Experimenting cross-disciplines to develop something new like a product or service.

4. Get inspired

Get in a room with cookies and food and talk it over – think about your wildest dreams.

• Look at stuff online, do some brainstorming and research
• Make a mood board
• Make a mind map
• Go on a field trip

5. What’s in it for you?

Make sure you’re always honest. Make an actual time commitment in your diary. Make sure you’re happy to do the work and don’t overpromise.

Think about what the fruits of your work will be. What’s at the top of that mountain? Will it be money? Will it be job satisfaction?

6. Manage expectations / For the love of ownership

• Make sure people know what they’re getting and what level of commitment they are capable of giving. How long can they help for and how best can you use their skills? Build on people’s motivations and let them go off on one if that’s fruitful for them.
• Have a silent back up plan – particularly if it’s a voluntary collaboration.
• You may need to reign it in eventually – but collaboration is a great testing ground for creative ideas.

8. Motivation, motivation, cookies.

One of the single greatest tools of project management is food. Sharing food is a great way to keep a voluntary group together physically. It means having regular in-person meetings and gives you the opportunity to be honest about how you feel about the project. It’s a great way to bond.

9. Momentum

Keeping momentum is about regular communication, giving praise and spotting stagnation. Giving the people the opportunity to be honest.

10. Feel goood

Collaboration usually happens as an extra-curricular activity to work. It’s not about work as such, it’s about quality of life, building skills, bonding and community. In this way it needs to be something that’s worth doing and that collaborators look forward to doing.

11. Small bites, big pleasure.

Try to keep it simple, stay away from being overly ambitious and take baby steps to make sure you work well together.

12. All’s well that ends well

When you’re done, make the most of your achievement. Blog about it, tweet about it (I’m @eldevri on twitter) or just go out for dinner with the team to say thank you.

Good luck with your future collaborations. I’ll look forward to hearing your feedback on the talk or on these notes. Thank you for coming along if you were there.

Content: Brochure copywriting.

What happened: The Grand Hotel marketing team asked us to write enticing copy for their Christmas brochure. The copy needed to be evocative and inviting to a large audience range, from families to business clients.

What they loved:

Being able to leave the task in our hands without fuss, or too many questions. We just got the job done with creativity, on budget and to a very tight deadline.

They will be working with us again in the future for all adhoc communications and brochures.

What we love:

Working such a landmark local brand. The De Vere Grand Hotel is known as the Ritz of Brighton by some, so it was an opportunity to write copy with taste, class and a touch of the exquisite.

Content strategy and editor: Ellen de Vries

What: Brand language development, tone of voice, content strategy training, copywriting training, copy editing.

Subjects: Lifestyle, fitness.

Content: Brand book, style guide, content strategy tools, copywriting guide, campaign language pool.

What happened: With a series of workshops we got to the bottom of what the Fitness First brand language is – and how it manifests in relation to its visual brand.

We created a series of branding and training materials for use in all branches of Fitness First in the UK, with future impact on global brand language and future campaigns. We also worked closely with the team to develop a content strategy to monitor all dynamic content.

The head of the marketing department received copywriting training, IA support and was given training in how to use the materials.

What they loved:

‘This is so great. I’m gonna keep the brand language book in my hand luggage and show it to the CMO on the way to Australia’

They loved seeing evidence of how the shift in the tone of voice could have such an impact. The shift meant that the tone was much more motivating and personal, speaking directly to the audience.

They loved being given all the tools to take care of the copy themselves, and to learn skills that they could use again and again in the future.
What we loved: Working with a global brand with so much energy and enthusiasm for their project. It was very satisfying to be able to show such clear results with the new tone of voice, and give clarity to such a potentially complex content strategy process.

Working with Fortune Cookie is more than satisfying as they are the most thorough, scientific and pragmatic agency I have worked with when it comes to UX and web building. They do things properly, and it’s great to be a part of that.

What: Content strategy training, copywriting training, copy editing and polishing.

Subjects: Third sector, training, agriculture, sustainability, specialist.

Content: Information architecture, tools for content strategy and website copy.

What happened: Working closely with the marketing department we developed a clear structure for the website copy. With two copy training workshops Jon was up and running, ready to write his own copy. We offered continuous support, as well as editing the copy he produced on a regular basis.

What they loved: They loved being given all the tools to take care of the copy themselves, and to learn skills that they could use again and again in the future. The Copy House support helped them do this efficiently.

What we loved: Working with such an interesting all-inclusive company that promotes sustainability on the ground is very much our cup of tea. We love the opportunity to give the right tools and skills to those who want to write the copy themselves. An inspiring project.

The brand language consultant and writer: Ellen de Vries

What happened: With research, a survey and a series of creative hands-on exercises, I worked closely with VGROUP to develop their brand story.

What they loved:

Bringing someone else in to help them workshop their brand values meant that they could gain objectivity.

They now have clear core values that the team identify with. They use this set of values to underpin everything they do.

They loved the creativity and hands-on nature of the process.

What we loved:

This was a great opportunity to work on branding and build a close relationship with a highly established and talented design and branding team. The project was educational. It allowed lots of room for experimentation with new techniques for drawing out the best in teams.

Brand language and writing: Ellen de Vries and Annie Corbett

Subjects: Education, Medical

What happened: We gave the Brighton and Sussex Medical school a clearly defined tone of voice. Working to a tight deadline we also produced website copy for the new site launch. The whole project was completed in under 15 days from start to finish.

What they loved:

On-time delivery.

Thorough project management with pragmatic processes.

Brand language activities really helped us determine exactly how the tone of voice should convey the Medical school.

How the team kept up the momentum with great communication.
What we loved:

Working with such an inspiring, communicative and thorough client. We learned a lot about the inner workings of a medical school.

We’re inspired to apply to become doctors now!

The brand language consultant and writer: Ellen de Vries

What: Rejuvenating print communications (brochures and mail outs) with a fresh tone of voice to be more appealing to members.

What happened: Ellen de Vries worked closely with the design team at Harrison to give Freedom Food a much friendlier, fresh and welcoming tone of voice in their membership documentation.

Their experience:

They loved the new fresh-feel tone of voice and the on-time, on budget delivery. Being able to work close at hand and with the client directly when questions arose.

Our experience:

We’re proud to be working with a client that understands the value of clearly ordered copy and how the copy can make even the driest of processes feel much more friendly.

The brand language consultant and writer: Ellen de Vries

What: Workshopping new brand concept, copy for print and brochures, message maps, website edit and polishing, concept development, tone of voice.

What happened: Ellen de Vries worked closely with the communications and accounts managers as well as three designers on the NEO creative team to develop the concepts and message maps. Ellen then edited the web copy for migration according to the new style guides that had been produced.

Their experience:

“The Copy House provided great support – creating fantastic concepts, copy and strategic input across a diverse range of jobs – all to budget and on-time.” Nick Christoforou, NEO Creative.

Our experience:

We loved working with such a professional team of designers who engaged fully in the brand language workshop as a basis for the visual direction.

We also loved working for such a good cause, giving it new life and helping it stand out in such a fiercely competitive market.