Val Swisher has written yet another excellent article that gets to the heart of content. Just today, in fact, I was questioning this very topic, and not understanding why more people don't understand these basics. Read this throughly if you write or manage any content, because this article will help to boil it all down for you and get you in the right (or “write”) mentality. Must, must, MUST read!

–techcommgeekmom

Quality Content is in the Eye of the Consumer

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak on a panel at TC Camp. The topic for the panel was “What is Quality Content?” The first thing I noticed is that we have a difficult time defining the term quality when it comes to content. We all have ideas about the characteristics of quality, but we have a difficult time taking a broad view of the term itself. Here is how the Oxford Dictionaries defines quality:

qual·i·ty noun \ˈkwä-lə-tē\

• the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind;
• the degree of excellence of something

Joan Lasselle, one of the other panel members, was the first to point out that, as a discipline, technical communications (and marketing communications I might add) has no standard of excellence. I agree completely. We do not have a bar that has been set, a number, a grade, or any set of common standards that we can use for an objective measure of overall quality content.

Our measurements of quality are based largely on a subjective declaration of characteristics that we agree on. For example, Content Science has a Content Quality Checklist that contains a number of attributes, including:

Continue reading “Danielle Villegas: Defining Quality Content”