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.
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Delivering content straight to the inboxes of customers who, at some stage, have shown an interest in our services is a prospect that can so often prove too tempting to pass up. But like the musician who releases a fantastic first album when most of their tracks were penned years ago – back when they were a lovesick teenager at college – we may have enough great content in the well to fill up three months worth of newsletters, but what about the next quarter?
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As 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.
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Trying to bang the web content strategy drum from within an organisation is not without its ups and downs – rather like a game of snakes and ladders. There will be occasions when you believe the message has sunk in. But all it can take is a loss of key personnel, momentum, or courage to send you tumbling back down again.
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When it’s your own website, blog or social media profile you can usually take as long as you need to publish something. Not always healthy but by and large the pressure (externally anyway) is off. It’s when you’re tasked with publishing content for an organisation with a far larger online reach and responsibility that the pressure is cranked up a notch or twelve and those self-doubting questions receive more airtime within the confines of your brain.
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To bring the curtain down on 2009 I thought I’d share nine of my favourite articles and blog entries of the past year. Whether they’ve helped me learn new methods, question any pre-held beliefs or simply helped me to do my job better; one way or another they’ve all made an impact.
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Publishing web content should work like clockwork, but an effective Content Strategy keeps those cogs moving smoothly.
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Like a musical conductor a content strategy helps to bring order to a complicated task with highly irregular rhythms and frequent shifts in tempo by keeping everyone in time with one another, delivering a consistent sound across all content channels and providing the direction to deliver content in tune to the key user and business goals.
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With so much to learn about the business, their market(s) and customers, no matter what the stage the web project’s at when they’re hired, freelance content creators still arrive at the table with so many burning questions.
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It seems more people then ever are reading and talking about content strategy. In a recent search for content strategy articles on delicious I was struck by the graph showing a sharp increase in saved bookmarks since the end of last year.
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