In total honesty, much of the material in the first couple of weeks of content here surprised me. Much of what I’ve learned thus far in my academic career has been more about making “good content” as the course text notes, without much of a focus on wider content strategy. I think what surprised me most, however, is the full scope of what is covered under content strategy – from delivery platforms all the way to content governance. Despite the surprise, this discovery is very exciting; it’s opened up my eyes to the complexity of this topic and to all the possibilities of well-considered and well-integrated content.
Given that my career goals are in teaching future technical communication professionals, I think that an understanding of the scale of what was covered was actually most meaningful to me. I feel that other tech comm pros who – like me – mainly focused on technical writing for much of their academic careers will have similar expectations around content strategy. I feel like a greater understanding of this scope in combination with my own experiences will help me to develop a plan to guide students into the wider world of content strategy.
An example of this applied to a single concept can best be found in my discovery of what the course text describes as “omnichannel strategy” – the art of providing “tailored content at every point in the customer journey.” The sheer scale of this multi-layer strategy that considers every avenue of distribution of content shocked me; I would never have considered that a single entity could possibly plan for each of these stages of consumer engagement with organizational content. With my understanding of the concept and my experience with my own amazement, I feel that I could design lessons around this point to show how existing companies perform this kind of integration.
Overall, these first couple of weeks in this course and their instructional materials have been very exciting for me. I can now see that this topic is much broader than I was expecting, and that comes with the knowledge that I will have ample opportunity to expand my knowledge and skill bases in this course. I am now very much looking forward to working through both the instructional materials and larger client-based projects in this course. Here’s hoping for a fascinating and informative couple of months in this course.
Joseph L Meyers 