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Content strategy

Content strategy is the practice of planning for content creation, delivery, and governance. (source: Wikipedia)

Controlling the pace of UX with content strategy

Added on 22 August 2013 Peter Bogaards
Content and interaction, a perfect match for the UX of apps?

Interview with Margot Bloomstein ~ “In some scenarios, getting a user to convert or react to a call to action is the desired outcome. It means your design and experience work. But if users are coming to and then quickly leaving your site, what are they really experiencing? If they don’t take the time to explore and discover they may not have any loyalty to you or the experience. And if you’re dealing in complex decisions, you want your users to take the time they need to fully understand and commit to their choice.”

(Sean Carmichael ~ UIE Brain Sparks)

Content re-framing: A digital disruption survival kit

Added on 16 August 2013 Peter Bogaards
Hope it helps.

A manifesto to connect experience design with content thinking. ~ “New challenges are upon us content people. The era of digital disruption requires adaptation at many levels by anyone involved with content, whatever its form or shape. As content crusaders, we want to point the road to travel with 10 imperatives. “Old school” and cutting-edge content organizations and professionals all face the same challenge of inventing and discovering mechanisms, rules and principles of unknown territories for content application. With this manifesto, we intend to reduce the friction in our collective journey of credible, useful, and relevant content for the digital era.”

(Bas Evers a.k.a. @everbass and Peter Bogaards a.k.a. @bogiezero ~ βiRDS on a W!RE)
Disclosure: I work at Informaat (The Netherlands)

Content is all that matters on the web

Added on 10 July 2013 Peter Bogaards
Couldn’t have said it better. Although,I wouldn’t label people as content consumers.

“The focus and widespread knowledge towards the importance of web design, web development, usability, and user experience is definitely positive, considering that only a few years ago most of the meetings I have had with clients had to start with an explanation of what the term usability meant. However, what is missing in these discussions – what is in desperate need of attention – is web content and the creation of a comprehensive and unified strategy for it.”

(Wojciech Chojnacki ~ Six Revisions)

A brief history of content strategy

Added on 27 June 2013 Peter Bogaards
Every field should know its history and be proud of it.

“Content strategy is a new ‘old thing’, as old as publishing itself, so it’s potentially a foolhardy exercise to lay down a history – although we won’t let that stop us, oh no! (…) When it comes to web content in particular, whether technical content or marketing comms, content strategy has experienced exponential growth in the past decade.”

(Fiona Cullinan a.k.a. @fionacullinan ~ Firehead) ~ courtesy of infochef

Interview with content strategy author Ann Rockley

Added on 23 May 2013 Peter Bogaards
Getting your hands dirty with markup for real.

“Content strategists should realize that XML isn’t scary and it is really powerful for doing cool things with your content. In the ‘olden days’ when we first began creating Web-based content we used to have to use HTML codes to tag the content, now you create content in web forms or Word and rarely, if ever, have to think about the HTML codes. The same is true of XML, you don’t have to use codes to create content, there are lots of tools that ‘hide’ the XML tags. However, XML is much smarter than HTML. HTML tags describe the formatting structure of the content, XML defines the semantic structure of the content. For example, we can define that some content is a teaser and then have the system handle it differently when published to the Web, mobile, or even print.”

(Words+Pictures=Web)

The Governance component of content strategy success

Added on 14 May 2013 Peter Bogaards
The larger the organization, the more important this component becomes.

“While all three components (creation, publication, governance) of the content strategy lifecycle are intended to be ongoing, it’s the Governance component that often requires the most dedication due to its never ending need for attention. Once content is created and published then it will forever need to be managed, maintained, optimised and compliant which leads to the age old question of ‘where to begin?'”

(Jessica O’Sullivan ~ Siteimprove)

WYSIWTF

Added on 2 May 2013 Peter Bogaards
Including the notion that form (a.k.a. presentation) has meaning too.

“Arguing for ‘separation of content from presentation’ implies a neat division between the two. The reality, of course, is that content and form, structure and style, can never be fully separated. Anyone who’s ever written a document and played around to see the impact of different fonts, heading weights, and whitespace on the way the writing flows knows this is true. Anyone who’s ever squinted at HTML code, trying to parse text from tags, knows it too.”

(Karen McGrane a.k.a. @karenmcgrane ~ A List Apart)

The content strategy order of operations or ‘Dear Aunt Sally Can Perform Magic’

Added on 12 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
Mnemonic device for the UX disciplines: LATCH re-visited.

“The reason I ask has to do with something you may remember from early math classes when coursework introduced multiple types of operations. There needed to be a set of rules in place so that little Jimmy would know whether or not multiplication happens before or after subtraction. Enter the Order of Operations, a.k.a ‘Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally’.”

(Tom Harari a.k.a. @tomharari ~ iAcquire)

The three components of content strategy success

Added on 27 March 2013 Peter Bogaards
Reducing the essence of content strategy to a holy trinity: create, publish, and govern.

“Creating effective website content can be an arduous task, especially when so many factors must be considered: varying role capacities, internal politics, customer expectations etc. However, following a structured strategy can make creating focused content a piece of cake!”

(Jessica O’Sullivan ~ SiteImprove)

The five elements of modular and adaptive content

Added on 18 February 2013 Peter Bogaards
Object orientation moving up the ladder. Now, it’s entering the info layer.

“When the word modular comes up in a conversation about web design, it’s usually in regards to the code. Object oriented programming on the backend, separating structure, presentation, and behavior on the front end, or perhaps the reuse of certain visual patterns like buttons across the site. However, if we’re going to spend some time talking about modularity in web design our first stop, like everything else web design, should be the content.”

(Steven Bradley a.k.a. @vangogh ~ Vanseo Design)

Content strategy: Separating content from information

Added on 13 February 2013 Peter Bogaards
A kind of new style DIKW and DTDT thinking with “(…) describes what content really is.”

“Content is a piece of information we want to share with our audience. We create content by turning a piece of information into a type that our audience is familiar with. Then we distribute that content on the channels where we think our target audiences spend their time.”

(Ahava Leibtag a.k.a. @ahaval)

What to expect from a content strategy process

Added on 7 February 2013 Peter Bogaards
Testimonial for content strategy, the Canadian way.

“Content strategy is the most important part of your project. It is where you plan what to put into the website, trade publication, brochure, catalog, fifty foot outdoor advertisement, or whatever. Some companies do content strategy intuitively, but most need a lot of help. Enter the content strategist.”

(Darcy Hastings a.k.a. @bioagency ~ BIO digital)

“All of the work we do is change management”

Added on 5 February 2013 Peter Bogaards
Karens star is rising and rising.

Interview with Karen McGrane. ~ “For us this is a generational issue, and it’s our life’s work to help contribute to organizations’ learning how digital design (and information architecture) should fit into their organization. If we are going to be successful, we may not fix it for ourselves, but for the next generation of digital designers, I want to leave those organizations better off. There will also be some social darwinism, where the organizations that successfully navigate this transition are the ones that are going to survive.”

(IA Summit 2013)

Three digital governance challenges

Added on 30 January 2013 Peter Bogaards
Embedding in the existing organization. A big challenge for UX and CX management and staff.

“It’s time to leave the web sandbox and lead the organization into a deeper understanding of the power and use of digital channels. It’s time to inform and engage executives so that organizational expectations are reasonable and that they’re supported culturally and fiscally. So maybe you can clean up the mess in six months – but it’s going to take a lot of resources and a cultural shift that can probably only be directed from an executive level. Most likely though, tough ‘redesigns’ are going to be ongoing evolutions.”

(Lisa Welchman a.k.a. @lwelchman ~ WelchmanPierpoint)

We must remove publishing and content management concerns from authoring systems

Added on 30 January 2013 Peter Bogaards
We tend to forget how important the content infrastructure and technology is.

“They create a language to express publishing, content management, or reuse concerns, and then expect writers to write directly into what is really an internal content management format. Putting a graphical face over the markup does nothing to change this. The graphical interface only hides the syntax of the XML. It does nothing to change the fact that authors are being asked to create what should be the internal semantics of the publishing system — semantics they generally neither care about nor understand.”

(Mark Baker ~ EveryPageIsOne)

The evolution of technical communication

Added on 9 January 2013 Peter Bogaards
Information management and technical communication appear to be the parents of content strategy.

“Over the years technical communication has transitioned from a conventional author-reader engagement to a realm of social collaboration. Let’s take a look at how technical communication has progressed over time and the significant milestones along the way.”

(Monalisa Sen and Debarshi Gupta Biswas ~ tcworld)

Content Planning Demystified

Added on 21 December 2012 Peter Bogaards
Without a plan, no project. Without a plan, no modification of the planning.

“It turns out that the only real way to avoid a trainwreck with editorial work is to get ahead of the trouble, line everything up carefully, and leave oodles of room for all the pieces to connect on time. The same is true of content strategy, content planning, and just about everything to do with content on the web, except for the writing itself – and that, too, usually takes far longer than anyone expects. If you’re not a professional editor and you suddenly find yourself dealing with content creation, you’re almost certainly going to underestimate the time and effort involved, or to skip something important in the planning process that pops up to bite you later.”

(Erin Kissane a.k.a. @kissane ~ 24ways)

An Interview with Ann Rockley, the “Mother of Content Strategy”

Added on 29 November 2012 Peter Bogaards
A mother, not thé mother. Who’s the father? Who’s the child?

“The other driver is the digital content revolution. While best-of-breed technical communication and training departments have been creating multi-channel outputs for years using a write-it-once, use-it-often strategy, traditional publishers haven’t felt the pressure to adopt this approach until the Kindle, smartphones, tablet computers – and of course, the iPad – changed consumer demand.”

(Scott Wrangler)