Confab 2012 is live! Blog
Content Strategy Is The Moment You Realize You Need To Do More Thinking
Confab presenter Jonathan Kahn wrote our third guest post. We think his oil tanker analogy is most suitable.
-Clinton Forry
The same problem keeps cropping up in web, marketing, and communications teams. You’re working on a project. Maybe it’s a time-limited campaign, a section of a website, or a specific delivery channel like email or social media. You know the project is unlikely to achieve its objectives because of problems with strategy, governance, execution, or measurement. But that higher-level stuff is outside your official scope. What can you do about it?
ORGANIZATIONS ARE LIKE OIL TANKERS
The commercial web has been around for 15 years, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at most organizations. They’re like oil tankers heading the wrong way, as if the web never happened. To quote Lisa Welchman, the web is now “the organization’s primary communications, sales, marketing, and transactional vehicle.” That oil tanker had better start turning soon, or the organization’s overall performance will suffer. And you’re hurting right now because these problems are hampering your project’s chances of success.
THE PROBLEM: THE WRONG HORIZON OF FOCUS
So what’s causing the problem, specifically? It could be any number of things:
- Organization-centric thinking, resistance to change
- Silos and turf-wars
- No realistic web strategy
- No standards and policies, ownership, decision-making processes
- Inappropriately staffed execution team
- No appropriate metrics (KPIs)
The root cause may not be directly related to content strategy. The reason your task seems impossible is you’re working at the wrong horizon of focus, to borrow “Getting Things Done”-author David Allen’s model. A typical web or communications initiative happens at 20,000 feet (areas of focus), but the problems we’re talking about are at 30,000 or 40,000 feet (goals, vision). We need to gain some height.
HOW CONTENT STRATEGY CAN HELP
But hang on, what are we doing up here at 40,000 feet? Isn’t that management’s job? Absolutely. But for some reason they’re not doing it, so we need to get better at articulating the problem in a way they can understand. Don’t worry, we’re not going to try to run the company. But we’ll start to make some organizational change.
This is where content strategy is indispensable. It’s probably not appropriate for you to start complaining about a lack of organizational strategy, out of the blue. But in the context of the requirements of a realistic, ongoing content strategy, it’s completely appropriate.
“I JUST NEED YOU TO ANSWER A FEW SIMPLE QUESTIONS...”
Content strategy is the ultimate discussion starter. Whatever project or initiative you’re working on, at some point you can bring out the innocent-sounding questions of content strategy:
- Why are we doing this?
- How does this fit into the overarching web strategy?
- How does this meet our users’ needs?
- What’s the decision making process?
- Who will write, edit, and publish it, and look after it over time?
Most organizations will have a hard time answering these questions in a useful way. If you articulate the requirements of content strategy well, your stakeholders will realize that they need to do more thinking. When that happens, seize the opportunity to switch the conversation to a higher horizon of focus. “It looks like we have a web governance problem here. How can we start making some changes?”
TURN AROUND THAT OIL TANKER, STARTING NOW
As people who care about user experience, the web, and quality content, we all need to start turning that oil tanker around. Often content itself isn’t the objective: content is the way we reconcile the user’s needs with the organization’s objectives. But talking about content strategy is essential to getting there.
