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Content Strategy Bitesize
TwitterCongility 2011: giving content agility
Confab 2011 was great last week except for two things: it took place in Minneapolis and it was sold out weeks ago. But next week (24-26 May) hardcore content professionals in Europe will get their chance. Congility 2011 – formerly known as X-Pubs – is taking place near Gatwick Airport and is aimed at technical authors, content strategists, documentation and user information managers, as well as UX and IA types. We asked Noz Urbina, senior consultant with Mekon and Congility chairman, to tell us more about the renamed conference and the new content integration theme…
Content strategy is changing the communications landscape. By focusing content around alignment with strategic business goals, the bar has been raised. In the past, there was a distinct separation between pre-sales and post-sales content; between technical communications and web marketing communications. That line is forced to blur when more and more content and support moves online, into the cloud and onto social platforms. Content that was once support or post-sales information is viewed and reviewed presales, affecting brand perceptions generally and quite often purchasing decisions specifically.
The impact? As communications professionals, both technical and web marketing, we’ve got to get our ducks in a row more than ever before – together.
A real-world scenario
Let’s walk through an example of where we need to bring tech and marketing together:
Say you’re a web marketing professional working for Philips (or Siemens, Bosch, Hitachi or any other diverse manufacturer like that). It’s a large organisation but you sync well with the client and you manage a successful project moving their home electronics products. Your name gets around. Then you get an internal referral to work with their medical devices or, scarier still, semiconductors (microchips) people. They have product to move and many juicy content problems for you to solve.
The problem is, you can’t write the content because the subject matter is totally alien to you; in many cases, you’re not even allowed to change it because it’s already been signed off following all sorts of regulatory processes. The customers are complaining that delivering the supporting documentation in downloadable PDF manuals is totally inadequate, and you’re supposed to integrate them better with the rest of the extranet. Life has suddenly got more complicated, sure, but you pull it off. You’re now one of the few out there who can bring measured, dynamic online benefits to this type of business. You’re value to the client has gone up considerably and your USP to the marketplace along with it.
The technical communicators working on the other side of this scenario are going to have to learn to work with this new model as well. They’ve been delivering print-oriented materials for years. Many customers still use print, and PDF seemed fine for online, but many are starting to want more flexibility. Technical communicators are going to need to know how single sourcing, social media concepts (if not social media itself) and web metrics change their work, processes and tools.
When you’ve got your material online, you’ve got unique IDs, feedback options and metrics that supply feedback and answers for which the technical communicator has traditionally been starved.
Who is reading what, and is it helpful to them? If you’re content is going to be read pre-sales, is it findable? Are you using titles and metadata to help search engines make your how-tos attractive to click on and are the deliverables easy to share with others? What about tech content delivered to tablet PCs and smartphones? How are you going to do all this nifty web stuff and keep your print deliverables in sync? Master all this, and you too have suddenly become a more rare and valuable resource.
Content strategy brings all this under one umbrella. The organisation, the communicators and the customer all win. Whether the content strategist has a web marketing or technical communications background, they’re delivering content across many more channels, and keeping it on-brand, accurate and consistent affects both costs and revenues.
Today’s content needs agility – Congility 2011
This is the thinking behind Congility and the Congility 2011 conference with its theme of Content Integration – Leveraging Content Standards to Improve Customer Experience.
Content that has agility can move around channels and user groups giving customers what they want. It’s not just people and process that need to be different, but the content itself needs to work in today’s automated systems.
There’s one week to go, but you can still join us and hear from world-class content strategy speakers such as Rahel Bailie, Ann Rockley, Nikki Tiedtke and many more from the UK and Europe (see the full speakers list).
Get a free pass!
Or a 20% discount… Thanks to the recent sponsorships of Siemens, Information Mapping and Quark, you might be able to join us at Congility 2011 for FREE.
For your 20% discount code and the chance of a free entry, we’ve just launched – hot off the press – our Exclusive Firehead Congility offer. BIG TIP: Be quick to click!