Articles
Interview with Richard Sheffield
2 April 2010
Destry Wion
Web Manager
STC France
Our Content Strategy Forum 2010 speaker interview series continues with Richard Sheffield, a former technical writer turned content strategy professional, and the author of the first, self-published book on web content strategy, The Web Content Strategist’s Bible (see our review). Richard has kindly donated copies of his revised edition for the book raffle at the Forum. Unfortunately, Richard will not be joining us in Paris, but he was happy to answer a few questions in support of the event, and to share his thoughts on making the transition from technical writer to content strategist.
Hi, Richard! We’re sorry you couldn’t make it to Paris. It’s a pleasure to be able to have this exchange, even if brief and from afar.
STCF: You are currently the Managing Editor for UPS.com. What kinds of things are you responsible for, and what would you say are the biggest content strategy elements of your work?
Sheffield: Working in content strategy on the client side (as opposed to the agency side) is very different in a lot of ways. By the time you get to the third or forth project on the same Web site, you find that many of the early steps in the content strategy process have already been done. By this point you probably know a lot about your users, your content inventory, voice and tone, etc. A lot of the discovery stage work carries over well from project to project.
So this means that you focus much more on project sizing and scoping issues and the development and content delivery aspects of content strategy. And you spend a LOT more time thinking about governance issues like ongoing maintenance and sun setting content at the end of its useful life.
On the client side YOU have to deal with the maintenance and governance issues you create.
I also spend a lot of time on standard people management issues, solving content problems, dealing with CMS issues, representing the content group during design meetings, and handling search engine optimization.
STCF: Your Web Content Strategy blog certainly provides good reading about your background and road to content strategy. Particularly interesting is your transition from technical writing to content strategy. Can you touch upon that history a bit, the course of events that brought you to your role now, and how satisfied you are with the change?
Sheffield: That transition was no accident. I left the software company I was with because they were not moving towards the Web fast enough. I saw that my years of experience in designing and creating online help systems were perfect training for dealing with hypertext online content. I had been writing online help content in GML so that made learning HTML a breeze. Plus, designing the layers and linking structure of Windows help systems was just basic information architecture. Everything I had been doing pointed me towards the Web, plus the pay was better!
I couldn’t be happier with the Web-related work that I do. It’s a perfect combination of technical, writing, design, consulting, and IA skills. If I could have designed a perfect job for me, this would be pretty close.
STCF: What could you share with any technical writers out there looking to be more involved with the Web, and particularly as a content strategist?
Sheffield: I always tell tech writers to go back and look closely at their previous work. There is a good chance something there can be re-described in content strategy terms. You have probably built something like a content matrix or worked in a system that could be called a content management system. And if you have done any work directly with customers and users, then that’s another skill that transfers well to a content strategy agency role. Putting new content strategists in front of clients is scary for agencies. Knowing that you are comfortable and experienced in front of clients is a big plus. Presentation skills are also important.
It can be hard for organizations to understand the value of content strategy until they see it in action. If you are working as a technical writer on a Web-based project, just build a few of the normal content strategy deliverables on your own. If they prove useful then you have a good starting point for talking about content strategy in your process and the value content strategy could add.
Just be confident that many of the skills you have will transfer well.
STCF: On your own website, you describe the content strategist as “a new breed of writing professional.” Some people might argue that content strategy is just a repackaging of existing skill sets: best practices in technical writing combined with graphic design skills and competence in information architecture. Is there truth in this argument?
Sheffield: Sure there is some repackaging of existing skills, but they are skills that until now have rarely been found in one person. A good content strategist might have a combination of any of the following skills:
- Writing – user support (tech writing)
- Writing – persuasive (sales and marketing)
- Writing – informal (social media)
- Editing
- Editorial planning (editorial calendar etc.)
- Editorial workflow design and management
- Graphical design
- Project management
- Customer-facing consulting
- Web development process
- Business strategy
- Categorization and nomenclature definition
- Search engine optimization
- People management
- Content management system use and design
- HTML, XML, or PHP coding
- Curation
I’m sure I’m forgetting something important, but you get the idea. I can’t think of another writing career that brings together all these skills in a single person, and elevates that person into a strategic project role. Content strategists are not just order takers, in the best case they operate at the highest level of the project hierarchy.
Sure you don’t have to be an expert in all of them, but you need to speak the language. I’m not a designer, but I can have a detailed and meaningful discussion with designers and art directors. The same thing goes with programmers, business analysts, and C-level executives.
STCF: What do you think is the unique selling proposition of the content strategist?
Sheffield: The unique selling proposition for a content strategist will differ from project to project, but I generally argue if you don’t completely understand your content, you can’t possibly understand your project. If you don’t understand the content, then your project plans, timelines, and budgets are guesses at best. Are you willing to make contractual commitments based on a guess?
STCF: This question is a popular one on the Web these days as people first come to know about content strategy. Muriel Vandermeulen will be talking about it at the conference too from the French perspective. How does content strategy differ from editorial strategy, or does it?
Sheffield: The answer to that question is complicated. In general, I’d say that editorial strategy is an integral process within the larger content strategy. Content strategy can deal with many issues that are outside what is normally considered editorial strategy. But this distinction falls apart a bit in cases where the content is the business.
For most traditional publishers (magazines, books, etc.) and Web-only publishers (content sites and blogs), the content is the business. The business value of Time magazine and time.com is mainly the content. Other kinds of Web sites frequently have to support a non-Web business, so the Web site is a small side function of a much larger enterprise. UPS existed just fine as a company for almost 90 years before the Internet came along. So sites like ups.com are tasked with finding ways to support an existing, offline business and hopefully finding ways to create new business value online. This greatly broadens the role of content strategy beyond just the editorial process.
So for a traditional or Web-only publisher, the entire company can be focused on the editorial strategy. Producing content is what the business does. In this case the editorial strategy can be essentially equal to content strategy.
STCF: After a solid year of content strategy hype, evangelism and buzz, the field is becoming embedded in the minds of Web professionals, at least in the sense that content strategy exists and its concepts are important. What do you think people need to start hearing about now? What messages in the evangelism should change?
Sheffield: Content strategy, as a professional practice, is in the same position that information architecture was about ten years ago. We will have to go through a period where we constantly justify and sell what we do. We have done a great job over the last year of explaining what content strategy is, now we have to shift to selling why content strategy is important and expanding our role in the development process. Even within organizations that currently use content strategists, there is often room to bring them into a project earlier to help steer strategic conversations and focus on content.
STCF: Your self-published book, the Web Content Strategist’s Bible, is really the first book focused on Web content strategy, providing good insights on the _what and how of what might be called “project level” content strategy. Kristina Halvorson’s book,_ Content Strategy for the Web , is enjoying a lot of success too. Certainly these books are not the end of the line; there’s still a lot of book opportunity for content strategy authors. What do you think is the next book that needs written on the subject?
Sheffield: If I had a good answer for that question I’d be writing it! I’m actually looking for ideas about what comes next. I’ve not really come up with anything that deserves a full, book-length treatment yet. Most of what I want to write about will just show up in a future version of the Web Content Strategist’s Bible, and that is not going to happen soon.
Again, I have to look at information architecture as a model. There are a few really good IA books that almost everyone in the field has. Specifically I’m thinking of books like Morville and Rosenfeld’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web. Morville and Rosenfeld recently published a third edition of their book and it still going strong.
Hopefully the interest in content strategy will remain high long enough to justify updates to my book and Kristina’s book, and push a few other publishers to add a content strategy book to their list.
STCF: Finally, if your bibliography page on Amazon is to be believed, it seems you are quite a prolific writer on WWII submarine tactics and strategy. Do you see any parallels between the role of the Web content strategist and the submarine commander?
Sheffield: I’m not sure there is a good connection there, but the latest WWII submarine book is an interesting case of curating my own content. I wrote two simulation-game related books on the subject years ago. The books and games were long out of print but I wanted to do something useful with the content. So I removed all the game play information and combined the factual information from both books into a single volume that is a pure history book now. Don’t let good content sit around unused!
STCF: Thank you for your time, Richard, and for the revised copies of your book to be raffled on the 16th at the Forum. When Europe has its next big content strategy conference, we hope to see you there.