2015 SEMpdx SearchFest Keynote Interview: Jonathon Colman

Jonathon Colman will be giving the afternoon keynote at SearchFest 2015 which will take place Friday, February 27, 2015 in Portland Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.

Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I’m a content strategist at Facebook—that means I plan, structure, and improve content experiences for people so that things make sense and are easy to use. It’s a user experience role focused on language, information architecture, and information design. Put simply, my goal is to make sure that you can achieve your goals whenever you use Facebook.

In particular, I work on interfaces that help people search on Facebook and also manage a team that works on payments, commerce, and developer products. If you’ve bought ads on Facebook, sold anything in a group, logged into an app with Facebook, or built your own app using our platform APIs, then you’ve probably seen our work—and please let me know if you have feedback!

Previously, I was the principal experience architect at REI, where I focused on search, taxonomy, and content management. Before that, I was REI’s first SEO and built their agile marketing strategy for content while trying to connect the dots between web development and user experience. A few SearchFest veterans may remember some of my previous talks at SearchFest about these efforts.

But most people don’t know that I also worked for non-profits focused on environmental conservation for nearly a decade. I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer working on rural public health development in Burkina Faso, West Africa. I also traveled throughout Australia as part of a conservation fellowship in 2008.

So I’ve been around the block a bit. Like Tolkien wrote, “Not all those who wander are lost.”

Most people see “Content” as just stories, videos, etc. You view “Content” more expansively than that. Can you please elaborate?

I see content as being not just the words, not just the font, not just the layout or design. Content’s not just the structure, the code, the metadata or even the brand.

The way I see it, content’s everything—the entire system and experience. So to build a sustainable, successful content strategy requires skills and thinking in all of those areas (and more). Focusing on marketing is great, but it’s just part of the bigger picture. You also need to focus on the experience.

Crafting good experiences requires us to understand and have empathy for our audience, their situation, their needs, and goals. The best content experiences are pitched perfectly in the sweet spot, the nexus of all those human factors. I think you’ll find that it’s hard to get the word out about brands and products that aren’t useful and usable in the first place.

So what does a content strategist at Facebook actually do? What’s a typical day like?

Ha, there’s never a typical day at Facebook! And I know a lot of people are surprised that Facebook even has a content strategy team because Facebook is all user-generated content, right?

But if you look a bit closer, you’ll start to see things that aren’t created by the people using Facebook: menus, buttons, navigation, education, announcements, hierarchy, flows of interfaces, and a lot more. It turns out that there’s quite a bit of content that isn’t created by you or your friends—and this content embedded in the UI that helps guide you and sets the tone for your overall experience with Facebook.

That’s where the content strategy team comes in. We see language as an interface, but also as infrastructure that helps connect people, design, and systems. We strive to make things easy and work to earn the trust of the people using Facebook all around the world. The content experiences we create should give people context, help them make informed decisions, and help them succeed in their goals.

To accomplish all this, we must be simple, straightforward, and human in all of our design and communications. Those are the principles of Facebook’s voice, and they guide our work every day.

You talked about “crafting good experiences”. What’s the biggest mistake organizations make when they do this?

The biggest mistake you can make isn’t bad code or a poor design or a lack of metadata or even some arcane SEO gotcha.

It’s not an issue of length, or keywords, or headlines. It’s not including too many or too few social buttons or commenting options. It’s not even a failure of empathy—although that would be a huge failure, to be sure.

It’s a failure to be useful, to provide actual value and solve problems.

You can get all the tactics right, all the tools set up and systems in order, and use lots of data alongside plenty of research. But if you don’t actually meet people’s needs and provide value, then what’s the point?

Start with empathy. Continue with utility. Improve with analysis. Optimize with love.