Defending Content Strategy

All throughout my professional life I have been captivated by how specific communication can be changed by the right or wrong choice of words. Words are important; content is important, and yet they don’t the credit they are due — particularly from the design field. Personally, I try to communicate effectively in my writing and speaking. And when the Internet came along, I guess you could say this all became even more needed and important to achieve— self-publishing became another way of achieving self-branding. 

Christina Halvorson, nationally known content strategist and author of the awe-inspiring book: “Content Strategy,” says about web copy: "It’s not copy. It’s content.” And that means that the information should be thought thoroughly through with enough time to revise it before it needs to be published, and it needs to come from a base of organized data that is minimally scrubbed through a business strategy (marketing plan), information architecture checklist and an appropriate interface design (secondary to the content, or the words).


And this often does not happen in web development.  In fact, it is often done "bass—ackwards” from the above perspective. I suppose this is because web development is a visual endeavor, right? And we have more visual cells in our brains than any other type.   It could be as simple as the fact that the content portion of the effort is not as exciting as the visual. 


Legendary Harvard marketing professor, Theodore Levitt, once said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. What they want is a quarter-inch hole.”

I say, “You don’t want a lot of content, you want content that matters.” Less is more. How much ROT (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial data) does your website have? Shouldn’t you care?  Don’t you want to get rid of it, or at least develop it correctly and in a meaningful way? Wouldn’t better SEO* help your cause?
Henry Ford once said, “If you need a machine and you don’t buy it, you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it.”

I say, “If you don’t attend to your content to ensure it meets your business plan, then you will pay for it through its inefficiency.”

Clayton Christensen, author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” said, “Questions are places in your mind where answers fit.  If you haven’t asked the question, then the answer has no where to go.” Ultimately, your client will be asking you those questions, and a good marketing program and content strategy always answers those questions before they are asked.

* search engine optimization or strategy-enriched omnipresence, hah, sorry.

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Some great resources for those of you who either need a content strategy or  want to learn more about content strategy is as follows (in the order of importance): Books:

• "Content Strategy" (Second Edition)," Kristina Halvorson, New Riders Press, 2012.
• "The Web Content Strategist Bible," Richard Sheffield, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 1 edition (March 4, 2009)
• "The Elements of Content Strategy," Erin Kissane, A Book Apart, 2012.
• "Content Strategy for Mobile Web," Karen McGrane, A Book Apart, 2013.
• "Clout," Colleen Jones, New Riders Press, 2011.
• "Mobile First," Luke Wroblewski, A Book Apart, 2013. 
• Letting Go of the Words, Second Edition: Writing Web Content that Works (Interactive Technologies) [Paperback], Janice Redish, 2012. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers; 2 edition (August 28, 2012).

Articles:

•  "Your Content, Now Mobile," Karen McGrane, Nov. 5, 29012. http://alistapart.com/article/your-content-now-mobile
• "Content Modeling: A Master Skill," Rachel Lovinger, April 24, 2012 http://alistapart.com/article/content-modelling-a-master-skill
• "Tinker, Tailor, Content Strategist," Rachel Lovinger,  April 24, 2012, http://alistapart.com/article/tinker-tailor-content-strategist
• "Future Ready Content," Sara Wachter-Boettcher, February 28, 2012, http://alistapart.com/article/future-ready-content
•  "Testing Content," Angela Colter,  December 14, 2010 http://alistapart.com/article/testing-content
• "A Checklist for Content Work," Erin Kissane, March 2011. http://alistapart.com/article/a-checklist-for-content-work
• "The Discipline of Content Strategy," Kristina Halvorson, 2008, http://alistapart.com/article/thedisciplineofcontentstrategy

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