CHAPTER 10 The Two Faces of Content Strategy: Balancing the Needs of Users and Editors
Each messaging plan comes with workflow suggestions: find someone
to become keeper of the style guide; or determine one person who can run
A/B testing on website content. Structural suggestions pull in editorial
workflow issues from across departments; for example, if we build a news
feed, will someone maintain it?
It’s these governance and workflow issues that pose the largest hurdles
in the process. Remember: people don’t like change. And this is often the
stage of the project where we start suggesting changes to their existing jobs.
Our job is to ease the change. Lay out all expected outcomes and show
what changes are needed. Personally meet people who may have to take on
extra duties and explain the benefits of those duties. Work with managers to
ensure they understand the amount of extra work or the change in skill set
required for each new initiative. But most of all, get people on board early.aSSigning RoleS
Who should be involved with Web content? Everyone.
Who can be involved? A select few who hold the password and have the
time to work on the new website. Who will be involved? That’s a subject
that can be both simple and complicated at the same time. Which is kind of
the point of an interdisciplinary content team.
We talk about interdisciplinary content teams because, at their heart,
every group of collected content workers is in some way interdisciplinary.
They play on their own experiences, their own backgrounds and their own
thoughts to create complex content systems for our websites. They don’t
always get along, but they combine their efforts to create a better mix than
any of the pieces could on their own.
There’s a concept called informed simplicity that comes into play when
building and assigning roles within a content team. Matthew Frederick, in
his book 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, says informed simplicity
is “founded upon an ability to discern or create clarifying patterns within