Will '09 be the year of the strategist?

Today's predictions on the emerging careers of 2009 come from Kristina Halvorson, founder and president of Brain Traffic, a content strategy, information architecture, and Web writing agency based in Minneapolis:

Content strategist: Everyone likes to think that Web content is the "easy part" of building a site. But who among us is asking the scary, important questions about content, such as “What’s the point?”, “Who cares?” or "Who’s overseeing the care and feeding of content once it’s out there, clogging up the tubes and dragging down our search engines?"

Content strategy is a massive field that can encompass almost every kind of media, not just words. Dealing with content is messy. It’s complicated, it’s painful, and it’s expensive. And yet, the web is content. Content is the web. It deserves our time and attention.

Editorial strategist: Part gatekeeper, part shepherd, the editorial strategist defines the guidelines by which all online content is governed: values, voice, tone, legal and regulatory concerns, user-generated content, and so on. This practice also defines an organization’s online editorial calendar, including content life cycles.

Metadata strategist: Yes, the name is daunting. But these days, countless Web sites depend on "metadata," which is the often-invisible coding that helps identify information about a post, video, etc. A quick example: You upload a photo to Flickr. That photo can include a wide range of metadata, from the location where it was shot to the type of camera you were using.

Smart, well-structured metadata helps publishers identify, organize, use, and re-use content in ways that are meaningful to their audiences. Thanks to the bottomless pool of information on the Internet, one metadata strategist can literally do the work of 1,000 traditional content producers.

This post was largely adapted from Kristina's more comprehensive post, "The Discipline of Content Strategy," so be sure to check it out if you want to know more. You can also follow her daily adventures on Twitter.

Also in this series:
• How coding and culture will shape the jobs of '09.
• Want to be a Conversation Auditor when you grow up?
• The emerging careers of '09: Advergirl's predictions.

Comments

[KatFrench]

Good thoughts, and ones that I've found myself pondering as January has me doing the "Five Year Plan Polka" once again.

At the moment, my role encompasses all three of those, depending on the client. It'd be nice to pare it down to just one.

[Greg Bowen]

I see more and more businesses talking about strategy.

It is about time that widget manufacturers realize that their web department might not be best suited to guide their business.

I think post 2009 is going to be about outsourcing web and strategy to people that do that exclusively.