Here’s a video of my talk from last month’s CS Forum 2011 in London. I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with some incredibly smart folk, so do make yourself comfortable and watch them all, particularly the excellent lightning talks by Shelly, Matthew, Nicole, and Sara.

Presentation links

• See the finished diagram on visualizing.org
• View the survey results on Flickr
• Study the survey data spreadsheet

Let me begin by extending a huge and sincere thanks to everyone who played their part in this, particularly those who responded to the survey, encouraged others to do so, and remained patient as I worked out what to do with the results, and to the attendees of CS Forum 2011 who offered such kind words following my sole destroying (you had to be there) attempt to squeeze the last six months into 20 minutes. I can’t deny it’s been fun.

Though the finished diagram is by no means perfect, I can say with a measure of confidence that not only are these the six commonest paths today’s practising content strategists have taken to reach the discipline, but that they demonstrate the extent of our varied skills and approaches. It only serves to emphasise how much we need to continue sharing a little of what we’ve picked up along the way.

The professional backgrounds of content strategists

Q10. To what extent does your work now relate to what you were doing five years ago?

Key findings

• While it’s not a huge surprise to learn that a combined 81% of all respondents considered the role they were in five years ago had “A great deal” and “A fair amount” of relevance to what they are doing now, you may be a little more interested to learn that 12% more females than males felt this way

Data summary for professional relevance in 2006

Q11. What job title, if anything, did you have written on your business card five years ago?

Description

• Made up of nodes and edges (lines), this network diagram displays the interconnected relationships between the job titles survey respondents had in 2006. The size of the primary and secondary nodes indicate the number of links between occupational groups, while the thickness of the edges indicates the weight of the relationships between two nodes

Key findings

• Of the 251 respondents who answered this question, 77% were working in the media, IT and artistic sectors in 2006

Comments

• To help categorise the job sectors, I used the British Office for National Statistics’ Standard Occupational Classification 2010 coding index
• You may have noticed that clicking on the above diagram takes you its visualizing.org entry, where you will be able to zoom and pan to your heart’s content

Q12. How, if at all, have your professional responsibilities and competencies changed from five years ago?

Description

• This word cloud, created using Wordle.net, has given greater prominence to the words frequently used by the 224 respondents who answered this question

Selected quotes from the responses to this question

I know much more about content strategy than I did five years ago, but my authority hasn’t yet increased to the point where I can implement much more of it.

Respondent #1 – Male, aged between 26-30, United Kingdom

I manage workflow, make recommendations on voice and style, manage a team, [and] create navigation. Before, I just wrote articles.

Respondent #7 – Female, aged between 31-35, Southern United States

I get included in projects at an earlier stage, and my input is treated with far more respect. These days I am asked for my “professional opinion” on language usage, usability, strategy and management issues, whereas previously I was asked how to spell a word once in a while.

Respondent #14 – Female, aged between 31-35, Africa

Many more meetings at which my input is listened to and valued, no longer an observer.

Respondent #81 – Female, aged between 46-50, Australasia

More strategy, less “throw it all against the wall and see what sticks.”

Respondent #122 – Male, aged between 31-35, Midwestern United States

I am much less “in the trenches” and much more involved with higher level staff and executives, providing guidance and recommendations. I suspect this has happened because the value of content strategy is being recognized more widely.

Respondent #101 – Male, aged between 41-45, Northeastern United States

I stay out of meetings whereever [sic] possible. I like to chuck in a content audit like a grenade and see what happens.

Respondent #242 – Female, aged between 56-60, United Kingdom

Comments

• With more responsibility and respect comes big breakthroughs. My, we’ve come a long way. I genuinely found some of these stories really rather touching. I’m half tempted to publish them in full

Q13. To what extent does your work now relate to what you were doing ten years ago?

Key findings

• Unsurprisingly, we have a far more even spread of figures than those of five years later. At this point in time plenty of respondents were still in formal education, some were on a completely different career path, while others were working for organisations that had yet to make the leap from offline to the web

Data summary for professional relevance in 2001

Q14. What job title, if anything, did you have written on your business card ten years ago?

Description

• Made up of nodes and edges (lines), this network diagram displays the interconnected relationships between the job titles survey respondents had in 2001. The size of the primary and secondary nodes indicate the number of links between occupational groups, while the thickness of the edges indicates the weight of the relationships between two nodes

Key findings

• We still have the majority of the 227 respondents who answered this question working in the media, IT and artistic sectors, but due largely to the drop in responses, plus a fair proportion of the respondents working in unrelated fields or in formal education, the diagram appears much more spread out as a result

Comments

• Once again, I used the British Office for National Statistics’ Standard Occupational Classification 2010 coding index to categorise the job sectors
• Clicking on the above diagram takes you its visualizing.org entry, where you will be able to zoom and pan to your heart’s content

Q15. How, if at all, have your professional responsibilities and competencies changed from ten years ago?

Description

• This word cloud, created using Wordle.net, has given greater prominence to the words frequently used by the 184 respondents who answered this question

Selected quotes from the responses to this question

I used to be a sheep, and now I’m a shepherd.

Respondent #29 – Female, aged between 41-45, Canada

10 years ago web work was only a small proportion of my role. I had less authority to make major changes to content that I was putting on websites. I would pretty much put up whatever was given me, with basic QA and layout changes. Was able to develop my own IA because there was no centralized web governance at that stage.

Respondent #81 – Female, aged between 46-50, Australasia

The big change is that now my work involves close collaboration with others in UX or IA rather than IT and engineering.

Respondent #101 – Male, aged between 41-45, Northeastern United States

I actually sort of do the same thing – except digitally, as opposed to in museum galleries. Crafting messages, collecting “artifacts” [sic], organizing everything, coordinating all the players – now, I just do it on the Web.

Respondent #137 – Female, aged between 41-45, Northeastern United States

Comments

• More stories of increased responsibility and respect were to be found alongside examples of how respondents had been able to draw on the skills and experience picked up while working within other allied professions

Matchup: Q13. To what extent does your work now relate to what you were doing ten years ago? vs. Q10. To what extent does your work now relate to what you were doing five years ago?

Description

• This diagram demonstrates how, in the five years between 2001 and 2006, our work gained far more relevance to the kind we’re doing today

Key findings

• 25% of respondents believed that five years on from 2001 their careers had “A great deal” of relevance to what they do today
• 30% of respondents who considered the role they were in ten years ago had “Not very much” or no relevance to what they are doing now or weren’t working at the time considered their role five years later had “A great deal” and “A fair amount” of relevance

Data summary for change in professional relevance between 2001 and 2006

What can you do with this data?

• Study the spreadsheet on Google docs
• Post your own sketches and visualisations on the Flickr group

The educational backgrounds of content strategists

Q8. To what extent has your educational route related to your work?

Key findings

• If we’re happy to consider a combination of the figures for “A great deal” and “A fair amount” to roughly indicate a high level of relevancy, then 60% of all respondents believed their educational route closely relates to their work. I’ve tried, and so far failed, to find a set of comparative figures from elsewhere which could indicate how common it is for graduates to study something in one field, only to end up with a career in another. If anyone knows of such a study, I’d love to hear about it

Comments

• One respondent answered “Don’t know” for this question – so it’s not strictly 0%. See the data summary below for a more accurate breakdown of the figures

Matchup #1: Q1. What is your gender? vs. Q8. To what extent has your educational route related to your work?

Key findings

• 64% of all female respondents considered their educational route had “A great deal” and “A fair amount” of relevance to their work, as opposed to 56% of males

Comments

• Though it may not have been entirely obvious at first glance, vertical dashes have been used to indicate the position of the overall shares from question eight

Matchup #2: Q2. Which age bracket do you fall into? vs. Q8. To what extent has your educational route related to your work?

Key findings

• Of the 51% share of respondents aged between 31 and 40, 64% considered their educational route had “A great deal” and “A fair amount” of relevance to their work

Comments

• The original age bracket categories have been merged to squeeze the data
• Vertical dashes have been used to indicate the position of the overall shares

Matchup #3: Q4. For what kind of organisation do you work? vs. Q8. To what extent has your educational route related to your work?

Key findings

• It’s a tale of two extremes for self-employed or freelance respondents, with a combined 44% who either considered their educational route had “A great deal” of relevance to their work or “Not at all”. To be fair, the relatively small overall share belonging to this category (16%) may have contributed to these figures

Comments

• Due to insufficient data, I refrained from including the “Government agency”, “Non-profit”, “School, college, university” and “Startup” categories in this graphic
• Vertical dashes have been used to indicate the position of the overall shares

Data summary for educational relevance

Q9. Which subject(s) provided your highest level of educational attainment?

Description

• This type of information visualization is known as a bubble race. Each bubble represents a field of study. The size of each bubble indicates how many respondents studied in this field. The vertical position of each bubble indicates how relevant respondents considered each field of study was to the work they do today

Key findings

• Despite its size, the field of technical communication provided the highest amount of “A great deal” responses. In fact, everyone who studied technical communication considered it to be highly relevant
• On the opposite end of the scale, economics provided the highest amount of “Not at all” responses
• The fields of English language and literature alone accounted for 58% of all listed fields of study

Comments

• I counted 121 different fields of study, 70 of which were omitted from this diagram due to only being mentioned once. Believe me, you’d need to possess a pair of eyes capable of spotting specks of dust on a fly’s nose from three miles away to pick them out
• Time to come clean: considering the survey’s global audience, this question was poorly worded. Somehow, in spite of this, I still received a great response. Littered amongst the replies from respondents who had successfully decoded my bizarre request were the puzzled comments of the poor souls who hadn’t have the foggiest idea what I was asking them to do. “Call me an idiot but I’m not sure what you mean here”, said one. “I’m not sure what this question means”, said another. And, in what was possibly the most damming chide of all, another asked: “Isn’t clear language a part of good survey design?”. Usually, yes

What can you do with this data?

• Study the spreadsheet on Google docs
• Post your own sketches and visualisations on the Flickr group

The working lives of content strategists (continued)

Q7. To what extent do the following form part of your responsibilities and competencies?

For added clarity, percentage shares have been rounded up and approximated. Fans of extra decimal places should head on down to the table of data at the foot of this post.

Accessibility testing/guidelines

Key findings

• Of the combined 23% of respondents who indicated their responsibility for “A great deal” and “A fair amount” of accessibility testing and writing accessibility guidelines, only 62% indicated their competency in accessibility back in question 6

Comments

• 4% of respondents skipped this question

Back-end development (e.g. PHP, ASP)

Key findings

• Of the combined 29% of respondents who indicated their responsibility for “A great deal” of, “A fair amount” of and “Not very much” back-end development work, 60% were male

Comments

• 3% of respondents skipped this question

CMS requirements

Comments

• 1% of respondents skipped this question

Communication plans

Comments

• 2% of respondents skipped this question

Competitive analyses

Comments

• 1% of respondents skipped this question

Content auditing

Comments

• No respondents skipped this question

Content delivery plans (channels)

Comments

• 3% of respondents skipped this question

Content editing

Comments

• 3% of respondents skipped this question

Content reuse strategies

Comments

• 1% of respondents answered “Don’t know” to this question
• 1% of respondents skipped this question

Content sourcing plans

Comments

• 3% of respondents answered “Don’t know” to this question
• 3% of respondents skipped this question

Content style guides

Comments

• 1% of respondents skipped this question

Content templating

Comments

• 1% of respondents skipped this question

Copy/asset production

Comments

• 1% of respondents answered “Don’t know” to this question
• 2% of respondents skipped this question

CSS coding

Comments

• 1% of respondents answered “Don’t know” to this question
• 4% of respondents skipped this question

Editorial planning (calendars)

Comments

• 2% of respondents skipped this question

Front-end development (e.g. JavaScript)

Comments

• 3% of respondents answered “Don’t know” to this question
• 3% of respondents skipped this question

Gap analyses

Comments

• 3% of respondents answered “Don’t know” to this question
• 3% of respondents skipped this question

Graphic design

Comments

• 1% of respondents answered “Don’t know” to this question
• 2% of respondents skipped this question

Information modelling

Key findings

• Of the combined 40% of respondents who answered “Don’t know” and “Not at all”, only 47% indicated their competency in information architecture back in question 6

Comments

• 7% of respondents answered “Don’t know” to this question
• 3% of respondents skipped this question

Interface design

Comments

• 1% of respondents answered “Don’t know” to this question
• 3% of respondents skipped this question

Markup (HTML, XHTML)

Comments

• 1% of respondents answered “Don’t know” to this question
• 3% of respondents skipped this question

Metadata recommendations

Comments

• 1% of respondents skipped this question

Page layout

Comments

• 1% of respondents skipped this question

Policies and guidelines (compiling)

Comments

• 2% of respondents skipped this question

Research plans

Comments

• 2% of respondents answered “Don’t know” to this question
• 2% of respondents skipped this question

Taxonomies

Comments

• 2% of respondents skipped this question

Traffic analyses

Comments

• 1% of respondents answered “Don’t know” to this question
• 3% of respondents skipped this question

Translation

Key findings

• Of the combined 13% of respondents who indicated they were responsible for “a great deal”, and “a fair amount” of translation work, 60% hailed from outside the United States.

Comments

• 3% of respondents answered “Don’t know” to this question
• 2% of respondents skipped this question

Usability testing

Comments

• 1% of respondents answered “Don’t know” to this question
• 2% of respondents skipped this question

User profiling

Comments

• 3% of respondents skipped this question

Wireframing

Comments

• 1% of respondents answered “Don’t know” to this question
• 2% of respondents skipped this question

Workflow recommendations

Comments

• 2% of respondents skipped this question

Data summary for the extent of each responsibility and competency area

What can you do with this data?

• Study the spreadsheet on Google docs
• Download and print high-resolution .png of all 32 see-saws (467Kb)
• Post your own sketches and visualisations on the Flickr group

After having to disappoint literally ten people who asked if I had any plans to sell prints of my diagrams, I’ve finally bowed to the pressure.

One of the primary reasons for my long-standing reluctance was the thought of organising the printing, handling and distribution of the prints myself. Reaching a point where I’d be on first name terms with all the Post Office cashiers as I negotiated weekly shipments (arrogance?) of thundersticks to far flung lands didn’t exactly fill me with much enthusiasm.

So when I stumbled upon those fine folks at Society6 and realised I could get away with placing any would-be customer in their capable hands, I finally got excited by the whole idea. You see, when you or I buy a product from Society6′s stable of ridiculously talented artists from around the world, they handle the production, packaging and shipping on the artist’s behalf. I know. I’ve rubbed my eyes a few times now and it still reads the same.

Society6 Stretched Canvas – a day in the life from Justin Wills on Vimeo.

What’s on the end of your stick, Vic?

What indeed? So far there are three diagrams available to order from my Society6 studio: Partners for the content strategist, Get a firm grip of your web content … and Web content in perpetual motion. I’ve put together this handy table detailing the size and price (in US Dollars) for each diagram print.

Size and price for each diagram print

Diagram	Mini		Small		Medium		Large		X-Large
	in	US$	in	US$	in	US$	in	US$	in	US$
	10×8	19	17×13	25	22×17	35	28×22	40	37×28	60
	8×9	19	13×15	25	17×19	35	22×25	40	28×32	60
	10×8	19	17×13	25	22×17	35	28×22	40	37×28	60

These diagrams are also available for a little extra as stretched canvases if that’s what tickles your fancy. However, baring an absurd and unlikely deluge of requests, I will not be offering T-shirts, hooded tops, iPhone cases or any other fruity device skins emblazoned with my diagrams. The mere thought of someone going about their business with a Venn diagram of how to approach a web project from a content perspective etched across their chest – expertly, I might add – would be enough to make me consider a drastic change of career. I have standards. You may not.

Crikey! Those prices have made my eyes water …

I could attempt to make you feel weak in the knees by revealing that your prints will be produced on fancy paper using fancy ink and topped off with a light sprinkling of fairy dust. But, essentially, what you’re really paying for is the privilege of not having me involved at any stage. Bargain.

That said, there may be a few non-US residents lamenting my choice of handler. I can sympathise. I mean, it’d probably be quicker for UK residents to visit my potting shed one afternoon and coax me into drawing one for them. We could even find time to shoehorn in a pathetic pseudo sword fight using various garden implements. En Garde!

And have I truly considered those of you lucky enough to possess or know someone with a printer the size of a Datsun Cherry? What about those of you with a burning desire to run off a few hundred copies of a diagram on your office network printer in a bizarre multi-departmental fly poster campaign?

To you I say this: consider downloading these hulking great versions of the diagrams instead. I won’t mind a bit.

Partners for the content strategist (2.9 MB)

Get a firm grip of your web content … (1.5 MB)

Web content in perpetual motion (2.9 MB)

At least you’ll be safe in the knowledge that you won’t be funding my questionable taste in knitwear.

The working lives of content strategists

Q4. For what kind of organisation do you work?

Key findings

• Excuse me while I speculate with reckless abandon. Do these results indicate that an increasing number of respondents are getting hired by web design agencies looking to offer content strategy? Have those with the necessary skills, interests and will within those agencies begun to adopt or practice elements of it? Or better still, have they been there all along? We can only imagine how different these figures would have looked from just a year or two ago

Comments

• I now regret not adding the option for a respondent to indicate whether they are a business partner, owner or an employee. Only the self-employed or freelance respondents offered a less-than-firm indication of how content strategists actually do their work. A missed opportunity
• Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that the figures add up to 101%. That’s what you get when you choose to round up, folks.

Q5. How many people does your organisation employ?

Key findings

• The largest share of respondents (31%) work in a self-employed or freelance capacity or as part of a small team of up to 10 employees
• A quarter of all respondents (25%) are practicing elements of content strategy in organisations of approximately 1001 people and above

Comments

• I can see this whole 101% issue is bothering you. If you’re partial to a few more decimal places, I suggest you scroll down for the data summary

Matchup #1: Q4. For what kind of organisation do you work? vs. Q5. How many people does your organisation employ?

Key findings

• 39% of the 40% overall share of respondents who work at a design, web agency or consultancy do so in a team of up to 25 employees
• 39% of the 22% overall share of respondents who work for a for-profit enterprise (corporation) do so in a team of over 3000 employees

Comments

• Interact with this visualization using IBM’s Many Eyes (requires Java)
• In a bid to to squeeze the data, I decided to merge a few of of the organisation size categories
• I also removed the organisation type for self-employed or freelance. Unsurprisingly, there were a high number of respondents in this category who also indicated they worked on their own. I’m still getting over this startling revelation

Data summaries for organisation type and size questions

Q6. In which of the following areas are you competent?

Key findings

• Just before last Friday’s close of play I decided to release this infographic to an unsuspecting and work weary audience to measure some of your initial reactions to the figures. One notable conversation centred around localisation’s meagre share. In a week when CS Forum 2011 co-organiser Destry Wion had already commented on the lack of conversations around localisation within the content strategy fraternity, the number of respondents who credited themselves with skills in this area certainly justified his concerns. Karen McGrane, Managing Partner at Bond Art + Science, later posed this pertinent question: “If content strategists (particularly in Europe) don’t get localization, who does?”. Fortunately the world can call upon experts like Lise Janody, who frequently works with large multi-language websites. She’ll be at CS Forum 2011 in London this September presenting on this very subject, as indeed did Kenneth Yau of Baddit Ltd at last year’s forum in Paris.
• While we’re on the subject, out of the 21% share of respondents from Europe, 21% indicated their competency in localisation. That’s a 9% increase on the overall share

Comments

• Respondents were invited to add an additional category (or seven). Pleasingly for me there were no recurring categories of real significance to make me lament their omission from the hulking main list. A few of the interesting submissions ranged from old favourites such as “Brand strategy” and “Social media strategy” to alternatives like “CMS training” and “Business development”. But for their entertainment value alone my personal favourites were “Whatever people decide needs to be added to my plate” and “putting client toys back in prams”. Mad skillz indeed

Matchup #2: Q4. For what kind of organisation do you work? vs. Q6. In which of the following areas are you competent?

Key findings

• More of the 16% overall share of self-employed or freelance respondents credited themselves with skills in analysing, curating and managing content as well as developing an editorial strategy than their counterparts working for for-profit enterprises (22% overall share)

Comments

• Interact with this visualization using IBM’s Many Eyes (requires Java)
• Due to insufficient data, I refrained from including the “Government agency”, “Non-profit”, “School, college, university” and “Startup” categories in this graphic

Matchup #3: Q5. How many people does your organisation employ? vs. Q6. In which of the following areas are you competent?

Key findings

• 82% of respondents who work in small teams of 2-10 employees credited themselves with skills in editorial strategy. That’s 11% more than the overall average
• Rather than the number of respondents practising information architecture decreasing as the size of the team grows, they actually increased

Comments

• Interact with this visualization using IBM’s Many Eyes (requires Java)
• Once more I decided to merge a few of of the organisation size categories to help squeeze the data

Data summary for areas of competency

What can you do with this data?

• Study the spreadsheet on Google docs
• Post your own sketches and visualisations on the Flickr group

Update (15/06/11): Added details of Lise Janody’s presentation on localisation at CS Forum 2011.

Gender and Age

Q1. What is your gender?

Key findings

• This near 60/40 split in favour of females compares favourably to the list of speakers at the recent Confab content strategy conference in Minneapolis where 63% were female, and the forthcoming Content Strategy Forum 2011 in London where 59% of the speakers will be female

Q2. Which age bracket do you fall into?

Key findings

• Hardly earth shattering stuff but over half of all respondents (55.57%) fell between the 31-40 age bracket

Q1. What is your gender? vs. Q2. Which age bracket do you fall into?

Key findings

• Of the 55.57% of respondents aged between 31-40, approximately 60% were female

Data summary for gender and age questions

Geographic Region

World

Key findings

• As expected the United States and United Kingdom accounted for the vast majority (83%) of all respondents

United States and Canada’s 73% share in detail

Key findings

• Just under a quarter of all respondents (24%) hailed from the Northeast region of the United States alone

Europe’s 21% share in detail

Key findings

• With France and Germany accounting for only 6% of Europe’s respondents excluding the United Kingdom, I’m intrigued to learn how the remaining 29% is distributed across the continent

Data summary for location question

What can you do with this data?

• Study the spreadsheet on Google docs
• Post your own sketches and visualisations on our Flickr group

Maths teachers are forever drumming it into their pupils that showing their workings out are nearly as important as the answers themselves. Neat rounded totals without the scribbled meanderings and eraser dust shed no light on a pupil’s process and progress.

Because my diagrams are almost always born out of a desire to solve a problem or an attempt to align certain things in my own mind, I’m more than aware that a diagram such as ‘Partners for the content strategist’ is unlikely to sit comfortably with everyone. So, to help you understand why I came to certain conclusions and shed a little light on my process, I thought I’d show you my workings out. Think of this, if you will, as akin to the last ten minutes modern natural world documentaries tend to reserve for a behind-the-scenes look at how a film crew captured a particularly challenging scene; except I was sat in a comfortable chair throughout, rather than going toe-to-toe with one of Mother Nature’s finest.

The problem

I wanted to find a way of mapping the tasks/deliverables associated with a mid-to-large organisation’s typical (as typical as any can be) content lifecycle with the practitioners who may be directly involved in their conception and completion. Faced with the problem of how to visualise this I did what any content strategist worth their salt would do and retreated to a place of immediately safety and familiarity: the spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet

Though I feared ending up with something resembling a bird’s nest I decided to begin by linking each content project task/deliverable with one or more practitioners who may benefit from the presence of a content strategist to consult or partner with – no matter how tenuous that link may be. I then repeated the same exercise again, only this time concentrating on essential links between the tasks/deliverables and each practitioner. Each essential link was highlighted by a darker cell colour and denoted with a ‘1’ to keep an automatic running total. Have a look at the spreadsheet for yourself.

After an inordinate amount of time consulting various books and recalling past experiences the table was complete. It was only now I realised I still had to find a way to visualise it. Step forward that six-sided king of regular polygonal tiling: the hexagon.

The prototype

Honey bees and content strategists? In truth I’ve yet to make that connection stick myself, but don’t forget I managed to wrap a game of snakes and ladders (did anyone actually play it?) around the trials and tribulations of an in-house content strategy advocate. I have, so they say, ‘form’ in this respect.

Though these rather crude scribbles of honey bees and honeycombs did not provide me with the theme I was looking for they did, at least, inadvertently guide me towards the hexagon – a shape I’d used to decent effect before.

It was now time to make the switch from paper to the screen. At this early stage I opted for OpenOffice.org’s Draw, due in no small part to its ability to successful manage the incessant fiddling that would come to characterise the piecing together of this diagram. Using Draw would also prevent me from getting too precious over how it looked – though, as you can see, I couldn’t help taking full advantage of this afforded opportunity to pay homage to a certain hexagonal-based television game show.

The use of tiled hexagons turned out to be something of a troublesome blessing. Having only six edges meant that any single task/deliverable or practitioner had a fixed limit as to how much weight in links they could carry. On one hand this was advantageous because the last thing I wanted was more arrows flying around than in the opening sequence from ‘Gladiator’ but, at the same time, I was acutely aware I could be doing a particular discipline an injustice by not considering their involvement to be important enough to mention. Thankfully, following extended bouts of head-scratching and blank gazes into the middle distance, I had a prototype ready for beautifying.

The snazzy Photoshop bit

Working initially in greyscale enabled me to find a suitable contrast balance between the tasks/deliverables and the practitioners before the fiddly aspect of colour was applied, but there remained a niggling problem differentiating between the two groups of hexagons. In a bid to counter this I considered offering an obvious size difference between the two but as this would adversely affect the tiling it was quickly ruled out. I also briefly entertained ideas of changing the font (Lucida Sans Unicode) to one which allowed for a heavier weight option and using upper-case lettering. After consideration I decided to keep the size and the font, plumping instead for changing the shape of the practitioner’s hexagon to that of a circle.

With the colours for each project stage already predetermined back when I compiled the spreadsheet all I had to do now was find legible variants for each. Though as a colour-blind individual I can’t say I’m overly fond of mixing certain shades of blues and purples, greens and yellows, and reds and greens. Thankfully the colour wheel and my only brother with no colour vision deficiencies to speak of (and a man who knows his colour theory) rode to my rescue.

The final diagram

And that was that. Save for a bit of indulgent nudging, preening, and slicing the diagram was complete. Maybe some day I’ll do one of these in the style of an open project and get the wider community involved in its conception. I mean, there’s nothing quite like trying to reach large-scale consensus, right? On second thought, I think I could quite easily talk myself out of that one …

Partners for the content strategist (827 KB)

Note: This diagram is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence. By all means bend, shape, and prod it.

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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