This year’s #LavaCon brought many technical writers, content designers, developers, and strategists to beautiful Portland, Oregon. Members of the Facebook Content Design Team spoke at LavaCon this year. The visiting members held a small get together with content strategists and technical writers from the conference and from around the area over at Portland’s Urban Farmer.

There was good food, great minds to pick, and awesome conversations. It had been a while since my last content strategy event. This was a great one to ease back into spending time with Portland’s awesome content and technical writing community.

I had the chance to speak with Elisabeth Carr, Content Strategist at Facebook. She explained her role across various teams, developing and managing content mainly for Photos, Privacy, and Facebook’s Safety Advisory program. It was fascinating to talk to Elisabeth for a bit about content strategy at Facebook, their challenges, and discuss my own role as a content strategist within our telecommunications company.

It was interesting to hear that even at a place like Facebook, the content teams still need to sell content initiatives to their leadership. They’re fighting the same fight that myself and many of my peers do to get great content and customer experience initiatives going for their organizations.

Of course, these are battles worth fighting.

After sharing stories, I received encouragement to share my own journey about bringing a content-centric program to my organization via speaking engagements or more articles. I have plenty of stories, fails, and case studies after building a content strategy infrastructure for our small telecommunications organization.

Hopefully there are people out there who will want to listen!

I guess I’ll start this journey by hanging out at Intelligent Content Conference 2014 in San Jose. It’s time to start closely studying how others in our field share their stories, case studies, and other tales. Please let me know if you’ll be there too.

I enjoyed the chance to see some Twitter peeps in real life, rather than just their words, media, and avatars. Thanks for hanging out, @dccd and @meaningmeasure! You better start that blog of yours soon, David! :p

I hope to see everyone at more upcoming events. Stay warm, all.