The problem with content is that everyone has their own opinion about it, so I can never be right...
This is my rather belated, more-than-140-characters response to @Peterkin‘s tweet of 8th October.
Content, and in particular the copy element of content, is a mixture of art and science.
With the art element comes subjectivity (as well as the interesting part of the job). That doesn’t mean that your opinion shouldn’t count for more than someone else’s. Much as I love social review sites like Qype, a single review of a restaurant by Jay Rayner outweighs dozens of reviews on Qype. Why? Because I believe Jay Rayner’s experience, expertise and ability to express his opinions lends him more credibility. And so it should go with content and user experience.
There’s also a problem that the word ‘content’ doesn’t scare people who don’t work in the field so that they feel able to comment with authority on it.1
For content: “I speak English, therefore you should listen to my opinion on copy.”2
The same goes for user experience: “I’m a user of websites, I have experience of them, therefore you should listen to my opinion on design.”
It’s the X Factor effect: “I listen to music therefore my opinion on someone’s singing and performance is perfectly valid, even though I can’t hold a note myself. It must be true because ITV are asking me to call in and vote.”
Ignoring the fact that X Factor values your opinion only to the extent of the revenue it gets from your premium-rate call, X Factor is a democracy where your vote counts as much as someone else’s.3
Coming up with great content or user experience, however, should be more technocratic process. (I suspect benign dictatorship would be the best model to follow, though.) It’s ok that some opinions count for more than others, and as a content specialist, your opinion on content should count the most. It is, after all, what you’re being paid for.
- Worth reading in relation to this is Gabriel Smy’s blog post: ‘Content strategy: as boring as it sounds?‘ that asks if it would “help customers to value content more if we called it something else”. [↩]
- My most memorable painful experience: being lectured by a non-native English speaker on my extremely deliberate and considered use of contractions. [↩]
- Yeah, I know the judges normally get the final say. [↩]
Justin
on Oct 16th, 2009
@ 5.16 pm:
Everyone’s a critic…
Peterkin
on Oct 19th, 2009
@ 12.03 pm:
True, but as Kenneth rightly points out, some people are more qualified than others. It’s taken me three years working in online content to fully realise that we don’t ‘just’ write. Our understanding of spelling, grammar, how content appears on a webpage, how it fits in with UX, how it can deliver what the user is looking for and how it can deliver what the business needs, is far more than simply rearranging a few words to make them look/sound pretty.
Unfortunately, on a daily basis, content professionals deal with other people in and outside of our businesses who think that that is all we do – and all this does is make our jobs harder. And while it’s unlikely that a piece of poorly written content, or a lack of content strategy, will have an instant impact on the business, over time it will erode user experience and brand values.
Thankfully, I currently work for a company that appreciates content (despite my original tweet, written in a moment of frustration) – but there are 1000s out there that don’t see the need for content professionals, and that’s scary.