No matter your expertise, there’s no mistaking: we need more intelligence devoted to content strategy. Here are 25 ideas for content strategy blog posts you should think about writing. How about tackling one this week?

If you do, feel free to link back to this post so your readers can get inspired too. In that respect, props to Chris Brogan and his post, 50 Blog Posts Marketers Could Write for their Companies, for inspiring this post.

Which post are you going to write?

For the content strategy newbie:

• How did you first hear about content strategy? What piqued your interest that first time?
• What are the top 3 benefits of a content strategy program, in your opinion. Or what 3 ways will it change the way you work day to day?
• How are you educating yourself about content strategy? What blogs or books are you using?
• How does your previous (or current) job prepare you for future content strategy work?
• Some say that content strategy practitioners are to copywriting as information architects are to design. Have you found this to be the case in your position?
• How do you explain content strategy to your closest co-workers? What metaphor aptly describes content strategy in your office?
• From where do you draw your daily inspiration? This could be a person, place, experience, book, or feeling.
• What do you most enjoy about content strategy? What makes you the happiest in your job?

For the content strategy journeyman:

• What has been your most successful content strategy effort? What one thing helped it work?
• How do you explain what you do to your grandparents?
• What personality traits have you found serve you well? Which ones trip you up?
• What’s the biggest hole in your industry that content strategy can help fill? How is your industry in particular reacting to content strategy?
• In the latest action movie you’ve seen, which character would have been most like a content strategist? Why? Is the content strategist the hero?
• Having had some experience in the practice, what are you most looking forward to in the next year in content strategy? Where are the biggest opportunities?
• How have you gotten involved in the content strategy community? Have you joined a Google group? Your local CS meet-up?
• What’s been the biggest internal dispute you’ve had this year regarding content strategy? How about with your client?

For expert content strategists:

• What are you doing to promote content strategy in your organization? How are you a content strategy ambassador?
• How has your agency or business implemented content strategy in the last year? What was the impetus?
• How did your college degree prepare you for your content strategy job, especially since it’s highly likely you did not major in content strategy? What path would you recommend to future strategists?
• What are some new opportunities you see in the field this year? What stands out to make an impact in the next quarter?
• Failure can often provide priceless insight. What have you learned from recent failures?
• What’s the first thing you do in the morning to prepare for your work each day? How does it help your content strategy work?
• What processes have you set up in your agency or business to improve your content strategy? What’s been your biggest hold-up?
• How have you customized your offerings to match your client’s needs? Did it make the end strategy result better or worse?
• What leadership are you showing outside of your own organization? How are you expanding your influence for the betterment of content strategy?

Which topic will you take on? Please leave a comment on this post if you answer these, so the rest of the community can read your answer.

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It’s OK. We’ve got you covered.

The video below tells you everything you want to know about content strategy, but didn’t know you needed to ask. It’s only 3 minutes long. And it uses Post-It notes. Quick and easy.

Check it out below or on the OnlineMarketerBlog YouTube channel. I hope it’s helpful – I’d love to hear your comments!

Don’t forget to stay subscribed to videos via iTunes. Thanks!

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Yesterday, I was in a tough meeting. We knew there was a problem. But we couldn’t figure out the answer. (Sound familiar?)

We talked about capabilities, functionality, and process. Nothing was clicking.

Taking a recommendation from Switch, I asked a simple question that (for me) turned around the meeting:

If this problem was solved right now, can you describe what it would look like?

Immediately, the conversation changed. Once the goal was identified, all we needed to do was come up with a plan to get there. As strategists, this is our golden zone!

It wasn’t until this morning that I realized why this was so important, especially in a creative agency.

Scott McCloud explains the six steps in the creative process in his (awesome) book Understanding Comics. The six steps are:

1. Idea/Purpose
2. Form
3. Idiom
4. Structure
5. Craft
6. Surface

For more details, just buy the book (you should – there’s a ton of great theory in there). But creation process aside, just look at those words.

Remind you of an agency at all?

Account folks give form to our projects. Developers build the structures that hold our creations. Designers use their craft to create beautiful surfaces. (I’m taking some liberties with McCloud’s list, but you get my drift.)

So where do content strategists appear?

We touch all points in the creation process, but our main impact is felt at the beginning of this process – shaping ideas from insights and determining how to satisfy users as well as the business objectives.

We all get stuck seeing only the trees instead of the forest from time to time. But strategists are required to see above the treeline and point the way toward the goal.

Asking someone to describe what a solution looks like in effect takes them from ground level where they worry about their position, their budget, their resources, their deadlines…and transports them to the end goal. Whew!

Once we imagine ourselves at the goal, it’s much easier to turn around and figure out how we got there. There’s less clutter. Less in-fighting. More solutions.

As the idea people – designers of the core content experience – it’s incumbent upon us to guide the idea-creation process. And sometimes to take that first step, we need to just imagine being at the last step and then figure out how we got there.

What do you think?

Have you found that asking your teammates to describe success has helped guide your strategy? What hiccups have you faced along the way?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

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Image courtesy of Ha-Wee via Flickr

Image compliments of Scott McCloud

Inspiration often comes from strange places.

In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, author Scott McCloud examines how we receive different types of information and that process relates directly to design, information architecture, copywriting and content strategy.

“Pictures are received information. We need no formal education to ‘get the message.’ The message is instantaneous.

Writing is perceived information. It takes time and specialized knowledge to decode the abstract symbols of language.” (page 49)

Anyone who’s ever sat through a client review will understand this. It’s not that images or art are less important; in fact, it’s the art that usually solicits “ohhs” and “ahhs” from the clients, right?

McCloud is speaking more about our intrinsic speed of understanding. We get a feeling from a picture right away.

But we need to process words – to piece together abstract ideas. With words, it’s incumbent that we create the images ourselves, in our own consciousness; we ponder meaning, ideas and symbols. Anyone who has read Roland Barthes’ Mythologies knows that this process ain’t easy.

What’s This Got To Do With Agency Life?

Comics and literary theory? Why should marketers care?

In the same way that images are understood before words in the human brain, so too has the planning and creative process developed in marketing agencies. The halcyon days of 1997 were critical for information architecture. IAs became a staple of the creative agency, a bridge between the client’s objectives and the designer’s creative vision.

The same thing didn’t happen for words. It was easy to understand why you’d want to plot out images. But it took another decade for us to plot out what was written on the page and why. (True, maybe astute IAs and copywriters filled this role until content strategy bloomed in recent years.)

So what’s changed? Well, SEO (based on keyWORDS) has blossomed into the main way we find content online. Search engines are ever more refining the way they surface the most relevant content. Our tastes have matured: the internet is no longer the shiny new object – it helps us complete tasks in everyday life. We now use many, many channels to access information and communicate with brands. Findable, useful, contextual, and consistent across channels…online content is more important to our lives than ever before!

It then makes sense that content strategy – a plan for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable, relevant content – would guide many important choices we make as digital marketers.

What Good Is Content Strategy If People Don’t Read?

I can already hear the Nielsen-ites protesting that readers don’t actually read online. So why should anyone care about content strategy?

This assumes that all content is created equal which we know just isn’t the case. Personally, I skim news articles, sure. But if I’m making a purchase, you can be damned sure I’m going to read everything, including the fine print. The quality and importance of the content is in direct relation to how much time we spend absorbing it.

As more and more transactions occur online, it makes sense that content becomes more and more important. After all, we’re not marketing random blog posts; we’re marketing watches and cars and insurance – things people want to read about.

And even Nielsen admits that more content is needed if you’re trying to solve a user’s problem.

“If you want people who really need a solution, focus on comprehensive coverage…But the very best content strategy is one that mirrors the users’ mixed diet. [his emphasis]“

Your potential customers will engage with you, if you provide something useful and usable. It’s a shame that is still so rare.

What Took So Long?

Words aren’t easy. It takes a long time to create them and often even longer to process their meaning. Content is both a science and an art.

But it’s not going away. Your customers want information…they’re dying for it. But not marketing messages you want to push on them.

Consider your audience. Serve up the content they need. Help them complete a task. Your customers will entrust their time to you if you provide quality content to help them do what they want.

Remind me again why it took so long for content strategy to mature?

(Originally published at Experience Matters – my employer’s blog. Thanks!)

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I’m trying to convince non-creative folks about the value of content strategy. I need facts and figures. Bonus points for graphs.

All I need to prove is that the stuff on your website is valuable to visitors. That content matters.

But there is a serious lack of empirical research to prove this. Why aren’t there studies done on the value of content strategy? Is the topic too broad? Is it just common sense?

Proving Our Value

As content strategists, we should be able to appeal to emotion, common sense, and hard logic to convince skeptics of our value.

Emotion I can do. We’re solving user’s problems and creating a great experience. Common sense is a little fuzzier, but it still works – after all, why wouldn’t the content on your site be valuable?

But hard logic – numbers and graphs – I’m having a tough time here.

Melissa Rach from Brain Traffic gets the award for closest to the mark, but even this is too convoluted for an internal or client presentation.

Content Strategy, Not Social Media

I can show you a dozen studies – Forrester, eMarketer, MarketingSherpa – that prove social media’s worth. The ROI of social media topic is so 2008.

But broader content – not just on a Twitter feed or blog, but incorporating all website text, metadata, videos, etc. – finding hard evidence for that is proving impossible.

Please Prove Me Wrong

I’ve searched on paid and unpaid professional research sites. I have worked the limits of my Google powers. But maybe you can help.

As a content strategist, how do you prove your value, in real, empirical numbers? What studies do you use? What have I missed?

I cannot honestly believe there has not been a study of this information (and if so, what a huge oversight!). Content strategists are in a battle to prove their relevance. We’ll need research, studies, ROI figures, etc to do this.

I would love to hear what studies you’ve seen or learn how you are coping with this challenge.

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(Image courtesy of chrisbb@prodigy.net via Flickr)