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Content strategy

Content strategy

Content strategy after mergers and acquisitions

Mergers and acquisitions often result in a new content strategy. In a typical scenario, the merged company needs to align disparate content organizations. Before the merger, the companies had different tools, technologies, workflows, deliverables, and content culture. A goal of the merger is to unify company products, and therefore, the merged organization must also unify content development.

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Content strategy

Your content strategy easy win

You have a content strategy plan. Management has agreed to fund implementation. Time for the happy dance, right?

A little celebration is in order. But you still have to prove your new strategy will work in the real world. Showing early success with an “easy win” during implementation will give you momentum.

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Content strategy

Is your content overhead or a customer delight?

Delight is the difference between what you and your team cost, and the revenue you directly (or indirectly) produce (or protect). This concept is as important to charities as hedge funds.

Andy Kessler & Bruce Clarke

You may not think that “delighting” customers is part of your content creation responsibilities. But when customer delight is defined in terms of revenue and costs, it suddenly becomes a critical part of your job.

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Case study Content strategy White papers

Creating a unified customer experience with a content fabric

Coauthored by Anna Schlegel (Senior Director, Globalization and Information Engineering, NetApp) and Sarah O’Keefe (President, Scriptorium Publishing)

The interest in customer experience presents an opportunity for enterprise content strategists. You can use the customer experience angle to finally get content proposals and issues into the discussion. Ultimately, the challenge is in execution—once you raise awareness of the importance of content synchronization, you are expected to deliver on your promises. You must figure out how to deliver information that fits smoothly into the entire customer experience. At a minimum, that requires combining information from multiple departmental silos.

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Content strategy

Do I need a content strategy consultant?

Do you need a content strategy consultant? If the following signs are uncomfortably familiar to you, the answer is yes:

  • You have contradictory content across departments. Customers get frustrated when the specifications in product literature don’t match what’s in the sales content they read earlier. They then call support to clear up the contradictions. It’s much more efficient to create the content once and reuse it across departments. Increased consistency and accuracy follow.

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Content strategy

QA in techcomm: you need a test bed

When I first started as a QA tech at a small game company, I was immediately thrown into the QA test bed. It was a place where we could test production-ready content without being interrupted by ongoing development or server restarts. Functionality was well-documented and could be used to test against our users’ bug reports.

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Content strategy

When strategy meets the storm

plane in a snowstorm

Perfect weather for flying! (image via Flickr: estudiante)

Just before the blizzard that crippled a significant portion of the East Coast, I was returning from a business trip. I did eventually make it home, but the return flight included a bonus three-day layover in Charlotte, NC.

I’ll spare you many of the details, but a few key events and situations really stand out from that trip. The lessons learned are applicable to any corporate strategy, content or not.

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Analysis Content strategy DITA

The second wave of DITA

You have DITA. Now what?

More companies are asking this question as DITA adoption increases. For many of our customers, the first wave of DITA means deciding whether it’s a good fit for their content. The companies that choose to implement DITA find that it increases the overall efficiency of content production with better reuse, automated formatting, and so on.

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Content strategy

The Force Awakens: Content strategy and project hype

With the most anticipated film of the year—Star Wars: The Force Awakens—coming out this week, I couldn’t help but think about movie hype and how sometimes it leads to disappointment.

The same thing can happen when hype builds around content strategy. Excitement about implementing a new strategy can be good for an organization, especially when the alternative is hostility or resistance to change. But too much enthusiasm can have unintended consequences and result in failure. Here are some of the pitfalls of project hype and how you can avoid them.

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