Properly managed, content has fabulous potential to deliver value. But too many organizations treat their website like a coalmine when they should be managing it like a goldmine. As web professionals we must continue to build the business case for the investment in a continuous improvement model. The value is unquestionably there.

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[M]arketing and media tend to focus on influencing attitude, while usability and technical communication focus on supporting action. There’s a time and a place for content that influences attitude—and for content that guides action. More and more, a complete user experience must plan content that influences both attitude and action.

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[I]t’s not enough to think tactically about content. To serve our clients and readers, we have to look beyond individual battles and ensure that the whole array of individual campaigns and choices works together to meet a clearly defined set of overarching goals.

via Erin Kissane, What Do Content Strategists Do? : Incisive.nu.

One of the best descriptions of content strategy I’ve ever heard is “information architecture over time.” I think there’s a great number of things that may happen to a website’s content over time, causing it to change and evolve as users work together to create and maintain more and more content, and it’s not always clear whose job it is to maintain and weed out all that content. So I think content strategy is really looking across the content’s entire life cycle, not just at the current moment.

via Karen McGrane – Speakers – IDEA2010 – Integration: Designing for Tomorrow.

A typical set of discovery questions for a 2-page design + copy project might look like this:

* What’s Acme Inc all about? Talk to me like I’m 10.

* Who are Acme Inc’s main competitors? What are their websites?

* Why did you hire us?

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As the year ended, Matt Idema and Yahoo media boss Jimmy Pitaro devised a test to see if Associated Content and its thousands of freelancers could bolster Yahoo’s local content offerings as much as they thought they could.

Starting in the first quarter of 2010, Yahoo secretly began publishing stories written by Associated Content’s freelancers for users coming to Yahoo.com from computers in Detroit and Cleveland. The stories were of local interest, and the positive reaction from users was immediate; they were clicking like crazy.

via Nicholas Carlson, The Inside Story: How Yahoo Bought Associated Content.