Live from JBoye: Who Put Their Technology in My Content Strategy?

Who Put Their Technology in My Content Strategy?, by Meghan Walsh

Content strategists job can also include tech planning, partner relationship management, business requirements, cross-program alignment… it’s a lot. We’re creating content that is personalized, and then we need to distribute it.

Meghan looks through both the practitioner lens and as the strategy and planning role, focusing on the technology, not the operations.

“The content strategist is the critical voice in content technology planning, selection and design.”

To be clear:

• Content strategists are not the only stakeholder.
• Content strategists don’t have to be tech experts.
• Content technology is not useful if it does not help achieve content goals.

History of a story at Marriott:

• There were two teams: content strategy and content development
• Content strategy “wrote”
  • Word-centric
  • Page focused
• Content development “did the CMS”
  • CMS centric
  • Managed structure
  • Project focused
• A content strategy company did an audit of their site and determined that the problem was how they did their work, not what work they were doing.
• They were (at the time) working with a three pillar approach:
  • Content Authorship
  • Content Structure
  • Content Distribution
• They realized all of these things need to be aligned with an overarching content strategy:
  • Governance (vision, standards, goals, direction)
  • Authoring (roles, experience, workflow, editorial)
  • Management (CMS, operations, and delivery)
  • Distribution (channels, audiences, mediums)
• The content technologist doesn’t need to do all the strategy. The technologist just needs to know the content strategist and the content manager’s:
  • Vision for the content
  • Definition of content
  • Workflow needs
  • Expectations for translation

Then the technologist can decide what CMS to use or update.

Lessons learned:

• Content strategy is a fourth pillar
• Technology needs to ask themselves
  • Does the content we have/are considering appropriately serve our content?
  • Will a change in technology make a positive difference?
  • Are we optimizing our existing products?