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A review by aqword
The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane
2.0
This book is painfully dry. Yet it's moderately well written for the abstract subject matter it covers. Its main benefit was thus showing me that I definitely do not want to work in content strategy full time.
There's something highly ironic about trying to write a book about clear, useful communication when your own communication is not particularly clear nor particularly useful.
Much of the writing's just not well thought out: "humans, being mammals, need [a list of things including] wheelchair ramps and other accessibility aids." Right...it's because we're mammals that we need those things. Clearly a chinchilla needs a wheelchair ramp, but a chameleon...surely not. On the next page after that quotation, I find "marketing is the practice of bringing products to market." Okay, also true, but somehow I don't think I needed this book to tell me that.
Some things this books says are:
* You can use time of access to infer what content is likely most appropriate to serve up to users.
* Each piece of content should have a specified purpose. It should show how a specific piece of information benefits specific users.
* Content (including content style) should be structured around user groups rather than around the organizational units that create it.
* Content strategy has its roots in the fields of editing, curating, marketing, and information science.
* A content strategist repeatedly evaluates content, (re)designs content-related things, and executes the plans from the designs.
* There are two separate strategies to deal with: creating content for the user, and creating deliverables about that content for the other people creating the website.
* A competitive review is a small content audit of competitors that can be useful to gain a sense of what works well and what should be avoided in your own content.
* It's important to make sweeping recommendations of changes before focusing on changing individual pages because otherwise you'll get bogged down in the details and miss how the site as a whole needs to change.
* A content strategist will often create page-level content guidelines as well as content templates to supplement wireframes.
* One of the great challenges of content development is to get the people who understand the content to write about it in such a way as to make it understandable by those who don't. Hired writers may be able to write more clearly, but will understand the content less; company-internal experts will understand the content more clearly, but may have difficulty explaining it to a lay audience. A good way to deal with this is to have experts review the content after it is written by others.
There's something highly ironic about trying to write a book about clear, useful communication when your own communication is not particularly clear nor particularly useful.
Much of the writing's just not well thought out: "humans, being mammals, need [a list of things including] wheelchair ramps and other accessibility aids." Right...it's because we're mammals that we need those things. Clearly a chinchilla needs a wheelchair ramp, but a chameleon...surely not. On the next page after that quotation, I find "marketing is the practice of bringing products to market." Okay, also true, but somehow I don't think I needed this book to tell me that.
Some things this books says are:
Spoiler
* You can use time of access to infer what content is likely most appropriate to serve up to users.
* Each piece of content should have a specified purpose. It should show how a specific piece of information benefits specific users.
* Content (including content style) should be structured around user groups rather than around the organizational units that create it.
* Content strategy has its roots in the fields of editing, curating, marketing, and information science.
* A content strategist repeatedly evaluates content, (re)designs content-related things, and executes the plans from the designs.
* There are two separate strategies to deal with: creating content for the user, and creating deliverables about that content for the other people creating the website.
* A competitive review is a small content audit of competitors that can be useful to gain a sense of what works well and what should be avoided in your own content.
* It's important to make sweeping recommendations of changes before focusing on changing individual pages because otherwise you'll get bogged down in the details and miss how the site as a whole needs to change.
* A content strategist will often create page-level content guidelines as well as content templates to supplement wireframes.
* One of the great challenges of content development is to get the people who understand the content to write about it in such a way as to make it understandable by those who don't. Hired writers may be able to write more clearly, but will understand the content less; company-internal experts will understand the content more clearly, but may have difficulty explaining it to a lay audience. A good way to deal with this is to have experts review the content after it is written by others.