Daniel Eizans: Content Strategist, Geek

Every Wednesday morning, I wander upstairs to cheat on my colleagues in the content strategy and user experience departments to broaden my knowledge base and talk about things just as geeky as our collective practices.

You see, Wednesdays are my weekly trysts with my agency’s Content Management and Content Integration groups. I very much enjoy these sessions, not only because it provides me the opportunity to fully nerd it out on everything from asset grids to meta data, but it also affords me the opportunity to vent shared frustrations, create new efficiences and discover insights as to how we make this whole content strategy/content management thing play nice. I do this because ultimately, I’d like to better serve our clients and assist our content developers in producing more relevant and compelling creative.

Let me start by disclaiming that I’m of the opinion that content strategy is most certainly NOT content management. As strategists, we have input on how the content is produced, managed and governed, but our goal is ultimately to aid in the creation of a strategic set of best practicies and personas to be sure that content developers are creating the most appropriate content for machines and humans.

So, if content management is concerned with the cataloging, re-purposing and proper tagging of assets so they’re readily available and relevant, and content integration is concerned with making these assets usable for a variety of media channels, how do these guys get along with and provide insights into the content strategy role?

The answer that I’ve slowly been coming to after a few months of getting inside the heads of various content integration and management team members is that there is an absolutely crucial need to design a common set of systems, routines and nomenclature for an integrated content development process – something myself and two colleagues are working very hard to shape.

It seems that our separate languages can certainly be understood by one another, but somehow can become twisted in interpretations when they’re translated to those outside our happy content development cycle. So, it seems far better to step forward with a universal dialogue to properly marry content strategy and user experience to content management and integration so that POV can be articulated to the content development process laymen.

This calls for unprecedented collaboration, which can be difficult in a large agency setting. It means content managers and strategists need to work very hard to understand the other’s practice.

Good content strategists should have a strong understanding of how asset management and integration works (EVEN IN NON-DIGITAL!!), and asset managers and integration specialists have to understand the insights and data sets that influence how a content strategist develops personas, works with experience planning, determines gap analysis and creates a point of view for a given project.

If content management doens’t understand the results of strategic persona process, assets can’t be tagged properly in databases and potential efficiencies for content integration across communication and campaign platforms will most likely be missed. Missed opportunity creates a creep on scope when new projects and the potential for new content creation comes around. Likewise, if content strategy doesn’t better understand the management and integration process influence on management and evenutal governance of an asset will never be achieved.

So I’m putitng out an APB for the creation of a content development dictionary of sorts. Content producers need a common set of terms and ways to explain the roles of their colleagues and everyone needs to understand these terms, roles, processes and routines through a common nomenclature.

Big agencies traditionally suck at this, so I’m especially interested in what you strategists working within this environment are doing to combat it.

I know it seems silly to have to tell people to integrate into a process for content development, but as agencies and organizations attempt to become less siloed by re-aligning as content production houses, they’re effectively creating new silos by coming up with their own language, process and routine for handling individual steps to creating the work.

So strategists … have you hugged your content manager or your integration team today? If you haven’t head upstairs and do so. They’re smart and insightful people who will make you think more deeply and cause you to write better strategies.

Drop thoughts below in the comments and check back for periodic updates to my attempts to write the Content Development dictionary.

Disclaimer: The opinions reflected in this post ARE NOT necessarily those of my employer. These opinoins are strictly my take on the content development process.