The Best Metric for Your Content

Content Audits Demystified

To my great surprise and amusement, my professor acknowledged today that my classmates and I are essentially drinking out of fire hoses. My team has a sizable content audit and strategy due at the end of the course. We started the project with only general knowledge of the process. Thus, this week’s learning materials clarified a lot.

This week’s video lecture gave an overview of the three steps of the assessment process:

1. Content inventory
2. Quantitative content audit
3. Qualitative content audit

Suddenly, questions and answers that had been forming in my subconscious since last week came into focus. How do we make a giant corpus of content manageable? Categorize items by asset and choose which asset aligns most with company goals. What do qualitative audits provide that quantitative audits can’t? Evidence-based judgement. Which qualities are the most important? KPIs, by definition. Key Performance Indicators.

The corpus is still staggeringly large, but I have a strategy for processing it now. This makes me calm.

Quality and Productivity

Episode 123 of the Cherryleaf Podcast discusses what gives content its quality. It gives examples of lists of criteria that ensure quality content. The episode also implies that you could expand on any of the concepts and lists for more precision. Eventually, though, time, budget, and other constraints will prevent you from adding to the list endlessly.

Limiting your list determines the trajectory of the project. The post Technical Communication Metrics from the I’d Rather Be Writing blog gives a whole host of insight into how to choose the right metric (criterium) for a technical writer.

Here’s the caveat: since technical writing is part art, it can be hard to quantify. This can be frustrating to other professionals in business settings whose fields revolve around metrics. Sometimes it leaves technical writers in a tailspin for defending our usefulness, especially to people who don’t have a good grasp of what we do. (See my post Introduction to Content Strategy for more thoughts on self-advocating as a technical writer.)

The reality is, we can’t rely on a single metric for productivity or quality. People have made dizzying algorithms composed of multiple metrics trying to quantify productivity for technical writers, but none of them answer the question completely. I think the key here is to keep the two seemingly opposing ideas of productivity and quality in tension with each other. They might seem opposing since quality takes time. However, refuse to fall into binary thinking in which the two cannot coexist. I’m not proposing an algorithm but a mindset.

However, productivity and time don’t always have to be in perfect equilibrium. To determine what kind of balance to strike, I recommend tracking your company’s main needs. If your company is populating a new website with staff-written blog posts, then posts per unit of time should be the priority. Quality is still important but keep the main thing the main thing. This method, aligning with company goals, has two potential advantages:

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1) Successful self-advocating and company approval. The company sees that you have studied its goals and have a plan for making them happen.

2) More revenue for the company.

Technical “Writing”

This week’s learning materials reminded me that technical writers only spend about 10% of their time writing. The other time seems to be 45% meta strategizing and 45% evaluating other people’s writing.

Even so, I think I will be just fine. Years ago, I took informal “brain tests” to see which cerebral hemisphere I use more often. The left hemisphere processes logic and language. The right hemisphere processes creativity and extralinguistic elements. Turns out that I use both hemispheres almost equally. These insights guided me to a field that walks the line between art and science. And I love it.