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    The Language of Content Strategy
    The Language of Content Strategy
    The Language of Content Strategy
    Ebook350 pages1 hour

    The Language of Content Strategy

    By Scott Abel and Rahel Anne Bailie

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    About this ebook

    The Language of Content Strategy is the gateway to a language that describes the world of content strategy. With fifty-two contributors, all known for their depth of knowleEA Digital (delivered electronically)e, this set of terms forms the core of an emerging profession and, as a result, helps shape the profession. The terminology spans a range of competencies with the broad area of content strategy.

    This book, and its companion website, is an invitation to readers to join the conversation. This is an important step: the beginning of a common language. Using this book will not only help you shape your work, but also encourage you to contribute your own terminology and help expand the depth and breadth of the profession

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherXML Press
    Release dateFeb 15, 2014
    ISBN9781492001966
    The Language of Content Strategy

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      Book preview

      The Language of Content Strategy - Scott Abel

      Trademarks

      The Language of Content Strategy

      Table of Contents

      ForewordPrefaceAcknowledgementsI. Core Concepts1. Content2. Content Strategy3. Content Lifecycle4. Content Standard5. Accessibility6. Content Optimization7. Content Quality Assurance8. Findability9. Metadata10. Search Engine Optimization11. PersonalizationII. Core Deliverables12. Content Brief13. Requirements Matrix14. Content Inventory15. Content Audit16. Content Analysis17. Content Matrix18. Content Type19. Content Flow20. Content Model21. Content Scorecard22. TaxonomyIII. Technical Concepts23. Single Sourcing24. Structured Content25. XML26. Content Reuse27. Modular Content28. Transclusion29. Content Engineering30. Document Engineering31. Content Management System32. Adaptive Content33. Content Migration34. Intelligent Content35. Augmented RealityIV. Extended Deliverables36. Message Architecture37. Information Visualization38. Editorial Calendar39. Transactional Content Map40. Information Architecture41. Wireframe42. Style Guide43. Governance Model44. FolksonomyV. Global Content45. Translation46. Localization47. Globalization48. Internationalization49. Machine Translation50. Translation Memory51. Terminology Management52. Multilingual Search Engine OptimizationContributor IndexSubject IndexA. Copyright and Legal Notices

      Foreword

      Stroll down the halls of any company, and you hear many languages: the language of engineering, the language of marketing, the language of finance, and others. These days, you also hear a new language. It’s a formidable language, a language that transcends department silos, a business language that ties other business languages together in a powerful way. In a world where content is king, you might call this language the king of business languages. I refer, of course, to the language of content strategy.

      Today, every business needs to be in the content business. Customers buy—or don’t buy—based on their experiences with the information they pick up about a company and what it sells. So today’s companies need people who think about information strategically, people who speak the language of content strategy.

      What do content strategists do with this language? They use it to grapple with questions like these: What content meets our customers’ needs while also meeting our business goals? How much content do we need? What forms must it take? How do we keep it on brand? Which editorial and technical standards shall we follow? Which terms shall we use, and which shall we avoid? How do we assess the quality of our content? What metadata do we tag it with? Who manages it? Who creates it? Which pieces of content do we share, and which do we keep to ourselves? What tools do we use to produce and maintain all those pieces? What results do we want our content to achieve? How do we measure those results? How much content do we translate? Where do we distribute it? How often do we update it? When do we archive it? How do we socialize it, monetize it, search-engine-optimize it, reuse it, and encourage customers to contribute to it? How much content do we have, anyway?

      These are big questions. To even form them, let alone answer them, we need a big language.

      The language of content strategy is as big as they come. Governance. Taxonomy. Content audit. Words like these straighten your spine, square your shoulders, and steel your gaze. Words like these call for unifying, boundary-busting, big-picture vision. At the enterprise level, words like these touch on every department in the company and every phase of the content lifecycle.

      Are you ready to think big about content? If so, you’re ready to blaze trails down the halls (real or virtual) between editorial and technical teams. You’re ready to tie together all the languages you run into along the way. You’re ready to place equal weight on what goes into a company’s content and what that content goes into. You’re ready to argue that stellar content has business value only if it gets to the right people at the right time in the right way—and that a brilliant content-management plan has business value only if it delivers content that people care about.

      If you’re ready to think big, whatever your job title—whether you’re a budding content strategist eager to learn more about the role, a veteran curious about the way others use the terms you use every day, a manager looking to hire a content strategist, or a colleague desperate to decipher what your content-strategist pals are talking about—you’re ready for the language of content strategy. Thanks to the efforts of Scott Abel, Rahel Anne Bailie, and all this book’s contributors, you now have access to this essential emerging lexicon.

      Like any lexicon, this one perpetually evolves. Words have meaning and relevance only to the extent that people use them in ways they find meaningful and relevant. So go ahead, square your shoulders, and try out these words with your colleagues. See what meaning and relevance this vocabulary brings to your conversations. Think big enough to need the language of content strategy. Your company’s future depends on it.

      Marcia Riefer Johnston

      Author of Word Up! How to Write Powerful Sentences and Paragraphs (And Everything You Build from Them)

      www.howtowriteeverything.com

      Preface

      The writing of a dictionary is not a task of setting up authoritative statements about the true meanings of words, but a task of recording, to the best of one's ability, what words have meant to authors in the distant or immediate past. The writer of a dictionary is a historian, not a law-giver.

      —S. I. Hayakawa (from Language in Action, Harcourt Brace, 1940)

      One aspect of having been in the workforce for over three—or in the case of one of us, four—decades is that we get to watch professions spring up and mature. Information architects, interaction designers, web writers, content strategists—all professions that rose as quickly as others withered away into obscurity.

      In the 1990s, we watched the discipline of information architecture spring up and take hold. In his essay on the history of the profession, Peter Morville recalls that web developers complained of a pain with no name.[1] Information architecture may have alleviated that pain, but discussing information architecture created a new pain.

      Negotiating deliverables was particularly difficult. Those conversations required a preamble wherein terms were defined. (What exactly do you mean when you say wireframe?) These conversations were the only way to be absolutely certain that contractors or colleagues envisioned the same concept. Eventually, as the discipline matured, terminology became codified, and practitioners could fall into discussions with the shorthand efficiency that comes with community and experience.

      In 2009, the awareness of the relatively new discipline of content strategy began to spill out into the greater business consciousness. And as we found with the sister discipline of information architecture, the vocabulary for content strategy is in flux. (What exactly do you mean when you say content audit?) In a blog entry titled Dear Content Strategists,[2] Lou Rosenfeld, one of the elders of information architecture, suggested that language and framing is critical early on. In all fairness, his statement was about creating an association, but can equally be applied to the vocabulary used to create community. Having a common vocabulary, an accepted lexicon, is an important aspect of a mature discipline.

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