Sue Davis and others at the London Content Strategy Meetup

3 March 2013

Content strategists: who are these people?

Several web designers, a former journalist who hates making phone calls, and a man who uses Victorian cautionary tales to make his point… these were among the speakers at last week’s London Content Strategy Meetup. It’s the second time I’ve attended one of these events and what struck me on both occasions is the diversity of the people involved.

Sue Davis and others at the London Content Strategy Meetup.Meetup attendees are from a range of ages and professional backgrounds and, based on those I’ve met, are enthusiastic people who like to keep learning and to share what they’ve learned. Apart from a tendency to over-use the word ‘awesome‘, my kind of people.

Most don’t actually call themselves content strategists: they are designers and developers, SEO specialists, project managers, information and user experience architects, and (like me) web editors and writers. But all are likely at some point to look at something they are asked to do and say, as one speaker put it: ‘This is a content strategy problem’.

Judging by the stories from speakers, looking at a problem that way can achieve a lot. Some examples were:

  • a charity fundraising appeal that saw a huge increase in donations
  • a disaster recovery plan for a large, complex organisation
  • getting health messages across to the right people
  • finding ways to get your content onto different devices for different audiences
  • achieving ‘one-click publishing’ without ‘one-click embarrassment’.

Here’s a plug for last week’s speakers, who were all excellent.
Cat Townsend
Catherine Scott
Chris Atherton
Clare Evans
Elizabeth McGuane
Ellis Pratt
Rob Mansfield
Rupert Bowater
Sue Davis

And finally, here’s a great blog post from Rob Mansfield on the people who really shouldn’t call themselves content strategists.

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