The word "content" is about as necessarily vague as the word "change" is in political circles. It has become a portmanteau, a kind of verbal suitcase into which people pack whatever meaning they like.

That may be a necessary evil of the marketing trade, since the discipline of content strategy is hard to define in a brief but holistic way.

It touches so many other skill sets, and straddles the line between departments so regularly, that one can be forgiven for a relativist approach to the discipline. For example...

• For people concerned with enterprise issues, content strategy largely refers to governance, migration planning, and technical issues related to integration into content management systems.
• For media mavens, content strategy conjures thoughts of content production, distribution channels, and associated editorial strategies.
• Writers often see content strategy as a way to think about copy in a more holistic manner, and how it comes together in a clear narrative architecture.
• For information architects, content strategy can summon a sudden vision of taxonomy spreadsheets, content models, and massive site inventories.
• And, finally: in her article "Content Strategy Is Not User Experience," Erin Kissane, author of The Elements of Content Strategy, notes the differences between content strategy and user experience, and usefully enumerates how different disciplines define the term.

Now try to sum all that up in 10 words...

Instead of whittling down the definition into a few lapidary phrases, I've found it useful to simply bring more concision to skill sets involved in the content strategist's role. Although not exhaustive, the following are some of the skills I've seen applied.

1. A curator's Capacity to Recognize and Aggregate Quality

Curation is growing in importance because somebody has to parse the quality from the quantity.

A curator is not simply an aggregator. Marketer Rohat Bhargava, on his popular blog, proposed some interesting approaches to curation that remind us that, done well, curation is always more than aggregation.

It can distill excellence from a mass of mediocre content; it can showcase an unnoticed trend; it can blend content to produce a new vantage point; and it can shape a chronology that might, for instance, illustrate the evolution of a field.

2. An Author's Ability to Structure a Meta-Narrative

Websites can benefit from a novelist's touch—the ability to see the big picture and to structure a plot and unfold a storyline across a defined space, whether a site architecture or trans-media campaign.

For sites, it often begins with the content architecture, perhaps a card-sorting exercise that identifies the hierarchies and taxonomy of content that function something like chapters in a book. This work essentially produces a narrative architecture for the site.

For campaigns, channel considerations often reveal the mindset of the user on receipt of brand content, and require the content strategist to consider the digital context as an influence in the shaping of a story.

3. A Campaign Manager's Obsession With Staying on Message