I went to a lot of conferences last year, but this keynote presentation by United Nations News and Media Director Stephane Dujarric stood out. I’d been wondering if lessons from a sprawling intergovernmental agency would apply to my world, which is essentially B2B. Well, they do: that’s why it’s my highlight n°2 from 2011.

Stephane Dujarric is a former ABC reporter and currently the director of news and media for one of the most sprawling seas of bureaucratic acronyms you could imagine: the United Nations.

He was at the IABC Europe conference in Turin last April to deliver a keynote talk entitled ‘Bartering for Communications’.  It was based on a single premise: that working through partnerships is the only way to have real impact when you have limited resources but something to ‘trade’ (in this case, the organization’s global reach and legitimacy).

UN Photo/Mark Gordon

While I was curious from a purely intellectual standpoint about what would he would say, I wasn’t sure how much of it would apply to my mostly B2B world. After all, the UN has communication challenges that most of us don’t. (Few of us have as a mandate to promote world peace and security, for example.)

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I thought I’d start my blogging year by sharing just three things that I found deeply interesting last year, and that resonate with me still, several months later. This is the first of three posts (the other two will be post before the end of January*).

The first was a presentation given by Asanka Wasala, a PhD student and localization researcher, at the Multilingual Web Workshop in Limerick in September. Entitled
‘A Micro Crowdsourcing Architecture to Localize Web Content for Less-Resourced Languages‘, the presentation grabbed my attention with the first two slides.

Take a look at them. The first is a tag cloud of the most common languages you’ll find on the web. Note the extraordinary place taken up by English. Now look at the second slide: that’s a tag cloud of the smaller languages on the web. Notice how many of them there are. In fact, many of those languages are not only under-represented on the web, they’re barely there at all.

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I’m getting ready to spend three days at the biggest web conference in Europe, LeWeb 2011, to be part of a liveblogging team for Orange.fr. I owe this opportunity to a stroke of good fortune, for which I’m truly grateful. It’s not everyday you get to mingle with the movers and shakers of SoLoMo (that’s social, local and mobile, THE hot topics of the moment), though I think you have to take the word ‘mingle’ with a grain of salt as there will be about 3000 people there.

I came to the web from content. For years, I was a copywriter, writing all sorts of things for print: articles, speeches, brochures, reports – that was my lot. Then, in the late 1990’s, companies decided they needed all this stuff on the web. So I came to the web from the world of content, and I discovered a whole new world.

As a content person, I regularly rail about the lack of consideration ‘web folks’ give to content. It drives me nuts to hear people talk about how they need an app, or a mobile site, or a new game – when they haven’t given a moment’s thought—no, that’s not fair—they haven’t given enough thought to the content they will need to make those sites and applications come alive.

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You think that I don’t even mean
A single word I say
It’s only words, and words are all I have
To take your heart away.
The Bee Gees, 1966

I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of words ever since I came back from the Content Strategy Forum in early September. (I’ve also had this song as a soundtrack I can’t seem to get rid of, thanks for Forum speaker Eric Reiss.) But in fact, that’s all I’ve been doing: thinking about it, mulling it through.

Then, this weekend, I came across a post in my twitter feed: On writing simply and saving the world economy (sub-head: Is corporate gobbledygook the cause of the economic apocalypse?). Two hours later, on public transport, I came across an older post by @krismausser on the Business value of words, where gobbledygook is once more singled out, maybe not for the economic crisis, but for undermining our ability to communicate with our customers.

It struck me that this was a recurring theme at conferences and seminars I’ve attended recently – regardless of the subject. It started with the CS Forum, where raconteur extraordinaire Gerry McGovern made his case: it’s not content, not even sentences, but words—individual, single words– that make or break our websites or our apps.

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There is something in the content strategy and web community known as the “11^th hour sh*tstorm”.  You know: that moment two weeks before the go-live date of a major website redesign when people are scrambling around like crazed chickens because they have everything ready – except the content.

Well, if you’re experiencing storm problems with your content, or suffering from related ones — lack of governance, no maintenance, rework, too much content, lack of purpose, and so on – you’re going to have them to the n^th degree if your content needs to be in 5, 15, or 40 languages.

Localizing websites and web content is hard work.  It can be costly, time-consuming, and a logistical pain in the butt. It creates complexities all over the place: for information architecture, SEO, look and feel, your CMS, and your infrastructure.  And it’s made that much harder when you’re working without a content strategy.

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In less than a week, I’ll be attending Content Strategy Forum 2011 in London.  I’m very excited about this conference, for three reasons:

Reason #1. Last year’s edition was a milestone for the content strategy community.  It was the world’s first dedicated conference on the subject, and it was in Europe—Paris, in fact.  I took it as a sign from the heavens because it was held at just the time I was kicking off of my own consulting practice in the field.  Kristina Halvorson, whose little red book has become a bible, was there to give a keynote and a workshop. And I discovered an entire community of kindred spirits.  So, obviously, I’m looking forward to v2.

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Earlier this month, I had the great fortune of being able to attend Confab, the first conference dedicated to content strategy in the U.S. There were lots of interesting presentations on a wide variety of subjects, yet there were two themes that emerged in the thousands of tweets (5000 just on the first day – make sense of that, if you will!), late night discussions, session notes and blog posts that followed.

The first was that although content strategy is all about busting silos, the discipline needs to ensure it doesn’t put itself in a silo; the second, a logical extension of the first, is that content strategy is really about change management.

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I spent the first week of April in beautiful, sunny Italy attending two conferences: the first, a W3C workshop in Pisa on Content on the Multilingual Web; and the second, Eurocomm, organized in Turin by the Europe and Middle East chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC).

While the two conferences attracted different audiences and addressed different issues, some of the same themes cropped up in several presentations at both.

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If you’re looking for a quick but comprehensive read on content strategy, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better option than Erin Kissane’s The Elements of Content Strategy, the third in a series of ‘brief books for people who make websites’ published by A Book Apart. In just over 70 pages (if you don’t count acknowledgements, resources, and index), Kissane’s crisp, concise prose outlines how content strategy works: the principles that guide it; the disciplines that lend it form; and the tools and techniques that give this otherwise opaque craft some concrete manifestations.

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A fellow content strategist tweeted earlier this month that she’d failed in her resolve to blog once a week. I could only empathize, given how tough I’m finding it to blog just….once a month!

Yet we’re both content strategists who understand the value of content as a critical business asset. We know that in our connected, online world, we are all publishers who need to ship. That’s what we do for a living; that’s what we tell our clients.

So why is it so difficult to blog for ourselves?

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