Margot: Thanks!

Shannon: Thanks, and good luck on your audit.

I’m in the middle of a massive content audit right now. While content strategy may have been around for a long time, it hasn’t been put into practice the way it should. Now, those of us on the bandwagon are looking at major clean-up.

A word to the wise — get on the content strategy bandwagon early. Exponential content growth means that every day you go without a content strategy will add days to your timeline when you finally decide to sort it out.

Great stuff. It does finally feel like people are starting to pay closer attention to our practice. I suppose what’s starting to trouble me is that many companies are starting to divorce their Web content strategy from their enterprise content strategy. At some point I believe it will become necessary to blend the two.

As content strategists I believe we’ll start to be tasked to do much, much more and think about how online content and engagements that result from that content will eventually start to influence how we plan and produce our offline materials. In other words the scale will eventually tip in favor of the Web and all of its wonders reshaping what’s considered to be “traditional content.”

Enjoyed this piece a lot. Great stuff.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment.

I definitely agree that content strategy has been around awhile. I’ve been doing it in one form or another for more than 15 years myself. There are many content strategists — Ann Rockley comes to mind first — who have been using the term consistently and publicly the whole time. And, like you said, Dan Brown — smart as they get.

And before them, there were the champions of integrated marketing and library science who created the foundations of a lot the work we do today. As I mention in the article, content strategy existed a long time before the web did.

However, until recently, those of us in the trenches were fighting uphill battles, largely alone, to get content taken seriously online. In the last three years or so, content strategy has gained momentum and attention. The people who practice it are starting to identify and partner with each other on a much larger scale. So, I do think content strategy is an emerging discipline, in the respect that it is growing rapidly and becoming a more unified/recognizable profession.

Content strategy may not be new to you and I, but it’s new to a lot of people — and those are the people this article was intended to reach.

Thanks again for the comment. I love a good historical discussion!

However, one aspect of their message has always troubled me. In this article Melissa mentions that the web has been around for more than 15 years and wonders “why hasn’t content strategy come to prominence before now?” In _Content Strategy for the Web_ Kristina has a similar portrayal of this discipline being a relatively new addition, even, I believe, using the term “emerging.”

But haven’t many agencies been using terms like “Content Strategist” for over a decade? If Dan Brown happens to be listening in, I think he could verify that at the dot-bomb poster child marchFIRST there were dozens of content strategists.

Of course, the argument can be made that Melissa and Kristina are concerned more about the wider audience’s awareness of this discipline and role. I accept that. I just have always found it odd that throughout their discussions of content strategy they have never acknowledged that many people have had “Content Strategist” on their cubicle for many years now.