Kristina Halvorson is the CEO and founder of Brain Traffic, a well known content strategy company that assists other businesses with fixing up and generating content for their websites.
Melissa Rach is the co-founder of Dialog Studios and previous VP of content strategy at Brain Traffic.
It's no surprise that two well-established content strategists such as Halvorson and Rach would come up with such a well-structured and useful guide to deal with content in all of its stages.
Content Strategy for the Web:
The book is structured as a 12-chapter guide to deal with all things content-related. The text operates with the understanding that there may not be any defined strategy in place and takes readers through the motions of defining roles, assigning responsibilities, auditing existing data, building core strategy structures, and implementing well-thought-out solutions.
The text provides a number of useful diagrams and case studies to demonstrate real world applications of its sometimes complex principles to further the reader's understanding of how these strategies work. The guide to defining tone in chapter 8 is accompanied by a case study from MailChimp. The study is very helpful in demonstrating how tone can be defined through terminology and antonyms, showing readers that MailChimp employees understand that they can be "fun but not childish" when developing content. I found this principal to be very useful, sometimes it's easier to know what your tone should be by having a thorough understanding of what it shouldn't be.
The dialogue is quite accessible to industry professionals, but may not be as simple of a read for anyone who doesn't consider themselves a "tech person". A base understanding of SEO best practices, scripting, and other tech-related tools and terms will be an asset to anyone hoping to glean as much information from the book as possible. That said, if you are up-to-date on the necessary lingo, you are sure to come away with some helpful ideas from reading this.
One small drawback is that the book presents a lot of positions and titles, duties, and responsibilities for creating and implementing a content strategy. For any sole proprietors or small groups this can sometimes seem a little daunting. If you, as a marketing professional or business owner, don't have any support staff to speak of, most, if not all, of these tasks will fall to you. That being said, if you aren't intimidated by a bit of hard work, the book does an excellent job of walking you through the steps you need to take to get to a place of better content.
Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who deals with content on a regular basis. It has a lot to offer and even if you don't need or want to implement every suggestion along the way, there is bound to be something you can learn from this book. I will certainly be keeping it on hand going forward.
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