Keeping Up with Content Strategy at LavaCon

It’s easy to become complacent in the everyday tasks of content strategy: inventories, audits, workflows—regardless of title or responsibilities, we’re all probably a little guilty of not keeping up with industry tools, practices, and new ideas. We at UX Booth are eager to help our readers get out and mingle with their peers at conferences like LavaCon so that new ideas ignite into better experiences across all our products.

When talking to others about content strategy, I find myself sometimes going through the motions. I use the same explanations, describe the same tools, outline the same processes. But sometimes, perhaps not often enough, I trip up and find myself thinking, “Am I keeping up with the industry?”

Yeah, yeah. I may or may not have some pretty consistent anxiety around keeping up with the times, so to speak. But enough of my own career insecurities; my point still stands. Industries and technologies change. We should all be making an effort to grow, to be in the conversation.

Man missing the content strategy boat, sitting on a dock, feeling like everything's lost.

I’m seriously self-conscious about falling behind in my profession. I don’t want to miss any boats.

I can’t stress enough the importance for content strategists (and everyone else, for that matter) to learn from others’ experiences. I know, I know — that’s an extremely obvious thing to say. But actually seeking out this professional growth can be time consuming, and it can be tough to think of the right questions to ask. What even are the right questions to ask when trying to broaden your content strategy horizons?

Conferences are a great place for this kind of learning. One of the reasons I wanted to wax on about my fear of being left behind is, as you’ve probably guessed by now, LavaCon 2017. There will be one in Portland in early July, but coming up around the corner is LavaCon Dublin. It’s May 22 – 24, and is totally chock full of fantastic opportunities for content professionals to share and learn from one another.

One particular track I’m excited about is the Case Studies & Tribal Knowledge sessions. This is what sparked this particular article – there are a ton of talks that cover real-life examples of content strategy success and failures, full of lessons learned and best practices. A few of the topics they’ll be covering are:

  • Change management (which, frankly, always seems to be the undercurrent of every project I’ve ever been on)
  • Managing a butt ton of content at once (obviously my words, not theirs)
  • DITA documentation in the wild (that’s Darwin Information Typing Architecture for the non-content folks out there)
  • Collaborating with subject matter experts
  • Why DITA will fail you on enterprise content platforms
  • Structured content and Cordova
  • Managing stakeholders (which I can never learn enough about)

And of course a whole lot more, but these are the topics I’m most interested in. And hey—the GatherContent folks will be there and, honestly, I’m just a huge fan of theirs. No, they didn’t pay me to say that.

I’ll stop beating a dead horse in just a second. I will repeat once more: don’t stagnate in your career. You don’t have to go to conferences to grow, but boy does it make it easier. If you’re interested in LavaCon Dublin, use the code UXBooth when you register to receive a discount. And I’ll get some details about LavaCon Portland to you, dear readers, in a few weeks.

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