From Content Magazine, Sally Whiting on the parallels between archiving and content strategy:
Curation properly begins with a mission statement, whether you’re a content creator or a researcher assembling resources: What is it you are trying to say? What does your collection represent?
When you’re a content creator, focus becomes even more crucial. A good content strategist wouldn’t let you set up even a Twitter feed without a full understanding of how you’re going to use it and what it’s going to do for you. Are you a design firm looking for new clients? Sure then, use Twitter to talk about design in a public space.
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There is no One Best Content Strategy; it’s all about context. What do you need to say about who you are and what you do, and to whom? What do your users expect to find there? If a website has a clear content strategy, visitors will get more out of it with less frustration. Exactly what they get depends on the goals of each site, since a successful interaction could be quantified in any number of ways: tickets sold, pages viewed, orders placed, tweets twittered.
A failed interaction is when a user doesn’t catch the underlying story or its relevance to their needs.
A content strategy needs several elements to make it work. Not least of which, a plan to validate the content with users, and to keep it fresh.
In addition to how much do we publish, where, and when, we should also think about how we organize what we have already published, including how we're going to handle stale content.
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