Confab 2013

Martin Belam

Published by Emblem Digital Consulting Ltd, March 2013

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“Nobody is handing content strategy down from on high” – Kristina Halvorson

In her opening keynote Kristina Halvorson co-opted the list format to run down 10 things that everybody at Confab had in common. At the core of the list was a call to action, that everybody in the room had the power to make changes to their organisations, and should use the conference as a big opportunity to learn things that would help solve the problems with content that all of us share.

Not all of the problems, mind you, she pointed out that if you locked yourself in a room for 48 hours and solved every problem that had ever been created with content ever, another 100,000 problems would have sprung up whilst you were working.

Why is content so difficult for organisations?

It isn’t that individually we are “doing it wrong”.

Kristina argues that businesses and organisations just don’t have the infrastructure in place to deal with the incredible demands that digital publishing has put on us. She described our websites as being “land-fill”, where we’ve generally just dumped everything we’ve published in the previous five years. Plus the stuff from the old server that we migrated over during the last redesign and promised t