Mobile Portland and Content Strategy Portland (@CS_PDX) had a joint event last night featuring UX and Content Strategy expert Karen McGrane. The sold out event over at the beautiful Urban Airship space in Portland, Oregon last night marked the second Content Strategy Portland event this month.

After some snacks and beer, McGrane kicked off her talk, even after speaking at a whole tour of events throughout the day in Portland.

That’s some dedication. Portland appreciates it!

McGrane emphasizes that, for many people, mobile IS the internet. This number looks like it will only grow. As mobile phone use and mobile internet access for people increase, there’s a mission to do mobile right– right from the start.

McGrane briefly discussed disruptive innovation: the practice of giving technology, service, or goods access to markets that never had any before. She used examples of technology over the last three decades and how each new player disrupted and trumped the old.

It may be an inferior product or service to major players, but the fact that it empowers an underserved, growing market makes it superior.

McGrane’s emphasis on disruptive technologies isn’t just a acknowledgement of mobile growth, but is also a battle cry that we can disrupt common content publishing and governance methodologies. The state of mobile publishing and content maintenance is horrid, where according to McGrane, roughly 16% of brands have a mobile strategy. This leaves a majority of organizations with a huge opportunity to improve not just their mobile content, but the way they publish and govern content in general.

An investment into content strategy, for mobile or as a whole, means your brand or organization can improve its methodology of teaching, supporting, informing your audiences via rich, meaningful content. This drives understanding, empowerment, and loyalty. Who doesn’t want that?

McGrane's three big takeaways:

If you want to take steps toward improving the state of content at your organization, McGrane recommends the following:

Know the content workflow. Map out responsibilities, understand the processes that go into content creation and maintenance, and eliminate practices that take away from this mission. Things like forking content or loose CMS/publishing policies need to go.

Write better. Acknowledge that there’s no such thing as writing better for a particular platform. Just learn how or empower your team to write better. There are plenty of resources out there to help with this cause.

Structure your content. Channel your inner Rahel Bailie and start typing and modeling content to adapt to different scenarios. Truncating isn’t a solution. We need to create chunking methods and new content schemas so our audiences can consume ALL of the content that they need, however they need to. It’s not a battle between desktop users or mobile users– it’s just serving your users. Serve them all with the same love and attention.

Okay. Now we can build our mobile/desktop content. Let’s do this.

McGrane reminds us that disruptive technology eventually gets good. Or, the brand or entity redefines what good means for that market. That said, let’s disrupt the way we currently do content and do mobile, and the whole thing, right.

Big thanks to the @CS_PDX crew for making this happen. The next Content Strategy Portland event is June 13th, 6PM over at ISITE Design in NW Portland. See you there.