Sep 14 2016

September Coffee and Chat

Join RVA Content Strategy for our monthly coffee and chat series.

For September, our host is James Shea of C3 Media Lab. He'll be leading a discussion about how to think like a journalist and use journalism best practices to create effective, engaging digital content.

About James

James is an award-winning journalist and web marketing professional. For more than ten years, he worked as a newspaper journalist. James has a knack for turning complex topics into simple, easy-to-understand prose. In 2014, he left the media world and started C3 Media Lab, a web marketing and content writing company where he helps his clients find better ways to communicate--and grow their business.

May 17 2016

The Secret to Designing Understandable, Usable Products

When we build a product or launch a service, we’re united by a common mission: make it easier for someone to do something. But, sometimes, things don’t quite gel with the user.

“I can’t find what I need!”

“What’s that mean?”

“I don’t understand.” 

Typically, usability is pegged as the culprit of these problems. But, usability problems are often understand-ability problems in disguise.

Imagine if information could feel like a personalized conversation, removing the ambiguity that causes users’ confusion and frustration.

You can do that, and content-first design is the way. In this talk, Alicia will share how designing the content first and then creating the structure can help. A content-first approach can help you nail down the natural language, use cases, and contextual relevance before you address structure and design. Ultimately, content-first design can help your team reduce unnecessary delays and rework and create a product people will want (and actually be able) to use.

About Alicia 

Alicia Lane is a UX Content Strategist at Capital One. On a typical day, you’ll find her helping product teams find the human language for a feature they’re building, conducting empathy interviews, running content tests, or mapping a customer’s experience. She does all of this with the goal of designing experiences to feel like personalized conversations. Alicia is also a co-founder of RVA Content Strategy. She loves green smoothies, gardening, and her cats.

Jun 21 2016

Content Marketing Hot Seat: Stump the Expert

Content marketing seems like a straightforward concept, but as they say - the devil is in the details.

While we haven’t got Beelzebub, but we do have an expert ready to shed light on your toughest questions. June’s workshop will be led by Jeffrey L. Cohen, the Director of Content Strategy at Oracle Marketing Cloud (so he knows a few things).

Jeff will be sitting in the hot seat to help solve your problems. Bring your hardest content questions and challenges that you need help with. They can be about strategy, creation, goals, metrics, tools, or whatever obstacle is getting in your way.

But be warned! This is an advanced session, so key takeaways will be very specific to the questions and audience.

About Jeff

As Director of Content Strategy at Oracle Marketing Cloud, Jeff oversees an award-winning corporate blog and the production of award-winning content campaigns with an unwavering focus on driving MQLs. He previously led the content marketing team at Salesforce.com. He’s also the co-author of The B2B Social Media Book, in addition to the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of leading marketing blog SocialMediaB2B.com, that, at its peak (#61 in the world), regularly beat MarketingProfs, Eloqua, Marketo, and Forrester blogs in the worldwide marketing blog rankings.

Jun 08 2016

June Coffee and Chat

Come on out to our monthly coffee and networking event. Bring a work question (what happens at RVA Content Strategy, stays at RVA Content Strategy), bring an interesting article, bring a friend. We look forward to seeing you!

Please get to ShoreDog by 7:30 to order food and drinks. We'll kick off at 8:00 sharp.

May 04 2016

May Coffee and Chat

Join RVA Content Strategy for our monthly coffee and chat. Content strategists and friends of contest strategists welcome.

Please get to ShoreDog by 7:30 to order food and network. We'll kick things off at 8:00 sharp.

Apr 20 2016

Workshop: Using Cards Against Humanity to Find Tone and Voice

"We want to be (insert trendy adjective du jour here)!" 

We've all heard that exclamation before, whether from clients or internal stakeholders. And they use adjectives like disruptive, edgy, or authentic without context. You nod and smile, then die a little inside knowing you'll just turn around the same corporate content as everyone else.

Fear not! Tone and voice can be distinctive if you just find out what those fluffy buzzwords mean to your stakeholder.

We're going to dive into how you can use unconventional tools like Cards Against Humanity (or Apples to Apples if you're afraid of HR) to suss out words and language that allow you to create a unique tone for a brand. Content strategist Emily Jasper will present how her team used Cards Against Humanity to build an Edginess Scale for Verizon FiOS.

You'll get a chance to learn how to use the cards, how to document the process so people don't think you're avoiding work, and ways to codify your findings into governance documents for future content development.

Many thanks to Workshop Digital for the location for this month's workshop!

Apr 06 2016

April Coffee and Chat

Happy spring! Join RVA Content Strategy for our monthly coffee and chat. Content strategists and friends of contest strategists welcome.

Please get to ShoreDog by 7:30 to order food. We'll get started promptly at 8:00.

Mar 23 2016

Workshop: Conversation Tracker

We are humans building products for humans. What we say and how we say it matters. How we make our customers feel through our language choices matter. Amy Thibodeau

Whether your product is a landing page, an app, or an online campaign, words matter. They have the power to help someone complete a task and feel like it was a piece of cakeor make someone bury their head in their hands in pure and utter frustration

So, how do you find the words that speak the customers' language?

We'd like to show you Conversation Tracker. In this workshop led by Rich Denzler, a UX Content Strategist at Capital One, you'll explore how, when, and who to use Conversation Tracker with.

Plus, bring your real-world content questions to the table and we'll use Conversation Tracker to explore different language to use.

Many thanks to Fahrenheit IT for the location for this month's workshop!

Mar 09 2016

March Coffee and Chat

Join RVA Content Strategy for our monthly coffee and chat. Meet other content strategists (and friends of content strategists), talk shop, ask questions, get help, and enjoy tasty drinks and eats.

Please get to ShoreDog by 7:30 to order food. We'll get started promptly at 8:00.

Feb 24 2016

February Coffee and Chat

At this month's coffee and chat, we'll be discussing what content strategy means to different businesses and organizations. We'll dive into how different content strategy teams are set up, challenges we all face, and things we're proud to have achieved (or want to achieve!).

Content is King.