Margot Bloomstein Shares How To Build Your Content Strategy with Message Architecture

Content is cool and complicated in equal measure. Margot Bloomstein ofAppropriate Inc. presented Building Your Content Strategy with Message Architecture at Converge 2015. Her powerful session echoed all of the emotions that we, as content strategists, often feel about content.

So what is content strategy?

Margot shared the following definition, which I think hits the nail pretty well on the head. Content strategy is planning for the creation, aggregation, delivery and governance of useful, usable and appropriate content in an experience. According to Margot, “this is your job now.”

Here are notes and comments overheard during the session:

• We like communication, but we love jargon.
• Words are valuable, but meaningless without context and priority.
• Content strategy dredges up politics. It also creates harmony.
• It allows us to build consistent user experience across channels, time and contributors.
• It helps us maintain workflow without teams fighting over differences in opinions and shifting goals.
• It’s how we avoid content without strategy. Simple.
• It’s a high-level vision that helps us prioritize.
• It allows us to communicate, measure and report ROI.
• Content strategy helps us COPE (create once, publish everywhere) with the complexities of content.

Action Item: Content Card Sorting Exercise

Working on a rebranding project or new website with your team? Margot recommends a content card sort to kickoff any content project. Here’s how:

1. Create 100 cards with words you currently use or would like to use to describe your institution.
2. Bucket them into three categories: Who We Are, Who We’re Not and Who We Would Like To Be.
3. Work with your content team to categorize, transition and prioritize the words.
4. Analyze the results.

Did we miss you at Converge 2015? Good news! It’s not too early to register forConverge 2017 in Palm Springs.