An Insider’s Scoop on Content Strategy

Janine Warner

Janine Warner

I just started contributing to a business blog belonging to Xtreme Consulting.

The first entry is based on a conversation with my friend Janine Warner, a web designer, content strategist and software-skills trainer who works in Los Angeles—when she is not traveling to far corners of the globe. In a previous life, she was director of new media at the Miami Herald, so we share journalism roots.

Janine is married to a close college chum, David LaFontaine, which is how I strayed into her orbit. She is the author of 25 books, many of them in the “Dummies” series. (I actually obtained a copy of her “Dreamweaver for Dummies” in the late 1990s, long before I had ever heard of her, and I think before Dave met her.)

You can read the Xtreme column here:
http://xtremeconsulting.com/blog/the-insiders-scoop-on-content-strategy/

I won’t reprint the item in full. But for someone like me who is intrigued by the concept of content strategy, it was an eye-opening conversation. In the blog post, Janine talks about what content strategy is. She describes how companies tend to realize they need a content strategy right around the time a customer accidentally Googles an ancient document from their web servers—one with old messaging that has little if anything to do with how the company operates in the present day.

From that perspective, this for me is Janine’s money quote:

A good content strategist knows that things that maybe worked as text items 10 years ago might better be portrayed in a video today, or an info graphic, or an animation. And because there are emerging ways of sharing content and there are all these different messages we want to put out, there are all these different formats we can use to put them out.

So a good content strategist is looking at all these variables. And they ultimately create something that is called a content strategy plan. Some people call it a content matrix. That becomes the detailed plan.

We spoke for 45 minutes, so I expect to generate some additional blog entries based on other aspects of content strategy as time permits.

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