But I wanted to address your client’s comment about ‘management’ not understanding Content Strategy as a separate line item. It was the perfect opportunity to open a dialogue about that and ask her to explain what she meant. It’s more than possible that *she* didn’t understand the phrase and, as such, would not have been able to explain it to her managers. Ask her how to help evangelize and prove the value of Content Strategy to her team.

A lot of IA work pre-project has long been spent figuring out why clients are resistant to it or think it can be glossed over. This requires any number of positively exhausting conversations, gaining an inch and then losing three. But it is worth it. You won’t win every time, but you will make progress.

The IAs happily include me, in their project scope and timeline, but we spend a lot of time “selling” the point of the content strategy. We come up against “not necessary, we know what to say” attitude and the “once the page/area/site is done, it’s done” attitude.

The IAs and my supervisor give me a great deal of support to insert strategies and recommendations. We promote the common sense behind it, and we cite user experience. We’ve created a three-point relationship between IA, UX, and content strategy. All of them evolve and flex based on the others.

It’s slow going, but we’re starting to see buy in – from top to bottom. It will be a while before we get to Kristina’s vision of Content Strategy leading the way, but that’s my goal. I’m keeping my line item AND working on it’s PR to be an essential task!

Not sure. But what happened within the IA community after those meetings is what interests me.

Ian

The thought leaders of content strategy should start justifying a leadership position for Chief Content Officer, this person does not report to the CIO. People come and go, but content as an asset remains.

Just my two cents.

But to your point:

“Until the work is recognized as a deep dive into the why, by who, for whom, when, where, how, how much, and what next, it will still be struck from proposals as “unnecessary, because we already know what we want to say.”

I say, yes there is work to be done, a practice to be assimilated and much to be broken down, reconstructed and embraced.*

*Kind of like when Sarah Connor has to wrap her head around Skynet sending a robot back in time to get rid of her husband John. But then it turns out her son is actually her husband but its all good because Sarah Connor learns to embrace what is now weird for what in the future will be shiny and cool.

We’re noodling all of these questions at Brain Traffic – particularly helping to identify how CS-focused agencies can effectively partner with other agencies without ending up doubling up on deliverables.

I think one thing that would help enormously is if content strategists can start working to woo information architects as our “life partners” – instead of continuing to watch IA and visual design walk hand in hand down the beach. Those two practices are, in my opinion, inappropriately coupled in most project workflows.

Content strategy plans for – in fact, DESIGNS – information, from the inside out. Information architecture creates meaningful context and structure for that information. (Interaction design is something different, yo, and requires partnership with a usability-savvy copywriter.)

One other note: A big challenge right now is to help folks understand that “content strategy” isn’t just answering, “What kind of content will you publish?” This is how I see it being regularly used by SEO, advertising, and content marketing folks. Until the work is recognized as a deep dive into the why, by who, for whom, when, where, how, how much, and what next, it will still be struck from proposals as “unnecessary, because we already know what we want to say.”

Finally, with regard for standard rates for content strategy, I’d like to propose ONE MILLLLLLLLLLLION DOLLARS.

p.s. write a book

I’ve said this elsewhere before, but I think the client and organizational literacy around content strategy–itself as a field; a set of deliverables; and something of a methodology–has been one of the most telling things I’ve noticed in the last three projects on which I’ve worked. In two of the three (and I’m not far into the third) there were specific requests around deliverables that I was not aware were all that well known, nevermind appreciated or requested. This may be partly a NY thing for the moment. But you can hit the bricks here and find more than one agency that has found themself for wont of a CS because a prospective client had it line-itemed in their RFP.

Appropriately enough, my next project is to write one such document, and you can believe I won’t leave the client exposed on that front.

Best,
Jeff