Objective

Develop an understanding of content strategy from both a practitioner and client perspective.

Description

In this project, you will work in teams of two to conduct a content strategy analysis of a Tennessee county’s website. These counties include:

• Montgomery County
• Sumner County
• Sullivan County
• Wilson County
• Blount County
• Washington County
• Bradley County

This content strategy analysis will include:

• A series of deliverables based on research, both primary (from the client) and secondary (best practices) research.
• An analysis against that research and develop recommendations for your client, so they may improve their online presence.
• A plan document that describes how your client can put your recommendations into action over the course of a year.
• A presentation to deliver your findings.

The media channels that you might address are:

• A website
• Social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
• Media channels: YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.
• Mobile or Smartphone Apps

You may want to interact with people in this organization who can share information on the target audience, brand messages, etc.

Some of the topics you should cover in your strategy are:

• A Content Inventory
• How content is published
• The target audience.
• Appropriate distribution channels.
• Content creation guidelines and style guides.
• Content repurposing content across platforms
• Content lifecycle – creation, revision, retirement
• Users – authors, editors, publishers.
• Editorial Calendar for three months to include various types of content to be created for the web
• Staffing (will depend on size and budget)

Must be a presentable document (Microsoft Word or PDF) to give to the company and a short 5-10 screen highlights presentation that could be delivered to your client. You will present the client presentation in class.

Deliverables

Content Strategy Project Brief – 50 points

Describe the site you will analyze. The elements in your brief must include.

• Title page with the project name, document name, client name (if any), your name and contact information, and submission date.
• Website description
• Project Objectives
• Audience(s) – You may have primary and secondary audiences.

Use and modify this Project Brief template.

Upload the Microsoft Word document to the appropriate Dropbox in D2L. (Apple Pages and Adobe PDFs will not be accepted.)

Content Inventory (Quantitative analysis) – 100 points

Crawl your project site using Screaming Frog SEO Spider and export the data to a spreadsheet. The crawler will find the first 500 pages of the site. Review the content inventory instruction document to complete your inventory.

Follow the instructions on the Create a Content Inventory with Screaming Frog page.

Review your content inventory spreadsheet and find out the information below. You will have to sort various data columns in Excel to make it easier to take a count of the various data points. After your review, create an analysis document in Microsoft Word to include the following information.

• Pages
• Duplicate page titles
• Missing page titles
• Duplicate H1 tags
• Missing H1 tags
• Missing page meta tag descriptions
• Missing meta tag keywords
• Images
• Missing image ALT tags
• CSS files
• PDF documents
• Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
• Video files
• Audio files
• Unusual or unexpected files

Your document must have a title page with the project name, document name, your name and contact information, and submission date. You can use the title page of the Project Brief as an example.

Upload your Microsoft Excel file (or a Microsoft Word document with links to an online sheet such as Google Sheets) and the Microsoft Word inventory analysis report document to the appropriate Dropbox in D2L. (Apple Numbers or Pages and Adobe PDFs will not be accepted.)

Content Audit (Qualitative analysis) report – 100 points

Using the data from your content inventory complete the qualitative section of the template (the content audit) with information for the first 25 pages in your inventory.

Upload your Microsoft Excel file (or a Microsoft Word document with links to an online sheet such as Google Sheets) to the appropriate Dropbox in D2L. (Apple Numbers or Pages and Adobe PDFs will not be accepted.)

Content Strategy Analysis Report – 200 points

Create a document to describe the implications of the first 25 pages of your inventory, both positive and negative, and provide recommendations to correct the negative issues.

This report should include:

• A title page with the project name, document name, your name and contact information, and submission date.
• An executive summary
• An entry for each page that is analyzed.

Upload the Microsoft Word document to the appropriate Dropbox in D2L. (Apple Pages and Adobe PDFs will not be accepted.)

Analysis Report Presentation (50 points)

Deliver a 5-7 minute presentation outlining the key points of your Analysis Report. This should be the kind of presentation you would make to your client, so it is important that the key points are what is most important to them and not to you or me. A good rule of thumb is a maximum of 1 minute per slide. You may use an online service such as Prezi or Google Slides.

You do not need a slide with your name and/or the course name.

Upload your presentation file (Microsoft PowerPoint) or a Microsoft Word doc (Apple Pages and Adobe PDFs will not be accepted) with a link if using an online service such as Prezi or Google Slides, to the appropriate Dropbox in D2L.

Due Dates

• SEE Course Schedule

Each deliverable must be posted to your website and uploaded to d2L by 11:59 p.m. on the due date. Late assignments will not be graded and will receive a 0 grade.

Evaluation

• Content Strategy Project Brief – 50 points
• Content Inventory (Quantitative analysis) – 100 points
• Content Audit (Qualitative analysis) report – 150 points
• Content Strategy Analysis Report – 200 points

Points are awarded on the following criteria:

• Completeness of each deliverable
• Following assignment directions

The simplest way to get the most points is to follow ALL the directions.

Total points available: 500