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.
These issues will only get worse if companies don’t start taming the beast in some systematic way. That’s why I liked how morning keynote speaker Rahel Bailie described content strategy: a repeatable system and a framework for governing the management of content throughout the entire content lifecycle.
The rise of social media is also pushing content issues to the foreground. As companies scurry to launch blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, YouTube channels and what have you, the lack of content strategy becomes that much more visible. What are we going to say and where? Why? When? To whom? How do we ensure a consistent customer experience across all these channels?
Finally, there’s been an explosion of literature on content strategy since 2008, and a corresponding rise in interest. As afternoon keynote speaker Kristina Halvorson noted, a Google search on the term content strategy, filtered on 2010, returns more result in mid-April than the same search did when it was filtered on all of 2009.
Halvorson herself has contributed a lot to making the subject of key interest, through a wide range of speaking engagements but also because of a thin, red book entitled Content Strategy for the Web, which highlights why companies need content strategy, and what its main component parts are. Her definition of content strategy has been widely quoted: it’s the practice of planning for the creation, delivery and governance of useful, usable content.
I encourage anyone involved in websites and or in any kind of content-related activity to read this book. It’s smart, eloquent, and most of all (for tired enterprise folks working 10 to 12 hour days on a regular basis), short and entertaining: you can read it in bed at the end of a long day and not feel like you’re doing homework.
Her keynote was much like her book (that’s brand consistency for you): engaging, conversational, smart. For all of us in the room, it was a call to arms: to go out, spread the word, add to growing body of knowledge, and contribute to its development as a legitimate practice, with common methodologies, well-understood deliverables, and predictable processes.
Content strategy has grown with the web, and though many of us have been practicing it (or at least, some of its components if not the whole thing from A to Z), it is only now coming into its own. By giving it structure and a name, we can make it easier for it to happen in a more systematic way.
There were a lot more highlights from the Content Strategy Forum, and much food for thought. I hope to use many of the insights gleaned over the two days as input into more blog posts over the coming weeks. In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more about content strategy, here are some resources you might want to check out:
Content Strategy Forum 2010 presentations
Final credits: the Content Strategy Forum was organized by the France and Transalpine chapters of the Society for Technical Communicators (STC). Many kudos for lining up such an impressive speaker roster and bringing together so many people.
