What did you read or watch that surprised, delighted or disappointed you? Why?

This week, I was delighted by the assigned text: Chapter 6 of “Content Audits and Inventories” textbook. The chapter covered preparing for a content audit, and I felt particularly inspired by it. Coming from a journalism background, I tend to have a narrow view of what content is — articles and social media posts. While this chapter mainly refers to this type of content as what we refer to and collectively understand as simply content, it broadened my view of what content can be by offering many examples of considerations for a content audit.

For example, previously, I’ve only considered legal implications for content when it comes to libel. I haven’t analyzed content through the lens of legal risk or a business. Also, the chapter suggests auditing content for its competitiveness relative to similar competing firms/companies. This is also different from the journalism world. There is surely competition across new outlets as they race to break stories and capture audiences, but I have personally never experience that competition in student journalism. This was particularly eye-opening for me because my entire job is submitting a form of content to compete with other businesses for work. This inspired me to look at other firms’ websites to measure my firm’s website content for competitiveness.

Additionally, I can find myself sharing the different content strategy development processes included in Dr. Kim’s video with my team at work. I have the kind of brain where I can complete a complicated task without a detailed roadmap — in fact, I typically function just fine with the plan in my head and forget to document the process. For example, I have never been able to keep a planner because I can remember what all the tasks are and when they are due, but I can never remember to write it all down. At the end of the day, the tasks were done on time and the planner was blank. However, I know this way of task completion is not conducive to a group task. The two frameworks from Rahel Bailie and Kevin P. Nichols are ready-made processes I can introduce and test at work. Often, the hardest part of a large initiative is figuring out how your team is going to pull it off, and these established roadmaps eliminate that work upfront.

What was most meaningful for your own career goals? Why?

The reading in “Content Audits and Inventories” was the most meaningful to my career goals. I work for a large, global organization, and we have a lot of internal and external content. That content, however, doesn’t really serve the technical scope of practice I work under. I’ve been inspired to, perhaps, perform a qualitative, competitive, content effectiveness, multichannel, brand and messaging, and global content audit on our website content. I can also perform a similar audit on the project writeups we include in statements of qualifications submitted to public clients. It will be harder to audit them for competitiveness when it comes to private SOQ submittals to public entities in the state of Texas, but I am not above submitting a public records request. That, in fact, is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I am always looking for more ways to contribute to our overall business development goals at work. This is a great place to start.