The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [20]
This can be every bit as interpersonally fiddly as it sounds, but it’s a learnable skill. A few things to keep in mind:
Acting as a user advocate doesn’t make you an impractical idealist. As we’ve learned from our editorial colleagues, if your content doesn’t work for the user, you’ve already failed. User advocacy is simply a way of ensuring that a project achieves business goals.
The personas or other user proxies that you or your colleagues have created are the best backup you could hope for. Return to these tools when you need to validate opinions—yours or someone else’s.
It’s very easy for content specialists to be drawn into internal conflicts. Don’t let it happen.
Content strategists must also act as advocates for content, which is a slightly different proposition. Whenever someone proposes a new feature or a major change in plan, you need to (tactfully) discover the content requirements that accompany that decision and determine whether or not they’re realistic.
Project Definition
Whether you’re working as a consultant or doing an in-house project, anything bigger than routine publishing and maintenance needs a project definition phase. On very large projects, such a phase might take months. For a small in-house revamp project, it might take fifteen minutes. What matters is that you take the time to clarify what the project is meant to accomplish—and to make sure that everyone who needs to agree on that point, does.
What are we doing and why?
For consultants, project definition usually begins with an RFP (“request for proposal”) or other initiating document from the client. Content work can’t be divorced from business goals, so content people need to know as much as possible about the client’s understanding of their goals. If you’re coming in after the contract has been signed, always ask to see these documents and any proposals created in response to them, and make sure content strategy is represented at internal and client kick-off meetings.
Complex projects usually require the preparation of a creative brief or communication brief or project summary: a document that clearly explains what your team is expected to do. If you want the project to go smoothly, make sure you contribute to this document so that content needs are integrated from the beginning.
If you’re on an internal team, you probably won’t see anything as formal as an RFP and proposal, but don’t neglect project definition. Internal projects are notoriously difficult to pin down, and if the goals and requirements of your decision-makers are allowed to remain nebulous, the project will suffer later on.
Meet the stakeholders
Whether you’re a consultant or on staff, you’ll want to conduct (or observe) stakeholder research.
Stakeholders are the people on the client side who are responsible for or strongly interested in a project’s success. On a large project, stakeholders will probably include executives, department or team leaders, and the internal staff members who work most closely with content or with the website on the whole. On a small project, you may need to conduct only a handful of stakeholder interviews; on a very large project for a big organization, you may need several dozen.
Planning stakeholder interviews—and becoming a good interviewer in general—requires thought and experience. It’s a skill worth learning, even if you plan to piggyback your work on research conducted by others, because no matter how good your initial interview plan is, you’ll almost certainly need to ask follow-up questions once the project is underway.
Once you’ve scooped up all the information you can from RFPs, proposals, kickoff meetings, and stakeholder interviews, it’s time to distill it into something you can use.