Once upon a time, way back in 2000, I joined Waggener Edstrom as senior editor. I relished that honorable title, which was easily understood by anyone in or out of the PR biz. Our team was called News Delivery, and we delivered news in the form of thousands of client press releases a year. Yes, thousands! Our writers wrote them, our editors edited them and our production coordinators produced them for press kits or the news wire. Each group had its distinct, separate role — no boundary-crossing allowed.
When some radical suggested we become hybrids such as writer-editor or editor-production coordinator, we scoffed. Hyphenate our jobs? Never! Or rather, only if grammatically correct! We dug in our heels, resisted, defended our special turf. Everything we knew pointed to keeping our roles separate.
Our world has spun around the sun 15 times since then, and PR has morphed into what we now call integrated communications. Guess what: Hybrids beat specialists.
One hour I may be an editor, helping shape a writer’s ideas into a v1 draft of a website. Next I might be a proofreader, poring over a PowerPoint deck for a new-business pitch. Then I might unleash my inner writer to draft a story in the right tone and voice for an e-newsletter. Then, bam, I’m on to play content strategist and advise a client on syndicating her blog posts.
Now named the WE Content Team, we’ve morphed into a group of versatile, multirole employees. Teammates have become writer-videographers or writer-publishers. Each of us came here with a specialized skill, but we’ve branched out. Each of us has a job title that starts with “content strategy” to emphasize our content creation, marketing and advising chops. Look at me — I’m a content strategy manager! It took me a few years to feel secure enough about that lengthy job title to say it when introducing myself. Although I now live up to that title, I suspect the general public still doesn’t understand the “content strategy” part: “Planning for the creation, aggregation, delivery, and useful governance of useful, usable, and appropriate content in an experience.”
Yeah, not so easy to grasp unless you’re living it every day.
What I do know is that clients who come to us for integrated communications understand the value of content strategy, and I’m glad we’re here, bolder and more versatile than ever, to deliver it to them.
