All posts about
Content strategy

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

Fear of Content

Added on 19 October 2011 Peter Bogaards
Not really sure why we changed data and information into content, as if it’s something completely different.

“Content can be a little frightening, it’s true. Not to everyone mind you. Some people simply love content, with all its oddities and challenges. More often than not these are the people who spend much of their time designing and creating content. But there are definitely people who look somewhat askance at this thing called ‘content’. The reasons why some people are less than enamored with content are worth considering and not only to refute them. There may well be good reasons to be afraid – or at least to approach content with due respect.”

(Joe Gollner a.k.a. @joegollner ~ The Fractal Enterprise)

Content Strategy for the Web

Added on 5 September 2011 Peter Bogaards
For many, adding value through content means more ‘conversion’ (a.k.a. traffic, leads, and sales).

“(…) the purpose of your web content centers on the customer’s experience. Just like keyword research attempts to identify what your customers are searching for in your industry, your website can provide the answer to those searches. A smart content strategy begins with understanding what the customer needs rather than what you want to offer them.”

(Arnie Kuenn a.k.a. @ArnieK ~ Business 2 Community)

Web Content Strategy: Sites vs Apps

Added on 25 July 2011 Peter Bogaards
Labels, copy, and paragraphs are all text. Where’s the strategy for all the other content?

“Content strategists should work with interface and UX designers to minimize these changes, by considering what future features and updates are likely to appear in the app. With this knowledge, the interface and labels can be designed to minimize changes in position or text.”

(Dan Zambonini a.k.a. @zambonini ~ contentini)

Designing for Content: Creating a Message Hierarchy

Added on 19 July 2011 Peter Bogaards
In the end, hierarchy will be replaced by network.

“When we integrate content creation early in our web development processes, we are more effective at orienting our conversations to the end goals for the user and the business. This is a huge win for our users, who are increasingly demanding meaningful content experiences before they engage with our web sites and apps. It’s also vital to businesses, whose success depends on communicating value in ways that convert bystanders to buyers.”

(Stephanie Hay a.k.a. @steph_hay ~ Web Standards Sherpa)

Building a Content Strategy Methodology in Several Thousand Easy Steps

Added on 21 June 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Methodology. An ugly word, to be sure. Cold and clinical, it marginalizes flexibility in the name of process. Gross. Yet, we all seek it out. We all want a methodology – a guide to doing what we are going to do. We want it for us. We want it for our clients. We want to take the amorphous blob that is content strategy and define WHAT THAT MEANS on a task-related level. Great. But how?”

(Corey Vilhauer a.k.a. @MrVilhauer ~ Eating Elephant)

Agile Content Strategy: Scrum Favors Generalists

Added on 17 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“One of the features of Scrum that is difficult for us to implement relates to specialization. We are indoctrinated to focus our talents on one primary field or specialty. When specialists work as a team, they contribute their unique work at the prescribed phase of a project and otherwise they sit on the sidelines and watch the progress. While they’re on the bench, they might as well work on other projects. So it is not uncommon for one person to be involved in a dozen or more projects with the hope that the timing will align and they can do their part when needed in all of them. Of course, it rarely works that way. Project plans overlap. So specialists typically vacillate between crazy overtime and burnout.” (James Mathewson ~ Writing for Digital)

The Importance of Web Content Strategy

Added on 16 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Some web design and web development agencies have it all. They provide their clients with a complete site solution from beginning to end, from site planning and information architecture to web design, web hosting, and SEO. It’s tough for a smaller web design company or the solo freelancer to compete. Or is it? It may be easier than you think to broaden your competitiveness by adding web content writing services to your web design company.” (Rick Sloboda ~ Six Revisions)

Confab Session Wrap: Selling Content Strategy

Added on 13 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Karen McGrane, of Bond Art + Science and an interaction design instructor at SVA, spoke to a packed crowd of audience of content strategists searching for tips and tricks on making the content strategy sell within organizations. She started with a personal history, entitled, Ways I Fucked Up By Not Talking About Content Strategy a Lot Earlier. It was a painful kind of funny, as most of us nodded when she spoke about dealing with organizational structure, budgets where one person wins and another loses, and recurring scoping heartaches. McGrane says we need to see our present day as an opportunity to change the way we work and do business. Not just to fix things for unhappy people. And psst, it’s also a good opportunity to sell more work.” (Sadia Latifi ~ barbarian group)

Q&A with Colleen Jones

Added on 5 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“How did you come to think of influential content in this way? Two big reasons. One was I studied rhetoric in grad school. I kept using rhetorical principles in my work successfully. But, if I tried to explain to people what I did as rhetoric, they had no idea what I was talking about. So, I saw an opportunity to make those principles practical and usable. The other big reason was over the past few years, I’ve seen persuasive marketing and design use pushy tactics in the name of cognitive and social psychology. Psychology principles focus more on form than on substance. Psychology, as a simple example, would tell you to have logos and quotes that endorse your product or service. Rhetoric would tell you to have those endorsements be from brands and people that your audience identifies with.” (Rachel Lovinger ~ Scatter/Gather)

Three Questons: The Content Strategy Discipline

Added on 2 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Most of the content strategy literature tries to define the discipline in terms of the deliverables practitioners produce–audits, plans, style guides and other resources, UX recommendations, human resource models, tooling recommendations, process engineering flow charts, etc. This is all well and good. But it won’t help to evangelize the practice of content strategy, or help define what unifies all these activities.” (Writing for Digital)

The UX of this article

Added on 27 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“In many respects, when we talk about, evaluate, and revise products from a usability standpoint, we overlook the most important piece: content. Our tendency is to be concerned only with the wrapper or container, navigation through that container, and the interplay of the elements that make up the container. But what about the content which populates this otherwise dead space?” (Brett Sandusky ~ UX Magazine)

Content/Communication

Added on 12 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“The way we talk about our content has significant impact on the way we treat it within our organizations… and, therefore, the quality of the content we produce. How can we make the shift from treating content as a commodity to valuing it as a business asset? With a little storytelling and the help of a few powerful metaphors, you can begin to turn the tides.” (Kristina Halvorson ~ Webstock 11 videos)

Making the right products in the right way: a consistent product lifecycle

Added on 11 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Creating a world class BBC Online depends on teams from diverse backgrounds working together, and this demands clear and consistent terminology, processes, and governance structures across all products in the BBC Online portfolio. The Product Lifecycle Management provides a framework for collaboration between technical and editorial disciplines.” (BBC)

Karen McGrane: CS Forum podcast episode 4

Added on 5 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“People love the recent history of things like Xerox PARC and Apple Computer. And I might set the history of content strategy almost on like a separate track, an alternate timeline. A lot of the history of principles that apply to content strategy come out of very old traditions in rhetoric and technical communication. (…) And that’s one of the things that’s so exciting to me about content strategy is, it’s bringing a lot of these principles that have been discussed for decades into this new space of the web and digital media.” (Randall Snare ~ CS Forum ’11)

The Five Models Of Content Curation

Added on 4 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Content Curation is a term that describes the act of finding, grouping, organizing or sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue. It is such a powerful idea because curation does NOT focus on adding more content/noise to the chaotic information overload of social media, and instead focuses on helping any one of us to make sense of this information by bringing together what is most important.” (Rohit Bhargava ~ IMB)