Content strategy is easy

Gordon McLean has a great post on his blog, One Man Writes, about all the buzz around content strategy. (The post is so good, I stole its title for this post!)

For many people who don’t spend a lot of time worrying about content, it seems a bit grandiose to have to have a strategy around something that has been taken for granted or, in the worst cases, ignored altogether.

McLean rightly points out that content strategy is not really anything new. It’s always been the goal of tech comms and technical marketing comms to get the right information to the right person at the right time. I think the reason there is so much buzz about Content Strategy (with initial caps) is that content has become so much of the currency social sphere of the Web. And because everything is online the tech-y stuff like user guides and specs are sitting alongside the marketing-y stuff, not hidden away in dusty three-ring binder manual that “nobody reads”.

Once you mention that having good control over the content being produced, with a view to improving how it is created and delivered, will cost money, suddenly the picture changes. … None of this is new, these ideas have been talked about and debated for several years under the guise of Content Strategy, and for far longer than that in terms of ROI of content (and the teams who deliver it).

McLean’s post has some other great stuff in it, including a mention of Rahel Baillie and Noz Urbina’s book Content Strategy for Decision Makers, which is now on my to-read list.