Content strategy depends on strong stakeholder relationships. You need stakeholders not only to help inform your content strategy but also to help implement and maintain it. Without involving stakeholders in the planning process and prioritizing their needs, competing objectives will compromise success. Meghan Casey of Brain Traffic offers great tips for gaining stakeholder support, as well as suggestions for group song. "Kumbaya," … [Read more...]
What’s the Right Content for the Job?
May 26, 2011 by
"We should do a video." "We need more photos with this article." "The site is sparse; we should add a few more pages." How many times have we heard such suggestions? Well-meaning, surely, but not necessarily in the best interest of our goals or our users' needs. If you think about it, it's kind of like saying, "We need more hamburgers" without considering whether our audience is hungry or thirsty, let alone whether or not they're … [Read more...]
Themes From #meetcontent: Relationship Management and Content Strategy
May 9, 2011 by
Last Tuesday night, just over a month after we brought Meet Content to life, we brought Meet Content to IRL with our launch event, a panel entitled “Creating and Sustaining Higher Ed Web Content.” And the #meetcontent hashtag was hopping! Our outstanding panelists -- Boston University’s Nathaniel Boyle, Emerson College’s Mike Petroff, Tufts University’s Samantha Snitow and Wellesley College’s Charna Westervelt -- covered a range of topics … [Read more...]
How to Hire Your Content All-Star
April 28, 2011 by
Are the budget purse strings loosening at your institution? Have you lobbied to get some of those newly available dollars thrown in the direction of improving content on your university’s website? Yes? Excellent! Now, who to hire? This decision is made more challenging by the always-evolving nature of the web and the many hats we in the content world are often forced (or sometimes choose) to wear. But Ann Handley, co-author of “Content Rules,” … [Read more...]
Making Friends with the Backend
April 19, 2011 by
You know who is one of your most valuable partners in content development? Your web developer. I'm a big believer in integrated teams, and the closer you can work with the web developer to understand the goals of your content initiatives, the more he or she can bake the structure and coding into your content that supports those goals. Content strategist Rachel Lovinger, who has written extensively on the semantic web and the concept of making … [Read more...]