T: This morning I am talking with Rachel Lovinger, a Senior Content Strategist for Avenue A | Razorfish. Rachel will be presenting at next week’s Semantic Technology Conference. In addition, she recently published a paper on Boxes and Arrows. And just this week, she started her blog Meaningful Data, available here http://meaningfuldata.wordpress.com/. Good morning, Rachel.

R: Good morning, Tobi Jo.

T: So, I thought I’d start by asking how does the work of a Content Strategist differ from or overlap with an Information Architect/Interaction designer?

R: Well, this is something I’ve thought about a lot because when I wrote that article for Boxes and Arrows, at first, that’s what I thought I was going to write about. Strictly speaking I think the goal of the Information Architect and the Content Strategist is basically the same - and that is to come up with the best way to present information so it is useful and meaningful to the user. Primarily the way the field is going right I feel like Information Architects and Content Strategists just take a slightly different perspective of it. While the Information Architect looks at the physical presentation and how its organized and structured as the person is interacting with it, the content strategist looks at it from the perspective of the content itself and says “does this content have everything in it that will enable it to be presented meaningfully?”. So, it’s like if you as an Information Architect have devised a really innovative and compelling way to present up the information and the content then my role as the Content Strategist is to make sure all the pieces are in place to support that presentation.

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