2017 content strategy trend: the rise of the machine (translation)
My 2017 trend is the impact of machine translation on content strategy.
Structured content
The horror! More content strategy monsters!
The ghoulish nasties I depicted two years ago in Content Strategy vs. The Undead continue to haunt content strategy implementations and information development projects.
They just… won’t… DIE!
However, they are not the only monsters that can terrorize your content strategy implementation.
Easy ways to undermine marketing with content strategy
Does your content deliver on your marketing promises?
Before XML, improve DTP
Thinking about migrating unstructured content to XML? Take a hard look at your existing desktop publishing workflow. The maturity of your DTP process will have a big impact on a move to XML.
Following a template-based DTP workflow is not just about implementing best-practice processes. Templates make a potential move to XML less expensive and painful.
Tech comm, content strategy, and coaching
Earlier in the year, I was chatting with Sharon Burton. As an aside to our knitting-focused discussion, I asked her what new services we should offer.
Going for the gold with your content strategy
Now that the 2016 Olympic Games have come to a close, countries are tallying up their final medal counts. Athletes are assessing their performances, celebrating their victories or mourning their losses. After you’ve implemented a content strategy, you should also assess the project to determine how successful it was.
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.
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.
Business case/ROI
Content management
Content reuse
DITA
DITA XML—authors
Localization
Structured content
Translation
Reduce translation costs with XML
$0.21 per word.
That’s the average cost in the US to translate content into another language according to Slator, a translation news and analytics site. That number is not speculative; they analyzed the costs per word from over 80 actual proposals gathered by the US General Services Administration (GSA). You can view the source proposals here.
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.
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.
Do you know a content strategy concrete head?
In lean management, a concrete head is someone resistant to change. In my years working on content strategy projects, I have noticed many people are resistant to changing how they develop and distribute content—sometimes without even knowing it.
QA in techcomm: creating use cases
A few months ago, I wrote about how you could benefit from having a test bed for your content. I made mention of use cases several times, but what are they, and how can you make them effective?
The last mile: getting approval for your content strategy
You’ve thought about your content strategy. You have a business case. You have a plan. What you don’t have is a budget and approval to proceed. What can you do?
Brand credibility
Business case/ROI
Case studies
Content pitfalls
Content silos
Structured content
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.
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.
Content strategy for technical communication
Content strategy is planning to use information to advance an organization’s goals. Your organization should have an enterprise content strategy that covers all customer-facing information, both persuasive content and informational content. Marketing content is generally persuasive, and technical content is generally informational.
InDesign XML for well-designed print layouts
Automated PDF formatting works well for technical communication. But what about highly designed content for printed books? How can companies enable flexibility in print/PDF layouts generated from structured content?
When strategy meets the storm
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.
How to get budget for content strategy
One common roadblock to content strategy is a lack of funding. This post describes how to get budget, even in lean years (and recently, they have all been lean years!).
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.
The advent of intelligent content
You can justify intelligent content with efficiency–more reuse, cheaper translation, better content management. The true value of intelligent content, however, is unlocked when you connect content across the organization.
Content strategy versus scope creep
Content strategy implementations require substantial planning, coordination, and hard work. The effort involved in keeping planned work moving along can be difficult. Scope creep–discovering new requirements along the way–can potentially derail your entire effort if you’re not careful.
Content should not be an obvious tourist
When you travel, do people ask you for directions and address you as if you live in the area? I’ve had that happen a few times, and friends and colleagues have shared similar experiences.
You may not stand out as an obvious tourist on your travels. But does the content you distribute fit in as well across different environs?
Tech comm skills: writing ability, technical aptitude, tool proficiency, and business sense
Technical Writing is only about what software you know! Is that why every where I read any type of document, web page, or article it is FULL of misspellings, incorrect punctuation, and horrible formatting?!!
That’s what started a thread on LinkedIn that encapsulates long-running debates on the skill sets technical writers need. (The thread was removed from LinkedIn sometime after Friday, unfortunately.)
