The slideshow:

The links and articles and such:

• “Thoughts on ‘Defining the Damn Thing’” - Eating Elephant
• “Content Strategy Deliverables: What Goes In…” – Shelly Bowen/Pybop
• New Liberal Arts (2009)
• Steal Like An Artist – Austin Kleon
• Slide deck for “Audit, Plan, Build, Grow: A Methodology for Content Strategy” – Jeffrey MacIntyre
• Fugazi’s “Five Corporations” (YouTube Video)
• Online and On Mission – C. David Gammel
• “Audiences, Outcomes, and Determining User Needs” - A List Apart
• Video of “Content Strategy Methodology: A DIY Project” – Melissa Rach
• “Being Intentional” – Nicole Jones/Swell Content

The content strategy guides-that-are-not-methodologies:

• Content Strategy for the Web, Second Edition – Kristina Halvorson/Melissa Rach
• Content Strategy at Work – Margot Bloomstein
• Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy – Ann Rockley/Charles Cooper
• The Web Content Strategist’s Bible – Richard Sheffield
• The Elements of Content Strategy – Erin Kissane
• Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content – Colleen Jones

The Flickr images used via Creative Commons:

• “Lucky Strike Vintage Advertising” by Fugue
• “Red and blue substances in transparent test tubes” by Horia Varlan
• “Snowflake” by J. Star
• “Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword artwork” by Colony of Gamers
• “Kotobukiya Rockman” by GogDog
• “Close-up of an opened dictionary” by zehfernando
• “Stamp of the Ickwell Bury Library” by kladcat
• “Infinity – 008/365″ by Odd Bod
• “Steal Like an Artist” by Austin Kleon
• “Robber” by richt-what
• “Fugazi” by Sumlin
• “Physics Homework” by nikitagubanov
• “D2A7732soapbox.jpg” by swh
• “London Underground” by Qsimple
• “26/366 Discrete Mathematical Structures” by samcrockett

This is born from decades of smoke and mirrors from both sides, I feel. Agencies are dependent upon what I’ve always called the Myth of the Grand Reveal – where things are done in secret and only revealed at the point of maximum impact. Creative becomes a big bang. On the other side, clients have come to expect this routine. They want the big bang, because that’s what you pay for when you get big creative.

Every agency wants to be McGarryBowen or CP+B. And every client wants to hire McGarryBowen or CP+B.

But we don’t need more McGarryBowens or CP+Bs. We need more partnerships. We need more focus not on the agency or the client, but on the people for whom we’re creating these marketing messages in the first place. Why waste our big bang on each other, when we have potential customers to impress?

It starts by recognizing our patterns. Here’s the traditional agency workflow:

1. Client makes request
2. Agency spends three weeks brainstorming and creating for a big reveal
3. Giant meeting is scheduled with lots of logos and crazy ideas
4. Client is either wowed or underwhelmed
5. Go back to step 1

Client services – and the process of creating something worthwhile – depends on a lot more than hunches and magic. It depends on constant communication and deep research. The traditional agency/client relationship is broken in that there’s too much flash and not enough talk. Surprises and unveilings and last-second reworks are part of advertising legend – it’s the sexy part of our jobs, this desire to impress – but they’re quickly becoming a thing of antiquity.

Too much pressure is placed on the reveal, when in practice we should be constantly placing pressure on each other at all points of a project. Every idea should be met with a “Why?” and every stage should be pushed forward gradually. Together. Without drama. In this way, we no longer draw the line between sides. There are no longer agencies and clients. There are only partners. There are only projects that require constant feedback, multiple iterations and, most importantly, no more surprises.

This isn’t cheap. This takes time. Which means the relationships needs to adapt and change.

Robin Sloan writes in his essay “Iteration” (from The New Liberal Arts)”

“Making things is a circle. You start the arc with an idea about the world: an observation or hunch. Then you sprint around the track, getting to a prototype – a breadboard, a rough draft, a run-through – as fast as you can. Your goal isn’t to finish the thing. It’s to explose it, no matter how rough or ragged, to the real world. You do that, and you learn: Which of your ideas were right? Which were wrong? What surprised you? What did other people think? Then you plow those findings back into an improved prototype. Around the circle again. Run!

“This is the basic tenet of work methodologies like Agile, and it’s the new way to handle creative services: expand in ideas one part at a time, continuously return to the drawing board, and change course when necessary.

“Ideally, iteration isn’t a circle at all; it’s a spiral. With each loop, you know more about the world. With each loop, you’re making something better. With each loop, you’re simply making better.”

We need to introduce more research. More interviews. More collaboration. And we need to help our client partners understand why these things are worth paying for.

Because with this in mind, we’re no longer trying to sell a creative product – we’re selling ourselves, our ability to react and adapt, and our process. We’re not relying on awards and luck, but on hard work and togetherness.

The grand reveal is dead. Long live our partners.

From the article, “Treat Website Content Like a Business Asset” from the Sioux Falls Business Journal:

The case for developing a unified content strategy — all aspects of a company’s message, from print and web to broadcast and public relations — depends heavily on our need to provide effective communications to our customers and stakeholders. Content strategy is more than just words and images — it’s an extension of corporate culture.

In “Content Strategy for the Web,” Kristina Halvorson says, “Your web content is your prospects’ first impression of you, your customers’ lifeline to your organization and shapes potential employees’ opinions about what it might be like to work for you.”

When it comes down to it, content work is easy. The organizational change that it requires? That’s hard. It’s also the most important thing to the process.

The entire thing’s pretty high-altitude and general, but still. Go read it.

The hidden theme of the conference, however, and the one that relates most directly to my work as a content strategy consultant, was the need for this industry to “Ask More Questions.”

If you have kids, you’re already an expert. “Why is the sky blue?” they ask. “Because light scatters through the atmosphere in a way that makes it blue.” “Why does the light scatter?” they ask. “Because it reflects off of dust particles in the air.” “Why is there dust in the air?” “Volcanoes.” “Why are there … ” “HERE IS SOME ICE CREAM PLEASE GO OUTSIDE.”

The concept reflects upon our need as consultants and strategists to keep asking questions. More questions, all the time questions, keep going deeper and deeper until we no longer find anything new. When project stakeholders say, “We don’t like yellow,” or “We think this button should be larger,” it’s up to us to continue the discussion.

“Why don’t you like yellow?” you ask.

“Because yellow is not part of our brand,” they respond.

“Why isn’t yellow a part of your brand?” you ask.

“Because yellow is the primary color of our competitor,” they respond.

In other words, we find that what seemed like a flippant personal issue is actually deep rooted in the competitive nature of the industry. Of COURSE we don’t use yellow. Just as Pepsi shies away from ads and commercials that are bathed in Coke Red.

This practice of asking more questions helps ease the tension that forms between a client and consultant – or management and user experience, or designers and content creators, or any two members of any partnership in the world of web development.

Brad Nunnaly was one of the first to notice this undercurrent, and his IA Summit 2012 Recap post does a great job of summarizing how that thread wove itself through the conference. Brad brings in a new twist on the concept: we shouldn’t only be asking MORE questions, but also BETTER questions. Sometimes, they’re one in the same: “Tell me why you feel that way,” helps clarfiy AND dig.

All in all, IA Summit 2012 was both overwhelming – three days of super smart, well-spoken industry stalwarts tends to throw the N00B CSer’s brain to mush – and enlightening, both for the realization that, despite the percieved rift between content strategy and information architecture, we’re all part of the same community, fighting for the same thing, and for the relief that there is SO MUCH WE HAVE TO LEARN and that’s completely and wonderfully okay.

Also: New Orleans is still beautiful. As it does.

Highlights from the conference:

• Karen McGrane’s Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content, which focused on our need to adapt workflow to encourage better chunking of content for improved future-friendliness.

• Josh Clark’s The Myths of Mobile Context (PDF download of slides), wherein we are schooled in the fallacy of all of those pesky mobile myths, i.e.: “mobile means less,” “extra taps are evil,” “mobile must rely on apps,” etc.

• Adam Conner and Aaron Irizarry’s Discussing Design: The Art of the Critique, which reminded us to be humble and level when receiving critique – and sensible and sensitive when giving it.

• Dan Brown’s Managing Difficult Situations on Design Projects, a primer in overcoming organizational management issues, complex problems, and project dead ends.

If you want to learn more about the process, we suggest two things.

1. Buy Gammel’s book. You can get it here.

2. Read my article, “Audiences, Outcomes, and Determining User Needs”, published today in Issue 345 of A List Apart

If you’re confused about how this differs from your standard discovery meeting, with people meeting in a room and answering questions and all of that, the answer is: it doesn’t. Not really. You may already do something like this without being so deliberate, or you may define audiences and outcomes elsewhere in your process.

That’s cool. We’ve found that tackling audiences and outcomes at the very beginning makes our content inventory more relevant (by allowing us to pair pages with audiences) and saves a step in our qualitative audit (by giving us context for content needs).

What’s more, it clarifies our goals from day one. This clarification is important. For example, if we’re building a site to sell mail-order diapers, we can’t just say, “We’re building a diaper delivery site, and mothers will come to the site to buy diapers, and so let’s start writing copy.” I’m not a mother. And if I was, I’m certainly not EVERY mother. I know damn well that fathers and other caregivers will come to the site, too. So if I move forward with the diaper-buying mother stereotype in mind, I’m doing a disservice to a giant percentage of the site’s users.

And, while you’re at it, this issue of A List Apart also has a wonderful look at future-friendly content from constant smarty Sara Wachter-Boettcher: “Future-Ready Content.”

Then, Contents asked us to fill in the spaces by submitting our own answers to the question, “What are your first principles?”

There’s difficulty in nailing down those first principles – especially for me – because our first principles are constantly changing. They adapt. They are found wanting. They slip out of our hands and are rarely in our control.

That’s kind of the point, I think. There’s a reason Contents asked not just WHAT, but HOW – specifically, “How have your first principles changed over time?”

What are my first principles?

1. We all want the same thing…

We all want to be loved, right? We all want to feel special. We all want to be included. The need to belong is a basic human need. Specifically, according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, love and belonging make up a third level of needs, trumped only by basic physiological and safety requirements.

A core element of belonging is communication. To be with others – by which I mean, to truly understand each other in a way that breeds friendship and trust – you must understand the basics of communication: truthfulness, clarity, the exchange of ideas, feedback. Which is what we do, people. We communicate. We help foster communication. We tear down the roadblocks that keep us from communicating.

Rah rah sis boom bah. Communication. Everybody wants some.

2. …unless we don’t.

Except that, you know, no one likes being exactly like everyone else. In other words, to go completely against my first principle, we have to forget everything I just said.

While we all strive to communicate and be part of the world’s conversation, the simple fact is that we’re all individuals. We work in different ways. We want to communicate in our own ways. I probably talk too much about the differences in how people work, specifically the fallacy of following a blueprint without considering the methodology behind it. But I do this because I know firsthand how impossible it is to communicate and work in lock step with someone else. I work differently from you. How can I expect to follow your process word for word?

Our work suffers if we assume one size fits all. Likewise, the people we communicate for suffer. I go into every project understanding that my number one goal is to effectively communicate the benefits and personality of the client, but that this goal is separated into sub-goals – that Goal 1A is to effectively communicate to THIS important group, and Goal 1B is to effectively communicate to THAT important group.

3. Nothing is concrete

The boundaries of what we do shift constantly. The things we hold dear will change. Someday, we’ll look back at our processes and methodologies and client work and laugh and laugh and laugh and that is okay because we will have learned and learned and learned.

And if we haven’t learned, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

How my principles have changed

How haven’t they changed, AMIRITE?

SRSLY, THO: In the few years I’ve been employed by the web, I’ve stopped thinking of others as adversaries.

That means clients. The eternal battle between client and consultant tends to be a vestigial part of any ex-advertiser. We’re groomed to believe in the power of creativity for creativity’s sake, that our client is too dumb to understand our delicate process and that we’re sent from GOD HIMSELF to place a dollop of MIRACLES upon our client’s brand. (Look at any recent Skittles commercial and you’d have a hard time thinking otherwise.)

That means colleagues, too. I’m still amazed at the camaraderie and open-mindedness within the content industry – how, as evidenced in the last issue of Contents, we’re all responsible for furthering our field and passing knowledge to each other, stealing from each other and high-fiving each other and not being territorial because, let’s face it, there’s not a lot of us. And there’s a lot of ground to cover.

We’re all in this together. Kumbaya and all of that.

Where I come from

I am a reformed copywriter, but at heart I’m a planner. One of the first things I learned as a copywriter wasn’t how to write headlines – it was how to develop and write marketing plans for small, local businesses. It was the most valuable thing I learned. I could never write great radio scripts, and my print ads were probably horrible, but I could look at a company, identify its biggest needs, and try to find solutions for those needs.

Writing marketing plans forced me to look at the big picture. It also provided enough detail and experience to make the push from writer to strategist four years later.

I don’t have 10+ years of experience, and I think that’s fantastic. I’m hoping I never lose the excitement for learning more, of being able to apply everyone else’s first principles as my own and, most importantly, of never understanding the One Way To Do Things.

—

(A note on that picture: almost everyone interviewed for the Contents article included an image of their workspace. So I did too. See first principle #1. And, introducing first principle #4 – make sure you hoard lots of books. Apparently.)

But that’s not really what we’re doing, is it? We’re not handing over documents – we’re handing over the keys to a very large vehicle, and our biggest hope is that the people we hand it over to can drive it safely.

Content Strategy Begins at Launch

Content strategy is not about the content as much as it’s about the content-makers, teaching those who will carry the flag long after our leg of the march has passed. As we learned over and over again at last year’s Confab, this is a field of organizational change. The templates and aggregators will stand without us, but the passion will not.

Passion isn’t often passed around in the content strategy circles, but it should be. When we as editors and consultants and architects take on a project, we do so not to construct the project ourselves, but to share our knowledge. We may take the first steps; we write the first about page, or we reword a paragraph, or we suggest a new location for the news feed. But when we’re gone, we’re gone.

It’s this handoff that we plan for. The goal of any content strategy project is to create a better experience for the user. But it is also to instill our clients and companies with the passion and confidence to create their own content.

Client Work, Thy Name is Empathy

It’s important that we learn early on in our careers that the youthful arrogance that comes from being a beginner – the notion that we are now officially a .Net developer or web designer or information architect and we are in a position to inform and advise – is fleeting. Our professional beginnings are spent learning from those above us, meaning we have little with which to define us. We need to find ways to separate ourselves from the common folk. We look down our nose. We assume our clients are dumb.

The faster this goes away, the faster we can start doing the real work: understanding and embracing the needs of our clients and organizations.

In other words, the most important thing we can develop as professionals isn’t a perfect template, or a revolutionary card sort method. Instead, we’re charged to work with empathy, snaking through the objections to present a better environment for organizational change, which in turn will help us create editorial change.

Re-learning to Write

Most people – even those who do it for a living – are very self conscious about their writing and creativity, and this self-consciousness seeps into even the most simple of projects. The people we’re hired to help are no different.

“I’ve never been a good writer, so this probably isn’t that good.”

“Oh, ha ha, well, YOU’RE the expert here, so you’ll come up with something brilliant!”

“Don’t mind the copy – it’s just something I threw together quickly.”

These aren’t problems. These are symptoms. They are cop-outs. Either the wrong person is writing content, or that the right person is writing, but that person has no confidence.

This is when we spring into action.

Writing for the web isn’t creative – it’s a science. It requires practice. It requires time. It could be helped by a degree in English, but it doesn’t necessarily require knowledge of James Joyce. It requires understanding which words are useless, and it requires knowing who your audience is.

What we’re hired to do is consult our clients or companies on not only what should be on the website or in that email, but also to take those decisions on as their own. We’re not here to assume the client is a dummy, but to find the right writers and push that client out of the next. “Fly, friends, fly,” we say. “You can do it on your own.”

It’s the only way. As content strategists, we provide the tools. But can not always be around to remind them how those tools function. That takes organizational change, acceptance and confidence.

Begin the Begin

From the first meeting to the last deliverable, our overall message should be two-fold: “Message matters,” and “You can do it.”

Eventually, every great organization is governed by its people. Let’s never forget that content is the same way.

A little more than three months ago, Erin Kissane approached me about writing for the first issue of a new content publication, Contents Magazine. I said yes. Of course I said yes.

That article went live today.

From “A Content Methodology Primer”:

It’s romantic to think that content work is an art, all brandy, pipes, and wood grain. But it’s not. It’s a process. A messy, sticky, multi-disciplinary process that begs for structure, consistency, and guidance.

That’s a daunting task. Content wants to be messy. It wants to roll around in the mud. It wants to be gross. Our job is to pull it together—to take the guesswork out of creating and curating it—and to treat content work as something closer to a science.

I’ll be honest – the process was completely new to me. Being a self-edited writer for most of my life, I’ve never gone through a true editorial process. It was wonderful – having that guidance and those extra sets of eyes kept me honest and challenged me to write better.

A huge thanks to the team over at Contents for giving me this opportunity, especially Erin and Krista Stevens, who were BEYOND patient in editing an article that threatened to explode into a 7,000-word maze of non sequiturs.

Because, over in a more enlightened part of the internet, something beautiful just launched.

Contents Magazine is a little project from the team of Krista Stevens, Erin Kissane, Erik Westra and Ethan Marcotte. A little project, I say. HA! More like a VERY MAJOR undertaking. It’s the act of taking a scattered industry of content people and giving them a little something special. Something UNIFIED. Publishers rub elbows with information architects and copywriters. The lines that threaten to separate the disciplines are blurred. Erased, even. Discussion begins and – wait for it – continues.

It’s that continuation that makes Contents Magazine so unique. This isn’t a one-and-done blast of an issue – it’s a slow trickle of content, each article telling more of the story, each voice shaping the concept with a different tool. There’s a promise of synthesis: examples, follow-up, comments; the elements that make up the full conversation, curated in a way that will add one last element of texture.

Contents Magazine furthers the promise of community that began at last May’s Confab, and carried over into this summer’s CS Forum in London.

This is a community of insight. We all like to talk. A lot. And we all like to share. A lot. That’s what happens when you combine word and data nerds and ask them to organize. As the world of content shifts and splits, we wander to the edge and create a bridge to the other side. Then, we celebrate with a glass of bourbon. Spreadsheets, too. Lots of bourbon and spreadsheets.

All of us content strategists and editors and publishers and information architects, we’ve got the passion. We’ve got the voices. We’ve got the drive to push things forward.

Now we’ve got the forum. And what a beautiful little forum it’s turned out to be.

Congrats, Contents Magazine team. We all look forward to being a part of this.

An Onion article to this effect, “Man Cruises By William H. Macy’s Website To Check Out The Latest News,” threw this into focus for Blend Interactive’s Deane Barker, and so he decided to put together a presentation for the Sioux Falls Content Strategy Group to talk about what, if any, purpose the news feed has in today’s content strategy landscape.

It was a good talk, and I didn’t want the 85-slide deck to go to waste, so here it is:

And beer.

See you there?