As I write this, I’m working from an open office space, called La Cantine in Montmarte, the Ameliest neighbourhood in Paris. This, of course, is because of the volcano. I was in Paris originally for the Content Strategy forum, in collaboration with the Society for Technical Communication France chapter, and now I’m here because of fate (obviously).

The CS forum was overshadowed (literally) by volcanic ash, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t momentous. For me at least. Here’s a roundup of the first Content Strategy forum in Europe, which though overdue, was great.

Conference | Day 1

The Conference was housed in the FIAP near Montparnasse, which looked like a giant ’80s French high school. There were posters of countries crowding wall space in every room, and smooth brightly coloured furniture.

The morning workshops were led by Kristina Halvorson, who I like to call the leader of Content Strategy, although she would probably prefer to be called a disciple. She runs Brain Traffic and wrote the definitive book Content Strategy for the Web. If you’re not familiar with her, acquaint yourself.

Her competitors for the morning slot were Rachel Lovinger, content strategy lead at Razorfish and Karen McGrane, a senior partner in Bond Art + Science. They are other leaders in the field and they were humbling to follow. Respectively they discussed the overall purpose and practice of Content Strategy and how best to analyse content.

The afternoon workshops were led by Elizabeth and me – with our Evolution of Content session, and Rahel Baile, founder of Intentional Design, Inc, who talked about applying Content Strategy in the workplace. Amongst other things we made our attendees do, we led them into a mini agile workshop, which we think they enjoyed because it involved cardboard and blue tac.

But let’s talk about what’s important shall we? Because we were in France, lunch was 2 hours and involved wine.

Conference | Day 2

The second day was an orgy of content strategy ideas, debates and commiseration. The two keynotes were led by the aforementioned Rahel Baile and Kristina Halvorson, who compared the junk content crowding the internet to the pile of garbage littering the post apocalyptic earth in Wall-E. Since most of the breakout sessions that followed overlapped, I can only give what I thought were highlights, which was basically everything I saw.

Clare O’Brien, managing director of CDA, talked about her company’s content auditing system, and how they use metrics. But mostly she talked about how metrics for the internet are different: for the first time, we can see exactly how people engage with our content.

Jeff MacIntyre, principal of Predicate, defined editorial strategy and how it operates within the larger context of content strategy. My favourite quote/argument: “Your website is a publication.” So we have to get better at publishing.

Kenneth Yau, a content strategist at Baddit, Ltd, started his talk by saying “I have a voice for writing.” His talk explored localisation, and it was fascinating — not just because most of his slides were pictures of food. There’s a lot more to worry about with localising content than just translation. Do you translate URLs? Metadata? Should google give you search results based on your IP address? Can localisation make you money? Short (and only) answer: Yes.

Rachel Lovinger is really good at making the complicated sound uncomplicated. She led a talk on the uber complex, yet really interesting semantic web. She made it so clear that I felt like a developer. The name of her talk sums up her argument: ‘There’s no semantic web without content and data.’

Panel: let the rage flow. The panel discussion that closed the talk included our own Elizabeth, along with Jonathan Kahn (from Together London), Clare O’Brien, and Sylvie Daumal (from Razorfish France). They were led in discussion by Jeff MacIntyre. The point of the panel was to explore content strategy in Europe, but the audience slowly veered it towards answering the questions:

• “Why doesn’t anyone appreciate us?” and
• “Why do we complain all the time?”

Valid points from an emerging field. All four panelists answered by giving specific examples from their own company and work, which is the only way to actually answer a content strategy question, unless you say, “it depends.” We haven’t come to a conclusion for the audience questions, but we did decide that forums like this are a good start. And constant evangelising to our UX, developer, IA and designer peers.

Did I mention there was a river boat dinner cruise?

And a closing cocktail hour, that was Mexican themed for some reason? Paris is a really good host. Even when you’re trapped there.