Content is King again. This year will be remembered as the year that content strategy finally made the leap from marginal concern to indispensable component of digital operations.
Taking concrete steps to enable you to manage your content has always made sense. And yet it routinely features near the bottom of everyone’s ‘To Do’ list. Until now – and people are waking up to the fact that looking after your content is worth time, effort and money. And they’re recognising that in order to make real use of your content you need a proper, grown-up strategy.
Content strategy is …
As with most “new” things in our industry, someone else has already thought up the best definition. Leading Content Strategy advocate Kristina Halvorson defines content strategy as “the practice of planning for the creation, delivery and governance of useful, usable content”. Which pretty much works. So, why content strategy and why now?
There are two principal reasons why, in my view, content strategy is suddenly in everyone’s mind.
The pips that squeaked
The obvious one is money. In these leaner times, making do with what you have makes sense. Wasteful and disorganised is very last year. Austerity is the new black. The smart money is invested in releasing the latent potential of the content you already own.
- Ensuring your content is fresh, relevant and coherently organised
- Checking – and checking again – that your content contributes to usable experiences
- Focusing content production and management on things that actually add value
- Taking care of the mechanical underbelly – SEO, accessibility, workflow, archiving
There’s the flipside: rather like finally tidying out the garden shed can be a messy, dusty, exhausting business, so turning in earnest to your content for the first time can be a daunting process. Albeit with fewer spiders.
If you don’t, they will
A less well understood reason is social media. Or, to use the older but more relevant tag, user-generated content. Nothing defines the Web 2.0 world more, um, definitely, than the simple fact that content is now firmly in the domain of the user. We have transcended the era of the web in which large brands and organisations were the primary publishers of content. Now, to use one of the typically vibrant memes that have sprung up around content strategy, everyone is a publisher. But we are still in the ageless era of content = experience = value. Upshot? Brands and organisations are no longer the primary source of experientially meaningful online facilities. We can all create and publish things that have a practical value to users all around us – and increasingly, we’re using your content to do it.
A second reason why social media contributes to the awakening of interest in content strategy: most digitally active organisations have done some social media toe-dipping by now. With a wide spectrum of results. Most are now evaluating what went well and what didn’t. And more often than not, one of the main answers they encounter is “content”.
Social media is two things:
- a channel by which we use content to reach out and project – to each other, to brands, to consumers, to organisations and institutions.
- a channel which we use to deliver or to profile content of every shape, form and shoesize.
Meaning? Meaning that in either instance, careful handling of content – both within your own brand space and outside it – is paramount. Meaning that without a strategy for using your own content, how can you hope to influence the way other people do?
There are lots of resources available which outline the basic principles of content strategy. There are lots of blog posts extolling the virtues of content strategy. The difference, here, now, finally, is that it appears to actually be making a difference.
Content is king: suddenly less banal truism, more urgent call-to-action.
