Confab Session Wrap: Eat Media Hip Hop Content Strategy
Frank Marquardt
Director of Content Strategy : San Francisco
topics:
filed under: Content Strategy
http://tbg.cm/kuRhtu
Ian Alexander from Eat Media: “Content strategy aims to better communicate the ideas and ideals of a brand, wherever that takes you.”
His session, provocatively titled “5 Elements of Hip Hop and Content Strategy,” offered a map to what the content strategists does against the skills that go into Hip Hop that was primarily descriptive of the role of the content strategist:
- DJing equates to the content strategist’s technical expertise. You’ve got to understand the technologies that will bring the content to life to use them well.
- MCing equates to editorial expertise. The MC tells the story as does the content specialist. “Without the MC there is no Hip Hop, without editorial there is no content strategy.”
- Graffiti equates to design. We see before we read; design engages us, compels us to investigate. “Great design has the ability to make good content great, bad content mediocre.”
- Break dancing equates to the IA experience. Break dancing the event that brings the other elements of Hip Hop together; information gives structure to the experience, communicating through wayfinding.
- Knowledge equates to change management. You’ve got to sew the elements together in both Hip Hop and content strategy; in Hip Hop, knowledge is about the cultural movement’s purpose, which is to uplift. In content strategy, you’re always doing something different (that’s why you’re doing it again), and that involves changing how you’re doing things.
The enduring lesson I take from the session is the idea of change management: communicating better—building trust with your audience, selling stuff (the two objectives Alexander called out)—typically involves reorganizing what you do, who does it, and how it gets done. These things are never easy. But we can’t forget that they’re typically critical to a project’s success.
(Based on a session at Confab 2011: The Content Strategy Conference, held in Minneapolis, MN May 9 – 11.)
