The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [14]
Channels differ
In the marketing world, “delivery channels” used to mean “ways of distributing actual products.” Now it means about six different things, so let’s be clear. When I say “distribution channel” and “channel strategy,” I’m talking about the method of getting content to its intended audience. Methods like:
“The website”—what you think of when you imagine a corporation’s main website
Sites aimed at subsets of the main audience (microsites, topical sites) or specific regions (often in translation or with content created for local audiences)
Blogs, whether or not they live within another site
Newsletters
Social communication channels (Facebook, Twitter, and their hundred million friends)
Webcasts, podcasts, and video series
Online magazines
Mobile applications
Third-party applications, publications, and sites
Downloadable text-based content like whitepapers, ebooks, and special reports
And channel strategy? That’s the part where you use all the things you’ve learned about your users and your business goals to figure out the best way of getting your content to your humans. Marketing people have been thinking about this for a long time, and have a lot to teach about it.
Note: You may have noticed that I don’t really talk about “web content” in this book. That’s because the web is just one piece of the online content world, and “web” vs. “not web” isn’t an especially useful way to think about distribution. “We’ll put it on the web” isn’t a very helpful distribution plan—much less useful than “this would be a good thing to summarize in the blog, publish as a full-length article on an external website, and mention in our newsletter and social media channels,” or “this piece can be a video podcast, with segment-specific cross-promotion on other channels.”
Influence #4: The (Info) Scientist
Information scientists come in many flavors. Some of them are librarians, archivists, data analysts, informaticians, digital curators, and other info-slingers with a very wide range of titles. They have one thing in common, which is that they work on ways of effectively storing, retrieving, and disseminating information.
If your native approach comes from editorial or marketing work, prop your eyelids open, because this matters for you. Here’s why: information science gave us much of what has turned into the modern practice of information architecture, which is what saves our slaved-over and expensive content from dissolving into a formless puddle of goo.
Information architecture
Information architecture is the design of structures for information, including navigational structures and content taxonomies. The people who do this work strive to bring order to chaos and build structures that help users find what they’re looking for and accomplish the tasks they set out to do. They create marvelous items like wireframes, site maps, page diagrams, and user flows, and often also do enormous amounts of user research beforehand.
If you’re working with an information architect, you may not need to concern yourself with the details of structural design except in areas where content strategy and information architecture overlap. Navigation labels and taxonomies are one obvious conjunction, particularly for content strategists with an editorial background. Detailed wireframes can bring together structural thinking with actual content—or at least, very good example content—long before visual design begins, thus giving both the information architect and the content strategist time to discover gaps and potential conflicts. Beyond specific deliverables, though, even more interesting collaborations are possible. Design often requires input from content people and programmers as well as information architects; content management system specifications can likewise benefit from this input.
Of course, if you’re not working with an IA, but you are involved in a serious site-building or redesign project, you may have to be the IA as well as the content specialist. And while