Content Strategist is a new position for many organizations and an attractive career option for copywriters, editors, content managers, journalists, freelance writers, and other digital media professionals with a passion for content—and an appreciation of a paycheck that matches their talents.

Digital agencies have long had content strategists on staff, but a variety of organizations are seeing the need to add someone to their team to be in charge of “the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content,” as Kristina Halvorson defines the job in Content Strategy for the Web, the book that popularized the term.

Because few people have been employed as content strategists, employers are open to considering job seekers looking to break into the field.

“All of the people in content strategy that I know have fallen into it through different routes,” says Vanessa Casavant, Content Strategist for Electronic Media at AdoptUSKids. “I came into it through journalism. I realized that it wasn’t the best career outlet for me and the outlook of having a job in journalism wasn’t that good. But I really enjoy the part of telling stories and finding the story within the story.”

Beyond copywriting

In her book, Halvorson identifies multiple steps in the content strategy process; first audit the existing content, then analyze, strategize, categorize, structure, create, revise, approve, tag, format, publish, update, and archive. Rinse and repeat.

Creating an effective content strategy is a bit like trying to put together the pieces of a big jigsaw puzzle, says Casavant. Not all of the pieces will fit together perfectly at first, until you spend time figuring out what are the corner pieces, and how do the other pieces fit together.

A background in editorial management and editorial process is helpful, but a passion for writing and editing is not enough, warns Mira Shields, Recruiter at Creative Circle, which places content strategists at digital agencies.

“In a straight copywriting job, the client already has a mission that they need to accomplish, or maybe they even already have the content and they’re looking for someone to create a voice. Agency clients need a content strategist to help them create and architect the messaging,” says Shields.

Mediator and instigator

Content strategists collaborate with a wide variety of other digital media professionals. Organizations such as World Vision—a global NGO based in Federal Way—are hiring content strategists to optimize the cross-team collaboration between many different disciplines and provide the vision and strategy to align the content with business goals and user needs.

“World Vision needs a content strategist to help bridge the gap between Web Content, Information Architecture, User Experience, Marketing, and Client Management,” says Rachael Boyer, Web Writer/Editor at World Vision and MCDM graduate student. “We have around 40 internal client teams who request new landing pages and micro sites, but need guidance and recommendations about the best approach that will balance donor needs with organizational goals.”

Because content is often owned and influenced by stakeholders across a variety of departments, content strategists need to be mindful of conflicting interests and priorities, and be able to prevent and defuse tense situations.

“People may not want to have a conversation about how things are done, because it means organizational change,” cautions Casavant.

To argue their case, content strategists heavily rely on data to support their analysis of whether the way content is being created, managed, and updated is working. “If it is, great. If not, let’s think about how we can better meet our goals,” says Casavant.

Breaking into the field

A background in marketing, PR, social media, community management, or copywriting with a good understanding of conceptual architecture and an interest in the development of the content will help if you’re looking to shift careers.

Recruiters and hiring managers may consider you for a content strategist position “even if you haven’t had the title before,” says Shields.

But, she adds, if you haven’t yet worked as a content strategist, it’s crucial to create a portfolio of relevant work.

“In any emerging field, the people who will have the easiest time getting a job will have samples to show—in this case writing samples or strategy samples. You should also be able to list what channels you feel comfortable developing content for, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, blogs or email marketing.”

Hands-on strategy

There aren’t any specific software programs or platforms candidates need to be familiar with, says Shields. “This position is more on the strategic, client-facing side. Presenting an idea can be done with Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.”

But that doesn’t mean content strategists aren’t expected to get their hands dirty, warns Boyer. “We’re not looking for someone to just sit and ‘strategize’ as much as someone who can jump into the thousands of pages on multiple platforms, and help us create a cohesive, strategic approach as we move forward.”

“We are looking for someone tactical who is experienced with content audits, content inventories, content management systems, SEO, and someone who loves Kristina Halvorson as much as we do!” Boyer adds.

Key concepts

Audit
A review of existing content—how much there is, how well it’s organized, and how accurate and how well-produced it is.

Content
Content is much more than text. Multimedia elements—pictures, graphic elements, video, audio—can help tell the story.

Content lifecycle
Content needs to be regularly evaluated: What needs to be refreshed, updated, retired? A website is never finished.

Message architecture
A hierarchy of the core messages that define an organization or brand, which helps content strategists figure out the story they are trying to tell and what content is off-brand and unnecessary.

Who’s hiring?

While content strategists have mostly been employed at digital agencies, organizations like World Vision that manage complex and sprawling content are adding this position to their payroll. “Currently, my requests for this role have been agencies,” says Shields, “but it’s going to be a common in-house role as well.”

Career level

Mid to senior.

Next step on the career ladder

“Because the role is strategic, content strategists can eventually move up into a role strongly tied to business objectives,” says Shields. “The role can also evolve into a Senior Content Strategist position working with key members of company to develop high level messaging, supervising a team of three or four copywriters and content strategists who do the more hands-on execution.”

Salary

Because this is a relatively new position, reliable salaries are hard to come by, but an experienced content strategist can make a 6-figure salary according to glassdoor.com, where the few listed full-time salaries range from $90,000 to $110,000. At non-profit organizations, salaries will likely be significantly lower.

According to glassdoor.com, hourly contractors at a major digital agency like Razorfish can expect to make about $50/hr. Creative Circle  has recently been advertising its content strategist openings at $35/hr.

Required reading

Kristina Halvorson: Content Strategy for the Web
Erin Kissane: The Elements of Content Strategy

Meetup

Content Strategy Seattle: Third Wednesdays.

Peter Luyckx recently joined Milliman as a Digital Content Editor, a role encompassing content strategy. Previously, he was the Managing Editor at Flip the Media, and a Web Producer and Editor at Microsoft’s MSN Health & Fitness and MSN Shopping. He is a graduate student in the MCDM program and can be followed on Twitter @peterlux.

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For 2011, I recommend the following five technologies. Some may be familiar, some may be new to you, but all are worth a try.

1. Landline phones

Mobile phones are great on the go, but their voice feature is suboptimal: reception can be spotty, calls get dropped, and noise distortion can turn a conversation into an exercise in misunderstanding.

With close to hundred percent uptime, landline phones are attractive to consumers who are willing to trade portability and location-based check-ins for reliability and sound quality.

Landline phones are a must-buy for entrepreneurs and business professionals. A call on your mobile or on your landline—it can mean the difference between losing and winning a business deal.

Cost: Landline phones are inexpensive ($5 and up), but plans can set you back an extra $40 in addition to your mobile plan. Qwest is a leader in landline phone connections.

Phone features vary by brand and model. A cordless phone provides limited portability within the home, but security experts recommend having at least one corded phone in the home for emergency situations, when electricity may not be available to recharge battery-operated phones.

2. E-mail

Texts, tweets, and status updates: who needs another communication channel? Yet, experts are expecting that e-mail will make inroads in 2011.

Unlike tweets and Facebook updates, which are limited in character length, e-mail copy has no limitations, though experts recommend keeping e-mail missives short and to the point.

E-mail is ideally suited for communicating with co-workers and managers. They are easily archived and re-sent; business professionals claim this adds accountability to projects they work on. “I sent you an email” is a favorite phrase among e-mail geeks, which can be translated as “I told you about that,” or “I told you so.”

Cost: Most companies nowadays provide their employees with no-cost email accounts. Astonishingly, you can also get free email accounts on the Internet. Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo are some of the leading free email providers.

3. Printed books and newspapers

This year, look for hipsters to start carrying around printed newspapers and books. Print is a technology in which digital text is transferred to paper or other non-virtual materials.

Printed newspapers are more portable than their online counterparts and lighter-weight than iPad publications.

Artfully-designed dust jackets add visual appeal to printed books, and their three-dimensionality adds a social component to reading: it’s easy to see what’s someone’s reading when they are carrying around a printed book. In awkward social situations, this can be a great conversation starter.

In addition, printed books feature built-in sharing functionality. Cities and counties across the nation have adopted widespread lending facilities, in which even newly published books are made available for free.

Heavy books also add gravitas to a subject and can be used as coffee table decorations.

Cost: New printed books can be more expensive than their Kindle counterparts, but don’t require an initial outlay to acquire a Kindle reader. All but the most voracious readers will find printed books more cost-effective. In addition, older books can often be purchased for $0.01 at Amazon and many are available for free lending. Do a search for “library” to find a book lending institution in your neighborhood.

Printed newspapers cost about 50 cents per copy. Avoid weekend editions, which are more expensive and filled with sections you won’t read and a small forest worth of advertising.

4. Analog games

Virtually everyone owns a video game console these days, but analog games, a highly tactile technology also known as board games, are all the rage with gamers who crave a real-time, real-person social experience.

Studies have shown that analog games can improve hand-eye coordination, and more complex games such as chess and checkers have been proven to stimulate brain development.

Some games, such as Trivial Pursuit, are gaining acceptance among educators as learning tools.

Cost: A popular version of analog games, a deck of cards, can be purchased for about $1, which can be leveraged to play hundreds of different kinds of games. Board games need to be purchased individually, but are often quite cheap. A game of Monopoly can be acquired for $11.50.

5. Happy hour

Social media experts and Facebook geeks, who have honed their brevity and wit with tweets and status updates, are going offline in 2011, influencers say. Old-school on-line social networking is being replaced by mingling with the crowd at in-person happy hours.

In 2011, off-line will be a crucial part of the information ecosystem.

Cost: Unlike virtual counterparts, in-person social networking requires a small investment, which increases with each drink you consume. Luckily, happy hour drinks are usually heavily discounted (often by 50%), which means you can do double the networking for the same price.

Whatever technologies you choose to adopt in 2011, remember not to lead with the tools. Instead, define your goals first and then find the gadgets and widgets and platforms that best match your needs.

Peter Luyckx is a contributing writer to Seattle Local Health Guide and to Flip the Media. Previously, he was the Managing Editor at Flip the Media, and a Web Producer and Editor at Microsoft’s MSN Health & Fitness and MSN Shopping. He is a graduate student in the MCDM program and can be followed on Twitter @peterlux.

Image by ozlady.

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“You’ve got to connect with what you hate, what you can’t stand. You’re starting up a company because you want to fix it,” Tan said.

At Posterous, Tan set out to build a blogging platform that would skip the annoying step of having to create yet another login. Users can create posts by simply emailing text and photos to the service, which automatically uploads and formats the content.

Tan’s talk on the three steps of a “product-driven state of mind” was a highlight of StartupDay 2010, hosted by Seattle 2.0, an organization dedicated to providing resources for tech entrepreneurs and startups.

Hate the problem is the first step towards creating great products, according to Tan, but completely fixing the problem is not necessarily the best second step. It’s counterproductive to be too perfectionist at the beginning, Tan warned. More important than creating a perfect product is creating any product at all. The second step is to ship the solution, Tan argued, even an imperfect one, because “until you can interact with the product, it doesn’t exist.” And what doesn’t exist, you can’t improve.

Another StartupDay speaker, Jan Miksovsky of “online family organizer” suite Cozi.com, struck a similar note. At one point Microsoft was venturing into the family organizing space, but the competitive threat dissipated because their product never shipped, perhaps because Microsoft only ships products that meet the company’s high standards, Miksovsky speculated. Cozi, in contrast, as a startup had the luxury of improving their service iteration by iteration, providing “incremental design goodness.”

“Designs that don’t ship are meaningless,” Miksovsky concluded.

Turning customers into evangelists

Building a startup is not like building a car, Tan said, a mere logistical and technological challenge. “What we’re really doing is throwing an amazing party.” To do so, you take care of every single detail to make sure that your guests have a great time. Or, as Tan puts it, the third step towards creating great products is to love your users.

Monica Harrington, Chief Marketing Officer at Seattle startup Intersect, and previously at Valve and Google-acquired Picnik, also stressed the need to build a customer-centric company. “You can’t be too obsessive about making users happy,” she said. If you listen to your customers, they can help you build the product and become evangelists. In fact, said Harrington, “they’ll often have better ideas than you.”

But before you can embrace your customers, you first have to embrace the idea of being an entrepreneur.

“All along I was waiting for someone to sign my permission slip to start a company,” said Tan, “but the only person who could sign it was me. Sign your own permission slip.”

Peter Luyckx is a contributing writer to Seattle Local Health Guide and to Flip the Media. Previously, he was the Managing Editor at Flip the Media, and a Web Producer and Editor at Microsoft’s MSN Health & Fitness and MSN Shopping. He is a graduate student in the MCDM program and can be followed on Twitter @peterlux.

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Presented by Seattle 2.0, the conference features an impressive roster of speakers, who will guide “pre-entrepreneurs” through the process of picking the right idea, building a team, wooing venture capitalists, building a product, and bringing it to market.

The conference also features sessions on an often-elusive goal: Making a profit.

StartupDay features local luminaries such as Keith Smith, (Co-founder & CEO of BigDoor Media), Monica Harrington (Chief Marketing Officer of Intersect) and Vivek Bhaskharan (Founder & CEO of Survey Analytics), as well as co-founders of LinkedIn, SlideShare and Posterous.

During the conference, attendees will be able to receive individual guidance from experienced entrepreneurs, investors and attorneys. Meetings will be booked on a first-come first-serve basis, so arrive early in the Advisory Room to sign up for up to two meetings.

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On April 16, 2010, the Master of Communication in Digital Media (MCDM) program will be hosting TEDx Seattle at the Pacific Science Center. This regional event, independent from but endorsed by TED, aims to “bring together great minds in creativity, scholarship, and entrepreneurship to discuss the possibilities and prospects of social development enhanced through information technologies.” The theme of the conference is “Convening Community Through Social Technologies: Stories from Puget Sound to Cape Town.”

A limited number of tickets are now available. To apply for one, go to http://tedxseattle.com/attend/. Attendees will be selected by lottery and notified on or about March 24.

Confirmed speakers at TEDx Seattle include award-winning science fiction author Greg Bear, Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh, acclaimed photographer Amanda Koster, and Fiona Lee, the Africa Project Manager for Google.

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MCDM’s Emerging series continues with an interview with Michele Myers, Producer of KEXP documentaries. KEXP’s current ten-part radio documentary, Blues For Hard Times, features UW Music History professor Larry Starr. Past documentary series, from Portraits of Post-Punk to Pop Goes Electronic to Civil Rights Songs, have covered a wide range of musical genres.

The interview with Michele Myers will be streamed on the MCDM Livestream Channel. Tune in on Friday, March 12, 2010 at 12:00 P.M. (PST).

About KEXP

KEXP Documentaries

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Free Press’ mobile phone campaigns fly under a “Free My Phone” banner and feature a cell phone angelically equipped with white wings. For this specific campaign, though, the phone has been retouched with an angry facial expression and the indecorous exclamation “ETF, WTF?” The ETF stands for the “early termination fees” charged by cell phone carriers. And you know what the WTF stands for.

Free Press is fuming that “carriers still force us to pay outrageous penalties — up to $350 — if we cancel our phone service or switch carriers. There’s one question on everyone’s mind: WTF?” (Not everyone may phrase it that way, but it’s certainly a good question why termination fees are so high. After all, if you want to cancel your cable service, providers don’t hit you with exorbitant fees.)

Apparently, the FCC is asking the same question (though, perhaps, without the “WTF?”): “After Washington threatened to investigate its activity, Verizon began pro-rating its ETF (so you would owe less for every month of your contract). Google and T-Mobile also lowered the combined ETF on the Google phone from a whopping $550 to $350 — still obscene — after a FCC letter of inquiry about their behavior.”

In their letter appealing to the FCC, Free Press makes it case by saying that “for millions of Americans, mobile devices represent the future of the Internet. Mass adoption of new ‘smart’ phones is sparking online innovation and blurring the lines separating the wired and wireless Web.”

More and more consumers are certainly starting to use mobile phones to access the Web, and early termination fees are unreasonably high. This is all true enough. But do early termination fees really block access to information? Do they have any impact on the quality of the media broadcast through mobile platforms?

I sympathize with the urge to reduce termination fees and applaud Free Press for lobbying the FCC. But what remains unmentioned in this campaign is that these fees are symptoms of a monopolistic power play by carriers and device makers like Apple. What really will “free my phone” is to take players vying for dominance in the smartphone market to task when they create closed platforms with consumers locked into services and subscriptions, whether they want to or not. Even if AT&T would let iPhone users walk away from their service, they still can’t take their iPhone and use it on a different network, or sell it to a friend for use without voice or data services (as an iPod touch).

Perhaps this is beyond the scope of the current Free Press campaign, but the focus on early termination fees seems like a populist cheap shot, narrowly missing the real target: open platforms and full consumer ownership of smartphones.

This post was first published, in slightly longer form, on the blog @peterlux.

Peter Luyckx is the Managing Editor at Flip the Media. Recently, he worked as a Web Producer and Editor at Microsoft’s MSN Health & Fitness and MSN Shopping (now Bing). He co-founded and published the environmental newsletter The Frugal Environmentalist. He is a graduate student in the MCDM program and can be followed on Twitter @ peterlux.

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