Content Strategy at Drupalcon Prague
At Drupalcon Prague an underlying theme was very clear. Drupalers are expanding their concerns to issues beyond just worrying about how to keep sites up and running or how to properly build views or layout pages. An increasing number are turning their focus on how best to take advantage of all these wonderful CMS tools we create to deliver tangible results (and not just a site). A key component of delivering results is, of course, defining a site's content strategy and, as such, I was particularly pleased to see content strategy related BOFs and sessions at Drupalcon Prague. Here is a short review for others interested to follow up.
The first session I attended related to all this was From Home Page to Hypertext Preprocessor and Back. The title (and the session description) did not reveal much about the topic. Eric Reiss, however, really just talked about how Drupal is currently perceived and what key questions we should be asking ourselves in order to change that perception and how we should communicate that to the world. This, in many ways, is the core of any content strategy. What is the message we want to get out there and how should we communicate it. Check out the session, there is a wealth of fantastic anecdotes and Eric could easily have been a keynote speaker at a Drupalcon - so a highly recommended session to watch.
Next up a BOF. It was organised by Lizzie Hodgson, who currently works at Deeson Online as a content strategist, and was titled What is Content Strategy and Why Should I Even Care. The BOF was well attended and the concerns coming from the attendees ranged from the more open-ended "How do I convince my clients to invest in content strategy" to the more practical "How do I manage them so that they actually have some content in place for launch?!". Some key takeaways:
1. The importance of having the discussions on content strategy early on.
2. Develop a careful calendar of actions that clearly identifies who is responsible to produce what content by which date.
3. Explain how content strategy is not a one-off but a process which necessarily requires experimentations.
4. Identify specific metrics against which to evaluate the suitability of your strategy.
Finally, a BOF on the last day of the conference went as far as presenting us with a full-blow content strategy tool that integrates with Drupal. Named Konzilo, it is the first product of Swedish-based KNTNT. It promises to be a full-blown platform for planning, ordering, delivering reviewing and managing content with some very cool features such as syncing of the content with multiple platforms (your Drupal site to Facebook, Twitter, etc).
Here at Bluespark we are very actively working on content strategy, both for clients and our own products, so looking forward to sharing insights via this blog and at future events.