If Content is King, Content Strategy is the King’s Astrologer - Part 2

This is the second part in my two part series about how content strategy has “glowed up” from my own personal and historical perspective. In part 1 of this series, I talk about how online content started with the rise of the internet from my perspective. As always, my thoughts are my own.

edited 10/11/23

After public use of the internet started to take off from about 1995, Alta Vista was the search engine of choice for the general population. It was around 1998–1999 when everyone and their brother was starting an online business. Google was also born, but it hadn’t dominated the search engine space. The VC money was flowing from angel investors, and it was a perfect time to be a writer who was fascinated by technology.

My first start-up job was with a small company called EzGov, LLC, which was started by some smart, visionary people who had this great idea to create software that would function with legacy infrastructures and allow people to better interact with their local governments. We were I think, the first to create software and interfaces so that people could pay water bills, parking tickets, property taxes, and such, online.

In this way, the product solutions offered had a very specific audience so even then we were beginning to think about customer experience and content strategy to clearly reach governments and their constituents. I wrote technical documentation for the government side but also, I wrote directional copy for the software itself to explain to a user who had never completed any sort of transaction online, except maybe to buy Pamela and Tommy’s video (I had nothing to do with that), how to pay their parking tickets and the directional copy that took them through the experience. In order to explain steps in a process and make sure consumers knew what to do, I had to think about things from a consumer’s point of view.

That was a fun job too, remember how start-ups were back in the day? There was a snack room, I called it snacks.com. We had scooters we rode around to talk to team members in this circular open floor plan office off Marietta St. in downtown Atlanta. There were office-wide Unreal Tournament games on Fridays. It was a social crowd of inspired employees who worked hard and played hard.

I began to develop a sort of strategic empathy if you will for writing content that hadn’t been done before. Theories about how to get more eyeballs to go to business sites were running rampant too, long before Google Analytics was born in 2005. By this time, I had bought my first ever house, at 30 all by myself, but sadly the VC money kind of dried up in some areas. EzGov eventually moved to Europe, and I moved on to a more marketing copy and content manager role for another startup which also gave me a raise.

My next start-up job was for a company called Computerjobs.com, which also had a niche audience focus and was started by a young couple in their basement. It was just a tech job-related database with job listings at first, with bonus content for people looking for careers in IT, sort of like an early Dice.com or Careerbuilder.com. In that role, I was able to learn even more about speaking to an audience in a way that resonated. That was a fun job too. One of the owners had a collection of classic video games that he moved into the office, so we had a game room and a pool table.

Even as early as 2001, when I started my first iteration with IBM helping to manage their Small and Medium Business Center as well as a lot of industry solution pages, they were starting then to think about customer experience and content strategy. IBM sold their personal computer business to Lenovo, but they were still selling storage systems and solutions for industries, that’s where I came in.

Mostly my team and I spent a lot of time migrating content from one system to another, IBM was always advancing these proprietary content management systems. But content migrations are a great opportunity to look at your content, streamline it, reframe it, that’s what my team and I managed.

Part of my job also was to track traffic using raw data in Excel to generate reports on the page sections I was responsible for as a Content Manager. We could see how our content messaging was reaching users to some extent.

That was a time when the idea behind content strategy was, let’s just offer up everything we have about a product or service, and let the customer figure it out. I don’t think SEO was even a thing yet. Google search engine dominance and analytics came later in 2005, overreaching Alta Vista.

The mid-2000s brought more change, and by 2008, companies were hiring more agencies to handle their online business enterprises. That’s when I left IBM to go work for Digitas, an ad agency, to become the lead writer managing the Delta Airlines website and social media campaigns, then Twitter was a thing too.

Advancements in tools and apps that utilized and measured the power of the internet changed the game for content strategy and continue to evolve as things move further into hybrid cloud and cloud-native operation management models. In a competitive marketplace, where there are so many eyeballs, plus with the onslaught of analytics, content strategy efforts must be even more defined.

“With great power comes great responsibility”, as the saying goes, it isn’t exactly known who said it first, but it was popularly referred to from a Spider-Man episode. A couple of brands obviously really hit the nail on the head, like Google and Facebook at the time, for example, with their brand and content messaging and the hybrid advertising models started using AI to dish up content and ads that people were interested in.

MySpace.com was soon dominated by Facebook. Was it their usability that made them dominate like that? Or was it their brand and content messaging strategy? Why isn’t it working for “Meta”? That might be another topic for another time.

In doing research for this piece, I came across an old article in Wired Magazine from 2014, which reminded me that it was Bill Gates who coined the phrase “content is king” in an essay he wrote in 1996 about how the internet was going to change the advertising model, and he was right about it, I’ll give him that.

I don’t remember seeing Content Strategy as a job function until much later starting in probably 2017 when I went back to IBM to help them revamp their product pages for their storage system product line.

That was the first time I saw heat maps in action, where you can visually see how traffic is hitting your content and what areas of the web pages users pay attention to. UX was becoming more popular as well, most people I knew who started out as graphic designers were now UX/UI Designers.

Since then, and throughout the pandemic years, I continue my tour of a variety of high-tech enterprises creating and implementing customer-focused content and content strategy initiatives for a variety of campaigns. Now, even more in 2023, I have observed that for a brand and content strategy to be effective, these four aspects must function symbiotically together, marketing, UX, content strategy, and the content itself.

Maybe marketing is the Queen then, if content is King, and content strategy is the King’s astrologer. UX might be the King’s ship, then, to provide a framework for all these other aspects to “travel” to customers.

Regardless of who is driving content initiatives, whether it’s C-level executives, marketing teams, SMEs, or writers, let strong brand and content strategy be your guide, especially if it is focused on telling a story, your content will reach your intended audience more effectively. Make the customer the hero of of your story, and the product is the guide for the hero to get where they need to go.

by M. McHaney