Content Strategy in Technical Communication

Guiseppe Getto, Jack Labriola, Sheryl Ruszkiewicz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429574986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Kommunikationswissenschaften

Content Strategy in Technical Communication provides a balanced, comprehensive overview of the current state of content strategy within the field of technical communication while showcasing groundbreaking work in the field.

Emerging technologies such as content management systems, social media platforms, open source information architectures, and application programming interfaces provide new opportunities for the creation, publication, and delivery of content. Technical communicators are now sometimes responsible for such diverse roles as content management, content auditing, and search engine optimization. At the same time, we are seeing remarkable growth in jobs devoted to these other content-centric skills. This book provides a roadmap including best practices, pedagogies for teaching, and implications for research in these areas. It covers elements of content strategy as diverse as "Editing Content for Global Reuse" and "Teaching Content Strategy to Graduate Students with Real Clients, " while giving equal weight to professional best practices and to pedagogy for content strategy.

This book is an essential resource for professionals, students, and scholars throughout the field of technical communication.

1
An Introduction to Content Strategy

Best Practices, Pedagogies, and What the Future Holds

Guiseppe Getto, Jack T. Labriola, and Sheryl Ruszkiewicz

Content strategy has become an essential element of technical communication practice. However, within technical communication we have yet to establish firm best practices and suitable pedagogies for this emerging discipline. We need a better understanding of how content strategy happens within technical communication. This book helps to fill that need.

This book is for:

• Technical communication practitioners working in industry who are being called upon to do content strategy work in some way, shape, or form.
• Technical communication practitioners seeking to inject content strategy best practices into their organizations through training or teaching.
• Technical communication researchers and students who are interested in learning about content strategy.
• Technical communication researchers who are willing to help contribute additional research into best practices within this growing discipline.
• Technical communication teachers looking to add content strategy into their pedagogies within academic or workplace contexts.

Defining Content Strategy

Halvorson (2008) defines content strategy as “planning for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.” The emphasis here is on “strategy” and “planning.” Technical communicators and marketers, of course, have always created, published, and even maintained useful, usable content. What content strategy adds is the bigger, broader picture of doing this on a strategic, not just a tactical, level.

In defining the “content” of content strategy, we can extrapolate from Halvorson’s definition of the field to say that content is useful, usable information deployed for a specific audience.

Rockley and Cooper (2012) remind us that, historically, content has been “managed as documents,” existing largely as complete texts formatted for delivery (p. 6). This has often resulted in what they call the “content silo trap”:

Too often, content is created by authors working in isolation from others within the organization. Walls are being erected between content areas and even within content areas. This leads to content being created, and recreated, and recreated, often with changes or differences introduced at each iteration. No one has a complete picture of the customer’s content requirements and no one has the responsibility to manage the customer experience.

(p.5)

This problem led Rockley and Cooper to call for a “unified content strategy” or:

[a] repeatable method of identifying all content requirements up front, creating consistently structured content for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling content on demand to meet customer needs.

(p.10)

Thus we can say that the best practice in content strategy is to plan for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable information in a repeatable manner by creating consistently structured content for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling content on demand to meet audience needs.

Introducing This Book

This book showcases the most innovative practices and pedagogies for content strategy within the broader field of technical communication.

Lots of books exist for practitioners on what content strategy is and how to do it. What this book adds are:

• Empirical research on content strategy best practices, which helps to cement them as the “best” things people are doing in industry (Albers, Flanagan, and Hovde, this volume).
• Explorations of emerging best practices, particularly doing content strategy in a variety of cultures, using augmented reality, and using dynamic content (Duin, Armfield, and Pedersen, and Albers, this volume).

• Case studies of teaching content strategy (Howard, Borgman, Steiner, and Behling and Bookman, this volume).

Within the field of technical communication, empirical research on content strategy has taken various forms, including:

• Content strategy as information design (Albers & Mazur, 2003; Albers, 2012).
• Content strategy as a rhetorical approach to managing content within content management systems and other technologies (Pullman & Gu, 2008; Hart-Davidson, Bernhardt, McLeod, Rife, & Grabill, 2008).
• Curating and facilitating user-generated content (Getto & Labriola, 2016; Walwema, Sarat-St. Peter, & Chong, forthcoming).
• Component-based content strategy (Andersen & Batova, 2015; Batova & Andersen, 2015).
• Website-based content strategy (Batova & Andersen, 2016).
• Developing localized, multicultural content within content management systems (Batova, 2018).

This partial list demonstrates the diversity of empirical content strategy literature within technical communication. This body of literature demonstrates the widespread applications of content strategy work. Though we can develop overarching best practices for this emerging discipline, it is arguable that specific applications will require specific best practices, as seems to be the case in disciplines like user experience (UX).

Such diverse and complex content situations raise questions like the following:

• What uses does content foster in an era when communication technologies are increasingly pervasive, multiplicitous, and global in scope?
• How must usability and usefulness be redefined, and content reshaped, in light of the diversity of users and user experiences?
• How must we rethink the concept of the user when communication technologies share content with one another as much as they share it with people?

Technical communicators are increasingly being called upon to think organization-wide when they are managing technical content. The “content silos” cited by Rockley and Cooper (2012), which frequently cause organizations to stockpile content in different departments, must be dismantled if content is finally to be freed from its technological and organizational constraints. This shift toward unified, organization-wide content strategies, however, brings with it a new set of challenges, specifically regarding the usability of content both within organizations and among core audiences and external stakeholders.

In this introductory chapter, we explore these challenges through a discussion of content strategy best practices, pedagogies, and considerations for the future of the discipline. After discussing these topics, we introduce each of the chapters of the book.

Content Strategy Best Practices

We can think of best practices within content strategy in three overlapping categories:

1. Strategies for developing and deploying content (Albers, Flanagan, Howard, Borgman, and Getto, this volume).
2. Use of emerging technologies and systems for managing and publishing content (Duin, Armfield, and Pedersen, Albers, and Flanagan, this volume).
3. Usability and audience awareness (Hovde, Steiner, and Behling and Bookman, this volume).

In the following we delve into each of these categories, synthesizing relevant literature for each.

Strategies for Developing and Deploying Content

Strategies for developing and deploying content are largely concerned with issues related to managing content across technologies, stakeholders, and media. Following Rockley and Cooper (2012), the goal of content management is to avoid creating content silos and to work toward structured, reusable content that is stored in a single, authoritative repository.

One way to conceptualize this process is a technique known as content modeling. Rockley and Cooper (2012) define content modeling as “formalizing the structure of your content in guidelines, templates, and structured frameworks” (p. 133). For Wachter-Boettcher (2012), content modeling can increase the life of content by making it “future-ready”:

Too often, today’s content is fixed: stuck to individual pages or in device-specific applications. But as connected devices get more varied, robust, and ubiquitous—and as users expect to find, relate, and share content in more and more ways—we need content that can go anywhere, its meaning and message intact.

(p. 1)

To produce and deliver content in the most sustainable manner, in other words, content strategists often create frameworks for a variety of different kinds of messaging and deploy those frameworks across communication channels (Albers, Flanagan, this volume).

These frameworks are developed in many ways, such as:

• As part of an effort to audit existing content to ascertain how effective it is in respect to specific goals and metrics important to the organization.
• As part of an overall content strategy plan deployed as an authoritative document to govern all aspects of an organization’s content.
• As part of building an authoritative content repository for reuse and deployment across channels, often hosted in a content management system.
• As part of open source, structured authoring architectures like DITA or GitHub.
• As settings within structured authoring tools, deployed as software that individuals and groups of writers use to develop and manage content.
• As part of consumer-facing websites, many of which are built in popular content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla!.
• As part of custom websites, mobile applications, and enterprise applications built for specific organizations, industries, or markets.

Comtech and DCL have conducted annual industry-wide surveys of publishing trends of content strategy (Stevens & Madison, 2018). Through these surveys, we get a clearer picture of the current state of content strategy, such as the roles content strategists perform, and in what industries content strategists typically work. According to the 2018 survey results, content strategists are “filling at least two, if not more, roles in their organization” (Stevens & Madison, 2018). With content strategists fulfilling multiple roles in their organizations, it may be difficult to attempt to discover consistent skill sets that are most essential to being an effective content strategist on a day-to day basis.

Additionally, the most common industry category in which content strategists typically work is technology, which the survey describes as “the software, hardware, semiconductor, and

telecommunications industries” (Stevens & Madison, 2018). In addition to the survey, it may also be helpful to attempt to document the vast array of industries in which content strategists work.

From this survey, we can also learn which tools are used most frequently by content strategists. Throughout the past few years of the survey, the types of tools used appears to be fairly consistent, with “the majority of people indicate they are using XML authoring tools and/or Microsoft Word to create content” (Stevens & Madison, 2018). Although the tools used by content strategists have remained fairly consistent, as well as consistent production of “core types of content” (Stevens & Madison, 2018), the different content formats continue to expand on a yearly basis. In order to document this expansion, the survey added social media content and marketing materials in 2017 (Stevens & Madison, 2017), and added API documentation, UI/UX strings, and video in 2018 (Stevens & Madison, 2018).

What is clear is that emerging technologies such as content authoring tools are beginning to change the way content strategists manage and publish content.

Use of Emerging Technologies and Systems for Managing and Publishing Content

As content strategy best practices are just beginning to emerge, it makes sense that the focus of literature on content strategy has been on firming up these best practices rather than providing specific technological solutions to common problems. At the same time, practitioner-led blogs such as The Content Wrangler, Scriptorium, and I’d Rather Be Writing often review specific technologies useful to content strategy work. Again, as there is currently no industry-wide survey of the technologies that content strategists use, it is difficult to say which ones are the most popular or most useful.

What is clear from ad hoc mentions of technologies within content strategy literature, however, is that content strategists use a wide variety of tools for managing and publishing content (Flanagan, Hovde, this volume), such as:

• Content management systems (CMSs)
• Social media platforms
• Social media publishing tools such as HootSuite and Buffer
• Analytics tools such as Google Analytics
• Open source information architectures (i.e., DITA)
• User-generated platforms such as wikis and forums
• Website-building CMSs such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla!
• Proprietary content management, documentation, and word processing software such as Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe RoboHelp, Oxygen XML Editor, MadCap Flare, Doc-to-Help, and the Microsoft Office suite
• Customized versions of tools created for enterprise-level organizations with complex needs

From self-reported explanations in content strategy literature, it would appear that content strategists use the tools that they find to be the most useful on an ad hoc basis. Especially when it comes to proprietary tools, companies like Adobe and MadCap have invested significant resources into marketing their tools as the best ones. The only real assessments we have of these tools are from practitioners or researchers discussing specific situations.

But these specific situations are also what drives content strategy best practices. If there’s one thing that most or all content strategists can agree on, it’s that creating useful, usable content for specific audiences of people is at the core of what they do.

Usability and Audience Awareness

Recall that the overall goal of content strategy is to plan for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable information in a repeatable manner by creating consistently structured content for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling content on demand to meet audienc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor Foreword
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 An Introduction to Content Strategy: Best Practices, Pedagogies, and What the Future Holds
• SECTION I Content Strategy Best Practices
• SECTION II Content Strategy Pedagogies
• Index