Content Strategy: The Old, New Thing

Content Strategy: The Old, New Thing

Recently, in the past year, you may have heard a lot of buzz about content strategy, as well as concepts such as ‘content curation,’ portable content and/or semantic web. Perhaps you have heard it said that content strategy is the next big thing in the interactive and digital worlds. Some proffer that ‘content is king,’ and that digital information will double or even triple in the next fear years. Others have asserted that content and content strategy will be the single most important factors in the future of the Web. For a lot of folks, these are quite bold statements that may or may not mean anything.

For those of us whom do it, content strategy is nothing new. In fact, it has been around in the publishing world for a long time, and predates the advent of the Internet. It is also not a practice that only applies to the Web or to marketing and editorial strategies. Finally, it is not entirely sexy, unless you think combing through thousands of pages of data and adding each to an Excel spreadsheet is fun. But it is important and is becoming more so in the digital and interactive worlds.

I’ve always defined content strategy from the following starting point: getting the right content to the right user at the right time, and the ‘how.’ In this context, the fact that content strategy is enterprise in nature is implicit—meaning here, that it touches not only consumer-facing channels (Mobile, Web) but internal applications and processes (content management systems, portals). At Sapient, we take the approach that content strategy is not just “strategy,” but, it is also inextricably linked to the solid tactics that implement it. As such, we define it with the following composites:

• Content Approach – Sets the strategic approach (this is the blueprint, the content strategy POV and the long-term vision)

• Taxonomy and Metadata/Content model– Creates the power behind intelligence built into the content, including Search Engine Optimization. It is the building block behind personalization and any rules-based approach to serving up content to a specific user or behavior.

• Editorial Strategy – Defines the voice, tone, rules of use and business logic for content. This includes what types of logic (personalization) are necessary for content.

• Content Production Design – The entire lifecycle for content production, and may include CMS workflow and localization strategies. It also includes the metrics approach to measure the efficacy of the solution.

• Content Production Plan– Creates the scope, timelines, resourcing models around the content lifecycle and includes content migration approach.

• Content Governance – Governs everything related to content within an organization

Within the content universe of an organization, all of these factors are related and a content strategist must analyze each in formulating a strategy as well as implementing it tactically. As content is never a final product, the same applies to the strategy that organizations use to seed, grow and maintain it. I like to think of it as a closed-loop process that continually refines itself. For example, on a simplest scale, content lifecycle is not just about acquiring, creating, authoring, reviewing, publishing, retiring and/or archiving. It is also about measuring the content, its users and the landscape to determine what is required to optimize what exists, as well as figuring out which new areas an organization should focus upon.

Figuring out whether to personalize content on a website, create portable and reusable content in a multichannel environment, publish content to myriad destinations independent of platform, or shoot for a semantic solution, is just the surface for a content strategist at Sapient. Without considering the other factors I outline above, none of these exciting trends in content publication are remotely possible or sustainable for an organization. Although staying abreast of the trends in the use and behaviors of content is important for an organization, it must also understand the critical components that create, maintain and optimize the tactical and strategic focus of content. Organizations that implement a robust model at an enterprise level to support a content strategy that can be seeded and fed, will emerge as leaders in the content landscape.