For the Content Hungry: The Eat Media Blog

A lot of the discussion in the content strategy Twittersphere has the feeling of a group of blind people trying to describe an elephant.

There’s a lot of talk, all of it descriptive, some of it incisive, but it falls far short of describing the elephant.

And that’s the problem: talking about content strategy isn’t going to answer any of the problems at hand: if you really want to know the elephant that is content strategy, you need to talk to a zookeeper.

The content zookeeper has a base of knowledge that may have come from textbooks. But the reality is, those textbooks were written by professors who spent little, if any, time in the field. The theory of content-keeping differs widely from the dirty reality of it all.

No, the content zookeeper has gained much knowledge the old fashioned way—he has earned it. The lessons were frequently visceral and, as such, unforgettable. They often contradict the textbook, and sometimes, go places the textbook author has never even imagined.

So who are today’s content zookeepers?

• The content zookeeper has learned the hard lessons of information architecture and user experience from the daily maintenance of a web site. He has dealt with the limitations and woes of various content management systems and knows how to make them dance.

• The content zookeeper has learned the intricacies of SEO and SEM by digging deep in the stinkiest piles of metadata.

• The content zookeeper has learned the care and feeding of freelance writers and bloggers, because he not only writes his own blog, but has written hundreds, maybe thousands of articles and edited at least that many more.

• The content zookeeper has sketched wireframes on a cocktail napkin and turned them into a website.

• The content zookeeper has learned unanticiapted lessons about how content interacts with other content and either creates synergy or anarchy.

• The content zookeepers is nimble, adaptive and can see to the root of a problem quickly and efficiently.

• The content zookeeper’s mantra is: “Test, Assess, Repeat.” What’s working? Keep executing the content strategy, keep monitoring the metrics and keep cleaning up the messes. The content strategy may be static, but the tactics keep changing to meet the conditions.

Ultimately, the content zookeeper is there to cultivate the tension between what people do when they visit a website and what we want them to do there.

Being a content zookeeper isn’t rocket science, but it IS science. Hire a trained content keeper for your next project.

Here are a few other places to look: Brain Traffic, scatter/gather, Predicate.

— Jonathan (@bentpiton)

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