By Corey Vilhauer CHAPTER 10It takes more than just empathy, though, more than putting ourselves
in their shoes. It takes action.
When we say empathy, we also mean perseverance; not only putting
ourselves in the shoes of those we create for, but also making sure we
don’t give up on them if they don’t immediately understand our process, or
when it seems like they’re resistant to change.
We mean empowerment, doing what we can to make teams and
co-workers and bosses and everyone involved feel like they’re not just
implementing some random change, but that they have skin in the game.
They have the power to facilitate change on their own. The website is
theirs, ready to be shaped into something awesome.
We mean passion — for the project and the industry, passion for solving
the problems that will undoubtedly arise. We need to be able to say, “Yes,
this is a lot of work right now, but it’s going to be OK. It’s going to make
your customers happy. It’s going to make your team happy.”
And finally, we mean humility, a trait we often overlook. There are two
faces to content strategy, just as there two faces to every part of the Web
process. Where there are two faces, there are two opinions, so we must ad-
mit, often, that — shudder — we’re wrong. That we didn’t fully understand
the relationship between departments, or that we were overzealous with
the changes we proposed.
If there’s anything we’re charged with doing, it’s to remember the
difference between knowing how to do something and communicating
how to do that thing. We can create the best website we can, with design
that’s out of this world and Pulitzer-level content. But it’s worth nothing
if we can’t communicate to our clients and teams how to use it. It’s worth
nothing if we create for the user, but forget to create for the editor.
Content strategy is not a singular discipline, and the Web isn’t some
kind of exclusive club. Our industry has been forged in a mix of disciplines,
each of which have adapted to the current situation to create better, more
readable, nimbler and certainly more effective websites.