The holidays are quickly approaching, and true to form, Scriptorium is all about the food! From time to time we use food analogies to explain various facets of content strategy. I have collected a few for you to enjoy.
When you’re working in a structured content environment, one of the biggest decisions you have to make is where and how you store your metadata. The approach you take has implications for how you’ll use, manage, and preserve your metadata over time.
You don’t need a scary movie or a haunted house to see ghoulish creatures—sometimes, they are lurking in your content processes. Learn how to fend off these monsters in posts from the Scriptorium crypt.
Content modeling may be the least understood part of structured content—which is saying something. Content modeling is the process of mapping your information’s implicit organization onto an explicit definition.
Content as a Service (CaaS) changes publishing from a “push” model to an on-demand model. If you’re looking to pull content from multiple sources and incorporate more flexibility into your content operations, it may be time to consider CaaS. Here are some resources to help you get started:
Digital content is great, but sometimes, I really need the experience of a physical book. To celebrate Scriptorium’s 25th anniversary, we have published a collection of our most popular white papers. All of these featured white papers are available (for free!) on our website, but if you’re having one of those days where only a book will do…this one is for you.
Even when you put an excellent plan for content strategy and solid content operations in place, you can be sure that there will be surprises. Your authors will come up with weird outlier content that your current formatting and your current information architecture can’t accommodate. Faced with a deadline, a quick and dirty solution is appealing.
But those quick fixes have hidden costs that add up over time, especially if the workaround gets popular.
Let’s take a look at some of our highlights from the year, including posts and podcasts on content operations (content ops) and personalization.
Content as a Service (CaaS) means that you make information available on request. The traditional publishing model is to package and format information into print, PDF, or websites, and make those collections available to the consumer. But with CaaS, consumers decide what information they want and in what format they want it.
Personalization—the delivery of custom, curated information tailored to an individual user’s needs—is becoming an important part of content strategies. Approaches to personalization vary depending on the type of content being served. Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) models, for example, will have very different requirements. Within an organization, you’ll also see marcom and techcomm groups personalize their content in their own ways.
Our internal Slack workspace has channels for projects, events, and other work-related items, but of course our most popular channel is #thefoodchannel, where we share recipes, restaurant recommendations, and general foodie discussions.
You’ve identified a need for a content strategy project, but you have limited resources available. How can you get enough funding to complete the project? And how do you move the project forward?
Taking a phased approach can enable you to start your content strategy project with limited resources.
Content governance is a formal system of checks and balances that regulates your content development. Project success depends on clearly defined roles and responsibilities of everyone involved in the content development process. So how do you get buy-in? And what’s involved in putting a content governance plan together?
Getting started with a content strategy project can be intimidating. There are a lot of unknowns and changes that will take place. How do you ensure the changes you are making address your company’s needs and requirements?
Enterprise content strategy means including all customer-facing content in your planning. Our enterprise content strategy maturity model provides requirements for that strategy. This article focuses on content integration. How do you unify content across disparate content teams and technology stacks?
Buyers are looking at your technical content and marketing content prior to the sale. To provide a unified customer experience, you need to integrate the two. Here are some resources to help you get started:
First published in Intercom (October 2020) by the Society for Technical Communication.
Scalable content requires you to assess your content lifecycle, identify points of friction, and remove them.
Company growth magnifies the challenges of information enablement. When you grow, you add products, product variants, markets, and languages—and each of those factors adds complexity. Process inefficiencies in your content lifecycle are multiplied for every new language or customer segment.
As a result, content scalability—increasing content throughput without increasing resources—becomes critical. Consider a simple localization example: when you translate, you have a few manual workarounds that require 1 hour of work per 100 pages of translated content. So if you translate 100 pages of content into 8 languages, you have 8 hours of workarounds. But as your content load grows, you are shipping 1,000 pages of content per month and translating into 20 languages. Suddenly, you are facing 200 hours of manual workarounds per month—the equivalent of one full-time person per year.
Structured content authoring tools behave differently than traditional tools like Microsoft Word, which causes difficulty or reluctance among authors to use them. Structured content imposes strict rules around content purpose (semantics) and placement. These tools diverge from the traditional WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) look and feel, which can be jarring for many authors. Fortunately, many structured authoring tools can be modified to feel less imposing.
Learning content is any material used for educational purposes, including e-learning courses, training guides, instructor guides, instructional videos, and more. This might represent the bulk of the content you produce, or it might be just one part of your overall content set. Either way, it’s important to develop a plan for creating, updating, and delivering learning content as efficiently as possible. Here are some tips for addressing learning content as part of your content strategy.
You’ve started developing a content strategy and are getting a better grasp on the content lifecycle. But what do you do about older content? It’s not as relevant as your most recent content, but there are still times when it proves useful. Your archiving approach is an important part of your content strategy and is often overlooked.
If you are moving from one content environment to another, you only want to convert what’s necessary. Archiving and organizing your content will help you decide what legacy content you want to convert. Here are some things to keep in mind when putting a plan in place for archiving content.
Good news: The technical problem of integrating marketing and technical content has been solved.
Bad news: The hard work is just starting.
The design-focused marcom perspective and the structure-focused techcomm perspective need to co-exist and co-create.
Does your content strategy include a plan for publishing consistent content? Technical content is written to inform the user. Marketing content is written to persuade the user to buy your product or service. The line between those two types of content is starting to blur.
When we look at structured content, the first priorities are usually efficiency and cost savings. These savings are gained through intelligent content reuse and automated content delivery. The implicit promise of structured authoring is consistency; use structure, get consistent content. But this isn’t always the case, nor should it be.
As 2020 comes to an interesting close, let’s take a look at some of our most popular posts and podcasts from the year.
