Subscribe through RSSTop 5 Content Strategy Trends To Watch In 2012
1 – Mobile & e-Commerce Content Strategy Will Be Hot
For the past few years, Content Strategists have been crusading for the need for organizations to develop and implement a content strategy to help plan, create, manage and analyze their content across channels… mostly web. In 2012, other web professionals, such as user experience designers, social media strategists and web developers, will start to seek out content strategy planning for mobile and e-commerce experiences.
2 – Content Strategy Apps Will Abound
Last year, a few notable content strategy apps came to the party early: DivvyHQ and InBoundWriter to name a few. With a wealth of opportunity to automate or simplify content strategy processes like content audits, inventories and editorial calendars, 2012 promises to see a few new apps, like Content Insight, help Content Strategists and organizations with the tactics of content strategy.
3 – “Information Overload” Will Go Mainstream
Already the subject of popular articles in the Harvard Business Review and The Economist, the topic of information overload will gain popularity with the mainstream press. As organizations battle with content bloat and increasingly fractured digital channels, Content Strategy will be the identifiable and championed solution by those in the know.
4 – “Curation” Will Be The New Buzzword
Curation is sweeping the nation. Seen as a viable solution to producing and re-purposing content for distinct target audiences, curation minimizes human resource demands and maximizes ROI by creating a more engaging and relevant user experience. As a buzzword, however, curation runs the risk of becoming synonymous with short-cut, poor quality, editorial-slant driven content and Content Strategists will need to rise to the occasion by continuing to focus on publishing content that is authentic, relevant, and consistent.
5 – Content Strategy Will Become A Business Process
Content strategy is often focused on as a discipline/profession, however as a practice it has the potential to become ubiquitous to the content processes currently under the domain of more time honored business channels like marketing, communications, public relations and customer relationship management. As content strategy moves from the introduction phase to the growth phase, 2012 will see other related disciplines starting to adopt content strategy practices as their own and the focus will no longer be on a small subset of industry veterans, but on the bigger implications and opportunities for content owners across disciplines.
Agree? Disagree? What are your Content Strategy predictions for 2012?
Interesting thoughts. I do hope that the year brings better ways to automate the content inventory process. However, the audit process will never be able to be automated – still needs someone to figure out what stays, goes, or needs updating.
Curation has been my buzzword for about 6 months. Not just in terms of outside content vetting, but for cutting through internal content to publish only relevant content and not every single word ever written by an organization. So this spills into the information overload thoughts as well. Curation is definitely an area in which success will be determined by having a content strategy. (and maybe one day my spell checkers will recognize it as a word!!)
And I think other disciplines are already adopting content strategy processes. As I read this, I began to wonder how long content strategy as a separate discipline will be tolerated. It really shouldn’t be the province of only a handful of people thinking about the web. It should be part of any good marketer or communication professional’s skill set – not to mention IA and design (development will follow along much later, I predict). If only 1 person on a team is thiknking about content strategy, it will never gain traction. Content strategy HAS to become part of the business process for successful campaigns, projects, and business plans.
Carrie,
I couldn’t agree more–automation won’t ever replace the human process of thoughtful analysis.
The big reason I decided to start Content Insight and build an inventory tool was that I realized how much time I was spending just post-processing the output of the tool I was using–time that could be much better spent actually reviewing the content, analyzing the structures, and crafting strategies. The goal is to make the inventory process easier and the output better, freeing up time for the fun stuff–the reason we do what we do!
Cheers,
Paula Land
Content Insight
Hi Carrie,
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I’ve heard from many whose own predictions align with those I’ve posted above.
While you’re right, the audit process can’t really be automated as it is intrinsically a human-process, I think there could be online apps that mimic the standard spreadsheet… only better. Perhaps with graphs that help organizations qualify and quantify their content types.
Like you, I have been wondering about content strategy as a stand-alone discipline. In my experience, in order for a content strategy to be implemented and succeed, it needs the buy-in and adoption from all content owners and creators within an organization. Typically, these roles were already defined long before “content strategy” became part of our vernacular.
I sat in a digital transformation workshop the other day with a lot of subject matter experts and business folks. What did we talk about? Tone of voice. Consistency. The enterprise as publisher. Mobile, mobile, mobile. And to a lesser degree, apps. Maybe this is the year content strategy goes mainstream?