Be a FOCS!

Submitted by jill.gutterman@... on 11/04/2011 / 0 Comments

This post is for all the “FOCS”s out there – that’s “Friends Of Content Strategy” if you work at Facebook. I had the pleasure of recently attending “Going All In:Content Strategy at Facebook”—a MIMA 10th Annual Summit hosted by Facebook Content Strategist, Sarah Cancilla.  Many of you might be wondering what role a content strategist would have at acompany focused on user generated content (UGC). As Sarah explained, hacking isn’t just an activity, but a mindset applicable to programming and content alike.

Still relatively new to Facebook herself, Sarah took us through her journey in the land of the hackers, showing us how she helped demonstrate the value of content strategy in one of the fastest growing companies in the world. Here are some of my takeaways from her discussion:

Learn your audience and connect with them

From Sarah's over 10 years working in content strategy, she has built an amazing CS toolkit. But instead of using these traditional models, Sarah created a framework that would connect with her unique audience of engineers and developers. Spring boarding off of the culture, she came up with a cleaver way to communicate content tone using something everyone would understand - food. Connecting to them on a“digestible” level, Sarah broke messaging examples into simplified phrasescombined with a correlating potato product. Ask any of the FOCS’s at Facebook if the message should be “baked potato” or “chili cheese fries”, and they’ll totally understand you.

Take a risk on small changes; have a 6,000,000 positive impact

Never underestimate well-written instructional copy. In one of Sarah’s first efforts, she made a big impact by taking lengthy copy and breaking it down into more user-oriented action-focused messaging. This copy “tweak” resulted 6,000,000+ new Facebook users.  Too many times simplify the message --- is overlooked as part of the development process.

Influence through “Friends”and give rewards

One of the great things I took from Sarah is that influence can spread slow wave, but its speed can be boosted with freeshirts. Slowly, her growing team of five+ content strategists are creating FOCSs across the organization. Sarah and her team provide rewards for thosethat embrace content strategy – a new friend’s bounty is simple a shirt showing their pride and commitment. 

As a former engineering major, I’m always so envious of those that are skilled in simplifying messages and keeping true to a brand and tone. I want to thank Sarah for inspiring the content strategist in all of us!

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Jill Gutterman, MIMA Board of Director