I have this friend who’s been looking for a Content Strategist for a web design project. He’s having trouble finding someone who has all the skills and experience that he wants them to have. This is bound to happen, because the field is new enough that there’s no standard set of skills and experience for people who practice content strategy. Plus, he was looking for some pretty specialized extras.

My advice to him was to look for someone with the core skills, and then prepare them to acquire the rest on the job. I’m pretty confident that a person with the following five qualities could pick up any content strategy task you might need them to do.

Source: scattergather.razorfish.com Posted by bee 761 days, 16 hours, 15 minutes ago

The first time I noticed the word "Content" had changed, I was being ushered into the inner sanctum of Zappos by a woman answering phones in an Elvis costume. Why is there a content department at Zappos? Don't they sell shoes and other nifty stuff? Well, it turns out, at Zappos the folks who make images, text, and product information for the Web site are working with Zappos "Content." Makes sense, in a Zappos kind of way, I thought at the time.

But in the eight months since that visit, the world has changed. All of us, it now appears, are in the Content business. Retail, E-commerce, Consumer Brands. And Media. It's all content now. And, if you accept that fact that your company is in the Content Business, then you're going to need a plan to turn your "build-it-and-forget-it" Web site into a thriving and organic content publishing offering.

Source: www.fastcompany.com Posted by bee 766 days, 16 hours, 43 minutes ago

TOP TIPS: 10 ways to secure buy-in for your intranet Are you finding obtaining buy-in from your organization a trickier process than anticipated? Recognizing your compelling content, refreshing design and finding a “champion” are some of the factors that can persuade senior executives to release resources.

When trying to make improvements to the intranet system, intranet managers may encounter a number of hurdles: trying to persuade senior managers...

Source: www.internalcommshub.com Posted by support 771 days, 14 hours, 8 minutes ago

According to Dante in his Divine Comedy the inscription above the door to Hades reads “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”. For many this could also be the sign on the home page of their organisation’s intranet as, with business-critical decisions to make, they begin the daily hunt for information that they are sure should be somewhere in the application.

It could just as easily be the sign on the door of the intranet manager of the organisation, though this door usually also carries a number of other job descriptions, all of which seem to be given more priority by the organisation than the care and development of the intranet. Most organisations of any size will have a full-time web manager, often with a support team, but this is rarely the case with the intranet.

Source: www.ariadne.ac.uk Posted by support 771 days, 14 hours, 26 minutes ago

One of my favorite parts of my job is the educational aspect - helping people new to content technology understand what different types of tools do and how they work. I've been told I "make things clear for non-technical types."

But really, as is so often the case in education, it's not the teacher but the willingness of the "non-technical" types to learn that makes all the difference.

When content technology implementations go wrong, it's often blamed on a gap of understanding on the part of IT as to what the business really needs. Sometimes that's accurate.

Source: www.realstorygroup.com Posted by bee 774 days, 17 hours, 16 minutes ago

The fundamental goal of developing a new structure for an intranet is to produce something that works well for staff. As discussed in the earlier article Escaping the organisation chart on your intranet, this often means getting away from a navigation structure that mirrors content ownership.

Experience has shown that staff will struggle to find information if they have to know who owns the content first.

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by bee 776 days, 16 hours, 22 minutes ago