Last week, I participated in a Career Fair at my younger daughter’s high school. I’d never been particularly good at the whole parent-teacher thing, but I was tired of reading career guides that listed web work solely under the ‘IT, Web and Telecoms’ section*.  Occasionally, you might find e-marketing or SEO in the marketing chapter, but where were the references to web content management, development, and maintenance? Nowhere that I could find.

So I signed up, much to my daughter’s dismay (she was concerned her classmates would find me boring).  I wasn’t planning on giving any heavy-duty presentation on content strategy as a field in itself; I just wanted to tell kids who liked words and stories that there were indeed a range of career possibilities they probably had no clue about.

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I would be remiss if I didn’t share the notes that I took during Lisa Welchman’s talk with our group Content Strategy Paris, even if it was held a few weeks ago.

For those of you who don’t know her, Lisa Welchman is a U.S.-based consultant and thought leader in web operations management.  She was in Paris on her way to the J. Boye Conference in Denmark to give a talk entitled “Hitting the wall: why web governance matters now more than ever”, and kindly offered to spend some time with our group.

It seems that web teams everywhere are faced with a common problem:  huge projects to undertake, volumes of content to clean up, and inability to muster the internal organizational resources to get things done.  “You want to do cool things, but you can’t because you’ve hit a wall.  You have a mess on those servers,” she said.

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You can’t spend ten years managing websites without developing some interest and experience in information architecture*.  However, I hesitated a bit to plunk down the conference fees to attend EuroIA conference, held September 24 and 25 here in Paris.  I worried it might be a bit too geeky and jargon-filled for someone like me, who works with IAs, is interested in IA, but is not a practicing IA.  But IA and content strategy are two sides of the same coin, so off I went.

I discovered I could spend hours listening to presentations, geeky or not, on faceted navigation, structured data, clustering tag clouds, implementing identity, and lean IA principles. I also thoroughly enjoyed the more existential questioning that went on in others: can information be architected? Has the industry reached the limits of its architectural metaphor?  I had so much fun at these sessions I left thinking I might be a closet IA.  Hmmm…

Rather than give you a blow-by-blow account of the conference  (you can get all that here) I’d like to share just a few impressions I am left with now that the excitement has died down and everyone’s gone home.

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Web editors often get defensive when content strategists say that no, they are not web editors.  (Read posts by content strategist Rachel Lovinger and digital content editor Lauren Pope, as well the ensuing comments, to get the gist of this ongoing discussion.)

Why such defensiveness?

For starters, there’s a lot of overlap between the two functions in many enterprises.  In addition to their daily responsibilities of creating, managing and publishing actual content, many web editors also handle many of the tasks now associated with content strategy:  managing taxonomies and controlled vocabularies; defining workflows and content models; specifying business and metadata requirements; overseeing editorial calendars; undertaking user research; ensuring content meets business objectives.

Clearly, this is a lot of work for a single person.  As a result, these web editors often work long hours under difficult circumstances, and while their managers and colleagues see the results of their work (the actual content), they get little recognition for the back-office work they do carry out.  (In fact, I think it’s one reason so many people are excited that content strategy is gaining traction: at last, there’s a full-blown practice that defines, structures and provides a framework for much of the work that has gone unnoticed and unrecognized by so many for so long.)

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I was in a meeting the other day, and someone from IT asked me a question that caught me off-guard. “Does having content that is consistent from one country site to another really matter?” he asked. “After all, there’s little chance that a user in the Netherlands is going to visit out sites in Turkey or the UK.  Our markets are every different.  So why does consistency matter?”

I had to think fast on my feet, because content consistency is just one of those things that I’d been taking as a given for as long as I’ve been working in web content.  It was like someone asking me why I construct my sentences the way I do: I just don’t think about it anymore.

I gave him the ‘killer’ reason for consistency:  the ability to share and re-use content without having multiple authors reinvent the wheel, which has both external and internal benefits.  Externally, it ensures brand integrity; internally, it’s more cost- efficient.

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I attended my very first UX (user experience for non-initiates) event in Paris ten days ago, during which I listened to information architect Paul Kahn talk about unstructured, semi-structured and structured data.

There was something about the title that appealed to me, and besides, what else was I going to do on a Wednesday evening?

Early in his presentation, he confirmed what I already knew:  people HATE filling in metadata, especially if it’s structured (that is, pre-defined, agreed-to, controlled).

And yet, some of coolest applications of data visualization today rely on structured or at least semi-structured data.

He gave a number of examples during his talk, all of them compelling, but the one I found particularly exciting was an application developed by Microsoft called Pivot (www.getpivot.com).

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Every once in a while, I’m sent to Slideshare (usually via Twitter) to view a new presentation posted by a thought leader on subjects ranging from content strategy to B2B web marketing to social media and metrics.  Once I’m there, I generally spend some time viewing other presentations, either on the same topic, or by the same person, or whatever else catches my fancy.

I can go through most of these presentations and get something out of them; after all, in spite of the buzz created by the NYT article on the evils of PowerPoint in the military a few weeks back, PowerPoint remains the lingua franca of the business world, and most of us are pretty conversant.

What’s becoming evident is that many good presenters are taking to heart some of the most oft-given complaints about presentations.  They’re removing the relentless lists of bullets; the text-heavy argumentation; the animated build-up slides and spaghetti charts.

These no-no’s have been replaced by presentations full of zippy, bold and funny images and graphics that illustrate a point rather than explicitly make it.  When done well, this works wonders, and has a terrific effect on audiences.  PowerPoint really does become a tool that supports a speaker, enhances a message, and gets the point across in a truly complementary way.

Trouble is, some of these presentations can fall really short on SlideShare.  Ever wade through 20 slides of cool images wondering, what the hell is this person talking about? Or trying to guess:  Hmmm…maybe she means ….this?

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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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