I had lunch with my friend Bill Albing, a veteran tech comm and user experience specialist, last week and we caught up on our different interests in the ever-broadening field of business and technical communications. I find the boundaries are softening between business, technical, and marketing communication these days, because everybody is in the content creation business. Along these lines, we discussed Sarah O’Keefe’s recent webinar in Tech Comm Content Strategy.
After talking to Bill, I did some research to see what else people are saying about content strategy. I had read both Joe Pulizzi’s and Kristina Halvorson’s groundbreaking books back in 2010, and wanted to see what they were doing now. Kristina’s got a new edition of her book coming out, and Joe has a very popular content hub going at Content Marketing Institute. The rise of web content as a marketing strategy has triggered several new content-themed conferences and content strategy meetup groups in just the last couple of years. I dashed off this email to Bill:
Well there certainly is a lot of buzz out there about online content marketing & strategy, and three big content-related conferences happening in the next couple of months! Joe Pulizzi, a marketing guy, has a central hub on “everything content” at Content Marketing Institute.
I just stopped by the CMI blog and they had an article about yet another content job, Content Engineer; it’s basically copywriting with a little seo, social media and analytics. This is either a lot of hype or a brilliant strategy to keep writers employed! Seriously though, I think tech communicators should look at this content engineering model and adapt it to tech comm. The chart shows customer support content under “Retention.” It’s a vital part of business to retain your customers, because the cost of getting new ones is much higher.
Suddenly there’s the huge awareness of how much content drives ROI, so there has to be more strategy in creating, using and managing it. Dollars are at stake!
There seems to be a strong parallel to editorial strategy also, like a magazine has, with the emphasis on driving consistent messaging. New terms being created, like “messaging architecture” and “content-driven experience.”
Update: As Bill said in his blog post, we’re just touching the tip of the iceberg on the subject of content strategy – there’s much more to be queried and articulated. It’s exciting to me that an overarching view could potentially connect the previously sharply divided realms of marketing and technical communications content. Look for more to follow on this topic as I share what I’m learning here.
Pingback: Content Stratification | Ideas in the Making
Great post, Betty. You don’t need to give me any credit for the conversation – these are your ideas and they need to be worked through. I posted some of my ideas about content strategy on my blog in a post entitled ‘Content Stratification’. I hope it makes sense and I hope you respond. You have a great perspective on content strategy and business value – keep articulating it!
Thanks Bill. I read your post and will be responding after some time for thoughts to percolate! I agree that on a smaller scale we have always done most aspects of content strategy in tech communication projects that adhered to any standards. It seems that the newer companies that have not yet standardized and the more mature companies that have massive amounts of content are the ones most in need of content strategy. Consistency is an important part of any business strategy!