The most important thing someone should do when learning about content strategy is to trust your instincts when judging the maturity level of a client and/or company. According to “A Maturity Model for Content Strategy Development and Technical Communicator Leadership”, most companies fall under the maturing level. I did not personally take this to heart and assumed my client had a high level of maturity. Although client meetings showed her character to be mature and professional, talking about the task at hand and asking for specific details about content portrayed an immaturity from my client (client Z) and the company as a whole.

This is detrimental to both parties. For a team perspective, I struggled to provide quality content to client Z, as she was unclear about their end goal, despite many questions about the company product, the Help Center, and their content. This led to 3 weeks of content having to be salvaged, as she finally articulated her goals at the fourth meeting. For a client perspective, they have a lot more to lose. First, they are wasting time, as time is a commodity and being wasted from unproductive work. Second, they are wasting money. Although this work was “free” since this is for a class, normal circumstances would have the team be under contract work, and the company is using their profits and stockholder money to only waste their money. Thirdly, the client’s reputation is lowered by this interaction. If the contract worker(s) did not enjoy the experience, they might turn down future work from the company, despite a possible higher pay. Furthermore, the company may not trust their employees to work with contractors again, as their bad results could tarnish the company brand.

The most important thing someone should not do when learning about content strategy is to not be shy when asking for feedback from their team members. Based on the content strategy project, the phases of the content strategy project include: the discovery phase, where the team plan and assess the client’s content; the gap analysis, where the team summarizes their fiends from the discovery phase; the roadmap, where the team designs the best strategies and tactics the company should implement to improve their situation; and implement and govern, where the team builds, publishes, measures, optimizes, and governs, the implementation of the roadmap design by the company. If the team fails to provide results for the client for any of these stages, the team will most likely not get future work from that company.

For this reason, team members should not shy away from constantly checking in on teammates, reviewing information with each other, and planning the next steps of the project. I did not ask my teammates if they needed assistance, nor did I ask them to review my work. This resulted in an average product for our client. After visiting with my professor, I pinpointed the issue of the average performance was due to the lack of communication on my end. If I had asked my professor for assistance, if I had asked my client for more information, if I had asked my teammate to explain to me their plan for the project, I know I would have done better.

With these two ideas in mind, the most meaningful part of content strategy what will assist me for my own career goal is to put heavy value on the relationship between your client, your SMEs, and teammates.

For this class, I was tasked with auditing content from a release note and Help Center. I observed my client (client Z) to be unorganized, unready, and somewhat confused with the task at hand. They did give an initial task which seemed clear; however, our fourth meeting made it clear that client Z did not explain the goal clearly. This was detrimental to my team, as for the content strategy project, our initial audit was incorrect, only some information was salvageable. If following the content strategy map, the first task is to plan and assess content given by the client. This is the most important step, as this is the first and will set up the rest of the map with the crucial information for the client. If the client does not provide a clear goal, content does. The map will suffer consequently. If I had put more weight into my relationship with my client, I would have pushed for more answers and clarification on the goal and maybe have produced a better audit, but I did not and suffered as a result.

For my SME, in this case my professor, and my teammates, I described the importance of these relationships earlier. These people are here to assist me when I need help, to clarify any information, and to strategize with me the next phases of our content strategy. I’m sure I would have performed better if I had asked my professor for help and my teammate to give their point-of-view on the project and next steps.

These past eight weeks have been a blur, with disappointment and learning opportunities coming from them. This will be a class I will never forget. This is the end of my blog post for Digital Content Strategies class. Until next time, thank you for reading.