Quick Content Strategy Takeaways from Last Month's Q&A with Kristina Halvorson

Last month Kristina Halvorson -- one of the first people who really brought attention to and defined content strategy for the masses -- took thoughtful questions from the Chicago Content Strategy Meetup group, and I passed along notes applicable to my association coworkers. Thought I'd share here too.

Q. I work in a silo-ed organization that’s dept.-focused. What should I be doing when my hands are tied most of the time?

•  Establish who owns what content on the website and who’s accountable for it.
• Communication – that will be main task to keep going and stay in on what’s coming down the line.
• Audit the content for the groups regularly
• Ask “What is the key objective of this page” or “this piece of content” each time – and push people to answers beyond describing an emotional response, e.g. “They will recognize us as a resource.”

 Q. What can I do when the content creators I work for live and die by PDFs?

 Make sure they are tagged, summarized, and curated and have the right meta data associated with them for your system. That said, “I [Halvorson] can’t think of a search result that gave me the top resource – a PDF – as one of first results.”

Q. How do I sell importance of content to C-suite, particularly in arguments for resources?

• Recognize they don’t care about content’s importance and won’t understand it.
• Base your arguments and sell to 1) what makes them tick/keeps them up at night and 2) what will make them look good.
• Find champions of content who can talk to them and sell to them in their language.

 Q. There is an abundance of tools and even CMSes applicable to content strategy. How do we know which to use?

n  Pick your content strategy and THEN choose the CMS or the tool – not the other way around. Don’t base your content strategy on your CMS.

Q. What trends are you and Brain Traffic [Halvorson’s content strategy agency] noticing?

• Among potential clients, clients, and non-content-based audiences she speaks to: people still learning about content strategy and then asking, “Where do I start?” (But it’s a hot topic.)
• Among designers and developers she talks to: the responsive design trend and people forgetting about the content behind it.
• Among content strategists: questions about organizational challenges and how to tackle them; understanding their business and how content strategy fits in.

 Q. I’m not a developer but we’re being asked to know code on top of everything else we need to know. What am I supposed to focus on?

Response from a developer at Leo Burnett:

• “Know just enough to be dangerous.”
• Know when just enough to identify when content has to get involved or when you should get a developer involved.

 Good resources she noted:

n  Contents online magazine

n  A soon-to-be-published book by Karen McGrath. I think she said the title will be “Content Strategy for Mobile.”

n  @halvorson

And my “wow” moment: Brain Traffic trimmed its site down to one page and increased inquiry volume 70% (I think that’s what she said) literally overnight. Obviously not all organizations -- particularly associations -- can or should do that, but I think it’s just a really cool illustration of paring information down to the most basic levels and having it become more effective.