The first-ever conference fully dedicated to content strategy was held mid-April in Paris.  It was a very happy coincidence for me, since I live in Paris and I’m just launching a content strategy consultancy.  So I was thrilled to be part of this inaugural event: it felt like we were breaking the champagne bottle on the ship.

Why is content strategy a hot topic right now? One key reason is that our websites have grown considerably over the last decade, and as presenter Jeffrey MacIntyre so aptly put it, there’s been a lot of deferred maintenance (as in, we know we have issues, but we’ll deal with them later).   The result is a lot of websites with way too much content, insufficient resources to support it, lack of content governance, lack of strategy for what happens after launch date; in short, a lack of an overall content strategy.

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One of the biggest pain points I had when I was managing large corporate B2B websites was trying to reconcile the rhythm of day-to-day operations with the demands of a major project.

Day-to-day web operations are driven by calendars: editorial and publishing calendars, webmastering and meeting schedules, and so on. Changes to those calendars are common. Expected content is late due to a program change; something goes into crisis mode and the time you’d planned for X gets allocated to Y. And on it goes.

Day-to-day is about the execution of a thousand tiny details, so time is managed in short increments: fifteen minutes here, a half-hour there, seven mails fired off in five minutes, a 40-minute meeting, 20 minutes in a colleague’s office—it doesn’t stop.

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I’m a late bloomer. 

I learned to drive at 40, got my first iPod just this Christmas, I finally watched the inaugural episode of 24hrs a few weeks ago, and started tweeting on January 17, 2010.  So I feel completely in character starting this blog sometime in April of 2010, several years after blogging has become de rigueur.  

A recent post, published by someone, somewhere (I’ll have to get better at remembering these things), wondered why people used the term ‘take the leap’ when it came to starting out in social media.  Well, it’s a huge leap, from my perspective.  

I’ve been reading blogs for year:  at lunchtime, at my desk; occasionally before going to bed at night; on rainy Sunday mornings.  I’ve never commented.  I’ve gotten much out of them, and that was enough for me then.  But writing a blog, commenting on other posts, getting personally involved– well, that’s a whole other level of commitment, and taking that leap means a major reassessment of my time.  (I may never get to watch another episode of 24hrs.) 
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