by Janus Boye
Content strategy in 2021 is changing as we are improving our understanding of both writing for the web and how content is consumed in today’s world
Michael Andrews in his Arlington, Virginia home office
When I recently talked to Michael Andrews, I wasn’t surprised that we would talk about content, but I was reminded of how the explosion in channels is having a big impact on content. Michael shared his latest thinking on how organisations are beefing up their content game and how we are moving away from web pages towards content as a living system.
Michael is Content Strategy Evangelist at Kontent.ai, where he advises global enterprises on how to innovate their content practices and operations. Today he is based in Arlington, Virginia, but he has also lived and worked in India, UK, New Zealand and Italy. He is our expert of the month.
20 years of progress with content strategy
Before he started working with content strategy, Michael actually focused on online metadata at the beginning of his career in the ’80s as a technical information specialist at the US Commerce Department. As he said in our call, his real interest initially wasn’t so much the web & IT, but rather he was intrigued by what wasn’t working so well. This led to him looking at Human-Computer Interaction, which turned his focus to content and service design.
Michael on stage doing a presentation on content metadata to Singapore Content Strategy Meetup in 2019
In the past two decades, he has focused on content strategy in various roles. He’s worked with global digital agency Publicis Sapient and led their content strategy work with non-profit and government clients. He’s also done several years of content strategy consulting supporting international clients and he has even served the community at large as Community Director for the Content Strategy Forum.
Since 2019, he has had the somewhat unusual title as Content Strategy Evangelist with Kentico. While Developer Evangelist is a widely adopted title among tech vendors focused on developer relations, it’s visionary of Kentico to embrace relations with the content folks that using their software and Michael clearly has the experience required for the role.
Michael works with customers and coaches them on how to approach content strategy. As Michael puts it:
It’s about advocating on behalf of users - both users of the CMS and the end-users of the content
Content Strategy in 2021 is changing
As a term content strategy has been around for a while now. While there was a huge initial buzz around the term, today other content terms have also appeared like content operations and content design.
We’ll talk terminology later, but according to Michael, we are far from done with content strategy. He pointed to three major forces at play at the moment:
Organisations are transitioning away from treating content as web pages to content as a living system. The explosion in channels also means you need more than web pages to deliver a great customer experience across apps, laptops, watches and huge screens
Content is no longer just one big blob, but made up of many smaller pieces. Content assets like images and video which are used on this page as well, but also smaller piece like content used to describe a product, or even content that goes in a GDPR consent form
Headless is driving agencies, vendors and customer alike to think differently about content.
There’s also been substantial progress according to Michael. Not only has usability improved considerably during the past 20 years, but it’s also possible to meet more targeted needs.
Michael spoke about an explosion in channels, and also increased volume and velocity of content. There’s more and more and it’s coming at it quicker than in the past. This has also led to the size of content shrinking. People consume smaller pieces, whether as a part of their daily SoMe doses or completing tasks online. It needs to be snackable and then from time to time, some consumers will dig deeper into your storytelling.
Content strategy vs. content design
As a final topic, we talked about what we call things. Words matter. As Michael said:
Content strategy was a sexy term a decade ago, but today it is getting more traction from customers.
He went on and talked about how it might look like we are just renaming industry buzzwords, but really in his view, we are collaboratively digging deeper into understanding writing for the web and really understand how content is diverse in today’s world. One example is the current rise of content for voice.
Content design is getting quite some buzz here in 2021. With his international background, Michael said that it’s worth keeping in mind, that the term actually comes from different origins and is used differently around the world:
In the UK content design came from Government Digital Service and was more oriented towards delivering digital services
In the US it has been more commercially led and content was then in turn more interface content to support an action or digital product.
Content is clearly here to stay. Perhaps we are sometimes too quick to move on to the next thing, before actually solving the problem we set out to solve? With Michael’s focus as a Content Strategy Evangelist he is clearly helping customers shape their thinking and up their content game.
Learn more about Michael Andrews
Michael has his own personal blog called Story Needle where he writes about content strategy for a post-device era. Michael is also the author of two books about metadata for web content:
If you don’t just want to read, you can also watch a recording below from a talk Michael gave last year at the IA Conference on IA for headless structured content.