I spend a lot of time in my work cleaning up jargon on college websites, which is why it pains me when I find myself using jargony content strategy terms. Yet, like other specialty web disciplines, content strategy has a number of specific guides, tools and processes to help us get our work done. Designers, developers, UX-ers, we all have them — and we need to be able to communicate the purpose and value of these concepts to other people on our … [Read more...]
Planning Content Goals With Web Stakeholder Interviews
July 30, 2014 by
In an earlier post, we talked about using focus groups to better understand your web users' needs. But external web users are not the only type of users we need to understand in order to create valuable and purposeful content. To create web content that works, we must also understand our internal web content stakeholders. These are all the people planning for, creating, curating, editing, approving, publishing and maintaining content, among … [Read more...]
Department-Level Content Strategy
March 19, 2014 by
The following guest post was written by Erin Martin, Web Communication Leader for the departments of Horticulture and Crop and Soil Science at Oregon State University. Last year, I scraped up enough funding to attend Confab Higher Ed, the inaugural higher education content strategy conference held in Atlanta. As I was wandering around, meeting inspiring folks and talking shop with people who get it — who see the value in thoughtful, mindful … [Read more...]
Content Strategy as Problem Solving
December 17, 2013 by
How many times has someone come to you and asked, “Can you make me a video?” or “Can you help me create this email newsletter?” or “We need a website, can you do this?” What do these requests have in common? In each instance, the requestor is leading with the solution, rather than articulating the problem. You might ask, why a video? What are you trying to communicate, and to whom? Is a video the best content type to support your message? … [Read more...]
Make Change: Host Your Own Content Strategy Conference
December 3, 2013 by
The following guest post was written by Laura D'Amelio, senior content developer for the Division of Students at York University, in Toronto, Canada Do you ever listen in to someone else’s conversation at lunch or while in line to grab a coffee on campus? Maybe you’ve heard the phrases “do more with less” and “wear multiple hats” often, like I do. My job hasn’t been so different – although originally hired as a writer, my content team and I … [Read more...]