Content strategy

Are you prepared for the Semantic Web?

"If you want to stay ahead of the web publishing curve, now is the time to start learning and experimenting with the Semantic Web. It’s been in development since the ’90s, led by Tim Berners-Lee himself. When media historians write books about the information transformation we are in (from print to web), the Semantic Web will be at least as important as the invention of HTML. Having Semantic Web-enabled pages will soon be a big competitive advantage for you and your company." (Writing for Digital)

Posted on July 20, 2010 | Permalink

How content strategy fits into the user experience

"I just presented a talk to the Content Strategy Seattle group on how content strategy fits into the user experience. Here are my slides and a videocast for the talk." (Nick Finck)

Posted on July 16, 2010 | Permalink

Content strategy and customer service: A talk with Ann Rockley

"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)

Posted on July 13, 2010 | Permalink

Designing from the Content/Story Out

"If you create a design that doesn't build from the content, you end up with a mismatch. When it comes to add your content, you find that your content/story doesn't actually fit the design/theme." (Tom Johnson ~ I'd Rather Be Writing)

Posted on June 28, 2010 | Permalink

On Curation and Curators: Skills vs. Roles

"(...) if content strategy is going to succeed, the community needs to know how they’ll get every team members skills dialed up to world-class levels. Once they do that, they'll see a world of difference. No ivory tower or self-serving academic interests here. This is the real world, baby." (Jared Spool)

Posted on June 23, 2010 | Permalink

Paris, je t’aime

"Led by some of the biggest names in the content strategy world, the workshops and sessions covered a lot of territory. Here are a few of the biggest takeaways for me from my two days in Paris." (Stacey King Gordon)

Posted on May 28, 2010 | Permalink

Why You Should Adopt An 'Accessible Content Strategy'

"With the burgeoning number of computing devices and software solutions, it is easier than ever before to deliver single-sourced content such that it is accessible, consumable and actionable by as many users as possible." (The Content Wrangler)

Posted on May 25, 2010 | Permalink

Organizating Content: A 7 Parts Series

"I'm starting a new series on organizing content. I'm not sure how many parts there will be in this series. Writing essays in a serial format is an experiment I'm exploring. Basically this approach to writing follows the agile model. I write a bit, get some feedback, write some more, get feedback, and keep going. The feedback along the way shapes the direction I'm heading. Also, with each serial post, I hope to take the issue a little deeper." (I'd Rather Be Writing)

Posted on May 25, 2010 | Permalink

Content strategy

"With the mass of online content available, merely repurposing offline material for the web won't satifsy the expectations of today's consumers. A more adventurous strategy is required." (Meg Carter ~ New Media Age)

Posted on May 21, 2010 | Permalink

A Common Sense Content Strategy

"Lately, everyone on the web is talking about content. Content strategy has made its way into our collective consciousness and web writing is coming into its own." (Tiffani Jones ~ MIX Online)

Posted on May 11, 2010 | Permalink

Intentional Communication: Expanding our Definition of User Experience Design

"Design and content. Content and design. It's impossible (and stupid) to argue over which one is more important than the other - which should come first, which is more difficult or 'strategic'. They need each other to provide context, meaning, information, and instruction in any user experience (UX)." (Kristina Halvorson - interactions XVII.3)

Posted on April 26, 2010 | Permalink

A DIY Guide to Content Strategy

"You’re a web professional: a designer, developer, information architect, or strategist. Your team has the web design disciplines covered: research, strategy, user experience design, standards-based development, and project management. But something’s going wrong with your projects; the user experience just isn’t meeting your expectations. You're reasonably sure you know why: there’s a problem with the content. You realise that your team could use some help from the discipline of content strategy, but for whatever reason, hiring a dedicated content strategist isn't a feasible option. So what can you do to add some content strategy to your projects? Learn how web professionals can practise content strategy for ourselves, through advocacy, improved design processes, and community engagement. And when we have the luxury of a dedicated content strategist, learn how we can engage with the discipline in our everyday practice." (Jonathan Kahn)

Posted on April 23, 2010 | Permalink

Content Strategists Gather in Paris!

"You may not have heard of them yet, but you will. They're called Content Strategists, and they're fast becoming the most in-demand advisers for Web sites and corporate customers looking for a way to evolve into content makers and curators." (Steve Rosenbaum - Huffington Post)

Posted on April 16, 2010 | Permalink

Why You Need A Content Strategist?

"Are you investing in your content? Do you have a strategy? If not then help is at hand. You need a content strategist, but who are they and what do they do?" (Paul Boag)

Posted on April 14, 2010 | Permalink

Content: Not Always King

"The strategy you adopt when tackling a project needs to take this continuum in mind. If your product is about content consumption, content is king and you should do due diligence and start from a content strategy perspective. Users of those products are coming to be informed or entertained and need the content to be front-and-center; the product is in service to displaying the content in as appropriate a manner as possible. The meaning of the content matters; you wouldn't display a cartoon the same way you’d display an analysis of the stock market. At least, not usually." (Dan Saffer - Kicker Studio) - Goes back to the old web app (code) versus doc (data) distinction.

Posted on March 22, 2010 | Permalink

Starting Out Organized: Website Content Planning The Right Way

"So many articles explain how to design interfaces, design graphics and deal with clients. But one step in the Web development process is often skipped over or forgotten altogether: content planning. Sometimes called information architecture, or IA planning, this step doesn't find a home easily in many people's workflow. But rushing on to programming and pushing pixels makes for content that looks shoehorned rather than fully integrated and will only require late-game revisions." (Kristin Wemmer - Smashing Magazine)

Posted on March 17, 2010 | Permalink

Content Strategy as Information Design

"Content strategy is in many respects information design. And as Steve Jobs famously said, 'Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.' Content, and content strategy are experiential – much the same as design. And design requires planning." (Will Sullivan - Craft Interactive)

Posted on March 17, 2010 | Permalink

Content Strategy Is About Publishing

"When people talk about the imminent death of publishing, they’re usually talking about something narrow, specific, and tied to ways of working that predate the internet: the publication of books, magazines, newspapers, and all kinds of printed legal and business data, along with the economic, logistical, and aesthetic structures that have made that process possible. And that kind of publishing is indeed getting whipped around like a very small cowboy on a very large bull. Why? Because the internet is made of publishing, and its new and often anarchic publishing models are messing with older models in all kinds of ways." (Erin Kissane - Incisive.nu) - courtesy of khalvorson

Posted on March 03, 2010 | Permalink

Eyes on Content Experience

"(...) slides about the special aspect to user experience: content experience. The value for user comes typically from the content, not the interaction itself. It is sometimes hard for us HCI people to remember this." (Virpi Roto - Eyes on User Experience)

Posted on March 01, 2010 | Permalink

Content strategy is, in fact, the next big thing

"Content strategy is more or less on the same trajectory as social media was three years ago. Why? I think it’s because the reality of social media initiatives—that they’re internal commitments, not advertising campaigns—has derailed more than a few organizations from really implementing effective, measurable programs. Most companies can’t sustain social media engagement because they lack the internal editorial infrastructure to support it." (Kristina Halvorson)

Posted on February 26, 2010 | Permalink

Words that Zing

"To select the right words, take cues from rhetoric and psychology. I do not mean use unctuous sales language or manipulative mind control, nor do I necessarily mean use catchy words. I simply mean add influential weight to web writing based on centuries of rhetorical wisdom and a growing body of scientific knowledge." (Colleen Jones - A List Apart)

Posted on February 10, 2010 | Permalink

Content Is King

"Just because content is king doesn't mean, however, that the designer's job is any less important. How seriously would people take the King if his suit was poorly made? It has to look good." (Paul Boag)

Posted on February 02, 2010 | Permalink

Writing for the Web: The Right Strategy

"When it comes to designing a website, content is often overlooked, but why? Very rarely do users browse the web looking for a good design or decent experience. Users come for the content. Not giving them what they want with poorly written content will frustrate users. Not only does it waste their time, but your time as well." (Shay Howe - letscountthedays) - courtesy of destrywion

Posted on January 26, 2010 | Permalink

It's time for content strategy

"Content is anything that informs, instructs, or entertains people. Text, raw data, images, games, music, lectures, videos, flash widgets, a good joke, roadside signs – it's all content. A content strategy is a plan for creating, sharing, and governing content effectively. Content strategy isn't just a web thing. In fact, it's been around for thousands of years. Content creation and sharing began when our earliest ancestors started telling each other stories." (Melissa Rach - Scroll Magazine)

Posted on January 15, 2010 | Permalink

In Defense of Lorem Ipsum

"If content strategists want to ask designers to stop using Lorem Ipsum, maybe designers should insist that content strategists add style sheets to their copy decks that match the proposed design direction." (Karen McGrane)

Posted on January 12, 2010 | Permalink

Testing Content Concepts

"As UX professionals, we’re all familiar with the need to test user experience designs. Testing content, however, might be a different story. Most companies haven’t given testing content the attention it deserves—partly because it’s challenging. One challenge is that time and budget usually do not allow us to test every single piece of content. Another challenge is that gathering too much unfocused feedback can freeze our projects in analysis paralysis. To meet these challenges, try testing your content concepts—and start testing them early in your projects." (Colleen Jones - UXmatters)

Posted on December 21, 2009 | Permalink

The Content Strategist as Digital Curator

"Curation has a distinguished history in cultural institutions. In galleries and museums, curators use judgment and a refined sense of style to select and arrange art to create a narrative, evoke a response, and communicate a message. As the digital landscape becomes increasingly complex, and as businesses become ever more comfortable using the web to bring their product and audience closer, the techniques and principles of museum curatorship can inform how we create online experiences — particularly when we approach content." (Erin Scime - A List Apart)

Posted on December 08, 2009 | Permalink

Why Strategists Need Content Managers

"(...) I'm of the opinion that content strategy is most certainly NOT content management. As strategists, we have input on how the content is produced, managed and governed, but our goal is ultimately to aid in the creation of a strategic set of best practicies and personas to be sure that content developers are creating the most appropriate content for machines and humans." (Daniel Eizans)

Posted on December 07, 2009 | Permalink

CS and IA Unite Already, Will Ya!

"Content Strategy is not Copywriting. Design is not Window Dressing. Information Architecture is not Boxes and Arrows. (...) CS and IA are the same thing, or at least they should be." (Ian Alexander - Eat Media)

Posted on December 02, 2009 | Permalink

The Scoop on Content Strategy: An Interview with Kristina Halvorson

"There are lots of different definitions floating around out there. It was important to me to talk about content strategy in a way that people can understand easily. I define content strategy as planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content. Planning is the key. Planning is about asking the right questions to collect data and information, with the goal of delivering a plan that gets you from where you are now to where you want to be." (Colleen Jones - UXmatters)

Posted on October 20, 2009 | Permalink

No Chief Web Officer Required

"It's a widely-held belief among various Web practitioners (from content strategists and information architects to Web infrastructure tool builders and application developers) that senior executives don’t understand the real power and capability of the Internet. And, that this lack of understanding has left Web Teams executing in a vacuum, with inappropriate funding and inadequate headcount. More importantly, it has left organizations exposed, as new Internet-enabled businesses sneak up and shut down the slower-to-react belle-weathers. The house is on fire and the C-Suite has got a garden hose. To address this strategic deficit, there’s been a lot of discussion about the placement of a senior Web-savvy person in the C-Suite to drive the creation of a sensible Web content and information strategy. I've thought about this potential new role in the C-suite a lot and think that it's not required." (Lisa Welchman) - courtesy of ruudruissaard

Posted on October 01, 2009 | Permalink

The Importance of Website Content in Online Purchasing Across Different Types of Products

"Several authors have suggested that the importance of website content elements in online purchasing varies across different types of products. Our aim is to empirically test this proposition. Here, we focus on goods versus services and hedonic versus utilitarian products. After reviewing the literature on the role of website content, we hypothesize which elements are more important for which type of product. The results of an empirical study confirm most of the different roles across different types of products. This suggests that retailers would profit from taking the differences in product types into account in designing their online stores." (Tibert Verhagen and Jaap Boter - VU Amsterdam)

Posted on September 22, 2009 | Permalink

Content Strategy for the Web Professional

"You're a web professional: a designer, developer, information architect, or strategist. Your team has the web design disciplines covered: research, strategy, user experience design, standards-based development, and project management. But something’s going wrong with your projects; the user experience just isn't meeting your expectations. You're reasonably sure you know why: there's a problem with the content." (Jonathan Kahn - lucid plot)

Posted on September 09, 2009 | Permalink

STC Content Strategy SIG

"This site is the home of the Content Strategy SIG (Special Interest Group) of the Society for Technical Communication. (...) Content strategy is an emerging field of practice dealing with the planning aspects of managing content throughout its lifecycle. Strategy includes alignment to business goals, analysis, and modeling, and influences the development, production, presentation, evaluation, measurement, and sunsetting of content, including governance." (About Content Strategy SIG)

Posted on September 09, 2009 | Permalink

Smart talk about content strategy

"A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of visiting the lovely city of Atlanta to moderate a panel discussion on content strategy. Panel participants were selected from a variety of disciplines in order to facilitate discussion about how content strategy has impact on (and benefits for) a number of roles and functions across an organization. (OK, we were also hoping for a little fighting.) Participants were: Karen McGrane, Bond Art + Science (User Experience), John Muehlbauer, InterContinental Hotels Group (Marketing), Brian Ikeda, Philips Design (Visual Design), and Ryan Esparza, Content Management Consultant (CMS/IT)." (Kristina Halvorson - Brain Traffic)

Posted on August 27, 2009 | Permalink

The Case for Content Strategy - Motown Style

"Over the past year, the content strategy chatter has been building. Jeffrey MacIntyre gave us its raison d'être. Kristina Halvorson wrote the call to arms. Panels at SXSW, presentations at An Event Apart, and regional meetups continue to build the drum roll. But how do you start humming the content strategy tune to your own team and to your prospective clients? Listen up and heed Aretha Franklin. No, really." (Margot Bloomsteim - A List Apart)

Posted on August 18, 2009 | Permalink

The Debut of Usable, Influential Content

"What happens when we architect a user experience that makes the content easy to find? The content becomes a focus of the experience, a star of the show. If the content performs well, it will have an influence. Users will be more likely to take the action we want them to take, make the decision we want them to make or have the perception we want them to have. Users will be more likely to consider our brand, our product or our idea." (Colleen Jones - ASIS&T Bulletin Aug/Sep 2009)

Posted on August 06, 2009 | Permalink

Blinded by Content Bliss

"Consider the source of the content you're reviewing. What's his or her background? Consider the individual’s education, career, and publishing history. That's not to say, of course, that people's opinions are only valid if they have the right alma mater, but that information may provide context and insight as to whether someone's qualified to make the particular claims he or she's making." (Robert Stribley - Scatter/Gather)

Posted on August 04, 2009 | Permalink

The Content Conundrum: Bridging the gap between design and content

"As web designers and information architects, we often dismiss deep consideration of content when we design interactive experiences. By content I'm not only referring to the various forms of text (e.g., headers, body copy, error messages) but also imagery, graphics, and videos or audio that make up the full interactive experience. Sure, we have a sense of what content is available, and we've likely considered it to some extent when creating flows, wireframes, and prototypes. But the design artifacts that we create represent only part of the overall user experience that we're designing. The content that sits inside of our design framework is often the final arbiter of success, yet we sometimes diminish it's importance and separate ourselves from it. The more we separate our design activities from content development, the greater the risk of design failure." (Christopher Detzi - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on August 04, 2009 | Permalink

Content Analysis: A Practical Approach

"To know your content is to love it. Content analysis is an essential part of many UX design projects that involve existing content. Examples of such projects include migrating a Web site to a new platform or design, merging multiple Web sites into one, or assessing Web content for reuse in a new channel. Just as you cannot nurture a garden without regularly inspecting its plants and flowers, you cannot take proper care of your content without looking at it closely. You must become familiar with your content to judge whether it's effective, understand how it relates to other content, make decisions about how to use or format it, identify opportunities for improving it, and more." (Colleen Jones - UXmatters)

Posted on August 04, 2009 | Permalink

Content Templates to the Rescue

"A content template is a simple document that serves two purposes: it's a paragraph-level companion to your website's wireframes (or other IA blueprints), and it's a simple, effective means of getting useful information from your experts to your writers." (Erin Kissane - A List Apart)

Posted on July 08, 2009 | Permalink

A practical definition of content

"Simply put, content is contextualized data." (Intentional Design)

Posted on June 29, 2009 | Permalink

Redefining content strategy

"When we talk about content strategy, then, my contention is that the type of content we include in the definition needs to broaden beyond Web content, as does the recognition that the content, even if just for the Web, includes not only persuasive content, but instructive/informative, user-generated, and even entertainment content." (Intentional Design)

Posted on June 29, 2009 | Permalink

Content First

"Kristina Halvorson quotes the origin of the phrase information architecture. Then Tufte came along. Designers took it upon themselves to craft information that was understandable and digestable. Then the web came along. To begin with, it was treated as a visual medium. Jesse James Garrett changed the emphasis to user experience. But where is content in Jesse's diagram? It's on the second level. Then it disappears. We were approaching content on the same level as functional specs; a feature than can be ticked off a list. But content is a living, breathing thing that evolves over time. Once you put it online, you are required to feed it and take care of it." (Jeremy Keith - Adactio)

Posted on June 22, 2009 | Permalink

Content Strategy: Content is King! (preso)

"Why do users visit a website? Most likely it's for the content. Then why is content strategy the most neglected aspect of user experience design? Delivering the right content to meet user needs requires attention throughout the process -- it must be planned, analyzed, produced, edited, managed, and maintained. Even though content is the centerpiece of the user's experience, it rarely gets the attention it deserves during site design and development. This workshop addressed how to integrate content strategy into the website design process, ensuring that the content that gets created is what users need." (Karen McGrane)

Posted on June 16, 2009 | Permalink

Using Content to Grow Customer Relationships

"Want to keep your customers despite tough economic times? Don't add yet another feature to your Web site. Stop worrying about redesigning it. Instead, take a hard look at improving your site's content." (Colleen Jones - UXmatters)

Posted on June 08, 2009 | Permalink

Dear Content Strategists

"Well done. You guys are fantastic. You've got some great leaders among you, and more importantly, you seem to be generating a lot of meaningful grass roots activity. The world really needs you, and you're poised to achieve some big things over the next couple years. Just don't screw it up, OK?" (Louis Rosenfeld)

Posted on June 07, 2009 | Permalink

Web Strategy: A Definition

"An effective Web Strategy provides the required guidance and implementation authority required to create and maintain a high-quality Web presence. It also emplaces accountability mechanisms to ensure that Web teams take a mature approach to developing and managing the organization’s most powerful communications and transactional tool." - (Lisa Welchman)

Posted on May 16, 2009 | Permalink

Content strategy and the new face of documentation

"The idea of looking at trends in our profession speak directly to the idea of content strategy. It’s a 'beyond the document' look at how we create and deliver content to various audiences. It's about content re-use and single-sourcing, about content management, about filtering content, about creating better ways to serve content consumers. It's also about how social media has raised the bar, and how consumers will take matters into their own hands if we don't step up to the plate." - (Rahel Anne Bailie - Intentional Design Inc.)

Posted on May 11, 2009 | Permalink

The Content Strategy Land Rush

"I don't have the answers. I’m sorry if that's disappointing news and I have lead you this far to learn it. In fact, this is what we are all watching to see. Such things as the social web explosion and the recent economy crash will undoubtedly shape content strategy considerations. The semantic web, and web as a platform, are increasingly becoming a part of that picture too." - (Wion)

Posted on May 05, 2009 | Permalink

Content Typology: Getting a Handle on Your Content Types

"Content types are among the least understood, and yet most potent, aspects of user experience and web design. Most people encounter them for the first time when implementing a grand-scale content management system (CMS) because you have to define content types before building templates for each kind of content you're going to publish." - (The Content Strategy Noob)

Posted on May 04, 2009 | Permalink

Toward Content Quality

"How do we know whether content is any good? This simple question does not have a simple answer. Yet, I think having a good answer would help us show our employers and clients why their content needs to improve and how their content compares to the competition's. As a start toward an answer to this question, I offer a set of content quality checklists for seven different lenses through which we can view content. I see these checklists as the groundwork for content heuristics, which would enable us to do heuristic evaluations and competitive analyses efficiently. With good content heuristics, we could make a case for better content without painstakingly doing an analysis of all of the content up front. Imagine, making a case for better content quality in a few hours instead of a few weeks." - (Colleen Jones - UXmatters)

Posted on April 14, 2009 | Permalink

Future Practice Interview: Kristina Halvorson

"I'd say that one of the biggest, hairiest questions I'm getting asked (ed. on content strategy) is how to plan for and govern user-generated content." - (Louis Rosenfeld - Rosenfeld Media)

Posted on April 08, 2009 | Permalink