First news first: I’m pleased to announce the Omaha Content Strategy Meetup! This is a Meetup group for digital professionals interested in discussing content strategy principles. You can get more information here.

I’m very excited about this. For one thing, it brings Omaha on board with a long list of other cities hosting regular CS meetups. Every time I’d see someone tweet about their next CS meetup, I’d get a little bummed that I didn’t have the same opportunity to look forward to in our fair little village. I always knew it was up to me to make it happen, but I waited and waffled, because “there are no other content strategists here.”

But of course, that’s not true. There are locals interested in the same things I’m interested in, even if they’re not wearing a content strategist hat (hell, that’s not even my job title). So I finally put the group together, and, lo and behold, within two days I’ve got five other members. Very encouraging!

And now, for the regularly scheduled list of excuses for not updating this website: Well, look, I was really busy. I had to have my gallbladder out, and then I moved. Things have, in fact, settled down now, so I really have no excuse. Regular posting shall commence!

One of the limitations of one of my CS projects at work is that a messaging strategy is out of scope. At the outset, that didn’t seem like a big deal to me — the client is relying on their own office to handle pretty much all execution (copywriting, photography, development and programming), while we’re providing analysis and planning.

But then, this week, I caught Kristina Halvorson’s An Event Apart presentation about messaging in content strategy. (It’s a great presentation, and got me all jazzed up about messaging strategies, and I ran to my manager and started prattling on about it, and now she’s requested the link and passed it around leadership, so! Thanks for making me look good, Kristina!)

Anyway, now I don’t see how content strategy and messaging strategy could possibly be separated. I’ve been scratching my head about how to deliver a robust content plan without a messaging strategy. (Weirdly, in my last job, I used to stress about writing websites for clients because I never had messaging strategies because I DIDN’T KNOW that was a thing that existed. Live and learn.)

Luckily, I fell very hard in love last week with page tables, courtesy of Halvorson’s Content Strategy for the Web, via this post by Relly Annet-Baker. The idea seems so necessary, and yet I’ve never worked with them before (not having had the opportunity to go in-depth on website strategy in the past, re: my last parenthetical).

But here? They’re the ideal tool to get the job done. While it’s not a messaging strategy, it does help answer similar questions. For each major page, I’m drafting up a table (tweaked to meet specific needs, of course), and can indicate the page’s objectives, users, message — and how to accomplish that message. When a page needs to, say, encourage visitors to donate money, the page table says so, then provides a list of tactics to generate said encouragement (like lots and lots of pathos-inducing language and pictures!).

This technique has been getting some oohs and ahhs from my teammates, and is going to provide a nice framework once the content plan gets handed over to the client. They should (emphasis) be able to create the content for each page of their website along fairly strategic lines. So, big thanks to the content strategy community, whose tweets and articles brought some key ingredients together for me this week!

When I first connected my job (that is, the tasks I completed at work) to that of a content strategist, I spent a lot of time trumpeting the Content First! rallying cry. I did it so much that some friends pretended to play a drinking game in which they took shots for every tweet in which I uttered the phrase. Hardy har.

So it was with some trepidation that I read Mark Boulton’s excellent article today, in which he has a go at my sacred cow. But he’s absolutely right: it shouldn’t be Content First, but Structure First, Content Always. Absolutely. Because of course, that’s what we mean.

We say Content First, but we really mean Message First. We mean Function First, Purpose First, Structure First. We mean, Answer Some Damn Basic Questions About What You’re Doing And Why First. Have those messy conversations. Figure out your message. Understand your undercurrents. First.

We mean these things, we mean all of these things, boiled down into this one word, content. But the word is getting misappropriated or mismanaged, and its nuances get lost in the internet shuffle, and yet we keep chanting content first, content first. So there’s absolutely something to Boulton’s call for revision.

But if I were still at my old agency, I don’t think the difference would matter to me. Content First was crucial to my initial approach to content strategy, which arose from a very reactionary place. I took on a content strategist role at that agency because I saw a gap no one was filling. I had been hired to answer phones (I was unemployed and scared and unsure of my direction and figured that getting my foot in the door at an agency, any agency, was a good idea), and quickly saw that nobody there was writing. We were developing websites without writer or editor, without any kind of attention to messaging or strategy. Client content was taken as it was given and pasted into Joomla and published. I was a writer and this drove me mad, so within months I went from playing secretary to running content audits.

But such an approach came with a lot of reactionary tactics. It involved a lot of making arguments, pleading my case, and ranting about Content First. It meant repeatedly, strenuously, justifying my existence. I had magicked my role out of thin air, it appeared, so there was an understandable defensiveness. Content strategy, and my job, felt precarious, and could be canceled or ignored or disregarded at any time. Content strategy needed to fight for its life.

Along the way, I felt that defensiveness in others, too. Not across the board, certainly, but that same justify-your-existence aggression is out there in other agencies, other freelancers, other companies. There’s something ugly to it, but also something necessary. When you’re spending all your energy getting stakeholders to understand what content means and why it matters, there is, unfortunately, little room left to get them to understand that content is message and message is structure and all of these things are fluid and meaningful and beautiful and hard.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be trying. We should be working to educate stakeholders with the best, most robust possible messages about our work. But I do understand the war cry buried in Content First, and that even that message, without nuance, is still a first step.

Good new, everyone! I’m working on a content strategy project at work. So far, it’s a challenge, mainly because I feel quite out of the CS loop (even only three months into my copywriting role). The articles I’ve missed! The blogs I’ve skipped! For me, content strategy is rooted in conversation — the conversations of designers and writers and developers and editors and marketers who are all working to establish standards and move forward with the best UX they can. And it’s a conversation I’ve had to, unfortunately, tune out so that I could focus on learning the ropes of traditional advertising agency life.

Working at a traditional ad agency has been fabulous, but of course it means that digital work doesn’t cross our plates too often. But with a recent website redesign for a new client in the works, I’ve been tapped for more than copywriting. Exciting! Terrifying! I feel like I’m about to take a test I didn’t study for.

So it’s back to that conversation. Trying to listen. Trying to read. Trying to find time where I’m not writing alternate subheads long enough to engage my brain in site maps and use cases.

It also means that I need to post here more often. Part of conversation is participating, not just lurking. Truth: I’ve written about half a dozen posts that have been deleted before publication because: they’re nothing new, it’s been said, I’m too amateur, I’m too self-conscious. New rule: no more worrying about that. I’m going to document this process, even the most late-to-the-CS-party revelations, because I want to get a picture of how I’m thinking through it.

Starting now.

Wrote a blog post last Friday! Saved it to my work email. Can’t access until tomorrow. Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

Ohhhhhhh, I want to write more. Ouch. It hurts. The not writing and the wanting.

I’ve been really occupied lately with adjusting to my new role as a copywriter. The shift seems to have taken up a great deal of mental energy – in a good way, but still a way that feels consuming. And it’s not just the new role, but also the new company and the new industry – I’m in advertising now, and that’s leaps and bounds away from the tiny web dev shop I worked in before.

This is all an excuse for why I haven’t been producing regular content for this website (I worked so hard to set it up correctly, only to leave it gathering dust). But the truth is that I’ve lost touch, somewhat, with content strategy these past few weeks. I still read my regular content strategy blogroll, I still follow content strategists on the Twitters, I still think about content strategy. But I’m not practicing it in a tangible way anymore.

This makes me sad.

This was the very concern that made me hesitate to accept the offer. I’m downright over-the-moon in love with my new job, so there’s absolutely no regret. But I was afraid (rightly so) that “becoming” a copywriter would derail my development in content strategy – a field that I adore, that speaks to my strengths, and that gave me crucial direction and validation in my career. It might be that last consideration that pains me the most. The shift brings a certain amount of disconnection and – well, this is starting to feel a lot like guilt. As if content strategy might ask me why I never call anymore.

My work now never involves navigation or information hierarchy or content audits. I don’t get to make sitemaps. I don’t get to make wireframes. Instead, it’s about headlines and subheads and body copy for print advertisements. And I truly love my new work. But I miss my old.

This week was supposed to be sooo productive. SO. PRODUCTIVE.

Instead, it’s Wednesday, and all I’ve done today is delete four different header images.

Ideas. I haz them. I don’t haz them.

Getting this website up and running again has been a bloody nightmare. Had to switch hosting. Had to switch domain registration. Had to reinstall the system. Still can’t wrap my brain around MySQL, no matter how many times it’s explained to me.

It’s been …six? months since I’ve decided to overhaul this thing, and this is where I’m at now. I’ve learned:

• that I have just enough knowledge to know what I don’t know,
• that not knowing things really pisses me off,
• that back-end changes take phenomenally longer to wrangle than I want them to.

Now I have to, you know, design this site. And then start actually producing regular quality content for it. Sure. NBD.