Content strategy: first steps (premium)

Content: You’re doing it wrong. That’s easy for me to say—we rarely hear from people who are happy with their content. But are you ready for a major transformation effort? Our approach is to assess the overall content lifecycle, meet with all the stakeholders, identify needs, develop a strategy, and then execute the strategy. If you want a more incremental approach, consider these inexpensive first steps.

Delivery formats

Baby steps // flickr: slopjop

Are you delivering content in the format that your readers want and need? Are there delivery mechanisms that would better meet their needs? Can you implement new formats in your existing toolchain?

Many of our clients are delivering content in PDF only. A move toward HTML and especially mobile-friendly HTML can be a good first step in improving the situation for readers.

Streamlining print publishing processes

Most print-heavy environments can benefit from improvement in the print production processes. Look for opportunities in the following main areas:

• Templates.
  Are you using templates efficiently? Your print production tool should, at a bare minimum, provide page templates and paragraph templates. Many tools go further with inline styles, table styles, object styles, and more. Building out a template that supplies correct formatting and teaching everyone to use the template can save hours and hours of production time.
• Appearance versus reusability.
  Be careful about print-specific tweaks that damage the usability of your content in other formats. The canonical example of this is hyphenation. When reading a book on my e-reader, I often encounter words that have hyphens in the middle of a line, like this:

  Why is there a hy-phen here??

  The hyphen was almost certainly inserted into the original document to improve the line breaks in the printed document. A better solution is to use a discretionary hyphen (better print publishing programs support them). Discretionary hyphens are displayed only when a word needs to be hyphenated (occurs near the end of a line). Random hyphens scattered through the ebook are artifacts of a print-centric process.

  The content creation process needs to address appearance requirements and reusability across different formats.

Appropriate content

Are you providing the content that your readers need? You can explore this question by reviewing web analytics (if you have web content) and by examining the technical support situation. Does the tech support organization have a list of frequent problem topics? Is tech support creating additional content to address deficiencies in the technical content?

Accommodating translation requirements

If your content is translated, you can greatly improve the translation/localization process with some simple fixes to the source content. (Bill Swallow has a great article on five localization problems.) Start thinking about the following:

• Consistent wording
• Template-based formatting
• Use of culturally neutral graphics
• Technical quality of files (how are files assembled? Are language layers separate from images?)

All of these steps will improve your content without a requirement for a major strategic initiative.

Here are some things you probably cannot do without a big project (and maybe help from Scriptorium):

• Implement intelligent content
• Build out sophisticated reuse with metadata and a formal taxonomy
• Reassess your tools/technologies and overall workflow
• Get buy-in across the organization for a major content initiative