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.)

Yet whether we sell cloud computing services or laundry detergent, routers or handbags, pharmaceuticals or support for charity, we all have to compete — for attention, for funding, against resistance to change.

How the UN competes

Dujarric went on to discuss the mix of tactics he relies on to compete — and get the organization’s messages out.

Let others tell your story

Through a tactic Dujarric calls participatory media, the UN works closely with content creators who can have influence on their communities – film and television in particular. ‘We’ve reached out to film industry, be it Hollywood, Bollywood or Nollywood to get those issues into the scripts. We provide one-stop shopping: script review, logistical help, and help filming on our premises. We’ve opened up the UN,’ he explained. Gone are the days when Hitchcock had to build a studio for his shots of the UN in North by Northwest! Moreover, today the organization adopts product placement tactics; television shows like ‘Ugly Betty’ have featured storylines about malaria, for example.

If the UN works closely with content creators, it also depends on celebrities to get its messages across. “We have a lot of goodwill ambassadors, from music, sports, even Royals. Athletes have a way of communicating to young people, who are not really interested in hearing from the UN. Sports figures like Zinedine Zidane are very important to us. They give us a lot of time; they allow us to use their likeness, they go out into the field,” he explained.

Make it really easy for the media

News organizations are slashing bureaus and limiting their presence outside their home countries, but they still have a need for coverage. Using a tactic Dujarric calls advocacy journalism, the UN has a news center that supplies raw footage, TV feeds, radio clips, photography and stories in wire format to the organizations. Of course, diminishing resources have led to a change of standards: He recalled his time at ABC a decade ago, when the news organization would not put on air video it did not produce. ‘But now, they need it, and as long as they’re sure of the quality and strength of the content, they can,” he said.

Use new channels and ‘old media’ formats in new ways

Like many organizations, the UN has a Facebook presence. Last year, it experimented with a live conversation between the public and Helen Clark, who’s a former New Zealand prime minister and administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). To make the conversation more engaging, they used a ‘hybrid journalism‘ format and had it moderated by a BBC journalist. They invited questions prior to the event, and the moderator continued to feed questions during the session. The video, on how to end poverty, got about 10,000 views.

Enable your teams

The UN’s real work is done in the field; that’s where all the stories are. Three years ago, it approached the manufacturers of the Flip cam, and purchased video cameras at a reduced priced – something the manufacturers were able to do as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility efforts. Dujarric’s team created an instructional DVD, and sent the videocams out to both communication managers as well as program officers. (Dujarric provided similar handbooks and toolkits for non-professionals on how to best use Facebook and Twitter.)

How do you motivate people who are not primarily communicators to communicate? Dujarric advised to work closely the leaders who ‘get it’ and then showcase their work. ‘Once you show that one person’s clip got on TV, then others follow,” he said.

Focus on the story, not the brand

This is all about putting the issue before the logo. ‘At the UN, it’s often a challenge,’ he noted, ‘but at end of the day, it’s the issue that’s key. In the end, the payback is much more. Audiences are much more sophisticated; people sniff out the bull, so that’s a self-correcting factor.

For the Flipcam project, for instance, field managers focused on demonstrating the impact of their programmes on people; only the last third of the story was the UN angle.

Get the most out of your content

Dujarric said they got a slew of terrific stories from the project. They then developed short videos that were UN-branded and posted to YouTube and used on Facebook. Broadcasters, however, received raw footage, without voice-overs, as well as the accompanying scripts. ‘We try to get most use out of every dime,’ he said.

And finally, demonstrate impact

As an intergovernmental agency, the UN needs to develop communication products that show that donor funding leads to real impact. There’s been a change in focus from how fast money could be spent to ‘what has the impact been’? (Sounds like a lot of marketing departments, no?) And while that’s a completely normal question, it has required a change of mentality.

A change of mentality, a focus on content, reduced budgets, competing for attention – isn’t that what we’re all facing right now?

View my highlight n° 1: Making content accessible for smaller languages.

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.

In his presentation, Wasala focuses on Sinhala, a language spoken by more than 15 million people in Sri Lanka. But the Sinhalese are not only hard-pressed to find content on the web in their native language, they’re also unable to use tools like Google Translate, which does not yet translate Sinhala (at least, not yet, though making content accessible is clearly Google’s mission). He goes on to talk about a crowd-sourced localization initiative that would allow Sinhalese and other users to translate sites on the fly, and have that translation sit in a translation memory for others to benefit from. (I encourage you to listen to his 13 minute video if you want to know more.)

Several things struck me about his presentation. The first has nothing to do with language and everything to do with data visualization. The overwhelming dominance of English on the web was not new to me – I even referred to it in my own presentation on localization issues in content strategy. But somehow, looking at those same numbers in a table, and then viewing that same information as a tag cloud – well, the impact is just so much greater. These slides – a very simple application of data visualization on a familiar subject – brought that home for me.

More fundamentally, though, this presentation drove home another point: content is indeed the ‘last mile’ of the digital divide. We may be catching up on connectivity (indeed, IBM claims it’ll be resolved in five years), but if substantial groups of people cannot access information because they cannot understand it, can we truly say we’ve closed the gap?

So as we spend 2012 and beyond thinking of how to make content engaging, sticky, authoritative, killer, relevant, useful, compelling and what have you, let’s remember that for many people in the world, content simply needs to be one thing: accessible. Hats off to the linguists, computer scientists, researchers, and organizations working to make this happen.

*I just posted Highlight N° 2, and it’s February 6th. Sigh…sorry folks, but client work comes first, and client work is sometimes unpredictable.

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.

But to be fair, content is nothing if it isn’t delivered, if it falls on deaf ears. And if it can be delivered in ways that cut through the noise, all the better. So I’m going to spend three days listening, learning, about all these new delivery mechanisms and channels that will take our content and take it to new places. I hope to learn as much as I can, and transmit as much as possible to people who are like me: the internet has changed our lives, we want to take advantage of it, we’re wary of a lot of things, and pretty ignorant of many others. I’ll be writing my posts with you in mind !

I’m also looking at it from the perspective of a digital immigrant mother of two teenaged digital natives: what will I learn that will make my life easier? There’s a start-up competition, where eminent judges will evaluate 10 or so ideas that may or may not become the next Foursquare.

I checked out the start-ups, and there’s one in particular I’ll follow. This is a start-up that seeks to alert Parisian drivers of new parking spaces that have just become available. I can see the potential in this, but I have a question: can this app also be use to find your car when you can’t remember where you parked it? Hey folks, I can guarantee that if your app can do this, you will become rich. Think of all of us digital immigrants, middle-aged and losing our memories. I, for one, will even invest!

Voila…I’ve gotta get to bed, the day starts early tomorrow. Look for the Orange Team’s coverage on the Live Orange blog.

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.

The single biggest thing that prevents users from doing the tasks they need to do, says McGovern, is poor choice of words in website labeling. It’s the proliferation of words that aren’t clear, that are approximate, which could provide answers – but then again, maybe not—that trip us up. Our sites have too many words that compete with each other. And this is terribly confusing for our users. Not convinced? Watch the video, this man is persuasive!

A few weeks later, I attended a session organized by IABC France on trends in corporate communications. Assaël Assary, head of French research institute Occurrence, spoke about the increasingly low trust levels French employees have in the public discourse of their country’s corporations. It’s not that people aren’t listening or being reached, it’s worse, he said: they hear our messages, but don’t believe them. Gobbledygook may be one reason, but spin is another. This relentless effort to portray even the most disheartening of news in a positive light has contributed to the ambient distrust of corporate ‘messaging’.

Could it be that the two are linked? That the corporate propensity for gobbledygook and spin has made it difficult for anyone to believe that the choice of one word or another might actually have an impact on the success of our websites?

I recently had someone ask me why we needed a writer to write a login page, because there really wasn’t anything to write but a set of simple instructions. But when you listen to Gerry McGovern explain how some invest in testing the exact wording on their calls to action (Donate vs Donate Now vs Please donate vs Why donate? Vs Donate and get a free gift – this from the Obama campaign) because they have a real impact on conversion rates, you wonder why all companies don’t take this as seriously.

We in the corporate world have legacy of developing content that no one believes will ever really be read and taken at face value. We’ve been doing this for so long that it’s hard for people to believe that words count. But they do. Enterprises need more than content owners, they need ‘word’ owners; people who will be accountable for the performance of words, not only on their websites but in their communications at large.

As enterprise communicators, we may not take anyone’s heart away; but, words are indeed all we have to help us lead the way, so we better mean it, and we better invest and take the time to choose those words carefully and thoughtfully.

PS. You can always listen the Bee Gees song — it’s a classic — but I invite you to listen to a cover performed by one of my favourite singers.

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.

It’s worth repeating:  content strategy plans for creation, delivery, and governance of content – ALL content, not just the source content.

Much like trying to retrofit content into wireframes, starting the localization process after the source content has been created (and often published) can lead to problems that could have been avoided with better upfront planning.

There are a lot of things that content strategists can do to facilitate the whole process:

Ask the right questions as you’re setting your target. External market forces, internal strategic ambitions, cultural and language factors, as well as the site’s objectives: such factors need to be considered and weighed against each other in order to make smart decision about your overall model, the number of languages you’ll support, and the critical mass of localized content you should deliver for different types of locale sites. (I suggest you ‘tier’ your sites: it’s unlikely you’ll be able to handle the web presence of a large subsidiary in the same way you would for a 2-person office in a new market.)

Get a handle on your universe:  What are you spending now? Who owns the budgets? How are you organized to support your localization efforts? How do localization and local web operations teams work together – if indeed there are different teams? What tool sets are at your disposal? Do you have a language service provider? Several of them? What are your metrics telling you? Is your CMS flexible? Is it integrated with your language tools? What language tools is your company using?

Get a handle on your content:  Start by qualifying your source content. Take out your inventory – and if you don’t have one, now’s the time to get it started – and assess it. Is there a little or a lot? Is it stock or flow? It is relevant for all audiences, or is it susceptible of being localized in some way? Too often, companies make all-or-nothing decisions about the content (yes we translate/localize – no we don’t); the choices don’t have to be so stark.

Compare your desired state to what you actually have.  Enlist some help reviewing your existing local sites. That’s one of the biggest added complications of working in global environment: your team rarely has the language skills required to assess what’s there (or maintain it, for that matter).  Plus, it’s a lot of work.  Unless you have sizeable internal resources to support you here, it’s practically impossible to do this part without external support.

Integrate localization issues into your editorial specifications:  Page specs are great for aligning people on objectives, and serve to provide guidance to those who actually write source content.  Voice and tone, terminology requirements, what elements will be localized – getting it right from the start can save a lot of frustration down the line.

Make a plan and get it done – but do it in chunks.  For many companies, developing a content strategy is daunting; they’re not sure it’s worth the investment to do the upfront work.  So taking on such a project and adding the global dimension to it can have people running in the other direction.  Part of this is because we try to do it all at once, during the redesign.  I’m a fan of Lou Rosenfeld’s ‘redesigns must die’ approach: yes, there will be projects, but managing website changes should be part of an ongoing and daily maintenance plan, kind of like putting one foot in front of the other when you’re climbing a very steep hill.

There’s more, of course – lots more.  I spoke about this recently at the Content Strategy Forum in London.  Here’s my presentation.

Note: I’ll also be speaking about this next week at the W3C Multilingual Web workshop in Limerick, Ireland.

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.

Reason #2. This year’s edition (v2) promises to be a hit. I’m finally going to hear Gerry McGovern, who wrote the book on Killer Web Content years ago. Lisa Welchman will speak eloquently, as always, on web governance.  Many of the practice’s thought leaders will bring fresh perspectives to day 1; day 2 will feature a host of speakers whose names may be less familiar, but whose experiences I am anxious to discover.  There are hands-on workshops on day 3. And Kristina Halvorson will be on hand again to lead the closing panel.

Reason #3. This one’s a personal milestone for me, since it’ll mark the first time I not only attend but present at a conference.  The subject of my talk is localization and the content strategy process.  I’m convinced there are a lot of things we can do upfront– as we plan and develop source content–that can make the localization process easier, faster, and less costly.   Today, those processes are often disconnected and sequential; they need to be better integrated and handled, at least in part, in parallel.

So, voila, three good reasons for me to be excited about next week.  If you’re interested in content strategy in general, be sure to follow the hashtag #csforum11 on Twitter; there will be loads of tweets from the conference, and probably as many reports.  So stay tuned…..

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.

But first, the silos. On the one hand, there are those who worry that by focusing too much on content strategy for the web, we are losing sight of the fact that content lives in many formats and needs to address multi-channel needs.  As Arjun Basu, Content Director of Spafax, wrote in a post-Confab write-up :

By being a web-centered industry (and I don’t think anyone will deny that the word “content,” at least at Confab, has been entirely appropriated by the web community), content strategy risks putting itself into a silo.

Consumer content doesn’t start and end on the web. The word “magazine” was heard once or twice, the first time by newyorker.com’s Blake Eskin (who bravely admitted to creating his first PowerPoint presentation ever) and then again by Junta42’s Joe Pulizzi at the conference wrap-up.

When content strategists start talking multichannel and multiplatform they will realize the fullness of content strategy and be able to move both land and sea. That is, the entire world.

At the same time, there are those who are concerned that content strategy, by focusing strictly on content, is ignoring its cousins UX and IA, and by doing so, risks putting itself – again — in a silo, but this time from a different angle.  As Ottawa content strategist Kristina Mausser tweeted:

For all the disparaging talk about silos in trad biz we had the opportunity in our young web industry to not do this. Yet we are #UX #IA #CS

These are legitimate points, and they’re not entirely wrong — but they’re not entirely right either.

I’ve started thinking about two types of content strategy – horizontal and vertical content strategy –, and this helps me both address these issues and put things into context.  Bear with me.

Horizontal content strategy is concerned about a holistic, enterprise-wide approach to content. It covers everything from ‘about us’ to products and solutions to thought leadership; from promotional offers to after-sales technical support to contacts and addresses, community and everything in between.  Horizontal content strategy seeks to ensure that every part contributes to a wider, consistent whole. This whole is most fully manifested in the enterprise website. In fact, in most companies, it’s really the only outlet that addresses this scope of content, especially if you’re in a reasonably large company.

Speak to enterprise web teams, and this is what they are referring to when they say content strategy.  It’s also the content strategy of UX/IA folks, who are rarely involved in channels other than web. In and of itself, it is a huge task.  (See Kristina Halvorson’s article ‘Why I wrote Content Strategy for the Web’.)

Vertical content strategy is also a holistic approach to content, but on a more granular level. It takes one part of that whole – a section, a specific topic, a content type – and delves into it across not only channels (websites, social media channels, print, events, etc.) but possibly a wider spectrum of audiences as well (particularly audiences within firewalls like internal sales or channel partners).

Speak to marcom specialists – indeed, marketing and communication professionals of all kinds — and this is likely what they mean when they refer to content strategy. This is also what many advertising and PR agencies mean when they talk content strategy. I’m not convinced that user experience or information architecture is high on their radar.

Of course, there have always been overlaps between the two, and social media, by expanding the boundaries of horizontal CS and deepening the playing field of vertical CS, is bringing them closer together still.  But if social media is the key driver behind the rise in vertical CS, horizontal CS has gained traction for an entirely different reason: the growing recognition that content on websites should get as much attention and consideration as CMS systems, user interfaces and design.

These differences give some explanation as to why content strategy is a practice in and of itself: it’s not just about UX, and it’s not just about marketing.  Even within horizontal and vertical content strategy, there are several specializations (Rahel Bailie’s series on The extraordinary world of content strategists remains a great reference for this).

So does that mean content strategy is creating its own silo? I don’t think so. Specializations are NOT silos.  People require some boundaries to work effectively together.  But specializations can become silos if there’s no collaboration, no recognition for the impact of one’s work on a wider whole. Indeed, a very recent HBR article suggests that communication and collaboration are pretty much the only solutions available to silo-spanning work and results.  Content strategists, by the hybrid nature of their work, are in a great position to do this, and yes, it will require some change management.  But that’s for another post.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear if this horizontal/vertical approach is useful to anyone else out there.

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

The first common topic was standards and guidelines: the lack of them, the need for them, and the challenge to get them adopted once you finally do have them. Interdependence underpins this need for standards. In communications, large ecosystems of individual content contributors must work within a framework that fosters consistency and protects the brand. Templates and guidelines on everything from emails to video production to social media use can provide that common direction and set of rules.

In the language industry, no one wants to be locked in with a single vendor or toolset. Yet the lack of interoperability standards makes it hard to share terminologies or transfer translation memories. There is also a call for standard practices: on the front end, in the ways users access languages on multilingual websites; and on the back end, in the organization of multilingual content across different content management systems.  The learning curve for both users and web managers who go from multilingual website to multilingual website should not be so high.

Lack of standards not only hurts brand consistency and limits interoperability, it costs a lot of money, in bug fixing and rework. The problem is: most companies have not quantified how much.

On the road from Pisa to Turin

Which brings us to the second big topic: ROI. We need to demonstrate that our content is effective, that money is well spent, that there is a return on investment. Without metrics, you do not speak the language of management, and you do not get a ‘seat at the table’. Without metrics, you cannot demonstrate that you’re taking a strategic approach to your work, and you risk losing your budget. No strategy, no credibility, no budget.

(Interestingly, I did hear of new take on this subject when applied to social media:  rather than measure ROI in social media, we really should be measuring IOR – impact of relationships.  Not sure it’s measurable but the point is well made:  some things have value but can’t be measured.)

Speed trumps quality. Not all the time, of course, but often, fast access to content that’s good enough trumps a long wait for content with high production values.  Plus, there’s now a plethora of tools that make that speed possible:  live tweeting from events, videos made with inexpensive, HD videocameras and smartphones, and machine translation are prime examples.  In fact, there are now instances where high production values may make your content less trustworthy: too much gloss can hurt authenticity. It’s a question of figuring out where you can lower standards, and where you can’t.

But does speed foster clarity? Lack of clarity is a big issue in business communications in general, and there are many reasons for it (including my favorite: the resistance to making changes to something that would then have to go to yet one more round of validation).  Not only does it create confusion and lead to poor user experience, it has impact on the bottom line. There are the lost opportunities because people did not act on a confusing call to action.  Or, your translator couldn’t understand the source content so hazarded a guess, which turned out completely wrong. (The need for post-editing English-language source content written by non-natives came up several times.)  The need for clarity is also behind the plain language movement. It’s also one reason we need…. templates and standards.

There’s a lot to be said on all these topics (which are far from the only ones covered at either conference), and I’ll be looking at them in closer detail in later blog posts.  In the meantime, here are links to some of the presentations at both conferences.

W3C Content on the Multilingual Web: You can find all presentations, minutes and videos here: http://www.multilingualweb.eu/documents/pisa-workshop/program.

In particular, check out the ones by

• Jaap van den Meer, Director of TAUS, on a study on what lack of interoperability costs the translation industry,
• Charles McCathieNevile from Opera Software on the benefits of standards for multilingual websites,
• Sophie Hurst from SDL and Paula Shannon both provided high-level presentations on managing multilingual websites and social media presence,
• while Dag Schmidtke from Microsoft gave details on the Office.com 2010 website re-engineering.

Eurocomm: Presentations are still being posted, and they’re all found here: http://europe.iabc.com/a-stunning-programme-of-speakers/

Some of these are not stand-alone, so you might want to check out some of the conference blog posts:

My fellow IABC France member, Claudia Vaccarone, posted her impressions and reviews in three separate posts here: http://thesocialcommunicator.posterous.com/

Swiss communicator Christina Riesen posted her impressions here: http://cristinariesen.com/

Head of the Dutch IABC chapter and communicator Steve Seager wrote posts covering:

• UN Comms Director Stephane Dujarric’s talk about bartering for communications, and
• Irish Communications Consultant Laoise O’Murchu’s talk on internal communications (do check out the hot air balloon video).

A tweetstream is also available from the conference.

Kissane begins her book with fundamentals.  Her first chapter is a 10-page reminder of why we’re doing content strategy in the first place, which is: to make web content more effective.  She not only tells us why effective web content needs to be appropriate, useful, user-centered, clear, consistent, concise and supported, she outlines what that entails.

She then goes on to describe the close relatives that influence content strategists: editors, museum curators, marketers, and information scientists.  She looks at what content strategy takes from each, and how it combines these borrowed elements to create a craft that stands on its own.

The final chapter, Tools and Techniques, looks at the tangibles and intangibles of content strategy.  “Content strategy is fundamentally a backstage discipline,” she writes. “Perhaps because of this opacity, I’m tempted to define the practice of content strategy primarily in terms of what it produces.”  Immediately after, though, she cautions that “although lists of deliverables and methods can be useful, they’re not enough on their own to explain how the practice works in real life.”  So while her description of these deliverables are about as useful and usable as content gets, it’s Kissane’s insight and advice on what goes in the middle that give the chapter – indeed, the book – its ‘supplément d’âme’.

There’s a lot to take away from this book, but I’d like to highlight just a few elements that resonated most with me.

Resist the temptation to show your clients everything you make. Just because you spent hours slaving over a mega excel file doesn’t mean you need to show it to the marketing VP.  “Give people what they need, and don’t deluge them with things they don’t…and even your most overworked client or manager will have an easier time give you the feedback and approval you need,” she advises.

Curation is more than filtering; it’s about caring for content. With a lot of the discussion on curation focused on tools like Paper.li and Pearltrees, it’s refreshing for an author to broaden the scope to cover “planning for the orderly acquisition, cataloging, and practical maintenance of the content in our care.” And even this she broadens: anyone who’s had to fight to keep annoying Flash banners off their sites will be saying ‘YESSSS’ as they read things like “curators and exhibition designers understand that people require certain things to have concentrated experiences: things like unobstructed access, good light, and freedom from distractions.” (Kissane is also the author of an excellent five-part series on curation – highly recommended reading for anyone interested in the subject.)

Information architects and content strategists should be best friends. While there are obvious crossovers between the disciplines– navigation labels and taxonomies being the most evident–Kissane is “big fan” of collaboration between the two. “In my experience,” she writes, “it is very easy for brilliant information architects to underestimate the importance of editorial planning, voice and tone, and detailed guidelines for content creation.  And conversely, it’s very easy for highly skilled content people to underestimate how much information architecture has to do with things other than content: the finicky details of application behavior and interaction design.”

There are a lot more of these kernels; the book may be short, but it’s dense and packed full with sensible advice. Anyone who cares deeply about content strategy will love this little blue book and find a place for it on their bookshelves, perhaps right next to the red one. Anyone with a just a passing interest will be grateful for so much, so well explained, in so little a format.

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?

Here are some thoughts (excuses?) on the subject.

Publishers are not all created equal. We can’t all be rock star bloggers. Nor do we all have a staff of writers who can take turns contributing weekly posts to an agency blog. When you’re a very small business, chances are that when faced with the choice of blogging or engaging in work that’s directly revenue generating, you will do the latter, even if you have topic list and a calendar. (I’m not including here community managers who actually get paid to blog on an employer or client’s behalf.) And we all have weeks when we all have so much client work, everything else gets put on hold.

It’s one thing to be prolific, quite another to be pertinent. There are a lot of people out there writing on the same subjects.  We all want to be pertinent; to add a fresh point of view; to further the conversation rather than just rehash what’s already been said. This raises the bar a little higher. It also opens the door to the lizard brain, that force of resistance that rears its head at inopportune times and sabotages your ability to get things done and out the door.

Finding your voice and your ‘groove’ takes a little while. It’s a rare new business that hits the ground running. The same is true for bloggers. There’s some trial and error, some doubt and hesitation. Surely that’s par for the course.

Writing is hard. Actually, it’s not so much the writing that’s hard; it’s the thinking that needs to go into the writing that’s tough. And if you’ve been focused all day and all week on a client’s issues, it’s tough to switch gears and get your thoughts in order on other topics. Of course, what you learn through your clients can nourish your blog, but it’s a delicate balance, and it takes some practice to get it right.

So, to my pal who’s finding it hard to blog once a week:  don’t be so hard on yourself. Consistency and some degree of regularity are more important than sheer frequency.  If you have to choose between quality and quantity, choose quality.  And trust in your ability to find the right rhythm.  Who knows? Within a year, you may find that once a week is a piece of cake.