To architect your content strategy is to design an information space – typically an internal website – where your team keeps the elements of its content strategy. Examples include: Message architecture Note: I use “architect” as a verb to describe a specialized activity – designing an information space – since information architects often use the term this way and since I lack a better word. ‘Here’s our 70-page content strategy. Which comes first: your website architecture or the content strategy documentation that will fill your site? Often, as one attendee of Denise’s session noted, “It’s a chicken-and-egg thing.” What matters, just as with a customer-facing website, is that both the architecture and the content of your internal website serve the needs of your audience – your content creators and anyone else with a stake in your content strategy. In other words, as you design your internal website, plan for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content about the content strategy itself. An example Denise gave an example from her job as information architect and manager of a content team with Blackbaud Inc., where she’s part of its user-education team within research and development. About five years ago, her team convinced several other content teams that it should curate all client-facing content related to the software because (a) her team’s writers were more familiar with the products than the other content teams and (b) people in several other teams – marketing, training, product support, and product services – were copying and pasting her team’s Help content into other deliverables, using inefficient processes to do so. “We have a lot of information in our content strategy.” Today, Blackbaud content creators use an internal WordPress site to communicate and maintain the elements of their content strategy. When you need to create a new topic, you can see how to do it.” Does your company have a resource center like this – an internal website that enables content creators and other stakeholders to align their efforts with your content strategy?
The first thing that struck me about Denise Kadilak’s talk at Content Marketing World was the title: How to Document and Architect Your Content Strategy. We hear over and over that a content strategy must be documented … but architected? What does it mean to architect a content strategy? Why and how do we do that?
What does it mean to architect your content strategy?
To architect something is to design a space for it. To architect your content strategy is to design an information space – typically an internal website – where your team keeps the elements of its content strategy. Examples include:
Note: I use “architect” as a verb to describe a specialized activity – designing an information space – since information architects often use the term this way and since I lack a better word.
Whatever your role – an information architect, a user-experience practitioner, a content strategist, a writer, or a hybrid of the above – if you’re part of the team that’s architecting a content strategy, consider designing a space for everything related to planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content. (This bolded phrase is Kristina Halvorson’s frequently quoted definition of content strategy).
Why architect your content strategy?
Why isn’t documenting your content strategy enough? Why do you need to architect it, too? Because content strategy comprises many parts. The more mature your content team, the more strategy-related information you have and the more architecting you need to do to make all that information usable.
Your content strategy documentation must be detailed, accessible, and easy to use, understand, and update. For it to be all those things, you need architecture, Denise says, especially as your strategy grows to include more and more elements.
A giant Word doc – or pile of Word docs – doesn’t cut it.
Word is the way almost everybody goes. ‘Here’s our 70-page content strategy. We’ve put it in a binder, and we’ve got copies of it all around the office.’ Don’t do that.
Imagine yourself starting a new job creating content for your organization. Before you can write one effective word or sketch one effective image, you need answers to lots of questions:
- Who’s going to read this?
- What do those people care about?
- Why are we creating this content?
- What voice do I use?
- Where do I go with style questions?
- What key terms do I use (and what terms do I avoid)?
- Where do I find examples of similar content to emulate?
And on and on.
Would you want your new boss to give you The Big Fat Content Strategy Binder (or its electronic equivalent)? Or would you rather be pointed to a thoughtfully architected internal website?
How do you architect your content strategy?
Which comes first: your website architecture or the content strategy documentation that will fill your site? Maybe you’ll design the site’s architecture first and document your strategy to fit. Maybe you’ll document your content strategy first and design the site architecture accordingly. Or maybe your process won’t be linear. Often, as one attendee of Denise’s session noted, “It’s a chicken-and-egg thing.”
What matters, just as with a customer-facing website, is that both the architecture and the content of…
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