What factors affect content strategy decisions? Every client has a different combination of requirements, and of course there are always outliers. But based on our consulting experience, here are some factors that affect content strategy decisions.
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.
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?
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?
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 you need a content strategy consultant? If the following signs are uncomfortably familiar to you, the answer is yes:
When I first started as a QA tech at a small game company, I was immediately thrown into the QA test bed. It was a place where we could test production-ready content without being interrupted by ongoing development or server restarts. Functionality was well-documented and could be used to test against our users’ bug reports.
Translating content for foreign markets can be an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. While it’s important to keep costs in check, the critical element to watch is quality. The only sure-fire way to ensure quality in translation is to build it into your source.
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.
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.
You have DITA. Now what?
More companies are asking this question as DITA adoption increases. For many of our customers, the first wave of DITA means deciding whether it’s a good fit for their content. The companies that choose to implement DITA find that it increases the overall efficiency of content production with better reuse, automated formatting, and so on.
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!).
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.
Content creation should no longer be the exclusive domain of full-time writers. Employees in other departments can offer valuable information that your company’s content should capture. Where can you find these part-time contributors?
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.
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?
Lean manufacturing begat lean software development which in turn begat lean content strategy.
What does lean content strategy look like?
Last week I was working in my home office when I heard an odd hissing sound. Upon investigation, I found that my hot water heater had decided to empty itself onto the basement floor.
Fortunately I had some failsafes in place; the heater’s pressure release valve was doing its job by routing scalding hot water onto the floor, and my floor is slightly slanted toward a drain in the floor. This got me thinking (because my brain is oddly wired this way) about failsafes in content workflows.
In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe discusses how content silos make it difficult to deliver a consistent, excellent customer experience. After all the hard work that goes into landing a customer, too many organizations destroy the customer’s initial goodwill with mediocre installation instructions and terrible customer support.
Do you have a unified customer experience? Do you know what your various content creators are producing? Join us for this thought-provoking webcast.
This post is a recap of the presentation I delivered at Localization World Berlin on June 4, 2015. It describes how and why to adapt a content strategy in support of The Internet of Things. The presentation slides are available on SlideShare.
What is the content strategy of things? To simplify definitions, content strategy is the planning for and governance of the content lifecycle, and the Internet of Things is the connecting of devices and software to provide greater value. To adapt content strategy to the Internet of Things, the content strategy of things can be defined as the planning for and governance of connected content to provide greater value.
Keeping a content strategy implementation moving forward is important, but it isn’t always easy. You may have to deal with an extremely slow-moving project or unexpected delay. You may even have to put a project completely on hold. Here are some common obstacles that get in the way of progress, and some ways you can work to overcome them.
Implementing a content strategy often involves overcoming significant technological and cultural challenges, but some of these challenges are so scary, so heinous, that they earn a place among the undead because they Just. Won’t. Die!
In this webcast, which debuted at Lavacon 2014, Bill Swallow takes a look at these nightmare-inducing monsters—from unrelenting copy-and-paste zombies to life-draining, change-avoiding vampires—and shows you what can be done to keep your content strategy implementation from turning into a fright fest.
Companies experience their greatest growing pains when expanding business to global markets. It’s an exciting time but can also be a rude awakening as differing local requirements emerge for both product and content.
On the content side, keeping all of these requirements in check can be a daunting task. Proper planning and execution is critical for meeting these requirements and delivery dates, and for keeping your sanity.
