For the last couple of months, I’ve been watching a wave of discussions about content strategy bubble up in blogs, white papers, and tweets. Some of the chatter is very impressive, capturing the arc of something not quite there yet, like marble in a quarry: some wants to be art, some wants to be bathroom tile. By and large, it’s a very smart, very self-conscious discussion by some very smart, very self-conscious people about what it means to be very smart, very self-conscious (and hopefully, very employed) content professionals in the age of the distributed web.

What’s that you say? Who needs content professionals in a distributed environment? It’s time to say bye-bye to editors? The era of the amateur is nigh?

Not so fast, say content strategists. First, who you callin an editor. Second, who the hell do you think is minding all that content? And third: we’ve got a distinctive competence that not only makes your content—which is, let’s face it, the face of your firm—shine: we’re the difference between competitive success or failure in the Googleplex. Every company, say the content strategists, has a content strategy, but only the ones that know it can turn on the Googlejuice. Whether they like it or not, pay for it or not, CS is a distinctive competence all its own and a source of competitive advantage no company can do without.

Good pitch. Logic? Er, not so much

That’s a good pitch, but I’m not sure how well it holds up. Is the argument that content strategy is a functional competence every agency, airline, bank, media company has to have (like accountants)? Or is it that CS is a necessary ingredient of a company’s distinctive competence, positioning, competitive advantage?

People in the tiny CS community have been all over on this. You could see the hairs stand up on a lot of CS necks when Campbell-Ewald’s brill Chris Moritz softballed a tweet about the difference between content strategy big or small a week or two ago. Some worried Moritz was being a splitist, trying to separate those who do little CS—the meat and potatoes of content inventories, taxonomies, editorial calendars, style books, integrated into UI—from the bigger strategic issues of messaging and competitive differentiation. (Moritz says he was just pointing out that it’d be a tragedy if CS fell into the same trap as IA where you’re defined by the deliverables.)

Most CSers seemed to reject the whole idea of big and little, strategic and tactical: If you have a CS job, count your blessings, big, little or anywhere in between. Some don’t want to make the big/little split because CS itself is nowhere yet recognized as a functional necessity, especially in a recession. Eat Media’s Ian Alexander asked whether CS would ever be anything more than a rounding error in a client budget. IA/UX: OK but if a CS tree falls in the forest, no one will hear it (much less pay for it.) Another CS brain, Jeff Macintyre, takes a resolutely big tent approach, pointing out that CS has one meaning in an agency context (where it’s about the deliverables: content audits, gap analysis, taxonomy and tagging, and style guides) and another in the rest of contentworld, whether marketing- or editorially-based. Why split, he says. The whole point of this evolving discipline is its fludity.

Size doesn’t matter. Really.

Well that’s what they say. You may know different:)

But to me it seems obvious that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar: both CS big and little are bubbling out of the same tap: It’s all about XML (or its many siblings such as DITA, SGML, etc.) surrounding content in the distributed search network of Googleland.

As far as I can see, this is the real differentiator between CS and most other content work: Unlike traditional editorial work, content strategy isn’t steeped in grand narratives so much as in bits, in data. “CS big” isn’t custom publishing (although there are definitely narrative and brand strategies one wants to be aware of). And “CS little” isn’t just those deliverables: content without context, from the container to the brand, is all essential if you want to sell in the Googlesphere.

WARNING: Technical language ahead

Another way of saying this: content strategy pushes authorial voice and traditional marketing monologues to the side in favor of taxonomical narratives that assist users in connecting their own dots, driving their own containers. (Don’t forget that the Latin root of content is contentere from “to be contained.”)

Let me repeat those two very odd sounding words together: “taxonimical narratives.” This is, I think, the big innovation of CS, and why firms that are pursuing it are on the right track and firms that are ignoring it are likely to lose their edge.

The way I see it, CS isn’t about big vs little, or strategy vs tactics so much as it’s about the sinking power of traditional brand narrative and the rise of data driven content. CS is about mastering the tiny—the power of data, contained and defined in those XML containers to bubble up via SEO and SEM—in the realm of the massive. As destination websites and traditional brand marketing give way to the artful arrangement and deployment of billions of nuggets of containerized info that can be reused, recycled, retweeted, reblogged, and otherwise recirculated in the vast data anarchy of the Googleplex, content strategy is the only measured response marketers and media companies have to get their stuff out there.

That’s why traditional brand marketing is getting eaten up by search. And why CS little without CS big could just as easily be done by information architects. And (paradoxically) why CS big without CS little is usually just another name for digital custom publishing or other traditionally brand narratives.

So if you want to know why CS matters and why it matters now, it’s because without it, you don’t have a shot at playing the Google game. And that’s where real competitive advantage—and media innovation—is today, whether your company is as big as The New York Times or as tiny as a blog.

Either way, size seems to matter less, frequency (of bit circulation) more. Just do it.

Tagged: Content management, content strategy, contentstrategy, Darwin Information Typing Architecture, Marketing, sem, seo, Standard Generalized Markup Language, UX/UI, XML