The idea of looking at trends in our profession speak directly to the idea of content strategy. It’s a “beyond the document” look at how we create and deliver content to various audiences. It’s about content re-use and single-sourcing, about content management, about filtering content, about creating better ways to serve content consumers. It’s also about how social media has raised the bar, and how consumers will take matters into their own hands if we don’t step up to the plate.

STC Summit attendees will eventually be able to hear the entire presentation along with the slide show. If you didn’t attend, you can see a slightly more concise version of the slides here. Comments encouraged – I’m truly interested in your impressions and feedback.

If you’re being asked to use your content in more than one way, you might be at the stage where the more part includes methods or technologies you’re not really familiar with. Maybe content re-use means syndication or collaborative creation with other departments or divisions, or incorporating content from other sites or user generated content. It could mean figuring how to build community or provide better support or get better feedback.

Maybe more means creating or incorporating help from the technical side, sharing the content in a knowledge base, putting it on the Web, maybe with automatic updates, and adopting XML, perhaps figuring out how the new DITA standard works for you in all of this.

No matter what your situation, you’re in the position where you’re supposed to figure out the XML stuff and the Web stuff and the quality stuff and the stuff around RSS feeds and copyright, how it all fits together, and why you need any of it, anyhow.

After all, if you’ve even tried to coordinate content creation between departments, or track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns, or just share content between a CMS and LMS, you’ll recognize how hard it is to find two systems that play nice together, let alone get an entire corporate strategy in place. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. The promise of content management was to solve the silo problem, but in many cases has simply created larger silos.

I’ve posted slides from my workshop, where we look at:

• The concepts of content convergence and integration, the principles behind it, and the market forces that are driving the trend
• Opportunities created by content convergence in various contexts, from technical documentation converging to support documentation to marketing material to user-generated content
• The changing nature of content to allow for successful convergence, and the changes in processes to support it
• Ways to prepare your organization to adapt, and explore ways to allow content convergence to drive improvements in business efficiency and customer relationships

If you’re the type of person who likes to write, think, edit, and then publish , tink about the pain of re-using content from an article created in a word processing program to a blog entry. You had to go through and check things like apostrophes, quotation marks, and dashes to make sure you didn’t end up with question marks in the middle of your carefully-crafted prose. That can be called “dumb work” – silly rote tasks that don’t add any value at all.

Now, multiply that dumb work by millions when content gets locked into a proprietary system. You may have a million-dollar content management installation, but what happens when you want to use your content elsewhere, or when you need to migrate content between your behemoth system and specialty systems, such as a component content management system?

Unless there is a vested interest by, say, a competitor in providing some sort of import wizard from a specific proprietary format into their own format, your content is now held hostage by the vendor’s system. This used to be considered good business sense, as it locked you into their system for long periods of time. In today’s world, however, it’s considered a pretty bad move on everyone’s part. The recognition that content is a valuable corporate asset whose value increases with its potential for re-use has changed the game.

Re-use is a concept that is often discussed at too low of a level within the corporate sphere. There are several kinds of re-use:

• Single-sourcing. This isn’t a particularly sexy type of re-use, but is the industrial workhorse of re-use that is the backbone of any product or service provider that produces technical content (user, installation, maintenance, and quick-start guides, training material, knowledge bases, and so on). The ROI on standards-based, re-usable content becomes critical, particularly in cases where translation are involved.
• Integration. Content among departments, divisions, or partner companies may need to be mashed together to create a cohesive whole. Saving troublesome conversion steps toward a common format is a huge time-saver, and eliminates the worries that the conversion process has eliminated or corrupted critical content that affects the quality and integrity of the end result.
• Convergence. This re-use case is bringing together content from various types of sources, such as mixing single-sourced content with user-generated content in a knoweldge base. The need to “round-trip” content relies on being able to get content in and out of systems easily and quickly, with as much automation and as little human intervention as possible.
• Syndication. Content flies (or should fly) outside of the organization, in the form of news releases, event announcements, and so on. If content doesn’t conform to the standards-based formats – microformats is the most common example – then the value of automating syndiations is lost, with a default position of cutting and pasting into multiple sites.

Having content that can “play nice” with other systems is a key component of a good content strategy. Because large-scale content projects are dependent on the technologies that manage the content, it’s critical to look at how the system treats the content, and how open the content is for re-use in strategic ways.

The main thrust is that content can’t be produced and consumed in silos any more. It’s no longer practical, on a number of levels.  First, organizations cannot afford to produce unique content for multiple products and product lines. Second, as consumers get used to engaging with social networking applications, the bar is raised; users demand more and better information to be delivered faster. Third, the type of strategy makes all the difference in an organization’s success; a too-timid strategies may do enough to get noticed but not enough to really satisfy requirements. Or, worse, a mal-adapted strategy may backfire if the outcome delivers the wrong content (or format) to the wrong users, in inappropriate channels or at the wrong time.

The feedback from the conference was: talk about this more – we need to further this discussion! Therefore, this autumn I’m taking my content convergence message on the road.

First stop: DocTrain East 2008 in Burlington, MA (just outside of Boston), where I’ll present Content Convergence: Trends in the Creation, Production, and Maintenance of Technical Content
Second stop: LavaCon in Honolulu, HI, where the program shows Content Convergence: The Future is Closer than You Think is followed by It’s the Content, Not the Tool: Making Project Decisions to Ensure Smooth CMS Adoptions
Third stop: STC Central New York in Syracuse, NY where I’ll talk about the principles of content convergence in the context of technical communication

You can see the slides, which I’ve posted to SlideShare, or read more about Content Convergence and Integration in TechCom Manager or in the Data Conversion Laboratory newsletter.

As well, if you’re already integrating and converging content, let me know. I’m interested in knowing about organizations who are using content convergence principles in interesting and effective ways.