The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [29]
The inside perspective
Those who do content strategy work from within organizations tend to fill roles quite similar to those of a traditional managing editor: they plan and oversee the communication of new themes and ideas, manage schedules, and collaborate with writers and other content producers. As importantly, they also work alongside designers, programmers, project managers, business managers, marketing teams, senior executives, human resources departments, event planners, and a horde of other stakeholders and fellow travelers to get content produced, revised, approved, and published—and to see to it that it’s regularly evaluated and eventually revised or removed.
Common content management tasks include:
Regularly scheduled editorial reviews of all content
Ongoing traffic and findability analysis
Community moderation and oversight, including comment-wrangling and social media interactions
Editorial planning sessions to define changes in theme and to introduce new campaigns
Ongoing translation and localization efforts
As more organizations realize that they must think of themselves as publishers, the world of ongoing internal editorial leadership is becoming ever more integrated into the practice of content strategy—something which can only enhance both disciplines.
A word on assessment
Within content strategy, the practice of ongoing assessment and refinement of content is just beginning to blossom. The next few years are certain to bring us dozens of new techniques and methods that will rapidly become standard practice.
We could all do much worse than to begin with the three whole chapters about evaluation and refinement in Colleen Jones’s Clout (it’s like Christmas, I tell you) and with the Peterson books recommended in Chapter 2 (Web Analytics Demystified and The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators).
1. Halvorson, Content Strategy for the Web, 89. [↵]
2. The long URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboencabulator [↵]
In Conclusion
I began the first section of this book by noting that our discipline has no playbook from which “content strategies” can be selected. Which is too bad, because that would be much easier. What we have instead is a collection of principles, goals, approaches, and tools.
It might be useful to think of these pieces as the axons and synapses and other physical structures of the brain. The chemical and electrical impulses that make up our thoughts zoom along and hop between these structures; they aren’t the structures themselves. In the same way, the values, approaches, and processes in this book are not “content strategy.” Content strategy is what happens in the spaces between.
Where we’re headed
Ten years ago, most “content” was either published using traditional print communication processes, or created by web writing pioneers and the first generation of specialist web editors.
Today, a slippage has unsettled these categories. Content is published on the web, in print, across multi-channel social networking systems, and in smartphone applications. And it’s made and managed by people from a very wide range of backgrounds, from copywriters to data wranglers.
I predict that as the ways in which we communicate continue to evolve, the distinction between organizational communication strategy, company-wide information management, and content strategy will blur and disappear. And as this happens, our processes and tools will necessarily evolve to meet the changing needs of our clients and to serve the new shape of content itself. And from here, we can’t quite see what that will mean.
If you’re reading this book, you’re probably part of that uncertain future. And you’ll