Content, multichannel, and convergence. If your paycheck depends on keeping your product-marketing strategy ahead of the curve at product launch and your budget below it, these are days, and those are words, that are undoubtedly trying your soul.
I was recently introduced to Sara Wachter-Boettcher and her book Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content, through an interview my colleague Trinity Hartman conducted on Content Ping. Sara is a content strategist and consultant who takes the long view of content and calls for a radical shift in how we conceive of, produce, and store content.
I have a lot of must reads on my shelf, but Content Everywhere is on my shortlist of absolutely must reads for anyone who manages or produces marketing content and for anyone who wants to tackle the growing challenge of how to efficiently produce content that can address your multichannel needs.
In short, she argues that by conceiving of, producing, marking up, and storing content in small “chunks,” we content managers can better position our content for today’s multichannel world of converging platforms and devices. And we can future-proof our content for whatever disruptive technology tomorrow will bring.
Specifically, by taking Sara’s approach to content, your organization can immediately benefit from being able to produce a single piece of content that can be optimized for the wide bevy of mobile devices that are now displaying your content, and you can more easily repurpose your content across your organization’s diverse needs.
Over the course of the next few posts, I’ll give a basic overview of Content Everywhere while adding a few of my own content26 experiences to the mix. I may not convince you to restructure your organization’s approach to content production overnight, but I hope to convince you that to understand where the future of content lies, you will probably want to mothball your English 101 texts and take a close look at Content Everywhere. Concise, engaging, and surprisingly well-written for such geeky stuff, it’s the best overview on the subject I have found to date.
