You are not a content strategist if…

It’s true! If you ask the content strategy community a provocative question, they’ll provide smart, useful answers! In mid-July 2016, I invited content strategists on Facebook and Twitter to complete this sentence: You are not a content strategist if….

I heard from dozens of content strategists, content marketers, agency owners, SEO consultants, and user experience professionals in the USA, Canada, Australia, UK, Austria, Ireland, Germany, Poland, and Denmark.

True to the breadth of content strategy, the comments covered a wide range of areas: scope, roles, structure, technology, and strategy. It was really hard to choose, but here are my top 10 favorites:

You are not a content strategist if….

1. If your approach doesn’t transform your organization, if it doesn’t change the way product owners think about team work and product design. – Wojtek Aleksander, product content strategist, Poland

2. if you design or recommend best-in-class solutions that are impossible for your organization to implement because of budget, resource, or political realities. Some of those can serve as aspirational goals for the organization, but then provide a realistic roadmap and plan to get them there! – Kathy Wagner, content strategy agency owner, Canada

3. If you’re not involved in discussions about why the org is producing the content you write. (that one’s from me)

4. If you think the answer to every content problem is more content. – Susan Westwater, content manager, USA

5. If you care more about what your company wants to say than what your audience wants to hear – Hal Werner, content strategist/copywriter, USA

6. If you don’t think about how content is created, managed and delivered. Content strategists seek ways to optimize the efficient and effective production of content. They use the time, money, and resources saved to innovate. – Scott Abel, content strategist and cognitive computing evangelist, USA

7. If you think tools solve content strategy problems. Tools don’t solve a problem. They help with the solution. – Maël Roth, content marketing consultant, Germany

8. If you think governance is a big bag of rules. – Gord Roberts, enterprise knowledge & content strategist, writer/editor, Canada

9. If you’re handed a finished design and asked to “put some words in there.” And you’re OK with that. Nawl.– Tina Johnson-Marcel, content strategy director, USA

10. If you think content is just about marketing. – Andrew Kaufman, content strategist, USA

Thank you to the others who responded:

Rahel Bailey, Anita Brunner-Irujo, Steve Cohen, Don Rutledge Day, Matthew Decuir, Neni Demetriou, Tony Dimmock, Vinish Garg, Marcia Riefer Johnston, William Jones, Kate Kenyon, Paula Land, Carolyn Shannon, Steve Singer, Lisa Lehman Trager