On Content Strategy and Identity
A couple of months ago, I realized I would be playing a larger role in web publishing at my work, moving more towards a user awareness role. Realizing this direction, and knowing I had some budget, I decided I should attend Confab, the first conference on content strategy. It was sold out, but by a stroke of luck the organizer offered me one of thirteen tickets held in reserve.
I never wrote much about the Confab conference. In part I was too busy with a presentation and workshop I was preparing for the STC Summit, which was the following weekend. But like most conferences, Confab turned out to be interesting and thought-provoking. This conference brought together experts from many disciplines. I even ran into seven colleagues from my own organization who I didn’t even know were going to the conference.
Developers, interaction designers, writers, marketers, and project managers were all drawn to this conference because they were faced with content challenges they hadn’t encountered before. This conference was the only one that seemed to address the growing issue of content — the common factor behind everyone’s attendance.
Except for a few tech comm notables, there weren’t many other tech writers in attendance. With all the cross-sectioning of disciplines, though, at one point I wondered who I was professionally. I was more than a technical writer. I had taken on web and wiki publishing roles at work, and this only aligned more with my blogging/podcasting/wordpress consulting role outside of work. I didn’t quite know who I was or where I should be anymore.
Later, as I met many people, I also began to realize that marketers and communications people made up the majority of the attendees (at least of those I met). This made me wonder if content strategy had grown out of marketing and the need to address the scope, need, and importance of web content.
I also began to realize that many of the exchanges on my blog I’d had prior to the conference about what content strategy is and isn’t were foolish. From the breadth of the Confab presentations, content strategy encompassed nearly everything related to content. One person defined it as anything you do to give your content an edge. This could be a simple as focusing on story, or defining a particular style and workflow for copy (such as Groupon does), or leveraging metadata and the semantic web, or using strategies for content curation, or infusing web copy with the right tone (“messaging”).
After the conference, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all. But I found that I kept searching Twitter for the hashtag #contentstrategy. The articles and discussions around #contentstrategy seemed to be a relevant hashtag that aligned with my professional responsibilities. Publishing, metrics, styles, curation, workflow, messaging — all of this becomes relevant when you’re creating content on the web. And no previous title, such as writer or web manager or information architect, seems to address all the aspects of content that people who publish on the web must take into account.
The shifting of identities that I felt during the conference was the beginning of a larger tectonic shift as I move closer to #contentstrategy. I recognize that many tech comm professionals implement content strategy within technical communication, and certainly Rahel Bailie has been exceptional at defining this influence and perspective within technical communication. But it seems to me that content strategy for the web is an easier fit for this emerging discipline.
The Confab conference ended registration two months early when they hit their attendance limit. I’m guessing that next year, Confab will be an enormous convention, with so many speakers and attendees that it will take the initial momentum of last year and dwarf it in size.
I do not think I’m the only one checking #contentstrategy on a daily basis. Kristina Halverson, the conference organizer, noted that five years ago, you could search for content strategy and find nothing. Today, many new articles, links, and discussions about #contentstrategy saturate the web. Clearly, as I found, content strategy is a term that many are finding aligns with their identity.
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Post update: As soon as I published this, I just saw Waving not drowning: or how I gave in and learned to love the content strategy flood.
Related Posts
Conferences I’m Attending This Year
Three Questions to Start Thinking Like a Content Strategist
Breaking into the Mobile Market: Joe Welinski at the STC Summit in Dallas, #stc10
Podcast: Why Content Management Projects Fail, Interview with Rahel Bailie
STC Presentation this Thursday: “Quick Reference Guides: Short and Sweet Technical Documentation”
How does one become a web content strategist? I’m a general Web writer but I find myself bored writing articles on other people’s orders. I want to take some responsibility, to plan and organize and manage.
This looks like a great conference that I might want to attend next year. Thanks for the heads up!
Anabelle – I’d recommend you pick up Erin Kissane’s book The Elements of Content Strategy from A Book Apart and have a read through. It’s a quick and friendly overview of some of the stuff Content Strategists do (which covers a huge range of skills) and will give you some idea of what you already do and what you might like to explore on your next project.
The next step is to try it out and show what you’ve learned and the difference it made to the end project – from there you might want to look at how to sell that into your business. How does you being more on top of content production improve their bottom line?
Hi Anabelle! I agree with you, it’s boring, but it gives a lot of experience and new skills. You increase your ability to write on various topics. I think it’s very useful because you never know what will be actual tomorrow.
Best,
Eric
Good post. I feel like I’m in a similar situation: I’m the lone tech writer for a software startup. I think that tech writers are more familiar with information architecture (more than content strategy, anyway) because we’re usually in charge of the help content, but not the corporate web site content. I’ve been learning about content strategy because I need to build a help site, and I want to be sure that the help, the company site (marketing), and our support site reinforce each other.
Making sure the content harmonizes across marketing, tech comm, and the website is a good idea. In smaller companies, the same writing team might handle all three. In large comparnies, there’s a lot more room for variation to crop up. But I think that beyond making sure the content is unified, content strategy for tech comm looks at ways to reuse the content, to leverage metrics and feedback, to target the learning preferences of users, and so on.
Whoops, check the confab link. should be http://confab2011.com/
I hadn’t heard of the term “content strategy” until it came up in an informational intereview 10 months ago when I began exploring new career opportunities. Bingo! It matches what I’m doing now: a role that extends beyond the “techincial writing” I did for over a decade.
It’s fun, and a little scary. Glad we’re forming communities to discuss and educate ourselves. Carry on your good work!
Laura, thanks for the note about the wrong link. I updated that. I’m glad to hear you find the content strategy community relevant to your role. I think many of us are coming to similar realizations.
I agree that content strategy needs to be wholesome. So often many involved with bits and pieces of communications, the writers, bloggers, marketers, and site content people aren’t working together to create cohesive messages.
I’ve been watching publications about content strategy since 2008, watching to see what it’s becoming. I was excited about it for a year or two, but I’m somewhat ambivalent these days about what this nascent field will actually be able to enable for those of us who’re managing content and trying to understand all the levels (from ones and zeroes, through complex social dynamics of workplaces, up to larger cultural values). Thanks for your thoughtful post, Tom—it’s posts like this which help us all decide what we think about new developments which may help us work and research more effectively.
Great post on content strategy! I took a big leap for my summer offering here in the IDC grad program at SPSU: I developed and taught a special topics content strategy (CS) course.
Like many of the other posts in this thread, I’ve been following CS for a couple of years and trying to see where it fits within the big picture of tech comm and the courses we offer. Over the past year or so, I finally felt I had enough material to put together something substantive and worthwhile for our grad students.
Overall, I think the course went well. It’s something I believe we should formally add to our course listings for our grad program. CS is, in my opinion, here to stay and it’s going to be a significant part of the future of the profession.
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Do you know roughly how long it takes for google to start indexing your pages?
Tom
I stumbled upon this post while searching for how content strategy has evolved from merely a technical writing role.
As an independent contractor, I have been doing (a) product documentation such as online user manuals, reference manuals, and quick guides (b) B2B documentation such as RFPs, proposals, case studies and even a few white papers (c) web content for IT.
This post and its comments gave me some directions on how I can propose a business case for content strategy services to my clients. I appreciate it.