A few weeks ago, while in the throes of manuscript editing, I wrote a quick post about what I was doing that week. I did so to help demystify content strategy to people who want to know, as the NYC CS Meetup group would have it, what content strategists do all day.

In the post, I mentioned something I’d made for a client project: a diagram that traces the mental path we want to encourage a particular group of site visitors to take. Not specific interactions, pages or tools, but a process of gradual engagement with ideas, eventually leading to the decision to act. I’d never made this particular thing before, and I’d never seen anything quite like it elsewhere.

I can’t show you the thing I made, but here’s an example that I sketched out for an imaginary conservation organization that wants to educate students about habitat loss and related activism when they visit the site to complete school assignments.

Pretty simple, right? A project with a dozen or a hundred pages and only a few target audiences wouldn’t need something like this. But before I could proceed with the content recommendation for this large, complex, and intellectually crunchy project, I needed to distill all the things we’d been saying and thinking about this audience’s progression through the site’s ideas.

I made it as an internal tool, but when I showed a dim iPhone photo of it to client stakeholders, they found useful, so I ended up including it in my content recommendations.

A Diagram Named Sue

When I showed the client my sketched-out version on my phone and then hastily re-drew it on their whiteboard, I called it a “user engagement model,” which is reasonably accurate, but also jargony. In my blog post, I called it:

a cognitive model that translates pieces of the organization’s mission into a conceptual blueprint for deepening user engagement with the site

That’s both vague and awkward, but it does describe  the thing and what it does—or at least, what it did for me on this project. A Google image search for “cognitive model” produces a variety of hideously formatted diagrams about how people think; the one I made is also about how people think, and specifically how we imagine them thinking their way through the information presented on a website.

But because I didn’t have a non-proprietary example to post, the mention produced confusion. So just to be clear, I’m not talking about a mental model. Nor am I talking about “the features of an information system,” as one commenter suggested.

Have You Seen This Boy? He Is Very Ugly.

I’m certain that I haven’t created anything new by drawing up this diagram when I needed it, and I expect to continue using the tool on other projects that need a nudge toward clarity.

So here’s my question for you, internet: Have you made or used something like this? And if you did, how did you use it? (And what did you call it, anyway?)

Related

Many others have capably defined content strategy. My favorite definitions are these:

content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design
—Rachel Lovinger

Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.
—Kristina Halvorson

And my newest favorite is:

Content strategy is just content planning.
—Elizabeth McGuane

Also, Rahel Bailie has a fantastic post about the definition of content itself.

In real life, content strategy falls somewhere between traditional editorial leadership, communication strategy, and information management, all of which have their own distinct connotations. It’s easy for discussions of terminology to float off into abstraction, so instead of talking about “content strategy” or what “a content strategist” does, I’m going to say what this content strategist does.

What I Do

Right now, I’m working on a few projects. One is very large and is a good example of a big, serious CS project, so I’ll talk about it in detail.

I’ve already collaborated on a quantitative and qualitative content audit for this project, which involved many thousands of pieces of content spread across several divisions and databases.

I’ve also already done high-level content recommendations, which included a description of major assumptions and concepts that would affect future content, structural design, visual design, and development choices. These recommendations included:

• a cognitive model that translates pieces of the organization’s mission into a conceptual blueprint for deepening user engagement with the site
• proposals for major new communication approaches and content-related features, including initial requirements for a proposed back-end system that would support specific kinds of content creation and management, all of which are linked to goals articulated by the client before and during the project’s initial phases
• audience prioritization and high-level plans for meeting the content needs of each of the site’s major audiences

Now I’m working on the next round of content strategy work, which will include:

• detailed discussions of the content in each of the site’s major sections, keyed to the wireframes that we’re developing—this includes clear documentation of the goals, style, format, sources, and upkeep needs of each major class of content on the site, and will eventually turn into content templates
• notes on new content that needs to be created and existing content that needs to be revised before launch
• a discussion of the editorial calendars (yep, plural) that will be in place before launch and will guide content creation and review in the future
• a snapshot of existing web publishing workflows in use throughout the organization and a discussion of new publishing workflow models and processes that the client may wish to adopt
• a discussion of underlying content-related business rules that affect workflow and content management
• a proposal for integrating appropriate, useful social/interactive features into various parts of the site

None of this work deals with all the content strategy aspects of off-site content, social media, email, mobile integration, and so on—we haven’t gotten there yet. Someday, there will also be a style guide, much of which will be integrated directly into the CMS and workflow documents so that people can actually see and use it. And all of this work happens in collaboration with the client, with the web consulting team I’m part of, and with a specialist consulting firm acting as our partner on this project.

Edited to add: This project also included a very substantial research phase, which was run by the UX team while I tagged along taking notes.

For two other clients, I’m collaborating on product development. For one of those clients, I’m also developing messages and writing copy. For another, I’m doing ad-hoc project management and sometimes general, old-school web strategy work.

Oh, a certain amount of staring off into space, which turns out to be essential for keeping the brain juicy enough to do all of the above.

That’s what I’m doing now. Strategic and tactical. Planning and execution. Also sometimes cake.

That Thing I Said I Wouldn’t Talk About

If you’ve read this blog before, you probably know that I’m an etymology nerd. It’s my main defense against ill-tempered, shortsighted prescriptivism. Here’s a little bonus geek-out.

“Strategy” is derived, of course, from the Greek word strategos, which means, roughly, “general” or “highest ranking military leader.” Strategos is derived from two other Greek words: stratos, which is used to mean “army” but literally means something like “the thing that is spread out” and agos, which means “leader.”¹ The OED, bless its adorable face, defines the modern sense of “strategy” as:

The art of a commander-in-chief; the art of projecting and directing the larger military movements and operations of a campaign. Usually distinguished from tactics, which is the art of handling forces in battle or in the immediate presence of the enemy.

Quite.

In Summary

The central message of content strategy in 2010 is that it’s not enough to think tactically about content. To serve our clients and readers, we have to look beyond individual battles and ensure that the whole array of individual campaigns and choices works together to meet a clearly defined set of overarching goals.

Notes