Tag: Content Strategy

Holy Cow, I’ve Been At This For Five Years

~ iambeastwood ~ Leave a comment

Roughly five years ago, I joined the ranks of millions of Americans who lost their jobs at the height of the pandemic. I wasn’t shocked by any means, as I worked for an in-person event company and focused on the healthcare industry. In fact, after my managers delivered the news to the entire editorial team, they called me for the first of the one-on-one chats with the recently departed because they expected, correctly, that I would take the news well.

I don’t remember the exact date, but I do know it was a Thursday morning with weather similar to this one. For the rest of the week, I spent some time relaxing and some time fiddling with the WordPress site I’d launched in 2017 and then quickly forgotten about.

I also spent some time thinking about what to do next. Getting laid off was the latest in a series of turns in my career. In both 2012 and 2014, I left one tech publishing company for another. In 2015, I took a job as a research analyst. In 2018, I moved to an agency. In 2019, I went into the event business. It’s fair to say I was having trouble figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Amid my various moves, I’d started freelancing a few hours a week in 2015. One friend recommended me for some work reviewing running watches; another thought I’d be a good fit to write about executive leadership and enterprise IT. Over time, I took on a couple more clients in higher ed and healthcare tech, and I set up the aforementioned website to highlight my work. Soon, though, the work eventually became juuuust a bit too much to handle.

I missed it. I frequently chatted with full-time freelancers who were not only making a living as writers but thriving, thanks to their business acumen and time-management skills. In the back of my head, a future version of myself had that role. I can’t remember if it was something I daydreamed about on my commute or during my runs, but I definitely thought about it.

That said, I couldn’t see myself leaving a full-time job with benefits. Fear of the unknown proved more powerful than building a professional life as a full-time freelancer with a lot more writing and far fewer meetings. Put another way, the perceived risks of going out on my own outweighed the benefits of being my own boss, as numerous as they may have been.

Then, well, it was April 2020, and pretty much nothing was stable – jobs, health, the future, one’s supply of peanut butter, etc. I sat down with my wife for a chat. The main takeaway: “Go do this thing. It’s now or never.”

So, on Monday morning, after filing for unemployment – a key safety net as I got started – I sat down in front of the personal laptop I hadn’t opened in close to two years. I reached out to my former freelance clients. I got in touch with past colleagues from my (many) previous full-time jobs. I researched publications, consultancies, and brands with content that aligned with my past work and crafted some cold emails to send along. After that, I probably went for a run on a secluded path.

As those early hours turned to days and weeks, I’m forever grateful to everyone willing to give me work in the early days of my shift to working for myself.

I’m honestly shocked sometimes to look back and see where I am now. I’ve found my footing, achieved stability, and learned where I want to focus my efforts. I have an LLC, my own domain name and, once I get around to it, a business email address. I never imagined I’d be in a place where I’d feel comfortable bringing an eBook into the world, and yet here we are. (You didn’t think I’d get this far without mentioning my eBook, did you?)

I’ve also made some mistakes along the way, and I’d be remiss in talking about my success without acknowledging these failures. For example, I discovered that content for life science isn’t my forte, short turnaround times are difficult for me to accommodate, and certain nuances of enterprise technology are beyond my expertise.

I need to recognize that I didn’t start from scratch, too. I was privileged to have a robust network, a nest egg, experience as a 1099 contractor, a business checking account, an excellent mortgage rate, employer-sponsored health insurance, and clips when I started sending those emails asking for work in April 2020. Heck, I even had that dormant website. Yes, I had skills and expertise, but even that was mostly a matter of being in the right place at the right time and managing to take advantage of my good fortune. After all, I never would have gotten into healthcare if the CIO group at TechTarget wasn’t in need of an editor for its new healthcare site and I wasn’t in need of a new role as the Vertical Software Media Group was shutting down and just so happened to have recently dabbled in writing about EMRs and practice management software.

That’s why this post is primarily a Thank You to so many folks for helping me along the way. I may have done the work, but *you* have trusted me to do that work and been willing to vouch for me when others are looking for someone who can do that work. While I’d like to think it’s improbable that I’d be wandering aimlessly in the wilderness without all of you, I do know I’d be nowhere near my current level of success.

Here’s to five years of freelancing down and many more to go. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to go for a run on a secluded path. After all, no matter where things stand in my professional life, some things will never change.

You Say You Want a Content Strategist – But What Do You *Really* Need?

~ iambeastwood ~ Leave a comment

My last three official roles all involved content strategy to some degree. Two even included “content strategist” in the title.

None of the three roles really focused on strategy, though. While that’s not the lone reason I’m no longer in any of those roles, a lack of clear expectations certainly played a part.

As I’ve continued my transition to full-time freelance writing, I’ve been thinking about why none of these roles met my expectations, and whether my experience is solely related to me or emblematic of a larger challenge for anyone seeking to fill a role with what they believe should be a content strategist.

Strategy Is Easier Said Than Done

The biggest challenge, I think, is that strategy is easier said than done. When you hire or promote someone to a role with strategist in their title, whatever the job or the industry, your primary aim is to project to the outside world, “We’re thinking big. Change is coming.”

Are you really, though? And is it? Consider the following.

  • If your strategist is limited to working within the confines of your existing processes and systems, without having much leeway to operate differently, then, well, you’re not thinking big. You can’t and shouldn’t be surprised if the results turn out to be pretty much the same. You can only fix a broken dishwasher so many times.
  • If the bulk of your strategist’s work is actually tactical, that’s also a problem.
    • Perhaps this role, like many others, involved a new title but not a new job description. How many companies have a Senior Associate Somethingorother who was given the title mostly to justify a higher paycheck because they’ve been there so long? In this case, you’re not innovating; you’re perpetuating existing bureaucracy. Don’t string the person along with a false sense of hope.
    • Maybe there’s just too much tactical work that needs to be done. If that’s the case, and you move ahead and hire someone for a strategic role, all you’re doing is reeling them in with a bait and switch. Don’t do that.
  • If your strategist isn’t given any guidance or direction, then you can’t expect to get much out of the role. Yes, some degree of autonomy is necessary – and, to reinforce the first point, you can’t innovate inside a rigid box – but you need regular check-ins (or at the very least a set of requirements and expectations) to guide their work. This is especially true if you’re bringing in someone who’s proven in your subject matter but new to your industry vertical, or vice versa. Simply saying “We’re trying to be like a startup” won’t cut it.
  • If you confuse strategy development and product development, there’s a good chance you’re going to hire the wrong person. These require different skill sets, not to mention different ways of thinking and approaching a problem. If you’re in a rush to fill a role, step back and figure out what you truly need. Simply putting a body in a seat rarely succeeds.

(OK, So I *Might* Not Be An Expert…)

I think each of these problems is solvable, to a degree. But before offering solutions, three caveats:

  • I’m not a recruiter or hiring manager (and likely never will be). So there’s a chance I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. I also recognize that you need to shoot for the stars in job descriptions. Noting that 50% of a job is wrestling with an home-grown and obsolete content management system, or that 40% of a job is sitting in meetings that could have been emails, surely won’t bring in top candidates.
  • It’s entirely possible that I didn’t like or succeed in my content strategy roles because I’m simply not cut out to do that type of work. I operate best when I have a clear assignment, objective, and deadline. Strategy obviously is more fluid. Sometimes I can work with that; sometimes I can’t.
  • Two of my three recent roles were in conference production. I learned the hard way that I really, really don’t like that work. The expectations of the role, coupled with how the work tends to be done, is a stark contract with how I prefer to work and am motivated to work. I’d like to think it’s not clouding my judgment here, but I can’t promise that it’s not.

Four Possible Fixes to Your Content Strategy Conundrum

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about how to try to fix these problems.

Rigid processes. Don’t hire someone to change something that’s already firmly established, whether it’s an event that’s already been planned or an editorial calendar that’s already full. A strategist can have minimal influence over something that’s already set in stone, and trying to change what someone else has already created is bound to lead to conflict. Instead, put a strategist to work on new projects – or don’t hire them at all.

Too much tactical work. In one sense, there’s a simple solution: Hire someone who will do, and is expecting to do, the tactical work that actually needs to be done. This points to a bigger issue, though: What do you need to fix? Are the Big Ideas really not there – or are they there, just not trickling down into your finished products? In the former case, a strategist might help, but you also need to explore why you’ve been missing the Big Ideas for so long in the first place. In the latter case, you don’t need a strategist; you need an experienced manager of products, people, or both. Again, these are different roles with different skill sets.

No direction. The temptation to hire a strategist and send them on their merry way to concoct business-changing ideas is great. But, let’s face it, that’s not how work gets done (unless you’re a tenured professor or inventor). A strategist needs to know where to focus – new or expanded markets, new clients, new content types, etc. – along with when, how, and who to coordinate with to begin execution. Arguably more so than with any other employee, set clear guidelines and milestones for specific tasks to be done. Establish a clear reporting structure as well. “Dotted lines” to multiple managers will only add to the confusion for the strategist – and it gives managers a valid reason to pay less attention, since technically they’re not “in charge” of the strategist.

A need for product development, as it turns out. If the aforementioned Big Ideas aren’t there, but your company knows how to turn ideas into reality, then a full-time strategist won’t help you. Because – here’s a feel-good moment – you actually know what to do! You just need a nudge. Hire someone on a freelance or contract basis to hand you a polished idea and then run with it. Yes, there are a lot of details to work out, but keeping a full-time strategist on your payroll to do work that you know you are better at managing isn’t going to help your business. You’re going to be overpaying someone to do a job that, most of the time, isn’t really what they signed up to do.

Let’s Think About It

While I’m happy with the direction that my career has taken in recent months, I’m also a bit sad that my content strategy roles didn’t pan out. I liked my coworkers and managers, and I appreciated the work that we were able to accomplish together.

I don’t think my experiences entirely reflect the shortcomings of the places I worked. I think it’s part of a larger trend: Content companies think they want a single strategist, or even a team of them, but their true need is a bit different, and they haven’t taken the time to explore what (or who) will best impact the business. (It’s not unlike data analytics – everyone says they want AI, but really they just need better business intelligence.)

I hope these rambling thoughts are helpful for anyone who’s either planning to hire someone for a content strategy role or looking for a job with that type of title. They aren’t easy roles to fill, or jobs to do, and I hope we can all give them a little more thought as we work to create better content.