Guest post by Paul Mueller.
Monday afternoon brings two popular, well-known speakers and authors to the Summit. This year is the first for these industry leaders to join us at the STC Summit and share their perspectives. They both have popular books and bring fresh perspectives to content strategy and content presentation. We are looking forward to these back-to-back spotlight sessions.
Flexible Content Demands Future-Ready Organizations
Sara Wachter-Boettcher discusses how today’s users are mobile—and they expect your content to be, too. But locked into inflexible pages and documents, today’s content isn’t ready for the world of responsive sites, apps, APIs, and read-later services. Instead of scrambling to make more content, you need content that does more: Content that’s structured so it can travel and shift while keeping its meaning intact. But structured content isn’t just about your CMS. It affects your whole organization. In this session, you’ll learn how to:
- Discuss the need for flexible, multi-device content with your organization’s stakeholders
- Evaluate your existing content, looking for patterns that help you define content types and relationships
- Use mobile as an opportunity to refocus your content, your authors, and your workflow
Sara Wachter-Boettcher is an independent content strategist, writer, and editor who focuses on designing systems for flexible, adaptable, future-friendly content, which she writes about in her first book, Content Everywhere. During stints as a journalist, copywriter, and web writer, she became increasingly dissatisfied with the chaos typically found in web content projects and became determined to find a better way. When she’s not consulting with clients or partnering with agencies, Sara is serving as editor in chief of A List Apart, contributing to publications like Contents and The Manual, and speaking about content strategy and user experience at conferences worldwide. You can read her blog at sarawb.com.
The Art of Explanation
Professional communicators explain ideas every day, but we rarely take a step back and think about the skill of explanation and what it can mean to our audience. Lee LeFever, author of The Art of Explanation, will help you take a fresh look at what makes explanations work, how to plan an explanation, and how to use media to make your explanations remarkable.
Lee began writing blog posts, such as RSS in Plain English and Wikis in Plain English, to help his clients gain a basic understanding of the social side of the web. These blog posts were popular and helped him discover that he likes explaining complex topics to beginners. Lee and his wife, Sachi, then had the idea to turn the “in Plain English” blog posts into videos.
Rather than standing in front of the camera with a whiteboard, Sachi had the idea of pointing the camera straight down onto a whiteboard on the floor and using hands, markers, and paper cut-outs to tell a story. Paperworks was born in February 2007. They published their first video, RSS in Plain English, in April 2007, which appeared on the front page of Digg and gained 10s of thousands of views. They have continued developing videos ever since.
The goal of their company, Common Craft, is to make the world a more understandable place to live and work by helping professionals like you become better explainers. For an example of their work, see Augmented Reality – explained by Common Craft.