"The words we choose matter"

Scott Abel is an internationally-recognized content management strategist and social networking choreographer whose strengths lie in helping global organizations improve the way they author, maintain, and deliver information. This year, he will be leading the Content Strategy Day at the tcworld confernce. tcworld spoke with him about how modern devices like smartphones and tablets might just turn around the world of technical communication.

Text by Corinna Melville

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The words we choose matter

How do you define “Content Strategy”?

That’s a really good question. There are many definitions of the term “content strategy” and far too many of them miss the mark. In order to define content strategy it’s important to first understand what we mean by “content”.

Enterprise content strategist Ann Rockley (one of the presenters at Content Strategy Day at the tcworld conference 2011) calls content “the lifeblood of an organization”. I agree. Content is all the stuff needed to run an organization. Proposals, press releases, documentation, online help, sales literature, marketing collateral, catalogs, scripts, web pages, computer code, training materials, policies, procedures, job openings, and documents and publications are all types of content. Admittedly, it’s a very broad term that can encompass myriad information types. Content is not limited to text-based communication. Videos, ...