The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [17]
Content specialists who work alongside user experience consultants or as a part of web development teams may need a methodology that works with marketing, educational, and technical content, and that accommodates on-site and off-site search, content taxonomies, CMS requirements development, and information architecture.
Whatever your situation or degree of specialization, you will need a methodology that supports the work you actually perform—and you’ll probably need to refine it from time to time to make sure it’s still appropriate. My own methodology is simple, and has emerged from my background as an online editorial strategist who usually works with user experience and web development teams. Although the deliverables and individual processes I use vary from project to project, all my work falls into three categories:
Evaluate
Design
Execute
This isn’t a chronology for each project—though each project will include all three phases—but a repeatable sequence to be followed in ways big and small throughout time-bounded projects and in the long-term maintenance of content.
Evaluation happens at the beginning of a project, and then again at the very end—and sometimes at the end of each phase. Research of all kinds falls under evaluation, as do usability testing and traffic analysis.
Design here doesn’t mean visual design. It includes high-level communication strategy and proposals for public-facing and back-end features related to content. It also includes the design of tactical plans for creating and revising content and the design of tools and processes for long-term management of content.
Execution refers to all the things we do to turn strategies into reality: writing and revising content, setting up publishing workflows, sourcing and aggregating content, and so on. Even on projects on which I’m not directly responsible for execution, I still create examples to illustrate recommendations, and this too is a form of execution.
Though you should feel free to use it, I don’t offer my own methodology as the One True Way, but as an example of a methodology optimized for performing certain kinds of content work.
And now, let’s take a look at the work itself.
The Things We Make
Before we dive in, a note about “deliverables”—those things we give or “deliver” to clients. It’s a ridiculous, clumsy word. Unfortunately, the circumlocutions required to get around it are awful, too, so I’m going to keep using it. And hey, it could be worse—at least our industry mostly avoids “work product.”
Here’s a completely non-comprehensive list of deliverables you might use while doing content strategy:
Accessibility guidelines
Benchmarks
Channel strategy
CMS requirements
Communication plans
Community and social strategy
Community moderation policies
Competitive analyses
Content production workshops
Content sourcing plans
Content style guides
Content templates
Editorial calendars
Example content
Feature descriptions
Gap analyses
Metadata recommendations
Project proposals
Publishing workflow
Qualitative content audit and findings
Quantitative content audit and findings
Resource review (people, tools, time)
Search-engine optimization reviews
Success metrics
Taxonomies
Traffic analysis
Usability tests
User personas
User research findings
User research plans
User scenarios
Visual presentation recommendations
Wireframes
Workflow recommendations
With one exception, I will offer overviews of documents and processes, rather than detailed instructions. You can find references for many of these documents at http://incisive.nu/elements. One lovely thing about being such a chatty discipline is that someone, somewhere is probably writing a blog post right this minute about whatever you might want to know.
The content strategist’s