Confessions of a Content Strategist: Matthew Grocki

Part of why we interview content strategists is to learn about major issues in the field, as well as situational challenges and their solutions. Matt Grocki delivers in his interview about the state of content strategy, as well as a revelatory narrative about how businesses need to seriously start thinking about how to make people the forefront of their content initiatives.

Like almost all content strategists, Matthew was “a content strategist for a number of years without knowing it.” Matthew started his career in technical communications as a writer explaining complicated financial issues, as well as how to use complex medical and financial software.

As his career evolved, he started managing writers, rather than writing. At that same time, the mid-sized firm he worked for started acquiring businesses. As a result, he was spending a lot of his time evaluating the new company’s content and deciding if they should keep, rewrite, or toss.  As global entities, Matthew found himself thinking not just about DNS issues, but voice and tone, localization in different languages and markets and core governance issues so important to the practice of a content strategist.

While acquiring and managing content and his team. Matthew was implementing many of the tools content strategists use today. For example, he was creating page tables before they were called page tables: at that time, he called them writer’s templates (you still may).  He realized that he was doing a lot of heavy lifting outside of technical writing and got in touch with Margot Bloomstein, another local content strategists, who put him in touch with other content strategists and recommended who to follow and what to read. Matthew opened his own content consultancy, Grass Fed Content shortly after. After 15 years in our business, Matthew is fairly outspoken about the future of content, as well as where the field needs to shift its focus.

 

“Content is more of an opportunity.”

Matthew is very clear about how content strategy needs to evolve: towards a more promising and positive future. “We need to stop being the negative nellies in the room; when content comes up, the eye rolling starts.” Matthew’s assertion is that we need to stop being pessimistic about content and learn to see content as an opportunity for businesses.  Selling it this way will do a lot toward fighting the prevailing negativity around content.

 

“Your job is to provide value and solve problems.”

Matthew shared a few stories about his recent engagement with a global computer retailer. He learned two major things from this engagement:

1. Listen
2. Look outside the SOW

Throughout the six month engagement, he addressed customer service content for all areas of the business. He and his team were tasked with improving customer satisfaction and reducing call volumes by providing better content for the retailer’s consumer and enterprise customers. “The tricky thing with this and other enterprise level content engagements is that you are brought in to one area of the business, but you end up needing to prove your value to other departments and demonstrate how you can help their content practices.”

During the engagement, Matthew and his team talked to 50-60 stakeholders to understand the internal content ecosystem, bottlenecks and challenges. What they realized was that the business was writing in siloes and that there need to be more cross-pollinating between the different writing groups. The reaction they got from the client? “We’ve had a lot of consultants tell us what to do, but you were the first consultant to ever ask us what our opinion was before you ever gave us your recommendations.” #win

Matthew observes, “Content strategy is a continuous process—you’re educating folks within the business and you’re also selling your value about what it is that you do for them. Having sensitivity to know that every content environment is different and you must fully understand it before you make any recommendations is critical. You have to listen to the actual people who are conducting the work.” (Mr. Vilhauer, anyone?)

 

“Look outside the SOW.”

Matthew also pointed out that content strategy projects can often mutate in the middle of an engagement. In this particular circumstance, because he interviewed so many writers, he heard their fears about the new CMS they were going to implement shortly. He went back to his main client contact and said, “While this isn’t part of the SOW (statement of work), I think it’s really important for us to talk to the CMS vendor to make sure the writers’ concerns are being addressed.”

Shockingly, the CMS vendor has not considered the writers (I know, right?), and Matthew was able to make some recommendations that put the writers’ needs closer to the front of the line.  “With any engagement there’s a level of give and take”, Matthew observed. “It comes down to client management; the value of an hour long conversation in the shadow of a six month engagement was worth the investment of time to change the way they look at their CMS implementation moving forward.”

Matthew adds about content strategy in general and for the future, “Our industry has to stop having rose colored glasses when it comes down to aligning business objectives with content. Our recommendations can go beyond content and often deal with organizational change—when we’re recommending how to modify an org chart, we have to have the business strategy chops to back that up.”

How about you? Have any confessions you want to share with your peers? We’d love to help you do just that. No confession booth necessary.

via Online it ALL Matters http://onlineitallmatters.blogspot.com/2013/07/confessions-of-content-strategist.html