1 All good arguments

I totally agree with what you are saying. The vast majority of content is written quickly with very little thought, or just copied and pasted from somewhere else. The difficulty in all this process is convincing clients that the lengthy and costly process of writing great content is worth it though. :(

posted at 01:14 pm on December 16, 2008 by David Kindness

2 Funny to think

I think it’s funny when content is talked about this way. It makes sense, but all I can think about is the countless web-spam articles put out by my last employer. Content, even by the big guys is spam these days. Nearly everything is syndicated from somewhere else, and changed enough to help one’s sit rank. Frustrating really, isn’t it.

posted at 02:19 pm on December 16, 2008 by jupiter florida

3 Put it up there...

I completely agree with you. How many times do I hear “let’s put it up there”? Who cares? Exactly! Is our target audience interested in our press releases? Most likely not, and especially not in a 1:1 copy of it or even worse in PDF.

Luckily nowadays the user is in charge, if they don’t find what they need or don’t like what they find they are gone and your business lost another customer. Get to the essence of the message and speak the language of your users!

PS.: I ‘put up’ a bullet-point list of what I think are good (general) Design Guidelines for Content and I’d love to hear your opinion on it.

posted at 05:43 pm on December 16, 2008 by Michael Gaigg

4 Here we go again - Content Strategy is just like I

It kind of creeps me out how similar Content Strategy’s emergence and development as a discipline mirrors that of “mainstream” IA 10 years ago.

• The same heartburn over “naming the damn thing”
• Questions about overlap – “I thought {discipline X} already does that”
• Everyone in the field mostly making it up as they go
• Sharply divergent backgrounds with predictable “styles” of output
• Plenty of frustration
• Tons of opportunity
• Sweet, sweet excitement over “the new”

I’m terribly pleased to be in this role – all of us with backgrounds in writing, editing, and/or IA who’ve been looking for the right way to move up the funnel in the face of sites that go out the door w/out genuine value to the users – now we have a better defined role to enable our best thinking to make it into the end product.

The “I’ll just throw some lorem ipsum into my wireframe and verbally walk the creative team through it” approach produces substandard results. Fears of stepping on toes and speaking out of one’s discipline is a relic of siloed teamspaces (Armano-style “fuzziness” is teh awesome!)

2009’s gonna be a big year for Content Strategy – those of us in the role in an official capacity and those who see a “right-fit” for themselves here should organize and help each other out.

Let’s see if we can make the same progress we’ve made with IA in half the time!

posted at 07:46 pm on December 16, 2008 by Chris Moritz

5 Content Professionals: We Need to Cultivate Our Ow

I’ve been working as a web content professional for 2 years now. It has always perplexed me why content professionals have completely failed to coalesce into an organized community that establishes and shares best practices, communicates its challenges and concerns to clients and web colleagues, and cultivates the discipline with vigor and direction.

Thanks to Kristina Halvorson, Jeffrey MacIntyre, Erin Kissane, Amber Simmons and others on ALA who have written some great calls to action, but we all need to emerge from our candle-lit burrows and come together in a serious way if we really want web writing, editing, and strategy to progress. Next steps, anyone?

posted at 10:56 pm on December 16, 2008 by Dan Haley

6 Speaking of content

For an article about content, this one seems relatively light on it. How about some concrete examples, or “actionable” (in the parlance of the profession) recommendations?

posted at 11:23 pm on December 16, 2008 by Nora Brown

7 Understand your target group

Most important in my opinion is that the user find the content he´s looking for. You always have to understand your users. This is much more difficult than it seems.

posted at 11:56 pm on December 16, 2008 by Katja Schiemann

8 Recommended reading

Very good points raised here, but I’m missing some more information.
Can you recommend some reading material – online articles, books, e-books and such?

posted at 05:55 am on December 17, 2008 by Alon Peer

9 What is Content Gap Analysis

Really liked reading this post some great comments made but what is the definition “content gap analysis”, is it simply adding content that should be on your site that is not??

posted at 12:50 pm on December 17, 2008 by Joe Edwards

10

The importance of the role of a Content Strategist within a group of people who make websites seems obvious to me.

Working alone, I have found it extremely difficult to get clients to provide me with clear and concise content that people will care about. I usually end up using what they’ve wrote, rewrite some and just try to make it work as best I can.

While I may not ever be a “Content Strategist” myself, I hope that by using some of the arguments made here I can become better at educating clients and help them publish more meaningful and useful content.

posted at 03:31 pm on December 17, 2008 by David Rodriguez