Content Strategy in 2021 — Reflections on how the discipline has matured

It’s been a whole year since I last published on Content Strategy Adventures! I’m happy to be back and excited to tell you what I learned from Lavacon 2021. Lavacon 2019 inspired me to start this publication, so it seems fitting that my re-inspiration came from the same conference, 2 years later.

In this article, I dive into the changes I’ve seen in the Content Strategy discipline over time and how that manifested at Lavacon 2021 compared with Lavacon 2019.

A Brief (Incomplete) History of Content Strategy

Hilary Marsh once told me she heard the earliest mention of the term, “Content Strategist” in the late 1990s. From what I can tell (and please correct me if I’m wrong), the discipline of what we see as “content strategy” formalized around 2009, with Kristina Halvorson & Melissa Rach’s book, Content Strategy for the Web.

Facebook was a leader in starting a formalized practice of what we now call “UX content designers.” Initially, they were called, “content strategists.” Some of the most respected and leading voices in this field today came out of this Facebook content strategy practice (Jonathon Colman and Andy Welfe, for starters).

Meanwhile, Ann Rockley wrote Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, published in 2002, geared more towards technical communicators. At that time, Ann Rockley was a leading expert in the technical communication field in creating technical content strategies for reuse using XML, including Docbook and DITA. She was solving problems for technical communicators facing the challenge of writing, maintaining, and publishing a high volume of constantly-changing documentation. XML is awesome for this and this work was accurately named “content strategy.” However, many technical communicators began to think of themselves (often, rightly so) as content strategists. However, this is where the confusion took hold. Technical communicators wondered, is this our new name? There was a perception that maybe technical communicators wanted a new, sexy name. And, the new, sexy name was “content strategy.” But, that was incorrect.

Further, the term “content strategy,” was already being used in marketing, causing more confusion. I won’t say more on content strategy in marketing, as I have limited knowledge in this area (but please comment if you do!).

Technical Writer or Content Strategist?

For someone from a technical writing background (me), Content Strategy sounded like an accurate description of what I did. I wrote content, yes. But my role almost always broke down like this:

• 30% auditing, organizing, and optimizing content and testing reuse and workflow strategies to publish more content with fewer time and resources. This included migrating and converting content from one format to another
• 25% strategizing how to create better documentation, faster by using existing engineering, product, and UX processes
• 25% acting as a resource for customer success, UX, and others (including weighing in on user flows and writing microcopy)
• 10% researching actual new product features requiring documentation
• 10% writing documentation

You can see that very little of my work was actual writing and was often strategic. Thus, it was easy to consider myself a “content strategist,” even though my title was “technical writer.”

When I learned that people with the title, “content strategist,” devoted much of their time to UX microcopy (my favorite!), I was determined to transition into this role.

And that’s when I noticed technical communicators experimenting with calling themselves “content strategists.”

Worlds Collide

Around this time, I discovered Lavacon, which started as a conference for technical communication leaders, who often played a strategic role on a technical writing team (essentially, they were content strategists). Over time, Lavacon became a resource for technical communicators who focused on higher-level strategy, more than writing.

By 2019, Lavacon was solidly in the middle, serving old-school technical communicators and new-school UX Content Strategists (now called “Content Designers”). I wrote my inaugural article to explain the differences to people in the field who didn’t know the history. I could see both UX Content Strategists and technical communicators getting confused.

Now

Fast forward to now. We seem to have matured in 2020 to a more solid understanding of what to call whom. We now call people who work on content on user interfaces (a.k.a. microcopy) with UX design teams, “content designers” and “UX writers.”

We call people who do more of the high-level strategy, “content strategists.” This work is often the less-glamorous work of content audits, optimizing content structures, creating or enforcing governance strategies, recommending and implementing new tools, and leading content conversion and migration.

Technical communicators and technical writers are researching and writing content to enable users to use products.

The lines between all these names and titles blur, but what I appreciate about Lavacon in 2021 is how it continues to be a resource for content strategy in all its iterations and titles. There were helpful reuse and content architecture talks. There were talks on how to use AI with content, on marketing strategies we can take away, and how to perform UX research for content. It’s a testament to how the discipline has matured.

But, most notably, the takeaway from all content strategy conferences, is that the discipline leads in empathy. Not just user empathy and advocacy, although that’s certainly a primary motivation. Content strategists are leading the English-speaking world (and more!) in using and advocating for language that is inclusive, accessible, and mindful of humanity. For example, here is one of the many resources out there, created by content strategists.

To be successful in any of the content strategy disciplines, we must regularly and proactively connect with humans — whether it’s to get the information on a meeting you otherwise may have missed or to communicate to others the value we bring to the table. We cannot do it without empathy and I have been so pleased to see Lavacon and Confab this year focus on this area.

Thanks to Jack Molisani for putting on a wonderful Lavacon conference with great content. And to all the amazing content strategists (and related!) that spoke this year. I’m looking forward to the next one.

Edited to correct the following oversights (thanks, Meghan Casey!): Corrected the spelling of Kristina Halvorson’s name and added Melissa Rach, who I originally left out, as a co-author on Content Strategy for the Web.