Looking back on my personal experience learning about content strategy throughout this course, I find that I’ve learned many lessons that will advance my career goals in teaching technical communication. I feel that what was most meaningful for me in what I have learned was actually my initial experience with starting to learn about content strategy. When I was just beginning this course, my primary focus had always been on writing well in isolation, without the considerations that go into writing and analyzing content in the context of a larger body of content.
In the beginning, I didn’t really have an appreciation for what was involved in content strategy, and I made some mistakes which made my experience learning about the subject much more difficult than it needed to be. Considering that issue, I’d like to talk about a few things I think may be useful for people who themselves are just starting to learn about content strategy. Today, I will be offering a few pieces of advice on what I feel new learners should do when beginning to learn about content strategy, and what I think they should avoid.
The most important thing I believe someone beginning an exploration of content strategy should do is to focus first on the individual elements involved within content strategy, rather than its overall scale and how they should fit together. There are so many considerations that must be addressed in an overall content strategy that it some may feel it would be better to try and the subject by addressing them all at once in content, rather than taking a systematic, step-by-step approach. Content strategy involves so many processes that attempting to consider them all at once may lead to certain elements being left by the wayside. I think this is important as when I first began learning about what goes in to content strategy, I was intimidated by the large scale of what all went into its practice and tried to fold everything together.
I thought that the best way to handle content strategy was to try and “get ahead” by performing multiple tasks at once. This became an issue during the early stages of the group content assessment report project, as I attempted to perform a gap analysis on the client’s content at the same time as our content audit – my thinking being that it should be easy to recognize where each piece of content diverged from the client’s overall content goals. When I reviewed the data that were collected at the end of the audit, I found that the individual content issues that I had noted didn’t fit into a more comprehensive analysis of the content as a whole. I ended up wasting quite a bit of time, but I did learn to better appreciate the structure of each step of content strategy.
Equally important as things one should do when beginning an exploration of content strategy are things one should not do. I think the most important of these is to not allow themselves to focus solely on developing individual pieces of content that are “good” in a vacuum without regard for the overall content goals. My initial instinct as a beginner in content strategy was to think more about the quality of the writing of a piece of content than the considerations such as audience focus that the content needed. I bring this issue up because it’s a trap that I fell into during the group content assessment report project in this course.
I was so focused during my initial drafting of that report on producing strong writing that I failed to consider how the client would perceive what I was writing. My initial draft was written with a very academic tone that would not have met the needs and expectations of the client. At the end while reviewing draft content with my team members, I discovered that it didn’t matter whether my writing was strong in a vacuum if I wasn’t keeping the overall goals for the content in mind. In the end, it was only with some diligent assistance from my team members in editing these drafts that we were able to produce a final product that was well-received by the client.
Coming into this course without a real understanding of content strategy, I found that I got in the way of my own success at the start more often than I didn’t. If feel that if I had gone into this course with some of these tips in mind, I may have had an easier and more productive start to my experience of learning about content strategy – particularly in my comprehension of why there is a specific and meticulous way in which content strategy is structured. I hope that I can learn from the mistakes I made in my initial learning experience and guide my future students toward the best learning experience I can provide.
Joseph L Meyers 