Skip to main content

Content strategy

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.

Read More
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.

Read More
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.

Read More
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.

Read More
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.

Read More
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.

Read More
Content strategy

Plumber’s guide to content workflows

Last week I was working in my home office when I heard an odd hissing sound. Upon investigation, I found that my hot water heater had decided to empty itself onto the basement floor.

Fortunately I had some failsafes in place; the heater’s pressure release valve was doing its job by routing scalding hot water onto the floor, and my floor is slightly slanted toward a drain in the floor. This got me thinking (because my brain is oddly wired this way) about failsafes in content workflows.

Read More
Content strategy Webinar

Webcast: Risky business: the challenge of content silos

In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe discusses how content silos make it difficult to deliver a consistent, excellent customer experience. After all the hard work that goes into landing a customer, too many organizations destroy the customer’s initial goodwill with mediocre installation instructions and terrible customer support.

Do you have a unified customer experience? Do you know what your various content creators are producing? Join us for this thought-provoking webcast.

Read More
Conferences Content strategy

The content strategy of things

This post is a recap of the presentation I delivered at Localization World Berlin on June 4, 2015. It describes how and why to adapt a content strategy in support of The Internet of Things. The presentation slides are available on SlideShare.

What is the content strategy of things? To simplify definitions, content strategy is the planning for and governance of the content lifecycle, and the Internet of Things is the connecting of devices and software to provide greater value. To adapt content strategy to the Internet of Things, the content strategy of things can be defined as the planning for and governance of connected content to provide greater value.

Read More
Content strategy Webinar

Webcast: Content Strategy vs. The Undead

Implementing a content strategy often involves overcoming significant technological and cultural challenges, but some of these challenges are so scary, so heinous, that they earn a place among the undead because they Just. Won’t. Die!

In this webcast, which debuted at Lavacon 2014, Bill Swallow takes a look at these nightmare-inducing monsters—from unrelenting copy-and-paste zombies to life-draining, change-avoiding vampires—and shows you what can be done to keep your content strategy implementation from turning into a fright fest.

Read More
Content strategy

Going global: the demand for intelligent content

Companies experience their greatest growing pains when expanding business to global markets. It’s an exciting time but can also be a rude awakening as differing local requirements emerge for both product and content.

On the content side, keeping all of these requirements in check can be a daunting task. Proper planning and execution is critical for meeting these requirements and delivery dates, and for keeping your sanity.

Read More
Analysis Content strategy

Buyer’s guide to CCMS evaluation and selection (premium)

“What CCMS should we buy?”

It’s a common question with no easy answer. This article provides a roadmap for CCMS evaluation and selection.

First, a few definitions. A CCMS (component content management system) is different from a CMS (content management system). You need a CCMS to manage chunks of information, such as reusable warnings, topics, or other small bits of information that are then assembled into larger documents. A CMS is for managing the results, like white papers, user manuals, and other documents.

Read More