CHAPTER 10 The Two Faces of Content Strategy: Balancing the Needs of Users and Editors
eMPaThY
Good content requires empowered and engaged people. Good content
needs people to read it, and it needs people to create it. Without people,
there is no content. Content strategy, at its heart, is people strategy.
Yet we still see content work banished to the back offices, left for IT
or the copywriter or the marketing department (people who already have
plenty to do, thanks). Such buck-passing is a sure sign that our discipline
is still fighting to reach maturity. We still spend too much time looking for
the right methods and workflow, and not enough time figuring out how
the vast changes in Web content will affect not just the jobs of those who
are tasked with creating content, but also every other job in the company.
So, those of us who help create or redesign websites must take into
account the needs of our websites’ audiences and the people who will create
content, every last one of them — which is to say: everyone. To do that, we
must put ourselves in their shoes and work with empathy for their situation.
We hand our content needs to an editor^5 with the expectation that
everything will be perfect, but each editor is responsible for additional
tasks that may not involve creating or maintaining Web content, tasks that
require time and attention. Every new content need — every addition to
the content workflow, and every new analytics system, every new CMS
platform — eats into that time and that attention.
This is where we come in as content strategists.Two Paths Converge
To keep things simple, the people engaging with a website can be divided
into two camps: those who will use the website; and those who will main-
tain the website.5 When I talk about editors throughout this chapter, I refer not just to the traditional editor, but to
anyone who will handle content duties during the creation and governance process. An editor could be a
co-worker, a client, a boss, a freelance copywriter, someone from a different department, a member of an
advisory board, or they could be an actual editor. The content process is a wild, woolly mess, even when
it’s well organized, and because of that we have all become, in some sense, editors of the Web.