I wrote an essay about cooking and vulnerability for my friend Nicole Jones’ magazine, Born Hungry. “Ordinary Cooking Takes Courage”:

To cook for someone is to open a relationship with them, to be vulnerable, to risk rejection. We’re offering the most basic type of gift, and it’s the basicness of it that makes us hold back, by triggering our fear of being ordinary.

Content strategy isn’t a technique or a process or a seven-stage program that will solve your organization’s content problems. If it was that easy, we’d all be relaxing on our yachts right now (WiFi enabled, of course) instead of tearing our hair out.

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In Episode 6 of the Together London Podcast, I talk to Nicole Jones about designing content, content strategy at Facebook, and being a maker. Check out Swell Content and Born Hungry, and follow Nicole on twitter @nicoleslaw.

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Two guests posts by me, for the Web Managers Group and Content Strategy Forum Cape Town.

Why Web Managers Need Content Strategy:

Part of our role as web managers is to help our colleagues to see their own reality. I’m not talking about opinion – what we think the organisation should do online – no, I’m talking about reality, obvious to people outside the building, but difficult for insiders to see.

How travel changes your career:

When I got back to London I wasn’t carrying a suitcase stuffed with greenbacks, I didn’t have a pipeline of new business leads, and my wallet wasn’t full of business cards—this was pre-twitter and my interpersonal skills were, ahem, underdeveloped—but the thing that changed my career was the attitude I learned at [the conference].

I’m speaking at these upcoming events:

• 21 September 2012, London: Advocate, Adapt, Align: Using Content Strategy to Change Your Organisation, a joint workshop with Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Kate Kenyon about how to get your content strategy adopted.
• 28-29 September 2012, Rome: EuroIA, the European Information Architecture conference. I’m talking about how information architects can become agents of change.
• 24-26 October 2012, Cape Town: Content Strategy Forum 2012 is in Cape Town, South Africa! I’m excited to be presenting this year (I organised last year’s event in London.)

I’ve also pitched a talk to South By Southwest interactive: API or Die: Why Digital-First Companies Thrive. If you participate in the PanelPicker voting process, I’d appreciate your consideration.

Hope to see you at an event soon.

After two years of sold-out shows in Minneapolis, Confab: the Content Strategy Conference is coming to London on 25-27 March 2013 at the Mermaid. And I’m excited to announce that my company Together London is producing Confab in collaboration with our friends at Brain Traffic. Make sure you save the date: this is the international content strategy event that you won’t want to miss.

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In Episode 5 of the Together London Podcast, I talk to Gabriel Smy about content strategy for small businesses, blogging, and being honest. Check out his blogs: SmyWord, Verbatim Poetry, and The Tongues of Men, and follow him on twitter @gabrielsmy.

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Most organizations are taking huge digital risks.

“We need someone to help us with our content strategy.” That was the request from a prospective client in the digital marketing department of a financial services group, and after spending five minutes with their website I understood why. Their business units were out of control: publishing endless content without a plan. The symptom they wanted to fix was poor customer experience ratings: most customers asked to be called back instead of attempting to use the website.

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In Episode 4 of the Together London Podcast, I talk to Erin Kissane about what she learned editing A List Apart magazine, her book The Elements of Content Strategy, why she started Contents Magazine, and what we can do about the problem of harassment online. Follow Erin on twitter @kissane.

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Organizations can’t succeed in our new multi-platform, mobile world unless they transform themselves into digital-first businesses.

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