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What is it?

A set of guidelines and standards covering areas such as vocabulary, editing, tone, and voice. May extend to structural aspects of content.

Why is it important?

Assists with consistency across a body of content and reinforces best practices, ultimately supporting business goals.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

A style guide defines grammar, spelling, and usage topics unique to your organization, such as product name capitalization, as well as style issues that reflect the branding or image of a company. Is the language of your content formal or casual? How do you address your audience? The style guide establishes a voice and tone that enable writers and editors to create consistent content across deliverables.

Consistency of language makes it easier for multiple writers to create a single, cohesive message and gives editors a baseline from which to work. Compliance with a style guide can help improve comprehension across a multinational audience and reduce translation costs. By standardizing phrases and choosing one word for each meaning (do you press, touch, or click a button?), you reduce the number of words that need to be translated.

A style guide may also include a breakdown of guidelines for content based on delivery mechanism. For example, it may specifically prohibit abbreviations like U for “you” and R for “are” on popular microblogging sites such as Twitter or specify the type of content that should or shouldn’t be shared on social media like Facebook or LinkedIn forums.

A good corporate style guide references (but does not duplicate or replace) published style guides. If you duplicate content found elsewhere, your style guide will quickly become bulky, complex, and difficult to enforce. Aim for the minimum amount of guidance that will enable the tone and voice your organization wants to project.

About Brenda Huettner

Photo of Brenda Huettner

Brenda Huettner is a technical communication consultant, a Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication, a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and principal of Microwaves101.com, an online encyclopedia of microwave engineering. Brenda writes about communication and technology and publishes books through her own imprint, Prince of the Road Press.

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Email: mailto:bphuettner@p-ndesigns.com

Website: p-ndesigns.com

Twitter: @bphuettner

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/pub/brenda-huettner/0/584/924

Facebook: facebook.com/bphuettner

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What is it?

A simplified representation of a web page or an application screen that illustrates and describes its proposed information and structure, as well as its functional behaviors.

Why is it important?

Creates visual clarity and direction for website or application content by allowing for a rapid exploration and refinement of its functionality, behaviors, and relative properties.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Wireframes are variable and flexible diagrams, both in their format and purpose. Typically prepared in grayscale with minimal styling (graphical or typographical), wireframes are a rapid and relatively inexpensive tool for representing screens, or portions of them, to other core members of the project team.

Their simplified appearance is precisely what helps steer any discussion closer towards how a screen will behave and what kinds of information will be displayed, rather than what the page or screen will look like. This lack of visual realism isn’t always seen as a good thing. Wireframes—often flat, nonfunctional vector-based drawings—don’t always effectively demonstrate dynamic client-side screen interactions.

There is an ongoing debate about the merits of displaying real content, as opposed to placeholder content. Some argue that, in much the same way that injecting enhanced visual elements onto a wireframe that make a screen seem closer to the final design can shift focus away from its functionality and behavior, incorporating content elements on wireframes that aren’t really in question can have a similarly adverse affect.

The answer most likely lies somewhere in between, where structural and instructional content integral to a screen’s core functionality and behavior is a must, but, say, mocking up a lengthy article to demonstrate a screen’s flexibility may risk undermining its true purpose. However wireframes are presented, they are ultimately about clearly communicating the different information elements and their relative properties, as well as the range of behaviors available to users.

About Richard Ingram

Photo of Richard Ingram

Richard Ingram is a writer, information designer, and content strategy advocate hailing from the sleepy English seaside town of Hastings. He is one of a triumvirate of brothers at accessible web design company Ingserv, co-founder of Kinship, and co-organizer of the London Content Strategy Meetup.

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Email: mailto:ringram@ingserv.com

Website: richardingram.co.uk

Twitter: @richardjingram

LinkedIn: uk.linkedin.com/pub/richard-ingram/20/31b/1a9/

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What is it?

The art and science of structuring information (knowledge) to support findability and usability.

Why is it important?

Allows for intuitive navigation and quick access to relevant content, supports interaction with content (usability), and makes the body of content both maintainable and extensible.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Information Architecture (IA) is both a process and a product. The process involves analyzing a body of content—a domain—to understand its components, the relationships among them, and their behavior; identifying the organizing principles; and designing a conceptual model that captures the underlying structure. The product is the conceptual model.

A typical IA model will feature one or more hierarchical structures (shown diagrammatically as inverted trees, with leaves at the bottom) with a secondary network structure. Hierarchies arise from the nesting of categories and sub-categories. In the digital world, a single piece of information (a leaf on the tree) can be part of more than one hierarchy, using a faceted categorization scheme. Relationships between components within or across hierarchies are allowed. This cross-linking (via hyperlinks) results in a secondary network structure.

Good IA results in a body of content that is:

  • Easy to navigate and search: A conceptual model that matches your users’ existing mental models allows them to navigate intuitively using recognition memory. Search results show more helpful context.

  • Usable: Standard conventions for search allow your users to draw on existing knowledge to complete tasks. Structured presentation of dynamic content enhances usability.

  • Maintainable: A defined structure ensures new instances of existing types of content—for example, meeting minutes—have a designated place.

  • Extensible: A growth plan ensures that your IA structure can be enhanced without massive re-organization.

In addition, clear IA informs the graphical design process, contributing to a coherent look and feel across the content domain.

About Claudia Wunder

Photo of Claudia Wunder

Claudia Wunder is a veteran of several Olympic Games, including Beijing, Vancouver, and London. As business analyst and interfaces manager, she defined the business rules for the Olympic Data Feed, a semantically rich XML feed that distributes sport results to broadcasters, print press, and websites around the world.

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Email: mailto:claudiaf@telus.net

Website:

LinkedIn: ca.linkedin.com/pub/claudiawunder

Facebook: facebook.com/claudia.wunder.90

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What is it?

A representation of the copy required at each stage of the transaction flow.

Why is it important?

Ensures that a content strategy accounts for all content that supports brand messaging. It includes error messages, feedback, and embedded assistance.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

A transactional content map ensures that copy displayed to users of an application, whether in an interface, an error, or a feedback message, is on-brand, produced in a streamlined way, and contributes to a positive user experience. The map captures details that might be missed or hidden from non-developers and interaction designers—especially in lean and agile teams. Different versions of the copy can be included, based on target devices or localization.

Capturing these details facilitates governance, the creation of a workflow for transactional content, and the interaction design process. Multi-disciplinary teams of writers, designers, and programmers can create a high-quality experience with on-brand content because they can see all the content needs in one place. The copy can be imported into a code base, speeding up development and ensuring that high-quality content gets into the code. The import process is another opportunity to discover if there are messages or copy in the code that are missing in the map and vice versa.

The map can be used by interaction designers to ensure that appropriate copy and messaging are displayed for each scenario. The map contains rules and logic for displaying content that can be difficult or impossible to track on annotated wireframes or specification documents and can serve as the authoritative source for the app’s transactional content and metadata. Content changes, improvements, and redesigns are easily tracked in the map. A transactional content map is also a great tool for planning and budgeting translation/localization services and accessibility.

About Linda Francis

Photo of Linda Francis

Linda Francis has been helping people understand their needs, and their customers’ needs and aspirations, for a long time. She has a reputation for comprehensive designs and strategies that reflect her empathy for people and awareness of the disciplines and functional areas that are woven into a person’s experience.

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Email: mailto:Linda@360c.co

Website: 360c.co

Twitter: @LindaFandango

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lindalfrancis

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What is it?

A schedule for the publishing of content over a given time period, often annually or during a given campaign period.

Why is it important?

Ensures that important publishing milestones are recognized and activities planned so that content publishing remains manageable.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

An editorial calendar is used to ensure consistent content publishing over a set time period. It helps you plan for content creation; establish priorities for when, where, and what content will be published across your given platforms; and discover any holes in your plan. It establishes guidelines to spread your content out and not overwhelm your audience with too much too fast or too little too late, while maintaining a consistent voice.

With an editorial calendar, “Monday Madness” can be a planned recap of all the weekend’s events, instead of a rush to figure out what to post before lunch. The solution to many common content strategy problems—lack of content, poor content quality, lack of consistency—is to plan ahead with an editorial calendar. A solid base of scheduled content allows you to supplement your publishing with reactive, timely content for your audience. Your calendar also helps you track audience habits. Learning from your audience lets you adjust your publishing practices and increase overall engagement.

An editorial calendar should suit your organization’s needs and be as detailed or as loose as required. Some calendars need to be followed to the last detail; others can simply be a guide to maintain a consistent content flow. Whether planning for a long-term marketing campaign or outlining a blog, an editorial calendar is an important piece of an overall content strategy and an important step on the way to achieving business objectives.

About Mat Szwajkos

Photo of Mat Szwajkos

Mat Szwajkos is the creative director at Swig Social. He has established Swig’s core offerings and best practices for real-time content creation for Fortune 10 companies and start-ups alike. He’s a forward thinker looking to create and discover what comes next in brand storytelling.

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Email: mailto:mat@swigsocial.com

Website: swigsocial.com

Twitter: @szwajkos

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/pub/mat-szwajkos/20/3/428/

Facebook: facebook.com/matszwajkos

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What is it?

An engaging, graphical way to present data, often with the intent to tell a persuasive visual story. May also be referred to as data visualization or information graphics.

Why is it important?

Allows the communication of complex ideas faster and in a more compelling way, which can help others perceive content strategists as visionaries, not just analysts.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

It’s not just clients who are compelled by visuals. Visuals grab everyone’s attention in meaningful, memorable ways, whether we’re trying to influence project managers or chief marketing officers. Many of us, though, crunch our data, analyze it, and think silently, “Wow! A whole bunch of this stuff is a big hot mess.” Then we hand our clients a thorough, polite content matrix and audit report and hope they’ll read between the lines. Instead, we should boldly punctuate our findings with information visuals, even internally in our own companies or agencies.

Those visuals should persuade our audiences to listen to our opinions instead of dispassionately displaying facts and figures. As content strategists, we’re usually not selecting color themes or stock photography; we’re delivering tough news that people may not be ready to hear. But make no mistake, we have exactly what our clients and coworkers need to hear, and the time to listen is now.

Information visualization can help us express our recommendations in a captivating, compelling way. We already have the data information visualization is the tool to help us transform that data into insight.

About Tosca Fasso

Photo of Tosca Fasso

Tosca Fasso has worked with clients like Nike Women and Intel to put the right content in front of the right audience at the right time. She’s particularly passionate about infographics, storytelling, and the magic of metadata. Tosca also managed an international style blog and has the shoes to prove it.

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Email: mailto:tosca@subtxt.us

Website: subtxt.us

Twitter: @toscafasso

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/toscamarie/

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What is it?

A hierarchy of communication goals that reflect a shared vocabulary.

Why is it important?

A strategic foundation and yardstick against which to measure existing content, determine quality, and prioritize content types, budget, and new content investments.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

A message architecture has an impact beyond editorial engagement:

  • Planning for creation

  • Assigning responsibilities

  • Establishing guidelines

  • Assessing quality

  • Auditing for redundancy

  • Scheduling archiving

For these activities, you need to grasp the purpose of your content. Should it inform? Entertain? Resolve a problem? Should it represent an authoritative brand or say the brand is approachable? Content articulates those differences with guidance from the message architecture.

Consider a stately financial institution that develops thought leadership through dense white papers with charts detailing ongoing research. Deft jargon conveys industry fluency while creating a distance between the organization and clients. They don’t serve everyone, and their clients pay a premium. Here’s their message architecture:

  • Respected

    • Relevant

    • Trusted

  • Deep but narrow expertise

    • Focused on large-cap funds

    • Premium

  • Serving an exclusive class of investors

You can employ this message architecture throughout an editorial and structural engagement. Use it as a yardstick to conduct a qualitative analysis: does instructional copy communicate these points or just meet functional goals? With a content audit, use the message architecture in a gap analysis: where is it weak? Perhaps the institution communicates expertise, but misses the premium nature of the brand. As you establish style guidelines, consider how content communicates these themes. As you structure repeated content types, look to the message architecture to determine ancillary elements to communicate the brand. But the first step is your message architecture.

About Margot Bloomstein

Photo of Margot Bloomstein

Margot Bloomstein is the author of Content Strategy at Work (Morgan Kaufmann, 2012) and principal of Appropriate, Inc., a brand and content strategy consultancy. A participant in the inaugural Content Strategy Consortium and featured speaker at South by Southwest, Margot speaks about enriching interactive engagements with content strategy.

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Email: mailto:margot@appropriateinc.com

Website: appropriateinc.com

Twitter: @mbloomstein

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mbloomstein

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What is it?

An enhanced view of a real-world environment, using technology to supplement a normal view with additional content that enhances the experience.

Why is it important?

Augmented reality (AR) is growing rapidly and is used in many fields, including publishing, translation, and education. Content strategy for augmented reality is critical for displaying the right content in the right place at the right time.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Augmented reality (AR) is becoming a common delivery mechanism for content. AR displays information about the environment as an overlay to an ordinary experience. Reality can be augmented on a variety of devices, including computers, eyeglasses such as Google Glass, and handheld devices such as mobile phones and tablets. Examples of AR apps for mobile devices include Blippar, Wikitude, and Layar.

Augmented reality is growing rapidly. In 2014, over 864 million cell phones will be AR enabled. By 2020, 103 million automobiles will contain AR technology. By the end of 2016, AR is expected to bring in as much as $600 billion USD in revenue. Augmented reality is influencing fields such as publishing, translation, task support, repair, workplace, accessibility, medical, military, navigation, sports, automotive, architecture, construction, education, games, art, shopping, and tourism.

In publishing, AR is making an impact by enhancing and even replacing publications. AR is increasingly used in newspapers in North America, Europe, and Asia, including Los Angeles Times, Le Figaro, and The Times of India. IKEA’s 2014 catalog lets users preview furniture in their room before buying. And Audi announced that the owner’s manual for its 2015 A3 model will be replaced with an augmented reality app that runs on mobile devices.

Content strategists must plan for AR implementations and understand how to integrate content in AR apps. Considerations include providing content that is tagged with appropriate metadata, easily refreshed, device-independent, and provided on demand in the correct format.

About Marta Rauch

Photo of Marta Rauch

Term:

Augmented Reality

Marta Rauch is a senior principal information developer at Oracle for mobile and cloud projects. A Google Glass Explorer, she is interested in enterprise use cases for augmented reality. Marta holds a BA from Stanford University and a certificate from the University of California in Managing the Development of Technical Communication.

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Website: martarauch.wordpress.com

Twitter: @martarauch

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/profile/view?id=11958425

Facebook: facebook.com/marta.rauch

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What is it?

Structurally-rich and semantically-categorized content that is, therefore, automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable, and adaptable.

Why is it important?

Enables organizations to rapidly adapt their content to the changing needs of their customers and the devices they use.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Too often, content is handcrafted to get the “message right” in a single output instead of getting the correct content to the right customer in the right context and on the device of their choosing. We have to move away from the artisanal creation of content to a manufacturing model in which consistently structured, reusable content components can be assembled into a variety of content deliverables. That requires intelligent content.

Intelligent content is supported by content models, a reuse strategy, and a taxonomy strategy.

Content models define the structure of content components and content assemblies. They are formalized in templates, forms, and markup languages like XML. Structured content is format-free, style-less content that can be automatically displayed, filtered, or layered to optimize display on a target device with little or no human intervention. It reduces costs and increases speed of delivery. Structured writing guidelines guide authors in writing consistently structured content.

A reuse strategy identifies what types of content will be reused, the level of granularity (component size), how the content will be reused, and how to automatically assemble reusable content. With modular, reusable content, you can change the order of components, include or exclude components, and reuse components to build entirely new types of content to meet new needs.

A taxonomy strategy defines how to store and retrieve your content based on a common vocabulary (metadata). Using metadata, you can retrieve the pieces of content you need to automatically build customized information sets.

About Ann Rockley

Photo of Ann Rockley

Ann Rockley is CEO of The Rockley Group. She is a pioneer in content reuse, intelligent content strategies for multi-channel delivery, and content management best practices. Known as the “mother” of content strategy, she introduced the concept with her best-selling book, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy (Peachpit, 2012).

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Email: mailto:rockley@rockley.com

Website: rockley.com

Twitter: @arockley

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/annrockleytrg

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What is it?

The one-time movement of content from one repository to another.

Why is it important?

Usually as the result of a publishing platform switch, a content migration is necessary to continue working with and publishing existing content on a new platform.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

When organizations change content management systems, the content in old systems must be moved into new systems. In the simplest scenario, this is a direct transfer from one repository to another. However, this “simple” operation usually opens up complicated questions about what content is moving, how the content must change, and how it will support the same level of functionality in the new system.

Content migrations are preceded by a comprehensive content inventory and an editorial process to determine which content can be discarded and which must be migrated.

Most migrations also have a development component, where technical decisions must be made on how content will function in a new environment—for example, how properties map from one system to another, how links are maintained, and how navigation is preserved.

In particular, migrating content that is interlinked to other content, either through explicit links or spatial positioning, can be difficult because the content, its relationships, and its position in the larger content structure must be preserved. This is complicated by the common reality that the two systems might have fundamentally different paradigms of content organization.

A content migration project invariably culminates in a “content freeze,” where no changes can be made to content in the old system until it has been quality checked and launched in its new environment.

The time and budget required for content migrations are often either completely overlooked or underestimated. Managing a migration process is a complex combination of technical, organizational, schedule, budget, and human processes.

About Deane Barker

Photo of Deane Barker

Deane Barker is a founding partner in Blend Interactive, a content management consultancy in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Deane has spent more than a decade speaking on and writing about web content management systems, methodologies, and practices.

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Email: mailto:deane@blendinteractive.com

Website: gadgetopia.com

Twitter: @gadgetopia

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/deane