The May issue of Intercom, with a theme of Content Strategy and guest edited by Alan Porter, is now online. Below is a copy of the note from the guest editor as well as from editor Liz Pohland for this issue. Remember, Intercom Online now has commenting available, so please ask questions, start a discussion, and give your thoughts.
From the Guest Editor
“There is a lot more content than there has ever been. The challenge is to be able to create it, find it, manage it, and curate it.”
The above quote is from an analyst at one of the leading business consultancies, who I heard speak during an industry briefing session on the morning of the day I sat down to write this editorial. The timing couldn’t have been better, as I feel it perfectly sums up the themes and ideas expressed in this special content strategy issue of Intercom.
Recent research shows that most companies now realize that great content and authentic engagement is key to success in attracting and retaining customers. Content creation is a top focus for over 50% of industry-leading companies, with content creation and management attracting larger budget share year to year, on average growing at around 9% a year.
To quote from the same analyst again, “The battles for customer attention are being won and lost on content alone. Great content sets the bar and defines leaders.”
Content is what we in the technical communication field are all about. I’d argue that we know content better than anyone. We know how important it is to our companies and, more importantly, what good content means to our customers.
Content strategy is the largest opportunity for technical communicators to prove their worth and value I’ve seen in my 20-plus years in this profession. It’s an opportunity we need to embrace, and I spoke on that very subject at this year’s ST C Summit in Atlanta.
For his lead-in article for this issue, Jack Molisani has conducted some revealing original research around how people have developed their skill sets as technical communicators to reposition themselves as content strategists.
The Content Wrangler, Scott Abel, provides some thoughts about the necessity of developing a strategic vision for content strategy, and Rahel Anne Bailie follows up with a great primer on the content strategy methodology she has developed.
As the opening quote illustrated, content management and curation is just as important as content creation when it comes to developing a content strategy. Again, this is an area where we technical communicators have decades of experience and knowledge that we can contribute. I recently heard someone suggest that the IT group is best qualified to handle content management because content is just data. That’s a stance I strongly challenged. To manage content properly, you need to understand content, its complex relationships, and the way that both the enterprise and customers interact with it. Joe Gollner’s article provides an excellent model for considering the technology needs of content management and strategy.
It is probably fair to say that the current interpretation of content strategy has been driven by the emergence of the need for content to drive online marketing. In her article, Sarah O’Keefe looks at how the traditional lines between tech comm and marcom are blurring, and as someone who has straddled both worlds for most of my career, I fully agree with her conclusions.
Rounding out my contributions to this issue is Robert Rose, one of the leading lights of the Content Marketing Institute on what we as a profession contribute to the developing world of content strategy.
My aim in putting editorial for this issue together was to try and develop more than a single issue of a magazine—rather to deliver something more akin to a primer on the emerging field and discipline of content strategy. Thanks to the great contributors, I hope we’ve managed to achieve that; please let us know.
From the Editor
What a fabulous issue Guest Editor Alan Porter has put together. I thank him for his efforts on behalf of Intercom and all the authors for their stellar contributions to such an important topic in our field—content strategy.
Just before going to press, I received two unsolicited articles on content strategy that I decided needed to be published in this issue as well, offering additional insights into content strategy and information and knowledge management. One article is by Geoff Hart on implicit information, and the other is by IBMers Alyson Riley, Andrea Ames, and Eileen Jones on storytelling and how it can be used to prove the business value of content.
Riley, Ames, and Jones explain six essential truths about content that echo themes found throughout this issue: that 1) content is a challenge; 2) content is an opportunity; 3) the client experience is not limited to the design of the user interface; 4) content is a catalyst; 5) content does not stand alone; and 6) successful products depend upon content. I hope all technical communicators reading this issue, no matter what your specific expertise, will find useful advice and thoughtful discussion from these experts into how to tell better stories about content.
This issue also marks Rich Maggiani’s final column for Social Media Insights. The topic of social media has been a challenge in the four year’s he’s been a columnist, with all the advancement and change we’ve experienced. Rich, I appreciate your tenacity and valuable contributions to such a moving target. It has been a pleasure working with you.