Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Rachel Lovinger

Rachel Lovinger — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 15:11:43 GMT

Thanks for all the interesting and thought provoking comments.

I definitely agree with Andrew, and I hope this came across in the article, that there’s a strong connection between IA and CS. I think that, regardless of job title, the role of thinking about content strategy can be taken on by many different people on a project, and often it will be IAs who do this. While I have worked with some IAs who don’t seem to be willing or able to really consider the deeper implications of the content on a site, more often my experience is that IAs are very aware of and concerned about content, but the constraints on their time mean that there’s a limit to how deeply they can afford to delve into it. For the development of content rich sites, it can be very helpful to have one person who focuses primarily on content issues (including scope, tone & voice, taxonomy, etc.) and makes content-specific recommendations, as part of the complete user experience picture.

Richard, my comment about content relationships probably needs to be explained a little more clearly. I meant this in a much broader sense than a list of related articles at the end of a piece of content. The fact that the user found an article in the first place is probably because, through some combination of the content, metadata and business rules about relevance, the search application determined that the article is related to the term that the user typed into the search box. Search is becoming so sophisticated that usually we don’t even notice the fine distinctions that a system has made in determining relevance. Additional contextual services embedded on the page (weather info, tickets sales, news feeds, stock quotes, etc) are also based on having some relationship to the content itself. Maybe a person hand selected each service, but increasingly these services are driven by metadata relationships captured with the content.

What I mean is, in a broad sense, content search and discovery (as you say “accurate and clear selection”) is often dependent on the relationships that are expressed within the content, its structure and its metadata.

Rachel Lovinger — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 15:18:58 GMT

Ray, I love your description of the hand in glove approach. I’m definitely going to use that! Your point about IAs (and Content Strategists) coming from all different backgrounds is a good one. This is why there can easily be overlap between the responsibilities of people with the title Information Architect and people with the title Content Strategist. For the most part, we’re all working to solve the same problems.

Rachel Lovinger — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 23:48:44 GMT

In response to the question about why I would take such an expansive view of content – it’s mostly just to gain the benefit of another perspective. Do I really think design elements should fall under in the domain of content strategy? Definitely not. But I do find that a lot of times content is addressed as an afterthought, and I’m wondering what happens if we flip that around? This sort of approach may not necessarily result in a change in roles & responsibilities, or even processes, but maybe it will inspire some individuals to think about some different aspects of the user experience then they might normally consider.

Rachel Lovinger — Mon, 12 May 2008 03:32:50 GMT

Ah, just stumbled across this thread. I’ve been thinking recently about doing a follow-up that’s something along these lines, so I’d be interested in hearing about the status of this article idea – are you working on it Theresa?

The particular focus I was thinking about leans more towards the first few questions you posed: “What does this title mean? Where did it come from? What do I need to know to be one?” plus the perspective of “What are those people looking for Content Strategists really looking for? And when they do end up hiring people, what kind of backgrounds do those people have?” This is, I guess the job trend angle that Elizabeth mentions above.

I wasn’t planning to cover things like how the role helps meet user needs and business goals, because I did cover that to some degree in the first article. These topics may, of course, warrant further analysis, but in that case I think they deserve to be covered in their own article, that can go deeper into the specifics.

A little background on why I think an article like this could be of interest – while it’s true that more and more job listings for Content Strategists are popping up, I also believe that a lot of people don’t quite know what it is that they’re looking for. This is partly because there’s not a clear, shared definition of what content strategy is. But also, there’s no single track or background that makes someone qualified to be a content strategist. I imagine that there are people out there who may be prime candidates for a specialization in content strategy and just don’t know it yet.

So, my goal was to write something that would be helpful to both the people who may be considering going down that path, and also to the people who are looking to hire someone into that sort of role, but aren’t sure how to go about it. I still think an article like this is needed, and if no one else is pursuing it right now, I’d love to claim the topic.