Gretyl Kinsey: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997 Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 32 we discuss risk management as part of our occasional series on content strategy pitfalls. What are the risks involved when putting a new content strategy in place, and what can you do to minimize them?
Gretyl Kinsey: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In Episode 29, we continue our occasional series on content strategy pitfalls. Our focus today is change management. What are some common change management pitfalls and how might the intrepid content strategist avoid or handle them?
Implementing a content strategy is tricky. Technical issues bubble up to the surface as challenges, but those issues usually have direct solutions. The real elephant in the room isn’t technology; it’s human nature.
A proof-of-concept phase is often the key to unlocking the budget for an entire content strategy project. When defining the scope and goals for a proof of concept, don’t forget your team will still need training.
In 2015, we talked about a vision to tackle, lead and map out an enterprise content strategy. Today I wanted to provide an update on making that vision a reality, and how to expand it beyond a singular team and into other parts of an organization.
The rollout of an enterprise content strategy can be done in phases to define content goals, clean up existing content and then expand to additional departments.
00:00 Bill Swallow: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 11, we’ll talk about transitioning from a developed content strategy to implementation of that strategy.
Last year we wrote about content strategy after mergers and acquisitions. While many infrastructure decisions and changes need to be made, change management on the personnel side is critical for success.
Things have changed since we wrote this! Check out new insights from our team in this post.
In lean management, a concrete head is someone resistant to change. In my years working on content strategy projects, I have noticed many people are resistant to changing how they develop and distribute content—sometimes without even knowing it.
You’ve thought about your content strategy. You have a business case. You have a plan. What you don’t have is a budget and approval to proceed. What can you do?
One common roadblock to content strategy is a lack of funding. This post describes how to get budget, even in lean years (and recently, they have all been lean years!).
With the most anticipated film of the year—Star Wars: The Force Awakens—coming out this week, I couldn’t help but think about movie hype and how sometimes it leads to disappointment.
The same thing can happen when hype builds around content strategy. Excitement about implementing a new strategy can be good for an organization, especially when the alternative is hostility or resistance to change. But too much enthusiasm can have unintended consequences and result in failure. Here are some of the pitfalls of project hype and how you can avoid them.
Content strategy implementations require substantial planning, coordination, and hard work. The effort involved in keeping planned work moving along can be difficult. Scope creep–discovering new requirements along the way–can potentially derail your entire effort if you’re not careful.
Keeping a content strategy implementation moving forward is important, but it isn’t always easy. You may have to deal with an extremely slow-moving project or unexpected delay. You may even have to put a project completely on hold. Here are some common obstacles that get in the way of progress, and some ways you can work to overcome them.
Having the budget to buy new technology isn’t the same as having a content strategy. Case in point: the US government has spent billions on electronic medical record (EMR) systems that can’t communicate with each other.
We moved into a new office at the end of October. The new space is bigger and nicer than the old space, but nonetheless, the moving process was painful. As a child, I moved several times and changed schools every two or three years. I then landed in North Carolina for college and stayed put. It occurs to me that a new content strategy introduces much of the same pain as relocation.
Are you thinking about engaging a content strategy consultant? Here are some thoughts on successful content strategy consulting relationships.
An effective content strategy requires participation (preferably enthusiastic) from a diverse array of people. When you are communicating with executives, IT specialists, marketing writers, translation coordinators, and more, recognize that each participant (including you) begins with a certain set of expectations and biases.
Your content strategy can learn a lot from soccer ball manufacturing plants in Sialkot, Pakistan.
For his 1959 horror movie The Tingler, director/producer William Castle had movie theater seats rigged with buzzers to scare moviegoers during a scene when the Tingler creature is loose in a theater. Patrons in those seats probably didn’t enjoy the jolt—or making a spectacle of themselves because of the Tingler’s “attack.”
Quick! What’s the first thing you think about when you want to change your content strategy (the way you produce and distribute content)? If your answer is “tools,” you’re in good company.
If you can’t handle some rough-and-tumble adversity, you are not ready to manage the implementation of a new content strategy.
We are moving companies away from a heroic model to a process-driven model. Processes are much less exciting that the adrenaline rush that comes from working miracles to deliver the impossible.
