Having trouble with your technical content process? Need a strategy that can help you improve and scale? Before you make a change, talk to the other content-producing groups in your company—marketing, training, sales, support—to develop a content strategy that works across the entire organization.
We moved into a new office at the end of October. The new space is bigger and nicer than the old space, but nonetheless, the moving process was painful. As a child, I moved several times and changed schools every two or three years. I then landed in North Carolina for college and stayed put. It occurs to me that a new content strategy introduces much of the same pain as relocation.
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.
Implementing a content strategy can involve overcoming many challenges. Some of these challenges can be quite scary and hazardous to your strategy. In fact, overcoming these challenges is a lot like battling the undead.
What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I say “XML and content”? If large technical documents and back-end databases pop into your mind, you’re in good company. But many content-heavy groups can benefit from adopting XML. Marketing is one of these groups.
In this webcast, Sarah O’Keefe provides a basic introduction to XML and explains how it could affect your content creation efforts. This presentation emphasizes the overall concept and has minimal technical content.
When developing a content strategy, you consider marcom, techcomm, and other groups whose primary role is creating content.
But don’t forget about engineering. Just ask the NASA Mohawk Guy.
In assessing an organization’s requirements, it’s important to identify content strategy burdens. That is, what practices or processes impose burdens on the organization? A content strategy burden might be an external cost, such as additional translation expense, or it might be an internal cost, such as a practice in one department that imposes additional work on a different department. A key to successful content strategy is to understand how these burdens are distributed in the organization.
If you’re about to revamp your content strategy, repeat after me:
Engage before change.
Your content strategy is approved. Your tools are in place. Now it’s time to crank up—your pilot project, that is.
Consider these tips when mapping out your content strategy pilot project.
In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe discusses the future of content strategy.
The purpose of content strategy is to support your organization’s business goals. Content strategists need to understand how content across the organization—marketing, technical, and more—contributes to the overall business success.
Are you thinking about engaging a content strategy consultant? Here are some thoughts on successful content strategy consulting relationships.
An effective content strategy requires participation (preferably enthusiastic) from a diverse array of people. When you are communicating with executives, IT specialists, marketing writers, translation coordinators, and more, recognize that each participant (including you) begins with a certain set of expectations and biases.
Your content strategy can learn a lot from soccer ball manufacturing plants in Sialkot, Pakistan.
Content strategy requires you to connect information with business results. The key to getting a content strategy approved? Return on investment (ROI). Once you show that your content strategy is beneficial to the business, you are on your way.
In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe discusses how content initiatives are putting new demands on technical communication—improving customer experience, building interactive documents, including advanced visualizations, integrated translations, and more.
In the legal world, discovery refers to the compulsory disclosure of relevant documents. In the consulting world, disclosure also important, but it is usually spotty and not in writing. Instead of disclosure, we have discovery.
As content strategy spreads far and wide, we are making old mistakes in new ways. Here are ten mistakes that content strategists need to avoid.
Technical writing and marketing writing attracts people who love words and books. (This definitely includes me.) In the emerging discipline of content strategy, content is an asset. Its value is determined by what it can do for the business, not by artistic or literary merit.
For his 1959 horror movie The Tingler, director/producer William Castle had movie theater seats rigged with buzzers to scare moviegoers during a scene when the Tingler creature is loose in a theater. Patrons in those seats probably didn’t enjoy the jolt—or making a spectacle of themselves because of the Tingler’s “attack.”
You’ve made the transition to an XML workflow for publishing your technical content, converted all of your legacy content, and started authoring in the new system, as discussed in part 1 of this post. Although you now have a much better outlook on sustainability, you’re still facing a problem: your content creators are having trouble with the idea of separating content from formatting.
In this webcast recording, Bill Swallow takes a look at intelligent content’s role in global markets, and how the entire content cycle directly affects a business’s bottom line (revenue).
Quick! What’s the first thing you think about when you want to change your content strategy (the way you produce and distribute content)? If your answer is “tools,” you’re in good company.
Your publishing workflow has been the same for years, but new technology, different customer requirements, and company growth are making you realize you might need a change. Your print-based processes won’t always be sustainable, and XML is looking like a possibility for the future. There’s just one problem: you have thousands of pages of legacy content that you’ll need to convert, and it’s not exactly XML-friendly.
