Because my diagrams are almost always born out of a desire to solve a problem or align certain things in my own mind I’m more than aware that a diagram such as ‘Partners for the content strategist’ is unlikely to sit comfortably with everyone. So, to help you understand why I came to certain conclusions and shed a little light on my process, I thought I’d show you my workings out.
Read moreWhen every facet, subset, and silo is boiled down the task of understanding how an organisation can be effective with their content is, in essence, what content strategy is all about: everything we do is driven and measured by it.
Working out why and how an organisation’s content needs to change cannot be achieved without three key considerations: the status and potential of the content itself, the platform that supports its delivery, and the people involved in its creation. The potentially dizzying amount of skills and responsibilities this requires means the content strategist must seek out all the available knowledge within an organisation, capture it, and use it effectively. Clear communication, a respect for each other’s skills and time, and a shared common goal can help forge the working partnerships that make such changes possible.
Read moreHow, in this modern world of furious digital content production and management, can we encourage and harness this inherent drive to create and analyse? You can’t go far wrong by bringing a sense of order and perpetual motion to proceedings. Following a continuous process of analysis, preparation, creation, and governance offers us an ideal way of producing consistently lean, user-focused, and bottom-line-affecting content for the web.
Read moreIt’s just shy of eight months since I charted the number of delicious bookmarks tagged with ‘content strategy’ and found that there’d been a significant increase in bookmarking between the back end of 2008 and the first half of of 2009.
The data available to me at the time only went up as far as June, but we now have an additional seven month’s worth that takes us up to February of this year. Well, if that’s not an excuse to plot some more points on the graph then I don’t know what is.
The social web platforms offer us a chance to engage directly and regularly with new and existing customers or clients, to put them first in the queue for special offers or new products, and to make it easy for them to share our content with their friends. But rather than let the first question be a case of choosing whether to launch a Facebook group, start a company blog, or register on Twitter, it should be to ask just how much time, resources, and budget we’re willing to commit – now and in the long term.
Read moreAs we know, dealing with content is a messy, complicated, and expensive business, and sometimes it’s just not possible to take things as far as you’d like. Is there a quicker (and whisper it softly: cheaper) way to reveal those weaknesses and gaps, discover those pressure points, and still make some considered recommendations as to the ideal path ahead? I believe that, through a combination of small-scale auditing, testing, and interviewing, you can go some way to achieving just that.
Read moreGenetically inherited – or acquired through illness, accident or poisoning – colour blindness is a condition affecting approximately 8% of men and 1% of women in developed nations. The absence or altered sensitivity of one of the three cone receptors at the back of your eyes causes the individual difficulty in distinguishing certain colours from one another. While not a disability, the condition can at times be frustrating. I’m sure anyone with a form of colour blindness has fielded many a ‘what colour does this pencil look to you?’ question ad nauseam.
Read morePublishing web content should work like clockwork, but an effective Content Strategy keeps those cogs moving smoothly.
Read moreIf complimented by sufficient summaries and visual highlights, infographics can maintain the reader’s interest and, crucially, let them get on with the task in hand. But the options for visualising data don’t necessarily have to start and end with the usual bar charts, pie chart or scatter diagrams – there’s always room for a little imagination.
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