The Web Project Guide Podcast: Episode 9: Develop a Strategy for Your Content (w/ Kristina Halvorson)
July 19, 2022
It’s The Web Project Guide Podcast, and we made you a new episode.
Back in 2010, I discovered content strategy. I wrote a blog post, and that blog post was retweeted by someone named Kristina Halvorson.
I had no idea who she was, but a quick search revealed she just wasn’t a random person: she wrote the book on content strategy, and with this, my exposure as Someone Who Talks About Content began to grow.
Six months later, I was hired by Blend. This was before the second edition of Content Strategy for the Web, and before Confab was born. This is what still felt like the “early days” of content strategy as a serious discipline, though looking back I can see it was actually the start of a second phase — a phase where early leaders found disciples, and those disciples were helping the industry grow.
I say all of this because this month’s guest is Kristina herself, and while a lot has changed, a lot has also stayed the same. Our discussion this month was recorded live as a webinar, and then cut down to focus on content strategy, with discussion around what to do when you encounter content strategy in the wild: how to understand the different names, how to decipher what’s important at the start, and how to begin finding the people to spin up your own practice.
Deane:
Kristina, you talked about how the explosion in content design is happening now. For years the title we’ve used is content strategist, and then content marketer, or content designer. Going forward, looking over the next five years, what do you think is the — I want to say title du jour, but that sounds super pejorative — do you think we’re going to see a shift from people identifying as content strategist to content designers?
Kristina:
Oh, we already have. I mean huge product teams across Facebook and Shopify and Airbnb and Spotify and Netflix, and I mean, I could go on. A lot of these organizations are taking their product content teams, who were previously called content strategists, as frontline independent practitioners or who are doing content on the front lines or managing people who are doing content and changing them to content designers.
Which frankly, Meghan Casey and I have been talking about this as long as I can remember. My concern was that if we started talking about content design, people would be like, “Oh, fonts!”
But of course, we have matured as a field beyond that. My hope is that what we will begin to see is content strategy sitting under the title of director or senior director or vice president or senior vice president.
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