Kristina Halvorson is the author of Content Strategy for the Web. I was excited to hear her speak to the Content Strategy New England Meet Up group on May 24, 2010.
What are the essential elements of content strategy?
- Auditing and Assessment – what’s the available content? What are the skill sets of the persons in the organization? What is their work flow? What do their competitors do? What are the needs? What are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?
- Messaging/Substance – what are you trying to say? What should your readers leave with or act upon? Can you archive older, less vital material in order to retain it but also have it leave more room for content that is more in demand?
- Structure – usability and design are key. Make it easy to browse for and search for content. Add a taxonomy and metadata.
- Workflow and Governance – what are the tools to move content through an organization? What are the metrics, and how will they be analysed? How does the organization decide which content is going to go out there? Who makes the decisions?
Ms. Halvorson talked a lot about working with companies that simply do not seem to get it. She made it clear that these strategies need to be implemented by humans, not automated CMS systems.
Tips included:
- Make and stick to an Editorial Calendar
- Create a Governance Policy
- Identify Standards and Goals
- Create and adhere to Benchmarks
- Establish Guidelines
- Create a Content Inventory
She recommended not only her own book but also a blog post by Rachel Lovinger, The Philosophy of Data.
One final whimsical, yet still serious tip: When you find cool stuff, tweet about it.
And so we will.
The book is written in the standard Dummies modular format, whereby you can skip around if you wish and not lose too much by not taking everything in order. A good thing, as the chapter on setting a strategy inexplicably comes after the one on installation. To my mind, that is placing the cart before the horse. Don’t we want a strategy before we go to the trouble of purchasing a domain and starting to put content out there? After all, a poorly conceived site could financially harm a company.
The book is also a little confusing when it comes to differentiating pages and stories. Stories seem to be aggregations of pages, or they might be more frequently updated than pages, but that’s tough to tell at first read.
The book discusses forums a bit but does not go far into community management as a whole. There doesn’t seem to be anything in here about, for example, restricting user access or even out and out denying a user access to any given site. While banning users is not the only function of a Community Manager, it’s still an important one, and it can be one that needs to be performed rather quickly. It’s outside of scope to talk about community management theory, strategy or values, but a quick how-to when it comes to banning users would be a fine (and small!) addition to this book. However, using a Captcha to eliminate auto-joining bots, and Mollom to detect spam, are covered.