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2019 Conference

SNT3: Creating a Content-First Culture: Assessing Your Strengths and Barriers

Tracy Playle, a consultant content strategist working with higher ed, said she often runs into a problem when she visits campuses to discuss their content strategy: she’s constantly being asked to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.

Many times, told her audience during her session “Creating a Content-First Culture: Assessing Your Strengths and Barriers” at High Ed Web 19 in Milwaukee, leaders told her their teams “weren’t creative enough.” Instead she found loads of creativity, and a ton of aversion to risk.

What that situation calls for, is developing a content strategy that enables success.  Playle defines content strategy as “The process of supporting organizational goals by planning, creating, distributing and maintaining content in a way that is useful and useable to your audience, and understandable and adaptable to machines and intelligent systems.”

She laid out 10 areas that an organization should asses to determine their strengths and barriers to having a strong content strategy.

Those are:

  • Strategy and Vision
  • Leadership and Accountability
  • Knowing your Audience
  • Outputs, Structures and efficiencies
  • Assessment and Evaluation
  • Collaboration and Work Practice
  • Risk Tolerance and Creativity
  • Resource and Investment
  • Skills and Know-how
  • Training and Development

The hope is for organizations to assess whether they are performing at a low, medium or high level. That knowledge can then serve as the basis for a plan to improve and grow. Moving to a high-performance model breaks down silos, helps organizations learn more about how to reuse and repurpose content, and increases creativity by lowering risk aversion,  Playle said.

“In a high performing model we don’t think about what we’ve done before, we look to what we can do in the future,” she said.

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