Giraffe Forum

Gerry, I think you’re expressing a really valid and important dimension here. There really is one strategy that matters, and that concerns the drivers and objectives of the business. Everything else must be aligned and subservient to the business strategy. That said, as you well know, content is often a really large, sometimes overwhelming dimension that can make or break the success and sustainability of the initiative. Hence the need for thoughtful consideration and planning, packaged as a “content strategy.” In my organization, we talk about a “content approach” that supports the overall strategy. But whatever you call it, I agree that it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on if it doesn’t ultimately serve the business strategy.

Whoa. I don’t need to get very far into this post to point out its major flaw. It’s the diminution of the part content plays in the success of … well, anything. Aside from the caliber of an organization’s people, I argue that content is its most important business asset.

That with which you demonstrate the value of your product, services, mindshare, expertise, etc. That with which you provide your employees the information they need to be productive and effective in their jobs. When you can prove that content is a critical business asset and that a content strategy that helps you achieve your overall business strategy is not something you can ignore, senior management pays attention. I’ve seen it.

Content strategy isn’t about writing good content. If you don’t know that, you’ve missed the boat. It’s about ensuring that your content is useful and usable for the users and purposeful and profitable for your business. That purposeful and profitable part is the most important. The content itself is really pretty easy if you do the legwork. The hard part is the way in which you create and govern it.

That stuff, combined with making sure you’re producing the right content, for the right people, at the right time, directly affects the bottom line. What kind of staff do you need? Who should perform what tasks? How much do you pay them? How do you make decisions about it to avoid wasting money on something that doesn’t work? How do you ensure it’s done right the first time? How do decide when it’s time to change course?

If your content strategy doesn’t consider all of those questions and many more, it’s not content strategy. And there lies the problem.

This post is fine where it applies to someone who creates content: I get that the boss doesn’t want to talk content. But I’m sure I’m not alone in working for an organisation where the content is all created by other staff with no experience or understanding of the web - so I have to talk content because if I don’t, the entire content of our website will be rubbish.

People who ‘do’ websites without any comms experience simply don’t understand that there is such a thing as web content. They’re only bothered about design - and the actual content is thrown together, cut and pasted out of a few leaflets.

So actually talking about content, and getting people to understand that content exists and it’s important because it’s what people come to your website for - is absolutely vital.

So here’s my speech to the executive:

You have (or ought to have) a strategy for customer engagement.

You have all of this content lying around, and I can show you how to use it to support your customer-engagement strategy.

The name of what I’m going to do for you is (ta-da) content strategy.

So, yes, there is such a thing as content strategy. While it’s not an end in itself, it’s an important and worthwhile activity.

I think the substance of this argument mainly has to do with the fact that Gerry is positioning his work quite differently than many of us do, which is entirely understandable. In the process, he’s made some statements I find a bit overwrought, and which certainly haven’t been borne out by my experience, or that of many of my colleagues—things like:

“If you want more respect, don’t talk about content. If you want to make progress in your web career, don’t talk about content.”

I’m sure this reflects your experience, Gerry, but it seems awfully broad to me…particularly when I see organizations of all sizes crying out for content specialists with strong strategy skills. Our approaches to marketing our work could scarcely be more different, though, so it’s probably a simple cultural disconnect.

Elizabeth, I can only say that I haven’t found that it serves my clients or colleagues well to drop my work for undefined phone conversations, but I’m always happy to answer emailed questions, as I mentioned in our correspondence.

But hey, now I get to be a “sidekick.” Dreamy!

Gerry, I think like many of your articles you are prone to hyperbole in how you express very valid points regarding the importance of content. I agree, just like your concept of “care words” business executives are looking for solutions that align with business objectives. For this very reason, “content” has to be framed in a way that makes sense to them, using their vocabulary and an understanding of what is important to them - what they value. I believe, however, as others have stated here that there are 2 levels of “strategy” within an organization - neither one of which is tactical. You can have overarching business objectives, along with departmental objectives that support the overarching organizational strategy. Perhaps that is what you mean by tactical within this macro concept. Regardless, in my opinion, the semantics here are what separate Content Strategy “the discipline” from trying to champion content at the boardroom table. Content Strategy at an organizational level looks to level silos in order to make all content more effective for the organization. It is somewhat agnostic in its approach to information dissemination through all channels (on and offline) and remains an impartial third-party to all organizational communications. In this instance it is, in and of itself, a strategy similar to any other traditional department (Marketing, Finance, Technology, etc.) with a strategy to guide its internal implementation of tactics.

Your original post sets up a straw man. Nobody ever defined “content strategy” as a replacement for business strategy. Nobody defined “design strategy” or any other kind of “strategy” that way, either. As you said yourself, content strategy, etc. work in service of an overarching business strategy. You seem to think that there can only be one thing called “strategy” and therefore there can’t be “content strategy”.

Sure, content is “strategic”. But what’s the difference? Strategy has to do with planning a course of action in order to meet objectives. Content strategy or, say, design strategy has to do with planning content or design in a way that supports the business strategy. By the same token, business strategy has to do with planning business activities in order to meet broader business objectives. So you don’t think content strategy is business strategy, and I agree; you don’t think it should be called “strategy”, fine; but you’ve completely glossed over what content strategy IS–strategy for content. That is, if you’ve decided that you’re going to have content and that you’re going to approach it in a deliberate way, you’re much better off having a philosophy and a methodology for planning, implementing, and maintaining the content, whether or not you do it Halvorson’s way.

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There may be another dimension to this …

Are your clients heading out, like Marco Polo did, on an expedition to Outer Mongolia?

Or are they on a reverse-engineering mission?

What I mean is, are they starting out like Shirley Kaiser of WebsiteTips.com with a few helpful hints that somehow manage to morph into a hewmungus and highly-respected “authority site” a couple of decades later?

Or have they decided to work the customer-attraction problem backwards from hot-niche market to high-commercial-intent keywords to heat-mapped conversions?

A voyage of discovery ???

A marriage of researchers ???

Whatever business your clients think they are in, the business they’re *really* in is the marketing business.

And in the marketing business, you only have to change *one* thing in order to change everything.

And that one thing is whatever you’re doing to get more customers.

So if you talk to your clients about what they’re doing to get more customers, they’ll listen for hours because odds are they aren’t doing anywhere near as much as they could be doing.

Furthermore, if you’ve got the courage to test your belief that your clients *really* want to hear you talk about content, then set things up in such a way that they can self-select by clicking on a “read-more-about-content” button and see what percentage of them select the “read-more-about-getting-more-customers” button instead.

Further furthermore, as Charlie Chan would say, the fast track to the fat fees is right through the heart of *specializing* in customer-getting content, not talking about content strategy.

Self-selection works great for that, too.

Start off with your highest-priced, super-special, customer-getting-content offer.

Then take something away from it and slap a medium price tag on what remains.

Then take something else away from that and give it the lowest price tag.

Then offer a 90-page whitepaper on content strategy for free!

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Gerry, I usually like what you have to say, recommend you to others, but this post seems reductive and wrongheaded. It smacks very much of “guy’s got a [top tasks] hammer, world must be a nail”. I’m confused: you’re a smarter guy than this.

Because people set up all kinds of different web properties, to serve all sorts of different user intents, blanket statements like those in the initial article just can’t hold up.

If a user’s top task is (depending upon the type of site) information seeking, the content is the user’s goal, and a site succeeds or fails on its findability, quality, currency, usability and desirability.

If you’re an Amazon, your content moves product, and the user often starts with an information-finding task. Can Amazon leave the content and metadata to chance? Should they have a warehouse full of products and just guess that some Amazon staffer will be good enough to write them up for the site? Should they leave that duty to the various manufacturers? How’s that working out for them elsewhere? How is Amazon’s content not strategic to their business? Should they proactively avoid “planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content” because you don’t find it important?

In my town, UPS, one of the world’s largest shipping companies has an editorial staff that publishes their site content worldwide for over 200 locales and in 24 languages. Can they realistically accomplish anything the business needs on the site without “planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content”?

Really?

It’s as though you decided not to explain Information Architecture to a CEO during a pitch (good move, I wouldn’t), and thus decided that IA as a discipline, a need or a fact of any carefully or carelessly arranged site doesn’t exist (huh?).

If your post is about being cogent and minimal when selling your services to an executive, I agree - it’s hard to get a minute of such people’s time: use it well when you have it.

But that doesn’t mean that important disciplines you choose not to tell them about don’t exist.

Gerry said “A different strategy would be to focus on core services (top tasks) and continuously improve them? Is that an organization strategy or a content strategy.”

Yes, I agree that is an organisation strategy, but the content strategy can then take thst much further. It can identify that folks coming to the website for those services do so irregularly, and perform one-off tasks. That they often come via a search engine, land deep within the site, and want to be in and out as quickly as possible. It can state that therefore content in this case must focus on task-based landing pages supported by a solid SEO plan and user-focused task flows, particularly for heavily trafficked pages. That’s where I see a content strategy adding value. It can also guide governance, workflow and publishing standards - to avoid the big mess we got ourselves into in the first place!

In an ideal world, the big strategic decisions would be loud and clear (that would make our jobs alot easier). But in my experience, that’s just not real. Often, when the big decisions are vague or absent, content strategy can actually guide the thinking, by asking the hard questions and forcing answers.

Yes, good points Gerry.
Collaboration is the key. A challenging one.

Gerry, I’d like to respond again and I’ll see if I can leave it at this.

1. If I understand correctly, when you use the word “strategy” you’re thinking of a high-level business strategy or organizational strategy. When you wrote “All these strategies don’t make a strategy”, you’re saying they don’t make a high-level strategy for the business. However, the phrase “content strategy” uses the word in a different way. Yes, this is a semantic issue, but your original article is based on a semantic issue in the first place–you’ve misinterpreted “content strategy” from the beginning.

2. Let me suggest a different meaning of the word: “Strategy” refers to the process of planning a course of action so as to accomplish specific objectives. So, for example, in the case of a business strategy, the course of action is the high-level actions that will be taken in order to meet the objectives of serving customers and making money. In the case of design strategy, the course of action is the design process (note: not the design itself) and the objective is to meet certain needs. In the case of content strategy, the course of action is the process (involving multiple content creators) of planning, creating, maintaining content, and the objective is to serve the customers or users of the content. So when you said that “content is a tool of strategy”, you’re right–it’s a tool of the business strategy. Content strategy is responsible for the creation and maintenance of the tool.

Content strategy –> (provides for) –> content –> (which is a tool of) –> high level strategy.

Does that clarify what I’m saying? If we replace “content strategy” with “content planning” or “content guidelines”, it still stands on its own. We’re not talking about a business strategy that focuses on content, but a separate strategy in service of the business strategy. Like Kris said, two levels of strategy. When I begin a new design project, I may already have a business strategy to follow, but I still develop a more specific, project-level strategy for the product I’m working on. Whether or not we call it strategy, a distinct activity takes place. I don’t have to do it, but it allows me to approach the project systematically and it improves the result. This is similar for content: content creators and maintainers have work to do; it helps to have a strategy for that work. That’s what content strategy is about (or, that’s a big part of it).

3. You also misrepresent content strategy. If, in a particular instance, content strategy simply “nods its head” to the customer but doesn’t really solve their problem (within the framework of the broader business/organization strategy), then it’s bad content strategy. If content strategy is done badly, then of course it’s not worthwhile. I understand that one fails by focusing on content as an end in itself. But if content strategy is done well, it (a) helps the business carry out its work, and (b) either provides for or works alongside the strategy or guidelines that help content creators serve the customer. It IS sensitive to human and organizational issues, and it moves the focus back towards the organization’s broader objectives. I think the progenitors of content strategy are well aware that the previous movements around content management and knowledge management have failed to address (a) and (b) and they’ve tackled those issues extensively in their work (but if you’ve read all the books and other literature on content strategy and still think that’s missing, then we have something more to talk about).

“The whole strategic change is all around the customer.”

Ain’t it the truth, though!

Beware!

Commoditization of our product or service is the kiss of death to our bottom line, but that’s just what we invite when we blather on about “content,” let alone “content strategy.”

I got a newsletter the other day that started out like this:

“You’re going to love the content I have for you today. I believe in really overdelivering.”

Well, bully for you!

And what daisy field in the back of your mind, may I ask, informs you that “content” turns me on?

It does no such thing!

I have come to positively *hate* that word!

What *is* it, anyway?

As an object lesson for a chief executive, I put a wireless microphone on his lapel, some speech recognition software on his laptop, and an inflammatory question about a controversial issue in his ear.

A grand rant ensued!

I pushed the print button, handed him a copy of it and said …

“Now, *that* is content. It *communicates* your thoughts on the subject to the reader. You don’t need to be a professor in order to produce it. You just need to be a communicator, which you already are … which we *all* already are.”

Strictly among ourselves, that printout did have a few misprints and typos in it, but that’s only because the software hadn’t been trained to recognize his voice prior to use. Apart from those nitpicky details, it was magnificent!

Magnificent!

Comprehension descended on his mind like a hammer on an anvil.

It was something to see.

And then he said, “If you weren’t so damn good, I’d fire you!”

(giggle!)

But he not only got the point, he got excited about it, too. It was as if a vista of communication with his customers was opening up before his eyes … as if he were seeing it in his mind’s eye as replete with entrepreneurial possibilities … as Jeff Bezos must have seen Amazon all those long years ago …

Which of my three packages do you suppose he picked?

The Platinum, the Gold, or the Silver?

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Reading all of this, I can’t help but think everyone is just talking in a semantic circle.

Definition of strategy: “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.”

Those of us focusing on web content better have a plan of action designed to achieve an overall aim. Or we’re not doing our jobs. Whether you want to call it strategy or not…tomaytoes/tomahtoes.

Right.

The point, it seems to me, is not to get caught up in semantics.

What you want is something you can sell with enough margin that you can make a profit that justifies your effort.

More Benefits = More Sales

Simple!

If it’s *really* important to you to discuss “content strategy” with clients, then you’d better add “loves to talk about content strategy” to your “Perfect Customer” profile so you can tailor your marketing to attract such people.

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