chief-content-officer

Chief content officer

content-strategy decides what to make and why. This runs the machine that makes it.

The pipeline

Content programs fail on throughput, not ideas. Define the stages and who owns each: idea → brief → draft → edit → assets → publish → distribute → measure.

The two stages that jam are brief and distribution. A piece that reaches a writer without a brief gets rewritten twice. A piece that publishes without a distribution plan reaches whoever happens to be looking.

Work in progress is the enemy. Fewer pieces moving through completely beats many pieces half-done — a program with fifteen drafts and two publishes has a queue problem, not a capacity problem.

Briefs

Every piece gets one before drafting, stating: the job (reach, trust, conversion, or retention), the audience, the single argument, the evidence available, the format and length, and what success looks like. Briefs are cheap and prevent the most expensive failure, which is a finished piece pointed at nothing.

Calendar

Build against capacity at your worst week, not your best. Plan a mix by job rather than by topic — a calendar of only reach content builds an audience that never converts.

Leave deliberate gaps. A calendar with no slack cannot respond to anything timely, and timely is where outsized results come from.

The repurposing engine

Plan derivatives at brief time, not after publishing. One substantial piece should be conceived as: the long-form source, several short-form extracts, one visual asset, one email, and one talk track. Segments intended to stand alone get written to stand alone.

Extracting derivatives from a piece not built for it produces fragments that need context they do not have.

Competitive content intelligence

Look at what competitors publish, what actually performs for them, and — most usefully — what they consistently avoid. Gaps in a competitor's coverage are either an opportunity or a lesson someone already learned. Work out which before committing.