Ask the Misfit: What are Some of the Top Traits a Content Manager Should Have?

Fellow Washington DC metro area blogger Kari Rippetoe, author of The Caffeinated Blog, recently asked me to provide some input with regard to this great question:

What are some of the top traits a content manager should have?
I know that "content manager" means different things for different companies; but what sort of fundamental skills, knowledge, and experience should a content manager have?

I sent Kari the full breadth of my response and she took the best of my blurbs and posted them, along with many other really insightful comments, on her blog. To view my complete, unedited response of what I had originally had shared with Kari, please see below.

marketing misfit response

Strong writing/editing for an online audience
Very important to be able to communicate ideas effectively in highly abridged web format for ease-of-skimming and scanning; strong copywriting skills aid in the development of strong headlines and sub-headlines that can influence, engage and educate reader on the main ideas of content on a page without having to actually read it.

Project/team management
Unless you are writing for yourself as a hobby or to share with family and friends, more than likely your content development efforts will be one of many various web aspects assigned to a team. The ability to coordinate, collaborate and cooperate with others in a dynamic team environment where web project requirements change rapidly is an essential detail to web content development; perhaps even more so with content development folks due to the "content is king" nature of content itself which tends to drive the overall design aspects of most any web project.

Tech/Web Savvy (basic HTML, image editors, ability to learn new tools quickly)
Having a solid foundation of web page structure and formatting are absolutely critical to clean placement of content on a blog or web site. Sound and basic formatting practices reduce the risks of buggy text layouts, weird symbols, spacings and characters and unwanted code kinks that so often negatively impact our web publishing efforts with delays in cumbersome formatting and typography clean up. Moreover, the web environment is a highly technical ambiance, therefore a content manager of any kind must have a decent grasp of working in a variety of web-based tools and graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Many content-related tools that facilitate web publishing tasks are web-based and GUI-driven so a content manager will find it difficult to attain any level of success without first mastering how to maneuver in this kind of source-code supported environment.

Site usability/navigability knowledge
Savvy and highly sought after content managers will have a solid understanding of site usability and web user interface issues because often, even the smallest content word, phrase or headline can serve as an effective navigational aid and visual cue, helping to direct users to specific areas of a web site. Without having some familiarity of the usability issues and navigational challenges many web projects inherently bring, a content manager will soon find that beautiful editorial capability is too insufficient of a skill on a medium that requires speed, ease of use and lots of cues to help orientate readers.

Online/content marketing knowledge (audience targeting, identifying metrics, analyzing data, copywriting, community building, social media)
This is just such a biggie because the purpose of most commercial content writing of any commercial kind is usually to promote or communicate about *something* about one’s business, be it a service, a product, a campaign or outreach effort of some marketing significance. Given the strong marketing nature of most web content, a content manager must be able to marry marketing messaging with good copywriting skills. The ability to inform, engage, lure, entice and excite a fan-base, prospects, members of a brand community or existing customers requires a content manager to have ample marketing-speak know how for integrating communications across a variety of web media.