Guidelines for Effective Editorial Calendars

Whether we’re planning content for a homepage, a blog, a news site, a Twitter account or some other destination, an editorial calendar is an essential tool for making sense of the who, what, when, where, why and how of our content: Who is responsible for creating this? What content type are we publishing? When will we publish this content? Where will we publish it? Why are we publishing this? How are we promoting this … [Read more...]

Leading Successful Editorial Meetings

Communication is hard. And when you think about higher ed, where we’ve got both central- and unit-level communications staff—each with their own stories, platforms, priorities, and staffing—it is really hard. The oft-invoked analogy is “herding cats,” and it certainly applies in this instance. So, we organize an editorial meeting, inviting all the top cats. Finally, we’ll bring order to the editorial chaos! But it’s not that simple. Our feline … [Read more...]

Content Governance Assessment

During our first Meet Content webinar, an attendee asked a great question: where do you start with web content governance? It’s a challenging question to answer because content governance requires that you first have a content plan. Content governance — a process of managing content roles, responsibilities, processes, documentation, tools and training — can’t be distinguished from your content strategy. In order to manage the elements of … [Read more...]

The Fallacy of User-Centered Content

On Meet Content, we talk a lot about the importance of users’ needs. Last week Georgy discussed content as customer service, highlighting the need for our content to be helpful to users. Indeed, content is customer service! For web writing and content creation, I consider this the number one guideline: keep your audience in mind. What are their needs? Why are they visiting your website? Content can't be useful if you don't know why it's needed … [Read more...]