Introduction
A unified content strategy is about much more than just content. It’s about how you create content once and how you publish many times from that content. It’s about pulling together the best practices, guidelines, and content structure your organization needs to enable you to rapidly design, build, test, and deliver a customer-centric content experience across many channels.
It’s about looking back at what worked and looking forward to what can work even better. It’s about using all the resources you have in your organization: your people and teams, your departments, your technology, your vendors, your assets, your customers, and the content you have already created and will be creating.
A unified content strategy places the emphasis on “unity”—people and technology coming together to produce content that serves the needs of everyone who reads and uses that content.
Is this an easy task? No. But it’s a necessary one as organizations battle it out in competitive markets for the attention of their most precious resource—their customers!
In this book, we will explore all the aspects of creating a unified content strategy. We’ll show you the pitfalls to avoid, and we’ll explain what you can do and how you can do it to create a unified content strategy that serves your organization’s needs now and well into the future.
Who should read this book?
This book was written with a number of audiences in mind. It is designed to assist content managers who are responsible for creating and managing content in many different channels for many types of customers. Content managers will learn what they need to know about what is involved in developing what we call a unified content strategy.
This book is also designed for content strategists who are responsible for designing an effective content strategy not for just one channel, but for multiple channels. Content strategists will receive practical advice on analyzing the requirements for and developing a unified content strategy.
This book is also designed for authors, specifically anyone responsible for creating structured, modular content for multichannel products. Authors will receive practical advice on structured writing, writing for multiple channels, and collaborative authoring.
How this book is organized
This book is divided into five sections. Each section focuses on a particular aspect of creating a unified content strategy and how that serves to help you manage your content. You do not have to read this book in chronological order, but it is designed to lead you through the logical stages of implementing a unified content strategy.
Part 1: “The basis of a unified content strategy” (Chapters 1–2)
This section provides an understanding of what makes up a unified content strategy, and why it’s such an important foundation for getting content out to the right customer at the right time and in the right format. We also explain the concept of a sustainable and intelligent content strategy—one that will deliver maximum benefit to the users of content while minimizing the cost to the organization.
Part 2: “Where does a unified content strategy fit?” (Chapters 3–6)
In this section, we discuss the implications of what content means for organizations today. We explore the issues of content as a strategic asset, how content can be delivered to customers through multichannel delivery mechanisms, and what content strategists must think about as they prepare for that multichannel delivery. We also talk about the concept of content reuse and how organizations can reuse content to their advantage.
Part 3: “Performing a substantive audit: Determining business requirements” (Chapters 7–11)
Customers are the reason for your business’s existence, your products and services, and your content. In this section, we explain how you can understand your customers’ needs and your organization’s needs for unified content. We show you a discovery process we call the substantive audit, which allows you to figure out what processes you are using to produce your content and how you can unify those processes. We’ll discuss ways to identify the dangers and the opportunities available to your organization as you begin the process of creating a unified content strategy. We’ll show you how to perform a content audit that gets to the heart of the issue—your content and how it suits your audiences. And then we’ll help you pull together the big picture as you visualize your unified content strategy and the content lifecycle that is part and parcel of it.
Part 4: “Developing a unified content strategy” (Chapters 12–17)
At the heart of a unified content strategy is the methodology involved in creating models for your content, determining how you want to reuse content, defining how people produce content, and managing all the change that has to take place in your organization to make your content strategy effective. We’ll show you what content modeling actually is, and we’ll show you what the different types of content reuse are. We’ll discuss how you pull together all the tasks and processes that are required for implementing a successful content strategy through workflow. We’ll tell you about the information (the metadata) that you’ll need to track your content. Then we’ll focus on creating the content—why you need to separate format from content and how you can create structured writing guidelines that will help you in setting up collaborative authoring.
Part 5: “Supporting your unified content strategy” (Chapters 18–20)
A unified content strategy depends on the people, and the roles they fill, to support it. We’ll discuss the type of roles you’ll need—and you’ll probably find some new roles that you’ll need to introduce to your organization. Along with people, technology also needs to support your unified content strategy, so we’ll discuss XML, the underlying technology that makes modern content management systems possible. At the end, we’ll wrap up with a discussion about how you can integrate content management into your environment, what types of authoring tools are available, workflow systems you can set up, and delivery mechanisms you can choose.
At what level is this book written?
This book is written with the assumption that readers have some exposure to the concepts of content strategy, but that most readers do not understand the concepts of a unified content strategy and what has to be done to implement one. It is designed to ensure that all the concepts are clear no matter what your existing knowledge level is.
What you should take away
This book will assist you in creating, implementing, and managing your unified content strategy. It will help you define your requirements and build your vision, design your content strategy, understand the tools, and overcome the hurdles of creating and managing content in a multichannel world. We hope that it will help you see the broad spectrum of a unified content strategy and how you can escape the tyranny of format.