Content Strategy: The Key to Getting Clarity and Alignment

Words fascinate me. I’m that guy who likes to look up the etymology of any word. I mean I couldn’t help but wonder just now what the etymology of ‘etymology’ was. It’s not all fancy stuff either—a lot of it is similar to this guy:

When I die and y’all go through my search history, you’ll be disappointed to find mostly just definitions for very common words that I wasn’t sure I was using correctly.

— Joel Wade (@Wahday44) January 14, 2019

Anyway, as a content strategist, I got to spend a lot of time defining concepts that made up our clients’ websites. I studied their existing websites and strategic documents, speak with key voices across the organization and I made note of all the nouns they used to describe who they are, what they do, where they want to go and how they want to get there. 

And then I would go to our client with these lists of words and we spent time defining them: “You talk about ‘initiatives’ and ‘projects’ — do these refer to the same thing? Oh, they’re different? What makes an initiative and what makes a project? I’ve also noticed sometimes you have a ‘Project’. What makes a capital ‘p’ Project?” 

To some, it might seem fussy. But if employees don’t agree (or aren’t sure) what makes a project and what makes an initiative and they can’t talk about them consistently, what chance does their audience have?

This lack of clarity seeps into the core of the website and even the brand. Employees end up with strings of vague concepts that appear straightforward. But every strategist knows that traps lie in what seems obvious.

Frequently, employees don’t feel comfortable asking clarifying questions to find out the difference between a project and a Project and an initiative. Nobody wants to seem dumb by asking obvious questions. So before they know it, they’ve been at that organization for five years and they still don’t know.

Definitely not speaking from experience here…

Here’s the thing: most of the time, nobody knows—there’s no agreed upon set of guidelines that dictate what words the organization is going to use consistently to describe a concept. These are just words that have been inherited over time that someone at some point had a strong opinion about and now we’ve created an entire department to run initiatives that are sometimes called projects and once we hired a writer who really liked to capitalize the odd thing.

But these choices matter when you’re building a brand or a website.

There’s an aphorism writers use a lot: clear thinking leads to clear writing. When the words we use are vague and poorly defined, it’s usually a sign that the ideas we’re trying to express are equally vague and poorly defined.

And that’s not what we want from a brand or a website. In fact, it’s the opposite of what we want. Building brands and websites are sense-making activities, even when we are building mystery or being unexpected. We never want someone to walk away confused.

Content strategy doesn’t just reveal where there’s a lack of clarity at an organization. It’s also very good at showing where there’s a lack of alignment at the leadership and to offer the tools to get people to align. 

Because sometimes people do know the difference between a project and an initiative and they care profoundly. And what they think is different than what somebody else at the organization thinks and they’ve been having this awkward feud for the last 300 days. 

When you can bring leaders together, ask them a question they have to answer on a post-it and show them that they don’t agree with each other, that’s a gift! 

Because that misalignment exists. The exercise surfaces it, brings it to light and now we can get somewhere—we can move towards a solution.

Around 2011-12, a lot of people went up in arms on Internet forums all around the world (wide web) after dictionaries accepted that ‘literally’ sometimes meant ‘figuratively’. 

How can the definition of a word include its opposite? 

But dictionaries don’t invent language, they simply record its use. And like it or not, we frequently use ‘literally’ when we mean ‘figuratively.’ 

Content strategists do so much more than split hairs over get people to agree on when an organization should use this word or that word. We use these insights to model your entire organization, identify the information that’s being displayed and the messages you’re sharing, and then shape that content into a connected system that’s easy to understand and to use. 

But it all starts with knowing the difference between a project, a Project and an initiative. It starts with the right words.