The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [1]
“Basic Principles” lays out our discipline’s shared values.
“The Craft of Content Strategy” explores the collected expertise of the fields that have contributed the most to our work.
“Tools and Techniques” provides a brisk walkthrough of approaches, methods, and deliverables used in the daily practice of content strategy.
You might think of these pieces as a (very) brief handbook, an introduction to a panel of potential mentors, and the key to the supply cabinet. Begin wherever you wish and end where you please. In the back of the book are additional examples and resources. When you’re done here, please join the raucous online content conversation, if you haven’t already.
When I get stuck on a project or intimidated by a blank page, there are a handful of books I reach for to remind myself what my options are: what else to try, what criteria I should use to judge my work, and how I might think differently about the obstacles ahead. If this book can be such a reference for some of you, I’ll consider it a great success.
Onward.
IN CONTENT STRATEGY, there is no playbook of generic strategies you can pick from to assemble a plan for your client or project. Instead, our discipline rests on a series of core principles about what makes content effective—what makes it work, what makes it good. The first section of this book is organized around these fundamentals.
Good Content is Appropriate
Publish content that is right for the user and for the business
There’s really only one central principle of good content: it should be appropriate for your business, for your users, and for its context. Appropriate in its method of delivery, in its style and structure, and above all in its substance. Content strategy is the practice of determining what each of those things means for your project—and how to get there from where you are now.
Right for the user (and context)
Let us meditate for a moment on James Bond. Clever and tough as he is, he’d be mincemeat a hundred times over if not for the hyper-competent support team that stands behind him. When he needs to chase a villain, the team summons an Aston Martin DB 5. When he’s poisoned by a beautiful woman with dubious connections, the team offers the antidote in a spring-loaded, space-age infusion device. When he emerges from a swamp overrun with trained alligators, it offers a shower, a shave, and a perfectly tailored suit. It does not talk down to him or waste his time. It anticipates his needs, but does not offer him everything he might ever need, all the time.
Content is appropriate for users when it helps them accomplish their goals.
Content is perfectly appropriate for users when it makes them feel like geniuses on critically important missions, offering them precisely what they need, exactly when they need it, and in just the right form. All of this requires that you get pretty deeply into your users’ heads, if not their tailoring specifications.
Part of this mind-reading act involves context, which encompasses quite a lot more than just access methods, or even a fine-grained understanding of user goals. Content strategist Daniel Eizans has suggested that a meaningful analysis of a user’s context requires not only an understanding of users’ goals, but also of their behaviors: What are they doing? How are they feeling? What are they capable of? (FIG 1)
FIG 1: The user’s context includes actions, constraints, emotions, cognitive conditions, and more. And that in turn affects the ways in which the user interacts with content. (“Personal-Behavioral Context: The New User Persona.” © Daniel Eizans, 2010. Modified from a diagram by Andrew Hinton. http://bkaprt.com/cs/1/)1
It’s a sensible notion. When I call the emergency room on a weekend, my context is likely to be