From time to time, big projects come across your desk that require large amounts of content. Obviously you can’t create thousands of articles over night, so you do the next best thing: Hire a content vendor. But before you sign on the dotted line, you want to make sure your contract works for both parties.

While it’s obviously important to include pricing details in your contract, you also want to cover the types of services you need. Here are questions to ask yourself before you commit to a vendor contract.

1. What do you want from your vendor? If expedient customer service is important to you, be sure to outline the terms of service in your contract. What level of copyright are you buying — do you want to own the work outright [most expensive option] or just license it for use for a while? If you need to reserve the right to make grammar or style changes to content provided by a vendor, add that to the contract, as well. Determine what you need to complete your work, and make sure the vendor you hire can meet those needs.
2. Who will facilitate the implementation? Do you want your vendor to provide the content and put it in a usable form for your content needs? Perhaps you’re willing to edit and format the content to save some money. Before you pay for a content service, work with your vendor to determine how the product will be implemented. Ideally, your vendor is writing to your defined content strategy, right?
3. What is your liability? Obviously both parties will want to limit their liability in the event of a problem — plagiarism, copyright violation, garden-variety errors. Be sure to add a section about liability to your contract, and negotiate for the terms that will best suit you. Liability issues will include who is responsible for a delay in service, potential damages and attorney’s fees.
4. What are the terms for pricing? While you’ll certainly want to agree on a standard price for your vendor’s services, keep in mind that you might need extra services at some point. Will the vendor charge a fee for extra content? Are the rates locked in for a certain period of time? Your contract should include any potential pricing issues.
5. What are the grounds for termination? Mistakes are one thing — but what about Really Big Mistakes? Before you sign a contract, identify your dealbreakers, and include them in a termination section of your contract.

While you know what your content needs are right now, be sure to include a clause that specifies your vendor’s responsibility for additional programming or other changes that could be necessary to meet your standards. A good contract uses flexible language that will keep it relevant throughout your relationship with your vendor.

Creek Content Founder and Principal Strategist Laura Creekmore was recently featured on All About Women, answering questions about social media for business, educating yourself on social media as a parent and the privacy concerns that accompany it all. All About Women is a non-profit organization by and for women, designed to help those who want to live healthier lives.

Laura answered questions ranging from simply defining the term “social media” to more delicate questions about privacy. For instance, what social media tools should small businesses be using?

“There’s no one right answer to this question. Start by thinking about your customers… Where do they spend their time online? What do they expect to be able to do there?” Laura goes on to explain that Facebook isn’t perfect for every business — neither is LinkedIn or Twitter.

“If you don’t need to use Twitter to reach your customers, it still may be one of your most valuable research and professional-connection tools; it is for my company.”

If you happen to be in Austin Saturday, you should come see me at BlogathonATX!

This Saturday marks the third Blogathon in Austin, which started innocently when organizer Ilene Haddad asked on Twitter if anyone wanted to get together and blog one afternoon. It’s now a day-long event that includes a tech room with experts to help you tweak (or even start) your blog, awesome food donated from great local businesses to keep us fueled for the day, and presenters who will answer blogging and social media questions related to content, finding your voice, engaging your audience and much more. Like me. I’ll be in the hot seat answering questions about personal vs. business blogging.

For instance: If you’re a business owner, should you have a business blog and a personal blog? What about separate social media accounts? Companies have social media policies, should individuals have personal policies?

We’ll be doing lots of things related to blogging — helping each other brainstorm ideas, offering input on design and maybe even starting new blogs with new friends over shared interests. But they’re also be lots of learning and fun. And I think that’s my favorite part.

The Information Architecture Institute this week announced the addition of two members to its board of directors. One of which is our very own founder and principal strategist, Laura Creekmore!

A global organization with more than 2,000 members worldwide, the IA Institute focuses on education, advocacy, service and social networking to demonstrate the value of information architecture to both individuals and organizations.

“I am deeply honored to have been selected, and I’m excited to get to work,” Creekmore said. “The IA Institute is a great resource for our discipline, and I’m looking forward to working with the rest of the board, staff and members.”

Congratulations, Laura! We wish you the best with your term on the board!

My dad had all sorts of great one-liners. They seemed to come out of his mind and mouth quickly and appropriately for any occasion. For a skinned knee, he would always say, “It’ll feel better when it quits hurting.” When it came to love, he often reminded me, with a wink, “It’s just as easy to marry for money as it is for love.” (I married for love, in case you’re wondering.) And when it came to my career, he encouraged me to aim high, explaining, “It’s better to aim high and miss just a little than to aim low and be right on the bull’s eye.”

Columnist Regina Brett from The Plain Dealer of Cleveland shared that same tip with participants recently in a Content Marketing World breakout session on emotion and storytelling. Brett encouraged those of us in the room — whether we’re writing for a newspaper, a personal blog or a corporate website — to pick a bull’s eye and go for it. To aim high or not even bother.

While I walked away with a full page of notes from her session and probably 20 tips for telling a great story, 5 from my list are definitely favorites:

1. “Put a face on it.” Say you run a hospital with the highest birth rate in the state. Instead of spouting off numbers and statistics in your writing, talk about specific babies or the doctors and nurses who give them such exceptional care.
2. “Circle the wagons.” If your manufacturing plant runs on the sweat of employees who have been there for 20 or 30 years, instead of writing from the corporate viewpoint, share the point of view of one of those employees. Brett called it “hearing the story through different ears” and seeing it through a different set of eyes.
3. “Show me, don’t tell me.” Do the words alone do your story, blog post or article justice? Would a picture make a positive impact? What about an infographic?
4. “Tell a big story small.” There was a huge music festival in Austin this weekend — Austin City Limits. It brings hundreds of thousands of visitors to the city and puts millions of dollars into the economy. Our local newspaper ran many stories on the festival, one of which focused on a 9-year-old boy who had been to the festival every year since it started when he was only 10 months old. Telling the story from his viewpoint makes a big story small.
5. “Edit.” It just takes a couple of minutes. Read it out loud. Email it to yourself and read it in a different font. Go eat lunch and come back to read it again. Just make sure you give every piece a good once (or twice) over.

We’ve been in business here for nearly 3 years and we’ve gone by Creekmore Consulting that whole time — but we’ve been content strategists for even longer than that. And the more we thought about it, the more we thought 2 things:

• Content is central to what we do, and we want that to be clear.
• creekmoreconsulting.com is a damn long URL.

So we toyed with a lot of new ideas, and we discovered that many, many people out there are sitting on some really fantastic URLs for content strategy consultancies and doing nothing with them. [Get busy with those URLs or let them go, folks!]

And then last year at South by Southwest, we realized we wanted to set up a Twitter account for the business, and without thinking too hard about it, we named it @creekcontent. And we’ve used it a bit from time to time, and each time we did, we thought, Huh, Creek Content. That’s nice, and it’s pretty short. So we bought the URL, just in case.

The more we thought about it, the more sense that made. We have played with a lot of different names in the past few months, but none seemed to fit like Creek Content, and the longer we talked about it, the more it felt like home.

So from here on out, Creek Content is what we’ll be calling ourselves, and hope you will too.

In a related matter, we’re starting a monthly newsletter. Content strategy isn’t rocket science — we couldn’t teach you that in a monthly newsletter — but there are some specific tools and strategies to our discipline, and we’ve found that people like to learn more. So, we’re going to start sharing more.

Be sure to share your email with us so we can share our content strategy goodies with you.

We hope you’ll sign up to get a little slice of content strategy goodness delivered from us right to your inbox each month.

You’ll sometimes hear navigation, taxonomy and even metadata used interchangeably, but to the information architect, these three different concepts work together to make your content work for you.

The navigation is what we all see on your website — the tabs across the top or down the side that direct users to sections of the site. We’ll quickly point out that we’ve never seen an org chart that made a useful navigation, no matter how many times we’ve seen it tried. Your customers don’t call your stuff the same thing you call it, and if you want to be successful, you’ll use the terms they prefer on your website. Need help figuring out what they think? We can help with that.

The taxonomy is often a hierarchy, as well, but it’s the hierarchy where you store your information. It’s not always the same as what you show your customers in the navigation. Usually, it’s more complex and multi-faceted. For a starting point, think of your taxonomy as a directory of every single kind of information on your website. Rarely is your navigation so complex, but you need a way to categorize everything so you can find it and render it correctly to your customer. Your taxonomy is the framework on the back end. Your taxonomy may be a place where you use your own terms, instead of your customer’s terms.

Metadata is a catalog of the information about each content item. Metadata is information about information, right? So it’s the information about each piece of content. For an image, the metadata might include width, height, orientation and file type. For an event, it might include start and end times and dates. For a news article, it might include the city and state, or the topic, or the section of the site. Perhaps you’d mark an age range or location that indicates the intended audience.

Metadata is also a place where we get into data interoperability. There are a number of standard metadata schemes, and if you want your content to be re-used and syndicated, you need to ensure you’re using universal standards for your metadata, at a minimum.

Because so much of this is on the back end, it’s frequently neglected. If your content isn’t working hard enough for you, this may be a place to evaluate carefully. Learn how Creek Content can help improve your information architecture for better business strategy.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across this post by Olivier Blanchard at Brandbuilder.com, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind ever since. Yes, it is a bit dated (posted in October 2010), but that doesn’t change the fact that I took offense to this particular paragraph:

2010′s Social Media experts, especially those who came to their impressive expertise by way of writing blogs about writing blogs, will magically transform themselves into “Content Strategists” (a term stolen from either the SEO world or that of content fulfillment firms keen on the fact that “content strategy” sounds a lot sexier than “content fulfillment”). Though for some, the transformation will take place sometime between the hours of 4am and 9am (GMT) on 1 January 2011, the vast majority of the metamorphoses will take place based on Social Media conferences’ need for Content Strategy speakers. Expect a deeper ‘content strategy’ track at SxSW, and a rapid addition of ‘content strategy’ to most failing digital agencies’ service offerings.

Ever since I laid eyes on that portion of the article, I have been mentally arguing with Blanchard. Here are a few points I’d like to make about content strategy as I see it — not a buzzword or the latest fad, but a real mindset and toolkit:

1. Content strategy is actually a communications strategy. Perhaps if we think of the way we deal with content in terms of the way we communicate to our friends/readers/visitors, it’s easier to understand how it works. Most people don’t think about the usability of content on their website until it’s too late. Implementing a concrete strategy will make your content do what you want it to do. I’m going to steal a phrase of Ann Handley‘s that Laura quotes frequently, and point out that everyone is a publisher. If you have a blog, Facebook page, Twitter account or even an email address, you create content every day. Content strategy can make that content work to help you reach your business goals.
2. Content strategy is a system. Though content strategy can’t be explained or visualized in terms of a tangible item (for example, it’s not a pretty website that you can see and interact with), it is a system of its own. The term “content strategy” describes a system that nurtures and maximizes the capability of your content from the time it’s created until it becomes outdated or you remove it from your website.
3. Content strategy is measurable. Maybe this is too easy, but in my opinion, if you can measure results of a service, it is real. Measuring the ROI on a content strategy starts by identifying your goal. Do you want more readers? Focus on page views and the average time spent on your website. Are you trying to generate more leads? A good content strategy will increase the quality of your leads and shorten your sales cycle. Of course, this isn’t going to happen overnight. But if you give us some time to use content to reach your goals, we can make it happen.
4. Content strategy effects change. If you don’t believe me, just read how strategically placed content inspired me to quit smoking for good.

There is lots of content on the web. Lots. If you wanted to build a website about, say, the health benefits of running, there would be no shortage of content already out there that you could license and curate to fill your pages. But don’t underestimate the power of custom content — your own words, videos and pictures produced from your own point of view — and what it can do for your site.

If you’ve been thinking about custom content but aren’t sure you’re ready to take that plunge, here are four benefits that might help persuade you:

1. It fills a void. What are readers searching for when they visit your site? More importantly, are they finding it? If not, fill those gaps with content that you create in the form of how-to articles, videos and illustrative photographs. If readers aren’t finding what they’re looking for when they search your site, you can be sure they’re searching for it — and finding it — elsewhere.
   Do you have content you wish you could get your hands on? If you’ve been spending your energy searching for just the right content vendor for that dream content, why not just write it yourself? You’ll save time, energy and money, and that custom content will lead right to the next three benefits.
2. It increases traffic. Google and other search engines really like fresh, relevant and timely content. It other words, if you wrote an article on cold weather running gear back in 2004 that only your employees read, Google doesn’t really care at this point. A new article on the subject will allow you to share that content with readers on your site and through social media tools. If people like it, share it and link to it, and if it contains strong keywords, more search engines will point to your piece of content when potential readers search for “cold weather running gear”.
3. It makes you the authority. If you’re licensing content from Kyle, The Running Expert, readers of your website will soon realize they only need to read and subscribe to Kyle’s site to get the information they want. Instead of serving as the middleman, sharing Kyle’s content, providing your own content will make you the expert and allow readers to trust your expertise enough to visit again, subscribe and share.
4. It creates an opportunity to make money. Yep, money! If you start creating enough quality content on a regular basis, maybe someone will knock on your door — or at least drop you an email — and ask about licensing your articles, videos or photographs.

   Let’s say you start a monthly video series on how to get started with a running program. it might include the right gear, proper nutrition for before and after a run, mistakes beginners make and so on. That new content is not only updating your website, but it’s also producing good “Google juice,” as it’s sometimes called. It’s making you an authority on the subject and it might even be good enough that someone else wants to pay you for using it. How cool would that be?!

Online communities must go through some initial setup phases, but once communities are up and running, several things should happen simultaneously.

As we create new communities or nurture existing ones, we must ensure we are always balancing needs in these three areas:

• Content
• User Recruitment and Acclimation
• Community Measurement and Evaluation