The reason I say it’s worth considering is that if you’re like majority of the practitioners I meet, you have an area of expertise within content strategy or marketing communications or technical authoring or the other 31 subsets of the publishing field, and may have some ancillary knowledge about a few of the related areas. But every so often, you need to break out of your comfort zone and go learn something else, something new, something deeper. Congility is one of those conferences where you can do that.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t want to intimate that you need extensive knowledge of XML to get any value from the presentations. What I’m saying is that if you want to broaden your knowledge and increase your market worth, then this is the perfect place to do that. Even as we’re defining the field of content strategy, it’s changing. We’re looking at integrated content systems, with all of the permutations and combinations of marketing, social, technical, and product information that you can imagine. Just as we decry the project that leaves content in the hands of the technologists, we are moving into the phase where we should decry the content strategist who leaves content technologies in the sole hands of technologists. We might not have to know it in any deep way, but we should know enough not to be steamrollered by those who have technology agendas that don’t benefit our content strategies. There’s something for practitioners of all levels, so you’re bound to find a presentation or workshop that suits you.

Congility is just a few weeks off, so check it out today. I’ll save you a seat in my workshop.
Registration

IDI’s Rahel Bailie will be there, making one of the keynote presentations, The Content Strategy Paradox, and running a workshop, Not All Content Strategies are Created Equal, about strategies for cross-genre content.

Read her take on content agility
Revisit her 2010 webinar on content strategy and ROI

The support center reps who expertly flip through their oversized binders crammed full of product content supplemented by sticky notes is a fast-dying stereotype. As software takes over the job of collective corporate memory, the delivery of content becomes as important as the content quality. Because no matter how awesome your content is, no one can use it if they can’t find it.

If you haven’t thought about attending Confab, now’s the time to think about joining us. We’d love to see you there!

Content strategy is an exciting place to be. It’s an emerging field, still open to interpretations and possibilities. As an emerging area of practice, content strategy promises to change the landscape of our work in significant ways. The definition of content strategy continues to evolve as we develop better definitions of the components that come together to form the framework that will eventually become the body of knowledge. So while single-sourcing or DITA is not, of itself, a content strategy, a content strategy could very well include these concepts.

By asserting that content strategy is the intersection of business analysis, user experience, and content development, we are laying claim to a profound change in the way we treat content. And we expect no less from the organizations that content serves. When we treat content, instead of a drain, as a corporate asset, when we look at its untapped potential instead of its cost, when we think about content in terms of consumer and corporate benefit, we are looking at content through a strategic lens.

LavaCon 2.0: The Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies – Sept 29-Oct 2, 2010

I’m in good company, with Robert Rose, Mark Fidelman, and others speaking on various aspects of content strategy. It’s not just marketing content, it’s strategy for social content, technical content, and a whole lot more.

Localization World – Oct 6-8, 2010

At this conference, content strategy hasn’t even made it onto the map. My attempt at introducing it got as far as a place on a panel for Optimizing the Global Content Supply Chain. Hey, it’s a start.

Iceweb Conference – Oct 7-8, 2010

Billed as: Going beyond the browser and focusing on good content, engaging users, social networks, optimizing stuff and mobile solutions. I wish I were going to this, but can’t make that claim. Content strategist Karen McGrane will be there, though. And how cool would it be to go to a conference in Reykjavik?

Feeling left behind when it comes to new technologies? Do you know instinctively that you should establish a public professional presence but don’t know where to start? Do you want to expand your professional network, and access to people with incredible expertise?

One way to increase your corporate value is to ensure that you have a strong and easily-identifiable personal brand. It’s not enough simply to have good references or have no embarrassing pictures on Facebook.

Whether it be to the corporation that employs you, or a professional practitioner demonstrating your potential to clients, your brand forms an impression before you hit the meeting room, and extends far beyond the resume.

Creating and protecting your personal brand is an important career strategy, and not just for independent consultants. An online professional presence has become the single most important self-marketing tool for demonstrating expertise and professional credibility. Learn to use social media in a smart, responsible, career-enhancing way.

Is this workshop is for you?

This workshop will be helpful if you:

• Don’t have your own website or blog or aren’t posting to it regularly
• Don’t have a LinkedIn profile or aren’t actively using it to build your personal brand
• Don’t have a Twitter account, or have one but aren’t sure how to use it effectively
• Wonder whether social communities (Facebook, MySpace, Ning) are useful for you
• Want to use social media without it becoming a waste of time
• Want to put technology to work for you without making big mistakes along the way
• Want to take pride in your presence online for your career, practice, or small business

Participants will learn:

• The six basic aspects of personal brand management
• How to create a distinctive, unforgettable brand
• Techniques for presenting an integrated brand
• Tools that can help to easily manage a personal brand

January 16, 2010 workshop, co-sponsored by STC Canada West Coast
Location: Downtown Vancouver >> Register online

January 30, 2010 workshop, sponsored by Intentional Design
207-14888 104th Ave, Surrey >> Register by email or pay through PayPal

If you’ve never been to CANUX, you’re missing out on a fabulous opportunity. Being up in a resort-like mountain setting at the Banff Centre imbues the workshop with some cosmic-force creative atmosphere. There are a few days left to sign up with the advance discount, so don’t delay if you’re sitting on the fence.

• October, New Orleans, LA: Lavacon
  A conference for techcomm managers and project managers, this year’s theme is professional and career development. If you sense a career change in your near future, or are out of a job and want to move to a field with a future, I’m presenting two sessions. One is on content strategy; the other is on managing your personal brand online.
• October, webinar: Leveraging Content Assets on a Tight Budget
  Part of Aptara Corporation’s Thought Leader webinar series, you can learn how to align technology and processes with business goals, leverage existing content assets for better user experience, and creating an optimized content supply chain
• November, Banff, AB, Canada: CANUX
  I’ll be presenting a case study at this 2-day Canadian User Experience workshop. If you attend, you’ll also get the infamous Kristina Halvorson, whose keynote my presentation follows
• December, Boston, MA: Content Management Professionals Association Summit
  The theme of the trade association summit this year is open source standards. My presentation on “open source content” is a little different aspect of content strategy.
• December, Boston, MA:  Gilbane Boston
  I’ll be moderating a panel discussion on Content Modeling and Information Architectures for Content Management, which is a critical aspect of content strategy.

If you can’t complete your professional development in the content strategy area during 2009, there will be multiple opportunities during 2010. Stay tuned!

Here are the content strategy panels on the table:

• Greening Your Content: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rahel Anne Bailie, Intentional Design Inc.
  Oh, Go Service Yourself! Interactive Content for Humans, Colleen Jones, threebrick
  Understanding Content: The Stuff We Design For, Rachel Lovinger, Razorfish
  Content & Semantics: The Wild, Wild Web of Data, Rachel Lovinger, Razorfish and Rahel Anne Bailie, Intentional Design Inc.
  Why Your Content Sucks and How to Fix It, Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic
  Let’s Talk About CS: Understanding Content Strategy, Elena Melendy, Independent Content Strategy Consultant and others
  Content Strategy: Where UX, Design, and Content Play Nice, Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic
  Keep ‘Em Coming: Courting Customers with Content, Colleen Jones, threebrick

Voting ends on Sept 3rd, so to choose the panels you want to see on the roster, vote now.

Janus is in the enviable position of living and working “across the pond” where talking about dysfunctions isn’t sanctioned by threats of lawsuits and exposed to the “shoot the messenger” syndrome. On this side of the pond, a CM consultant is expected to turn away, tight-lipped, and not expose irregularities to public scrutiny. When one sees, for example, a CMS contract awarded to a questionable vendor – the vendor rep who leaves the group RFP debrief, where requirements were being discussed, and courts the IT Director instead – any questioning of this manipulation of the system will work against the consultant. It’s as if ethics takes a back seat to the expediency that requires membership to the inside track.

Janus Boye is organizer of the J Boye conference series. At the Philadelphia, online professionals can share knowledge, hear great keynote speakers, and further their professional development. If I weren’t already committed to going to the STC Summit, I would definitely be there.