Quotes

Frank Marquardt
Good, smart, fun and relevant content should be at the core of any social media strategy. Great content should reflect your brand and give people a reason to stay engaged. That’s why it’s critical to build a content strategy into your social media campaign. Without a framework for what you say and a plan for how and when you say it, you risk leaving your audiences, at best, confused. At worst, they’ll ignore you. Who wants that?
Mashable.com
Mitch Joel
There’s pressure for Marketing departments to be all things to all people, but one core competency that most are missing is their ability to create volumes of gorgeous content. They’re not built for this. They are built to either manage the agency process or sift through creative for execution. They may even have the in-house talents to get some micro-sites and e-mail marketing rocking, but when it comes to the time, strength and commitment to consistently deliver fresh and relevant content, it’s a struggle.
Twist Image
Kristina Halvorson (Brain Traffic)
In 2008, not a single UX conference had a session or workshop devoted to content strategy; In 2010, nearly all of them did, including the IA Summit, UX Week, UX London, User Interface Conference, and even SXSW. Why the gold rush? The answer is pretty simple: it’s inherently impossible to design a great user experience for bad content. If you’re passionate about creating better user experiences, you can’t help but care about delivering useful, usable, engaging content.
UX Magazine
Heidi Cohen
Your content is both the face of your brand and a prime way to attract revenue. Remember to consider the marketing implications of the content you create and how it’s organized. Create content that does double duty, as both the extension of the brand and the driver of your revenue streams.
Clickz
Jonathan Kahn
How many of these easy solutions to the content problem have you seen?

  • Design the site with “lorem ipsum”, and hope the client comes up with the content later.
  • Demand that the client supplies all the content before you start work.
  • Install a content management system (CMS).
  • Hire a copywriter at the last minute.

Unfortunately, none of these “solutions” actually work. “Lorem ipsum” produces a template, aesthetics-only design, which has no relationship with the actual purpose of the site. Demanding content from the client is better than nothing, but is unlikely to work unless your stakeholders have an exceptionally strong grasp of content strategy themselves. (It can work for launch day content, but the site soon goes stale.) Everyone loves a good CMS, but software isn’t magic pixie dust: a CMS without a content strategy leads to shovelware or worse. And even the most talented copywriter won’t be able to rescue your content at the last minute: content strategy isn’t all copywriting, and it needs to be practiced throughout the design process.
Lucid Plot