So I looked around, found a few articles on the subject, and I bought a book.
The book “The Elements of Content Strategy” written by Erin Kissane published by A Book Apart.

I devoured the book: short and concise writing and it provides a clear picture of the relationship with other functions in the webteam (editors, IAs, designers, etc..). I was happy to discover that the section of useful resources has a list of books that I had read or own:

• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Lou Rosenfeld,
• Don’t make me think by Steve Krug,
• The Elements of User Experience by Jess James Garret and
• Managing Enterprise Content by Ann Rockley.

Seems I should have some idea of what content strategy is, right?

The book explains a few things about Content strategists. Basically a CS thinks about the who, what, where and why of content.

Who will publish that document?
Editors need to be trained, and the document needs to go through a process, formal or informal, to make sure it is properly published. Document life-cycle is part of what a CS does, but that is also what IA’s do, right? Designing workflows in a CMS, how to reuse content, which content to reuse, that is also part of the IA tasks.

What are you going to publish?
Data and content are pretty abundant if you know where to look for. But that doesn’t mean everything has to go online. Here the tasks of a CS and IA start to differ in that the IA does not always have a grip on the actual content.

Where are you going to publish it?
Content can be reused and rewritten for different channels. If you are posting it on twitter, Facebook, an RSS feed or a webpage, the CS considers which parts of the text goes online. Maybe even the tone and voice of the content has to be reviewed.

I think here the CS tasks start to get borderline with SEO tasks and/or journalism. One good examples of this overlap can be seen at the BBC and how they produce headlines. Most of the headlines convey the whole story in 5 words. Is that good copywriting? a content strategists defining standards? or the SEO requiring the most prominent keywords to be available in the titles? I guess journalists have been doing this already for a long long time.

Why are you going to publish this?
The strategy, the why behind the content should be become clear after stakeholder interviews and audience analyses.
The strategy should bring those 2 mindsets together. Here the idea is the same as in IA: align the mental model of the business with the mindset of the audience.

In chapter 3 the author lists a batch of deliverables (Channel strategy , CMS requirements, Communication plans , Usability tests) and I think the majority of those documents need to be shared with the IA.

Both the the IA and the CS perform user research, create content inventories, write up persona’s, the shared list of tools goes on and on. But I think the content strategists focuses more on the message behind, the voice and tone of the content and for that matter I think the CS is very close to a graphic designer. Choosing the colors and images can drastically change the messages that a website conveys. The tone and voice of the content can do the same.

A wireframe is a black and white presentation of what will be published where. But the message can be so dramatically changed by choosing the wrong words or the right ones. The wireframe can act as a reference but the if the design uses pink tones and cartoon images, or corporate blue and stock photography, the message is no longer the same.

Content strategy is nothing new, it has been done from the moment books were published, radio started to broadcast and television shows were brought into the living room. Yes, the environment has changed, so the tools and techniques need to change too but basically it is a new name for what was considered part of other professions.

Update

An excerpt of the book The Elements of Content Strategy is now online at A List Apart

I managed to go back to November 2003 and reviewed an article I wrote back then about CSS as a debugging tool for templates. This is a little theoretical, but three years later I wrote an article on how to implement this technique:

• Theory: Debugging HTML structure using CSS
• Practice: Quality control with style sheets

• Persona fill out form
• Persona examples all over the web

• Non English blogs (about IA)

Persona tool, a form for sales and marketing people to create personas
Last updated on 13th November 2007.

At the moment it seems more and more people are interested in using personas in the development process of writing software or creating websites. Here are 3 more examples and some really good introductions to personas

Examples

• Meet Kelly – Sample user persona development -by Debra Levin Internet archive
  The following is a sample persona for ToMarket, a fictional employment Web site for marketing professionals.
• Persona of a Cognetics Design Specialist Internet archive
  Example persona of an employee, showing customers how the company builds these profiles.
• Examples from a travel website build according to main types of travellers

Articles

• Introduction to creating user profiles and personas with an example of a financial trader [PDF]
• Dealing With Uninvolved Customers
  Here are a few tactics to help developers get the information they need from the project’s business representatives.
• What’s your customer’s persona?
  

  Every year, one health care company throws a birthday party for “Gerta,” complete with birthday cake. But Gerta’s not an employee, supplier, or even a real customer. What makes her special? Gerta is the “persona” who embodies the specific characteristics of that company’s target customer.

• Mort, Elvis and Einstein: 3 developer personas used to write the ASP.net framework [DOC] ( HTML version from Google)
  This is a whitepaper dealing with APIs and how these 3 personas are used to build requirements and features lists.
• Upping The Ante Understanding business & design through casino poker
  3 part serie on how to use personas

What I do with personas is to make sure that one of them is a grump,
one is impatience, one is dysfuctional, another is low-vision and
angry, and so forth. The fastest way to design for Mr Jenkins, age 53,
and to align him with the business goals is to point to him and ask if
someone on our team ever had to deal with this grump! And sure enough,
they have, and lots of suggestions crop up to try to get him off our
back, in the best possible way. People seem to (again, my experience)
spot flaws in systems faster based on how dysfunctional grumpy
impatient people use them. I also find it easier to work with my peers
when the personas are loaded with emotions and flaws more than
stereotypes of behavioral patterns.

Alexander Johannesen

The Windows Persona creation team consisted of 22 people: several technical writers, several usability engineers, four product planners, and two market researchers.

pruitt.pdf [PDF]

The PDF gives a detailed explanation on how they used personas, how they extended them. The interesting thing is that the personas created crosses team boundaries. Other teams adapted the personas, rewrote them and applied them again to their product.

The document also describes the way the persona team created the personas documents and how they communicated the research.

I started a redesign last month of our French corporate website and introduced the concept of personas. I organised a meeting and started with a presentation explaining what personas really are and how we could use them.

In the beginning the people in the room felt a bit awkward but in the end I got them telling stories about customers. I asked them to create mashups of customers they knew and mixed this information into personas. I got 18 personas out of the meeting and I consider the meeting a real success.

One of the things that started the people was my persona form sheet. I created a simple form that I could hand out. After my presentation everybody could fill out the paper form and create a basic persona. The form is based on the questions and suggestions from the persona toolbox George Olsen published in 2004.

I started the form with background questions; general information: gender, name, profession, age, location, interests or studies. The next thing is computer usage. This is difficult to know and I matched this information with the info from log files I have from the webserver (The Mac browser Safari doesn’t exist, strange but true).

The business relation part is about what type of client this is. If he/she is an important client, big client, small client. How many of these clients do we have or would like to have on our website.

The next sections, “Usage goals”, “Specific needs” are free form and this section needed a little talking. I asked to think about clients and why they would need a website. To convince their bosses? To find information about a product? A contact number? Etc …

The last section, “Context” is about the reason why the client would come to the website, where he works and how much time he/she would spend on the website and if he ever comes back to the website.

At this point I got all the forms and a lot of people looking at me. They were not sure what was expected and if they actually helped me. Then I asked each one of them to present the persona they had written down. I asked to tell a story in front of everyone. This allowed the others to review their own personas and see what was wrong, missing, or useless and correct these things if possible.

I was surprised what the people told me about their customers. You know, creating personas is not about being politically correct.

The form helped so if you want to use the form, download it [VISIO], print it [PDF] and rearrange it.Let me know if it helped you in getting the information you needed.