“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)

“There’s a big difference between persuasion, or influence, and manipulation. People have experienced much interactive marketing (…) as a collection of manipulative tricks—to the point that the connotations of marketing and advertising are now almost synonymous with lying. That really needs to change.” (Kristina Mausser ~ UXmatters)

“The goal is helping people make good decisions and then act on those decisions. The goal is matching a business, product, or idea with users who are interested in and can benefit from it, then act on it. The goal is being a trusted advisor to users, not controllers of users’ minds. (…) Content strategy is more than a set of skills. It’s a mindset and a process. I would advise anyone interested to focus on that first, then worry about the skills. Skills, tools, and tips constantly change and are hard to use properly without understanding the mindset and process first.” (Peachpit)

“The conversation around content strategy has exploded in the last few months. We’ve certainly contributed to that conversation ourselves, as you’ve undoubtedly seen on this blog. Still there remains some ambiguity about what exactly is content strategy and why it’s important? In the following series of videos, MindTouch’s Mark Fidelman spends some time with Scott Abel, aka The Content Wrangler, and investigates the realm of content strategy, the benefits of application, and its relation to technical communicators and social media.” (MindTouch)

“A unified content strategy is a repeatable method of identifying all content requirements up front, creating consistently structured content for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling content on demand to meet your customer’s needs. Intelligent content/smart documents are the way in which we prepare our content so that it’s structurally rich and semantically aware, and is therefore discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable. So the content strategy is the plan of action, and intelligent content is the way we implement it.” (Jill C. Nagle ~ Zengage)