Shut the door on your way out, Cicero…

Like many of the disciplines concerned with designing for the web, content strategy is a rich and colourful conglomerate of overlapping approaches. Can we really square the circle of being a content strategist and not being, in some senses, an information architect, user experience designer, or technical communicator?

This isn’t to say that the content strategist lacks the defining element of their professional purpose. On the contrary, I believe that when every facet, subset, and silo is boiled down all that remains is the single task of understanding how an organisation can be effective with their content – everything else, that’s fuelled and measured by it, I regard as external.

Working out why and how an organisation’s content needs to change cannot be achieved without three key considerations: the status and potential of the content itself, the platform that supports its delivery, and the people involved in its creation. The potentially dizzying amount of skills and responsibilities this requires means the content strategist must seek out all the available knowledge within an organisation, capture it, and use it effectively. Clear communication, a respect for each other’s skills and time, and a shared common goal can help forge the working partnerships that make such changes possible.

Partners for the content strategist (827 KB)

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