Building Confidence: The Hidden Content Deliverable
When we sign a contract for content work – whether it’s working with a client as a consultant or accepting a position within a large company – we do so with the expectation of deliverables. They are the things we make. They are often a symbol of milestone completion, or quarterly goal. They are CONCRETE. They are LAW.
But that’s not really what we’re doing, is it? We’re not handing over documents – we’re handing over the keys to a very large vehicle, and our biggest hope is that the people we hand it over to can drive it safely.
Content Strategy Begins at Launch
Content strategy is not about the content as much as it’s about the content-makers, teaching those who will carry the flag long after our leg of the march has passed. As we learned over and over again at last year’s Confab, this is a field of organizational change. The templates and aggregators will stand without us, but the passion will not.
Passion isn’t often passed around in the content strategy circles, but it should be. When we as editors and consultants and architects take on a project, we do so not to construct the project ourselves, but to share our knowledge. We may take the first steps; we write the first about page, or we reword a paragraph, or we suggest a new location for the news feed. But when we’re gone, we’re gone.
It’s this handoff that we plan for. The goal of any content strategy project is to create a better experience for the user. But it is also to instill our clients and companies with the passion and confidence to create their own content.
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