The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [8]
Finally, a word on working with storytellers.
One of the spookiest aspects of the editorial craft is the ability to nudge, cajole, or otherwise wrangle each author into producing his or her best work without diluting the individual author’s voice and perspective. It’s tricky as hell and requires an ever-shifting balance of tact and frankness. Whenever you approach content creators, it’s worth spending a little extra effort on communicating with them in ways that neither devastate nor condescend.
Publishing is hard
In the brief history of the internet so far, two kinds of content-related train wrecks stand out:
project delays produced by the inability to get the right content ready for launch, and
project derailments caused by a lack of planning for ongoing content oversight, production, revision, and distribution—what Jeffrey MacIntyre of Predicate, LLC, aptly calls “The Day Two Problem” (http://bkaprt.com/cs/3/)4.
Both problems are caused by underestimating the time, attention, skill, and money required to plan, create, and publish content, both immediately and in the long term. As a species, we’ve been doing all that since about 2000 BC, so we happen to know quite a lot about it. But before the internet, the vast majority of people who had to worry about the nuances of publishing were . . . publishers.
Now that organizations ranging from hospitals and libraries to boutiques and family vineyards have all learned that doing business online involves dealing with content, the gritty details of the publishing process have become relevant to a much wider group. If you need to produce useful, high-quality content at any level beyond the personal weblog, you need an editorial process that will support creation, review and revision, publication, performance tracking, and ongoing maintenance. (You’re also going to need resources, primarily in the form of time, which gets paid for with money.)
As content strategists, we can help our teams and clients communicate more effectively by introducing common tools of the publishing trade. Tools such as:
clearly documented editorial workflows, including approval processes and thorough quality checks;
editorial calendars including content campaigns and themes planned well in advance; and
content custom-tuned for specific channels and audiences.
Most importantly, editors can teach us quite a lot about how to regularly publish original content that readers can use. In part, they can demonstrate how to hire and manage writers who can listen to experts, and then collect and create content that extends well beyond executive bios and annual reports.
Our clients and employers are beginning to understand that they need to do more than simply hire a web writer at the end of a project and hope someone else will maintain the content later. As their content specialists, the more we know about solid editorial practices, the better we can help our clients with the transition to the new world of distributed online publishing.
Content is expensive
Useful content is expensive. This is a fact that editors have long understood, but web companies have only just begun to discover.
Leaving aside the effort required to publish a daily newspaper, consider just the people involved in book publishing: the acquisition editors, development editors, copyeditors, proofreaders, book designers, compositors, project managers, cover designers, and sales and marketing teams. In traditional publishing, these people are paid. As are the accountants, secretaries, printers, and everyone else who isn’t an intern.
Now consider the marketing lead who receives word that he must now review and revise forty pages of content inherited from another department, ensure that new brand guidelines are implemented