Strategic traits of content #3: Trajectory

This is the 3rd in a series of three articles about the traits shared by effective web content. The previous ones were about purpose and staging.

I don’t know about you, but I’m lazy. When I land on a website for the first time I (usually) know why I am there, but I don’t know where the information or service I’m looking for is located. The same thing happens when I try to do something new on a website that I’ve used before (this relates to the notion of progress I mentioned in the previous post).

In both cases I’m missing the “how” to get where I want to go. A repository-style website assumes that visitors will rationally use the tools provided to find their way. But not all visitors think this way. Many of them go cross-eyed when faced an unclear pathways. One way to overcome the confusion is to remove clutter to make the path more obvious.

Clear path

Even if the path is clear, it doesn’t mean visitors will take it. And if they do, there’s no guarantee that they’ll make it to the end. Another, often overlooked, approach is what I call trajectory. Think of it as a path with propulsion.

The idea of trajectory came to me when reading Robert McKee’s book on scriptwriting called The Story. He talks a lot about a story’s arc. Without getting into whether you’re a fan of McKee or not, the basic idea is that a story has a central momentum that leads the protagonist from beginning to resolution.

This got me thinking about websites, because in many ways they are like movies. The audience arrives with a vague idea of what they’re going to see (based on ads, reviews and WOM). They expect a certain kind of experience. The director and screenwriter then lead the audience from start to finish in an attempt to tell a story. McKee contends that a film with a good story is a film that delivers the expected experience and that makes the audience want to find out what happens next. The audience is implicated in the story.

Ditto for a website. Visitor arrives with an idea of why they are there. The home page is the opening scene. It needs to immediately make the visitor care about what happens next. The path from that point forward to the resolution (the service, the info I’m looking for) is what I call a trajectory. If I don’t care or I can’t figure out what happens next on a website, then the trajectories aren’t clear. Trajectories and personas are closely linked.

Think beyond the call to action

Trajectory is probably the hardest trait to wrap your brain around. But you know it when you see it. It’s an elegant dance between content and user experience that makes you want to keep clicking, reading, exploring. It gives you the urge to stick around, to share with others, to come back. It suppresses the urge to flee. It’s a rare quality and it requires much more than just peppering pages with “share,” “learn more” and “buy now”. I am convinced that trajectory can’t really exist without purpose and staging.

I know what you’re thinking

You’re saying to yourself, but Richard, that’s just storytelling. Maybe it is. But when I say the word storytelling to a group of engineers or suits their eyes glaze over. It’s  too artistic a concept for many people. But when I talk about auditing their company’s content for purpose, staging and trajectory — and give them concrete examples – they seem to get it. It’s anecdotal, and your mileage may vary, but it works for me. And hey, content strategists need all the help we can get.

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November 1, 2010 2 Comments Short URL , , content strategy, copywriting

Strategic traits of content #2: Staging

This is the 2nd in a series of three articles about the traits shared by effective web content. The first installment was about progress.

How well content achieves it purpose depends a lot on how it is staged. We don’t think twice about restaurants serving us a meal in a series of courses. But it wasn’t always the case. Up until the early 19th century, food was laid out on the table and everyone ate in whatever order they felt like. Then came service à la russe, with one dish after another. The meal was staged. The content creator went from being a cook producing sustenance to a chef creating an experience.

Dosage and order

I define staging as the dosage and order in which content is delivered. I’m sure everyone can think of poorly staged content. Content that arrives at the wrong time or in the wrong place or in the wrong quantity or the wrong format. A lack of staging can creation frustration, confusion or tedium. Staging isn’t graphic design. It’s more analogous to directions in a screenplay.

One of the most complicated parts of staging is the notion of progress. There’s the progress of the visitor through the site. Then there’s the visitor’s progress in his or her relationship with the brand/organization. Put simply, staging content for a prospective customer isn’t the same as staging it for a returning customer. The content may be the same, but how it is staged probably shouldn’t be.

An example

I was recently doing some research on CMS systems and ended up on the ExpressionEngine website. (full disclosure: I’ve never used the product and have no ties with the company. Looks like a great product.).

I’m a content creation practitioner, so I figure I must match one of their user personas. Specifically, I was looking for examples of what the business end of the software looks like, because that’s the part of a CMS that I spend the most time with. I wanted to get a feel for the interface.

Upon arriving on the home page, I zero in on the “learn more” button. I notice there’s some video content, but I skip that (for the moment) because I’m more of a text kind of person.

This leads me to the Overview page. A quick scroll down the page and a scan of the headlines shows there are no screenshots. Humf. A quick click on Features and I’m frightened away by the laundry list. Frustration sets in.

I go back to the home page and decide to try the video. I’m trapped. Sure, it shows some of the interface but there are no chapters. I have to sit through the spiel, which I don’t have time to do. I decide to close the overlay with the video player. But like a moron I can’t find the close X. It doesn’t occur to me to click on the page behind. I leave. By the looks of it, they spent a lot of time on the content, but I barely touched it – in large part because of the staging.

Final installment: Trajectory

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October 26, 2010 2 Comments Short URL , , content strategy, web writing

Strategic traits of content #1: Purpose

Jeffrey Zeldman famously tweeted back in 2008 “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”

I’d like to add:

Purpose precedes content. Content in the absence of purpose isn’t content, it’s masturbation.

Books have purpose. Writers don’t give readers a bunch of pages and then hope they’ll put them in the right order. Cars have purpose. Religions have purpose. In fact, most manmade things have purpose. Sometimes purpose is complex, sometimes it is simple.

Effective web content is no exception. It must have purpose. And the purpose of web content isn’t to be well organized, findable or grammatically correct. Those are just consequences of the purpose. Content has a job to do.

The job is contributing to the creation of “strategic meaning”, as per Axel Albin’s definition (Thanks to Nicole Jones for re-introducing me to communication design and Albin).

Alignment and focus

How well content creates strategic meaning depends primarily on two things: alignment and focus. Misalignment is the mismatch between a visitor’s intent and the content (or site’s) purpose. Like trying to open a can of spinach with a toothbrush. Extreme misalignment is called irrelevance. Basically, it’s a purpose for which there is no real intent – what I call “who cares” content.

Focus is best expressed by the adage “don’t try to be all things to all people”. Poor focus results in either too much content — because you don’t want to miss a purpose — or content that’s too fuzzy — because you want it to be multi-purpose, like a Swiss Army knife.

And this is why one of a content strategist’s most important responsibilities is getting into the design process as early as possible. Because the purpose of a website isn’t solely to be a library, any more than the purpose of a kitchen is to be a storage room for pots, pans and appliances. It is high time that websites aspired to be more than just glorified repositories of passive, aimless content.

Next installment: Staging

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October 22, 2010 1 Comment Short URL , , content strategy, web writing

Prologue: Habits of highly effective web content

I sometimes get the feeling that the world of content strategy is perpetually obsessed with strategy, and less with content.

Discussions quickly speed past content creation on their way to talking about managing it. For each PowerPoint slide describing the different forms of content you get a dozen more on how to slice and dice it.

Or sometimes it’s the complete opposite. Threads about content creation often veer off into wordsmithing, style guides and branded content.

Something is missing

As useful as all this is, it leaves me hungry. Where are the discussions about strategies for creating content? Take, for example, writing. Everyone seems to agree that writing for the web is fundamentally different than writing for print. But if this true, then the strategies for writing for the web must be fundamentally different as well, right?.

But what are the differences? Doesn’t effective web content, whether words, video, audio or whatever, share common strategic traits? What are they? This is what I’ve been obsessing about recently.

In the next three posts I’m going to take a modest stab at describing the three traits that I’ve found so far. This isn’t to say there aren’t others, but I’ve been testing this trio with clients and I’m getting traction. They seem to speak to them in ways that talk about CS tactics doesn’t, especially when working with people from advertising and marketing.

To help prevent indigestion, I’ve broken my thoughts into a 3-part series. The first installment will be published tomorrow.

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October 21, 2010 2 Comments Short URL , , content strategy, web writing

10 reasons to be kind to European content strategists

This post is a follow-up to a recent tweet in which I said:

“The biggest enemy of CS in Europe is the budgetary bloat caused by localization requirements. Right tech ends up being too expensive.”

I’m a lucky guy. In the past few weeks I’ve been pitching and/or working on projects that involve serious content creation. Just the kind of thing I love.

But I keep running up against the same wall: languages. There’s nothing more frustrating than coming up with great content ideas, only to have them dashed on the hard rocks of multilingual reality.

To avoid future headaches, I’ve scraped together a checklist of issues that I make sure to cover during the initial (pre-strategy, pre-creative) stages of the project. It never ceases to amaze me how often they are overlooked/underestimated by clients, strategists and project managers.

1. Translation

I’m not going do down the slippery slope of discussing the finer points of translation vs. adaptation vs. transcreation. I’ll leave that for another post. A much more mundane point is cost. The more languages you have, the more expensive it is – and quality translation even more so. However, another often-ignored angle is speed. Good translation takes time, making it tough to keep content fresh, relevant and responsive – which is what fast moving brand demand of web content.

2. Hidden content

Legends. Images. Video subtitles. Voiceovers. Motion graphics. Rollover captions. Forms. Prompts. Charts. Graphs. All these elements can contain textual content that will need inventorying and translating.

3. Metadata

When estimating translation costs, metadata are often forgotten. And what if there are metadata that need to exist for one language/location but not for others? How do you track it?

4. Accents & subtitles

When recording people speaking in a language other than their mother tongue, listen to their accent before sending the crew to film them. Also, remember that if you decide to subtitle your videos, the text will be impossible to read if the screen size is too small.

5. Location & language

Who gets to see what, in what language, and where are they located? Clients need to understand (even if they don’t want to) that translation and localization are not the same thing. Content in French may turn out to be useful in France, Belgium and Switzerland. But a French phone number for Belgian users is rude. Browser language and IP localization can help, but can also be a hassle when the site visitor is browsing when traveling.

6. Geolocalization & mobile devices

The problems are related to those in the previous paragraph, and are exacerbated by social media. Imagine, you’re a registered user of a brand’s local website. You’ve picked your country and language. But you’re traveling abroad and accessing the web via your iPhone with geolocalization turned on. You want to find the brand’s nearest store in the country where you are, but when you go to the Store Directory page all you can see are the stores at home. You get the picture. And this is just one of the problems I’ve encountered.

7. Approval process

This is the dirty underbelly of multilingual content creation. You need to figure out early on who approves what in which language. But this is rarely the case. In the giddy, heady days at the start of a project, no one wants to think about something as mundane as sign-offs.

Obviously, it’s easiest to work and approve all content in one language, but it’s not always practical. If you’ve interviewed someone in French, but written the article in English, in what language do you think they’ll be most comfortable approving the article? And the costs and delays generated by having to redo content (especially audio-video) because someone didn’t like it when they finally read/heard it in their mother tongue are enough to turn a great project into a giant fiasco.

8. Social media

“Oh, let’s set up a Twitter account for our brand.” And in what language will you tweet? I ask. Who tweets? Agency or client? What’s the workflow and approval process?

9. CMS

Does the existing one support localization? Which one to pick if they don’t have one? Have they budgeted for it? If you’re obligated to work with the existing CMS and it won’t support your ideas, it’s a recipe for disappointment. Oh, and don’t get me started on IT departments that won’t authorize certain kinds of content or that impose a crappy CMS.

10. Budget & Time

I’ve seen too many projects get the axe because the budget was just plain unrealistic. The client may have loved the creative, loved the concept, loved the UX, but it was too costly to be feasible. Get an idea of the budget as soon as you can. Ensure that there is no disconnect between ambition, technology and dinero.

Speaking of disconnect, one of the best ways to keep costs under control is to assemble a multi-lingual CS team that includes members from all the localities served by the site. But since many brand CS projects are managed centrally by head office, this is rarely the case. There is usually a strong disconnect between what HQ wants from the website what the countries want. If HQ doesn’t know or care about what the countries want, you’ve got yourself a red flag.

In my experience, US companies operating in Europe are notorious for underestimating what a content project will cost in terms of money and time, because they think in terms of one market and one language (two if you’re lucky). This is especially true when you venture out of consumer brands into B2B and internal communications projects.

So, the next time you feel like ripping you hair out on a monolingual project, spare a thought for your CS brethren in Europe.

PS: Like all lists, this one is incomplete and superficial, but it’s start. Feel free to add any other issues that you think might be missing in the comments. I’d look forward to hearing from you.

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September 16, 2010 4 Comments Short URL , , , , , , , content strategy, Translation

Pre-flight checklist: Is the client ready for content strategy?

Clients are increasingly open to content strategy. So are agencies. But does being open equal being ready?

The success or failure of a content strategy project depends on a great many things that are totally out of our control. So before starting a project (or providing a quotation), I try to get a feel for the client’s state of readiness by using the following checklist.

1) Culture of communications

Is the company tight lipped or voluble? Introverted or extroverted? Content strategy is a hard sell in a company with a strong culture of secrecy. No duh, right? But think about it this way: if the content that you think would be the most meaningful to customers is the same information that the company doesn’t want competitors to see, then you’re going to have a tough time coming up with a content strategy built on anything significant.

2) Sources of content

I talked about this in a previous post. It’s very important to find out where content lives inside the company. Is the knowledge formal or informal? Is it inside someone’s head? How interesting is it? Is there a core set of pre-existing content or is it spread across hard drives and intranets? Make sure your content audit goes beyond the current website. Look at collateral and PR. Look under mattresses and in cupboards.

3) IT maturity

Get the IT people on board right away. Find out what their capabilities and expertise are. How open are they to change? What you’re going to propose will most likely upset their daily routine. There’s no point coming up with a content strategy that will require the installation of infrastructure or tools that the IT department can’t afford or won’t approve. Case in point. On a recent intranet project we couldn’t figure out why the visitor numbers were stagnating, until we discovered that the IT person in charge of uploading fresh content (we weren’t allowed to touch the CMS for security reasons) had gone on vacation (and hadn’t given the task to someone else). Doh.

4) Attitude to design

Opinions are like belly buttons, everybody has one. Nowhere is this more true that when it comes to visual design and art direction. This excellent article by Kim Mullen at Adaptive Path has some great advice on how to talk to clients about design.

5) Level of support

This is a hard one to nail down. It’s a mixture of tangible clues, like how much staff, time and budget the client has allocated to the project, and intangible ones, like personal preconceptions, willingness to organize project kickoff meetings, access to business owners and the seniority/authority of the person driving the project.

Alas, there are still companies out there who don’t see their website as a part of their company. They consider it to be an outsourceable cost center. They want the website to be “fire and forget.” Be honest with yourself: you are a content strategist, not a miracle worker. Just because you have fire in your belly doesn’t mean they do. Adjust your ambitions accordingly.

6) Agendas and Plans

Hidden and otherwise. Sometimes the person at the impetus of a project isn’t the only one who wants to see improvements made to the website. Get permission to canvas wide. Try hard to get everyone into the loop. Align objectives. Attempts to restrict your access to other stakeholders can spell danger. Don’t let content strategy get caught in interdepartmental crossfire.

When it comes to plans, make sure you know where the company is headed. A sudden decision to launch a new product or enter a new market or region can throw a huge wrench in the works.

7) Localization

This is a barrel of monkeys with four prongs: languages, geographies (countries or regions), developmental maturity and market perception. There’s more to localization than translating or adapting content. Different geographies have specific content needs (even if headquarters won’t admit it). A company may be a household name in one country and an outsider in another. One country may “weigh” more at headquarters than another. For historical reasons, some products may be popular with one set of customers in one country and with another set in another country. Compromises will have to be made. Hackles will be raised. Fur will need to be rubbed.

These seven parameters are part of my current pre-project checklist. I’d love to hear about any other ones you might be using to ensure that your content strategy projects get off on the right foot.

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August 5, 2010 6 Comments Short URL , , content strategy, web writing

Je ne suis pas content: Do cultural attitudes to writing affect content strategy?

I’m convinced that cultural attitudes to writing can have a big impact on content strategy, especially when you’re trying to produce web writing in English for non-English organizations.

I’m going to use my experience in France to highlight some issues that I’ve encountered. Please note: I’m going to make sweeping generalizations about the French language based on personal experience. Your mileage may differ.

Keeping it simple ain’t so simple

French is very good at dealing with abstract concepts, while English is a very concrete language. In English, we tend to be more factual and pragmatic.

On the whole, French sentences are longer, with more complicated syntax,  subordinate clauses and lots of connectors. It’s very telling that on a French keyboard you have to hit SHIFT to insert a period.

As a result, many of the tenets of “effective web writing” (write tight, keep it short) that are directly rooted in the Anglo-Saxon approach to writing don’t always come naturally to non-English speakers.

An inverted what?

For most non-writers, school was the last time they actually had to pump out any serious verbiage. So to understand how people view writing, it’s worth looking at how students are taught to write essays.

In France, there is one sacrosanct essay structure: introduction, thesis, antithesis, synthesis and conclusion. Each section gets at least one paragraph, which is why Anglo-Saxon readers can be heard muttering “get on with it” when reading a French essay. The antithesis and synthesis sections smells like digression.

While this time-honored tradition is slowly disappearing from today’s high school classrooms, most of my French clients had to jump through these hoops back in their school days. The structure was burned into their souls with a hot poker, which makes it hard for them to wrap their heads around concepts like the inverted pyramid and front-loading.

Should writing impress or express?

Then there’s how students are taught to write. A lot of emphasis is put on learning how to write “good French” not on how to be a good writer. Writing is seen as a stylistic exercise not a story-telling exercise. And don’t forget that France is saddled with lucky enough to have the Académie Française, which decides what is and isn’t good French. (For a giggle, check out the Académie’s page on the French language. Inviting isn’t it?).

French students learn early on the differences between the registers of language – formal, normal, informal, slang – but they are rarely taught the process of writing. They study philosophy at an AP-level but practically never dabble in creative writing. I’ve never met a French person who wasn’t traumatized by learning how to write.

Consequently, in France writing serves to replicate archetypes. And the archetypes are poorly adapted to the real world and the web. What you are saying and your ability to elicit a response isn’t taken into account. Writing is to impress not express. A bit like the difference between the short program in figure skating and Holiday On Ice. The plain language movement might as well be from Mars.

This can cause problems with French clients when trying to establish their voice and style. What might come across in English as natural and flowing can be seen as too conversational and dumbing down. These remarks become more frequent the higher up the org chart you go. It can cause further problems when back-translated into French. Even if the client is comfortable with the style in English, they suddenly revert to their old ways when they see it their native tongue.

Et vous?

My experience is limited to English and French – and is purely anecdotal – but I’m pretty sure that other content professionals working in multi-cultural organizations run into issues caused by cultural attitudes to writing every day. Care to share them with me?

I also wonder what impact the “Anglo-Saxon” model will have on content in other languages. Will it end up enriching writing in other languages or impoverishing it?

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July 21, 2010 4 Comments Short URL , , content strategy, web writing

Naked clients: the paradox of brevity and its cause

Two hours into a site redesign meeting I looked up to discover that my client was naked.

Rewind. I’d been brought in on the project to develop the content. We were basically starting from zero, which was good, or so I thought. After interviewing a gaggle of execs, we’d come up with a site map with all the requisite pages. We’d done a content audit. Because the budget was tight, the client’s marcom people were in charge of preparing all the source material that would be turned into final content.

Kissing a brick wall

When the source material started trickling in, my heart sank. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there was no there there. The source material was copious but thin. In one case, three pages of explanation yielded one paragraph of real content. Scads of waffle words trying to mask an obvious paucity of information.

We’d been run smack into the dreaded Paradox of Brevity.

“You’ll just have to work with what we’ve got”

When the marcom people saw the content I was producing they weren’t happy. Where had their beautiful, carefully thought out prose gone? But once they’d gotten over their emotions, they quickly realized the larger problem.

The depth of the content available in the company wasn’t aligned with the depth of the site map that had been approved. The client was naked and feeling very uncomfortable about it.

We proposed going back to the business owners for more fabric, so to speak. We developed a helpful questionnaire/template (we probably should have done this from the get-go, but marcom told us it wasn’t needed). “Oh, they won’t have time for that. Too busy,” said marcom. “You’ll just have to work with what we’ve got.”

The site map trap

By now, you’re probably saying to yourself: why didn’t you just simplify the site map? Consolidate the threadbare service pages into one strong services page, for example.

Because clients have an inferiority complex when it comes to navigation bars, that’s why. I may be the last person in the world to have clued on to this, but clients want their navbar to be as long as those of their competitors. God forbid they have a wee one. The navbar was sacrosanct.

So we were stuck in the Paradox of Brevity. We couldn’t adjust the site map. And we couldn’t fill the pages with strong content, based on the source material we had.

In need of a third leg

As I write these words I’m trying to figure out how to integrate this experience into my content audit workflow. What follows are my first thoughts.

We’re all familiar with the concepts of quality and quantity when assessing content, but they mainly measure what exists. Gap analysis tells us what’s missing.

I think the quality/quantity stool needs a third leg. For lack of better word, I’ll call it “richness”.

Diagnosing Richness Deficiency

Richness is an assessment of the raw materials the content producer has to work with. Richness (or lack of) is what determines if content strategists and content producers are going to be able to bridge the gaps they find, producing the right quantity of content with the right level of quality.

I’m convinced that Content Richness Deficiency is to blame for a lot of poor web sites. And it’s closely linked to organizational maturity. In a lot of companies, the most interesting raw materials about a service or a product reside in the heads of people, not on paper. They are the stories told during sales calls, but never written down. The inability to formally capture this information is what leads to the Paradox of Brevity.

But how the hell do you measure it?

Post scriptum

We finally convinced marcom to let us go back to the business owners. We also got them to consolidate part of the site map. In the end, we won’t have to pad and decorate. But it’s a hollow victory. The story we’re left to tell lacks the original ambition. And we’ve had to push delivery back by a month.

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July 12, 2010 5 Comments Short URL , , , content strategy, copywriting, web writing

Don't shoot the copywriter

Am I paranoid or does copywriting have a bad name in content strategy circles?

The more I read, the more I feel like some members of the CS community want to distance themselves from copywriters. Worse, an ad hoc caste system seems to be emerging:

  • At the bottom are copywriters, who come in two flavors. 1) hacks hired at the last minute to fill lorem ipsum holes. 2) con artists who dupe guileless souls with malevolently persuasive copy.
  • Web writers are noble experts. They “get” the web. They are domain experts who lovingly craft interesting content refreshingly devoid of marketing messages and sales copy.
  • Content strategists are the new Brahmins. Gandalf meets Yoda.

Stop the stereotypes

I started out as a copywriter, and copywriting still plays a large part in all the content strategy work that I do. I realize that I’m starting to sound defensive, but I rarely recognize myself in how people describe copywriting.

Even Kristina Halvorson let me down on this one. There’s a whole section in her seminal book entitled “It’s not copy. It’s content.” In it she describes her work in a previous life as a copywriter as Concept. Create. Revise. Approve. Then she shows a complicated diagram of the “messy content lifecycle,” implying that web writing is more complicated than the simple world of copywriting (and that many copywriters probably don’t want to deal with the mess.)

Huh? I can’t remember a copywriting project that was as straightforward as concept, create, revise, approve. Copywriting has mutated and evolved violently in the past 20 years. Some copywriters haven’t made the shift (or don’t want too) but the same is true for a long list of professions that have had their gravy train overturned by the web.  It’s not unique to copywriters. I get my hands dirty all the time. I learn about my clients, their business. I go deep. Not all copywriters operate that way, but many do.

Death to misconceptions

While I’m at it, let me kill a few more.

No such thing as the copywriter

The copywriter is not an archetype. Copywriting and copywriters come in all shapes and flavors.

No content strategy without words

You can strategize forever, but unless someone is willing and able to do what I call the “heavy lifting,” your website will go wordless.

No content strategy without copywriting

Copywriting is a form of content, but not the only form. Stop setting content against copy, as if the former is beter than the latter.  Focus on picking the right writer(s).

Persuasive isn’t evil

Content isn’t a deodorant. It doesn’t have to stay dry to be effective. Persuasion is part of content’s job. As Nicole Jones wrote recently:  “writing influences perception and understanding. It influences the experience.”

Bad content isn’t (only) the copywriter’s fault

Copy doesn’t suck because it was written by a copywriter. And it won’t necessarily be better if it’s written by a web writer or guided by a content strategist. Lack of resources (time, money, thinking, governance) produces more bad content every year than an army of copywriters ever could.

We’d all be money ahead if we stopped blaming the copywriter and started working together to redefine what it means to write for the web.

For the moment, the article by Nicole Jones that I quoted from earlier is the most sensible and inspiring thing I’ve read so far on the subject.

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July 1, 2010 7 Comments Short URL , , , , , , , , content strategy, copywriting, web writing

Can I get some creativity with that content strategy?

I have confession to make. I’m struggling with content strategy. Specifically, the strategy part.

Let me walk you through what’s been niggling at my brain.

Uncomfortable with the definition

The Content Strategy Knol says that “content strategy is an emerging field of practice encompassing every aspect of content, including its design, development, analysis, presentation, measurement, evaluation, production, management, and governance.”

Kristina Halvorson, of Content Strategy for the Web fame, defines content strategy as “the practice of planning for content creation, delivery, and governance.”

We’ve all seen Erin Scime’s diagram of the content lifecycle.

All good stuff. And yes, it all sounds very strategic – well almost. These definitions basically equate content strategy with a process. If your content strategy is good it’s because your process is good. The quality of the content is determined by the quality of execution. But something is missing. It’s not giving me the whole story.

Well-executed, lame content is still lame content

I don’t want to downplay the importance of good execution. We need it. But I would like to see content strategy put more emphasis on creativity. We need to pay more attention to the idea behind the strategy in the first place, what I sometimes call the strategy of content.

I’d like CS professionals (me included) to dedicate more brain-time to the creative uses of content, to creating new kinds of content, to building new kinds of customer experience involving content, to finding new strategic uses for content. If content is king and the customer experience is content, then we have duty to create better, more interesting kinds of content.

So here’s a plea for putting creativity in the driver’s seat of content strategy. As far as I’m concerned, creativity has been absent from content strategy – and I think that this is why I’ve been feeling uncomfortable. (or maybe all those damn vuvuzelas).

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June 14, 2010 5 Comments Short URL , , content strategy, text

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