When I say that I’m a brand and content strategist, I don’t offer the breadth or depth of expertise that a branding agency might. I feel like as long as I’m upfront with my clients about that, that’s usually appropriate for their needs on a particular project. Often times, clients might come in and say we’re a new company or we’re an existing company trying to relaunch our brand on the web so maybe they already have figured out how their brand works offline, but they need help translating it to a new medium or figuring out the voice and style and what that means for content types that they should be supporting. So I really practice brand strategy in the context of content strategy. I think that also speaks to my background – I have a BFA in design – so I have approached it from a visual and verbal angle, and I think it also more broadly speaks to the breadth of content strategy. We say that content strategy is a pretty broad umbrella in that there are people under it that focus more on metadata-driven content strategy and content models, and maybe other people that focus more on workflow and governance issues as they relate to content management and still other people that focus more on brand-driven content strategy. That’s really where I tend to work.

Early in my career, definitely. I learned a lot by working alongside those folks especially how they view the entire marketplace in which we were introducing a new brand. And I worked just as much with usability and user researchers, and that’s helpful to understand the audience that’s going to be engaging with the brand. Now that we’re focusing more and more on content strategy as it works in communities and social media and user generated content, we have to constantly balance the needs of the business and the needs of their target audience and kind of establish the goals and rhetorical arena that exists between the two.

At a semantic level, over the past year, I was seeing more and more how people within content marketing, SEO, and content strategy realms were kind of co-opting the term curation and using it interchangeably with aggregation and editing in some contexts. That bugged me because I knew that we were getting behind something as a buzz word without really understanding all of its implications. That’s why I wanted to reach out to the more traditional world of curating content – museums and exhibit designers – to find out more about when they use that term – what do they mean, what does it entail, and what are the implications and responsibilities that they have to convey.

That was the conversational milieu that I was responding to and then specifically on the web, when I was seeing content, it appeared like it was aggregated entirely by an automated engine without human oversight. That was really bugging me because I knew from a branding perspective that it was undermining what it was attempting to do. It was undermining the credibility and thought leadership of the brands that were producing it.

It’s definitely useful as an intermediary step in an internal process. I’m a big fan of automated curated solutions to sort of establish the scope and gather the things that a human curator can oversee and say ‘Okay, this obviously came in through the keywords and it came in through a Boolean search but it’s not right for our target audience, or it’s not right because it’s talking about an especially volatile political issue.’ There’s always got to be that person that steps in and until our so-called “curation solutions” get better at sentiment analysis and understanding nuance in the way that people do, it’s going to be very tough to replace what a human can do in that process.

Well, I think the idea with open access to information is half of the equation. We’re giving everyone access to all of this content with the assumption then that people will look through it and make their own decisions. That’s great and it works when you have a very focused, niche target audience and a narrow data set, but once you start saying, everybody jump into this, where this is a huge volume of content, then you have to wonder: are people looking through all of it? I look at the challenge of when the Huffington Post says ‘OK, the government just released all of this content and we need volunteers now to look through it to look at what’s important’ – they’re basically saying we need help curating.

Even if we just look at content online, there are billions of websites, millions of blogs, and more content goes up on YouTube every minute than anybody could ever look through in their entire lives, so that’s why we need ways to filter it ourselves. Of course, YouTube gives you ways to filter it by topic and keyword, and they also give you assistance in filtering by showing you related videos that are more like what you just saw and then they’re putting the tools of curation in part in the hands of the viewer, but also in the hands of the content publisher and the person that uploads that video and decides to tag it.

I think that raises a lot of difficult and uncomfortable issues. Siva Vaidhyanathan spoke recently at edUi. His talk was all around the power of Google and what we recognize as that curatorial power, and he also shared an example of two people conducting the same search with the same keywords but doing them on two different devices or from two different geographic locations and how the content that showed up on the search results was very different because Google was making certain assumptions and the algorithm was basing its results on the results of past searches and what those different users have previously chosen from different search results. It also raises some big challenges around the issues of the echo chamber within our news environment. That more and more we self-polarize and tend to seek out news sources and support viewpoints that we already have – that’s really not that different from going to the search engine, having it either be cookied or that you log in to use it, and it says, ‘Oh, you again and I know the type of content you like and let me show you more of that’ because we’re getting more content within that echo chamber that supports our existing beliefs and our existing knowledge.

If we go back to one of the core working definitions of content strategy, it’s that it’s fighting for the creation, aggregation, governance, and expiration of content in an experience. I think it’s easy to focus on the first two parts of it – on the creation and aggregation of content. What are we getting, where are we getting it from, that type of thing. But I think the ethical issues around curation especially focused on governance and expiration are important – you wouldn’t bring content into an experience if you were an exhibit designer and say “Okay, well we’re going to include this particular painting but we won’t think about how to get it back to its original owner after the exhibit is over” or “We’re not going to think about where it needs to go back in our own collection if we pulled it from our own archives.” Or, if content is no longer relevant to an experience – maybe an exhibit has been designed to speak to a particular current hot button topic in the news – the exhibit designer is not just going to abdicate the responsibility of maintaining it and making sure that it’s still relevant to that topic and current. Online, I think we face similar challenges. If we’re bringing content into an experience, whether by linking to it on someone else’s website or maybe introducing a blog post about it, we can’t then abdicate the responsibility of continuing that conversation. That’s why we say content strategy is a committeemen, not just a campaign.

I think the challenge that we face then is how do we link to something faithfully – link to the original source material or give credit to the original copyright and follow whatever rules for that particular originator are. How do we make sure the links aren’t broken over time? Or, if we’re introducing a concept or linking out to a particular item on a website or writing a brief blog post about it, what are we doing to moderate the comments on that blog post? How are we remaining faithful to the content that we’re curating, and how are we remaining true to the target audience so that we’re then bringing them into the experience and then allowing them to interact with that content?

Some of it is about the logistics of it – like making sure links aren’t broken. But then there are the other issues of what’s our governance plans. Or we’re writing this number of blog posts this week, so what’s our plan to engage in the comments of those blog posts? If we’re making the commitment to start to start engaging as a brand on Twitter, how frequently will be tweeting and listening to what’s going on there and reading tweets from others so we’re staying abreast of the conversation?

I think there are still a lot of challenges around curation especially as that’s becoming more mainstream. Can I bring in some automated curated solution and check it off and say ‘Okay, I’m done with curation.’ We want to work with people to make sure they understand the implications. I think that closely ties to issues of sustainability and our love affairs with tools in the content management world as well. Where in many organizations, content management is still a problem that IT owns and choosing the new CMS is something that comes out of the IT department. They choose them based on features rather than workflow, and they don’t look at content management as a cultural issue that relates to their organization’s publishing culture. I see that as a challenge frequently with my clients, to encourage them to look at content management as everybody’s problem – that often times has cultural roots, not just technical roots. I guess those two are big for me.

I think more and more, we’re seeing the opportunities and challenges that responsive design and design for multiple devices can pose. The opportunities there are tremendous. How can we tailor our content for different devices for different screens and in multiple contexts, and how do we make sure that we have the information to do that in an appropriate and useful way, not in an annoying way. That’s an interesting challenge for us. Fortunately, there are a lot of opportunities and the beginnings of solutions out there through smart, structured content and metadata.

It’s called Content Strategy at Work because one of the things that I think we’re always crying out for in our profession are more case studies, more discussion around the ROI of content strategy, and more war stories about things that go well and things that don’t and what we can learn from them. Over the course of the book, I met with brand managers, content strategists, project managers, IAs, and social media consultants in a wide range of agencies, large and small, digital agencies as well as more traditional marketing and advertising agencies, corporations, non-profits and government agencies to talk about their approaches to content strategy on different initiatives. We got some really good discussion and case studies, and we approached it from perspectives outside content strategy.

That’s another thing. As content strategists, we have our conferences, we meet with each other, we drink with each other, and those are all fabulous things and I’m thrilled to be able to contribute to that. I want to open the door a little bit and invite some other folks into our party and say if you’re a designer, an IA, a UX person, an SEO person, a social media strategist, a salesperson focused on business development – what do you need to know about content strategy? How can you bring it into your own practice, partner with a content strategist, or take a look at what they’re doing and incorporate it into your own work? That’s it in a nutshell.

What do you have to do to articulate the business case?

Design is the easy part. Coming up with the better solution is EASY. For content, it’s the same thing. Content creation is the easy part. What’s hard is making things happen in an organization. Organizational change. You have to go out and get a whole bunch of people who care about different things and persuade them. That’s a life’s work. That’s really hard.

McGrane showed off a funny chart (I’ll try to find it and link to it later) that essentially connects three steps in the process: We have to figure out what the hell we’re going to do, then some stuff happens, then money pops up at the end of the other side if we’re successful.

1. You’re not selling content strategy. You’re a problem solver.
   You are a detective, your ears perk up when someone bitches or when people say there’s no value in this. How can I use the tools that I have, contextualize the work that I do, as a solution to the problem? Identifying problems in other lives and positioning yourself as the solution to it. You don’t even have to find problems – you can invent them by asking, “Hey, have you thought about what this will mean in the future?”
2. You speak the language of all the seats at the table.
   You have to be sympathetic with the needs of everybody in the table: stakeholders, departments within creative, etc. They don’t want you to be at the table but you want to get a seat at that table. It can’t just be because you don’t want their job to be harder. You have to be able to articulate what your doing that provides business value. In other words, how are you going to show that you deeply, deeply rock?
3. Like a spawning salmon, you propel yourself further upstream.
   If someone says “I want to be more strategic” – that says that I don’t want to do anymore work. It means I’ve found that I don’t do work and want to just have big ideas. If you’re not getting involved in those early meetings, you need to ask: what am I doing wrong? (Hint: You’re probably not good at strategic thinking, not good at ideas or perceived as sharp.) If you do get involved with those meetings: for the good of the industry, you have go to knock it out of the park. Make sure you are the nicest person in the room. You must be seen as a STAR that is going to help them avoid the shit storm but also create a lot of value in a unique way. Your perspective is going to help them do things they couldn’t do before.

1. You’re changing work habits.
   People HATE THIS. People have entrenched processes, their own patch of turf, and they will defend it to death. For you to get in there and push things a little bit – it takes time. All kinds of things you need to understand – agile or waterfall process? Multi-disciplinary skill sets? Understand the culture and values of an organization. Why is it this way, and are there any downsides? There is no one perfect process or org structure.
2. You’re selling a process.
   Be very careful about balancing the strategic and factual. Get at the right level of granularity when you scope projects. Process is not destiny in terms of how you structure, but if you’re doing your job right – audits, analysis, etc. – that really does define the way people write contracts, stack projects, and scope work in the future. Make sure you have enough stuff at a high level of granularity so that you have freedom and flexibility to do what you need to do—but also get specific so they know what you’re going to do. (Personal note: I think this is called managing expectations.)
3. You’re scoping the work.
   Get some time parameters in advance and figure out what you’re realistically able to do. You are never going to have enough time, and there is never a perfect scope of work. You have to say: “Given the constraints, here is what is realistic for me.” This is why when you write contracts, you should not document at too fine a level because then you’re on the hook. You need to sell to the client and offer a certain level of confidence to them, but don’t go overboard.

1. Your goal is to create business value.
   You have to understand how that business makes money and how they value what you do.
   Profit is not the goal of the business; profit is the yardstick. Creating a customer and creating value is shown whether they have a profit. My job is to understand what my business is doing to create customers and success.
2. Businesses want to make money. Period.
   Reducing costs often reducing headcount and no one wants to suggest that, so you have to talk about what you’re doing to make this company money. How are you going to reach sales? Don’t explain it as an efficiency or pain point story, but as something that will achieve monetary value. For example: If we fix the CMS, we will fix X, and then we make money.) That;s the simplest argument you can make.
3. You’re talking about ROI. Whatever that means.

1. Cost analysis:
   Do post-mortems and get real numbers.
2. Usability Testing:
   This is the most profound way to convince people. Show a video of someone struggling, and you’ll get a powerful reaction.
3. Analytics and KPIs:
   This can often be just a pat on the back tool, but this is also a DIAGNOSTICS tool. Use it to figure out measurable problems and to suggest measurable solutions.

1. Lunchtime Sessions:
   Do a brown bag session with people at your organization. Have food, invite everybody to it, and talk about why it’s important. You can also have one-on-one sessions, and take people out to lunch. You have to keep that conversation going instead of writing those passive-aggressive e-mails. Is someone resistant? Why?
2. Manage Up:
   What do you have to do to manage a boss? Executives are terrified because they don’t understand web or digital. Focus on that relationship.
3. Build a Public Profile:
   Attend Meetups, LinkedIn, blog posts, write books.
   Persuade without offending. Be the leader. Be the change agent.
4. Content Strategy is Change Management:
   How do you get them to start thinking in their business about users, not just customers?
   We have customers, but those customers are users and what does it mean to design and create digital projects that meet user needs? Usually, your content person is at the bottom of the org ladder, but your content problem is at the top. Digital is often not incentivized properly.

1. Evangelizing It:
   It’s probably tempting to think that you are going to be treated like the Second Coming of Christ. But really, you are a Jehovah’s Witness and the door will get slammed in your face. It is going to be a long road.
2. Selling It:
   Connect up. Tie content strategy to business goals and values. Articulate your case.
3. Promoting It:
   Promotion means persuasion. Great at framing the audience. Think of yourself as a persuader.
4. Championing It:
   That means change management. And people do not like change.
   What does it take to understand the human side?