Content Strategy Insights

Most enterprises and software companies now have design systems, and many have content operations and/or design operations teams.

At Cisco, Barbara Blythe works on the content design operations team. She focuses on sharing content guidance across the products she serves, enabling not only content designers but also their UX design and engineering partners to efficiently create consistent product content.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/barbara-blythe/

Nicole Michaelis brings a thoughtful leadership style and deep and varied experience to her content design work.

Like all of us, she is pondering how to best use AI in her practice and wrestling with the impacts of layoffs and other change in the content and design professions. 

Despite the current challenging business and labor environment, she's hopeful for the future and offers encouragement to both current and future content designers.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/nicole-michaelis-2/

Terry Roach helps enterprises build a "web of connectedness" that helps them understand what's happening across the span of their business

Built on an ontological understanding of business that is expressed in a knowledge graph, his methods and technology help enterprises develop a holistic understanding that can be expressed as an operating manual that all stakeholders can consult.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/terry-roach/

With more than a billion internet users and half of all global e-commerce transactions, digital business in China is huge.

Anna Potapova and Arnaud Frattini work in content roles at Alibaba, the biggest online merchant in China. Lately they have been looking beyond their desks, trying to connect with their peers at other companies and to develop a broader understanding of content practice in the country.

They've shared some of their discoveries in an article on content design in China, and they're building a new community to share practice ideas with other content strategists and designers.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/content-in-china/

As the field of content design grows and matures, so too do the organizations in which content designers practice. 

At Condé Nast, the publisher of iconic brands like The New Yorker, WIRED, and Vogue, Sophie Tahran has built content-design orgs from one-person units to company-spanning teams.

Her latest work has been informed by original research that she conducted to learn more about how others design and manage their content-design organizations.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sophie-tahran/

Matt Hayes is a staff content designer at LinkedIn, where he focuses on enterprise experience design and works closely with the design system team.

The content design team at LinkedIn is known in the industry as a small-but-mighty group that makes an outsized impact on their organization.

Among the secrets to their success: democratizating their content guidance, focusing on efficient decision-making, and working closely with their design-systems colleagues. 

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/matt-hayes/

The promise of computers augmenting our minds has been a long time coming. We're beginning to see better tools for extending human cognition, but good guidebooks for using them have been sparse.

Jorge Arango's new book, Duly Noted, fills this gap elegantly. It shows you how to extend your mind with connected digital notes that capture your thoughts and nourish them in a personal knowledge garden from which you can harvest and share your unique insights.

Through February 15, 2024, use the code ContentPod to get a 20% discount when you order the book at the Rosenfeld Media website.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jorge-arango/

Peter Compo says that "the number one thing missing in most strategic plans is a strategy."

He's talking about the tendency of executives and managers to draft plans that present lists of goals and include a bullet point for every possible stakeholder in their purview.

Peter points out that true strategy involves tough trade-offs and lots of collaboration. His pragmatic approach lets strategic objectives emerge organically, includes a variety of stakeholders, and applies adaptive thinking to address questions that have no obvious answer.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/peter-compo/

Relly Annett-Baker recently said in a LinkedIn post, "The words are an expression of the solution, the last 20%, but we also need to do the 80% that comes before to know wtf to write. "

UX writers and content designers spend a lot of their time, arguably too much of it, explaining this core aspect of their work to their colleagues and collaborators.

While she sometimes bristles at the need to constantly defend and describe her team's work, Relly also realizes that that is, in fact, the most important part of her job.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/relly-annett-baker/

Like many digital practices, search engine optimization is becoming more conversational. 

Not long ago, SEOs had to make their best educated guesses about what was working to get their websites to rank better. Now, by focusing on both feeding information to and gleaning feedback from Google's knowledge graph, Jason Barnard helps companies craft content strategies and messaging architectures that keep their brand prominent in Google's search results.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jason-barnard/

As content design becomes entrenched as a UX design practice, leaders from the craft are beginning to move into design leadership positions.

Melinda Belcher's ascent to her current design management role is an instructive and inspirational story of professional development, creative team leadership, and community building.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/melinda-belcher/

Navigating the complex and multifaceted online media landscape can be a disjointed and disorienting experience.

Scott Abel has a method for smoothing out online customers' experiences. His "content unification" approach benefits both the organizations that create content experiences and the customers who are navigating them.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/scott-abel-2/

The basics of building a design system are fairly simple. Ensconcing a system in an organization's culture so that it's actually adopted and used is a more complex undertaking.

Dan Mall takes a content-first approach as he helps organizations evolve their design systems from projects to products and ultimately to firmly embedded practices that let teams deliver the efficiency and consistency benefits that such systems offer. 

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/dan-mall/

Jarno van Driel is a true pioneer on the semantic web.

Even before you could add machine-readable semantic markup to webpages, he was discovering ways to help search engines understand what web pages were about. Much of that success grew out of his early focus on accessibility and usability.

When semantic markup was introduced, he was among the first cadre of experts on RDFa, Microdata, schema.org, and other semantic practices, and he is to this day one of the most respected practitioners of this craft.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jarno-van-driel/

To conduct a good research-focused interview, you need to cultivate a professional interviewing mindset.

Steve Portigal has been doing this for years, and he has written a book to help other researchers and designers conduct better interviews.

Now in its second edition, Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, covers interviewing techniques, of course, but also research best practices, how to document your work, and how to make sense of your discoveries.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/steve-portigal/

Michael Reid is a consultant who helps organizations with their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

A linquist by training, he is extremely attuned to the role of language in his work, which led to his explorations of the privilege given to English-language speakers in our modern,  hyper-connected world.

His discoveries can help content professionals of all kinds identify and address the dynamics and biases that arise from the pivotal role that the English language plays in modern digital business.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/michael-reid/

The arrival of decoupled content architectures and headless CMSs creates a new set of challenges for content modelers, authors, administrators, and others who work with content systems.

Lo Etheredge does developer relations for Hygraph, a headless CMS company. Dev rel folks don't typically drive organizational change and stakeholder alignment, but Lo's unique background in social work uniquely prepares them to help customers with the human side of content management.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/lo-etheridge/

The emergence of modular web architectures and complex digital experiences has created a need for new content-management practices and for new enterprise tools. 

One of the most pressing new needs is the ability to orchestrate the assembly of content elements, which may come from a variety of sources and be used in a variety of distribution channels.

Sana Remekie started her company, Conscia, to help large enterprises deal with these new challenges.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sana-remekie/

Knowledge graphs let people and computers work from the same body of facts to create uniquely informative and powerful experiences.

Katariina Kari and her colleagues at IKEA use ontologies and knowledge graphs to drive applications like recommendation systems and to streamline back-end processes like image recognition.

Katariina balances her engineering expertise with a deep appreciation for the humans who create and use AI applications like knowledge graphs.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/katariina-kari/

Aligning brand messaging for a variety of customer segments across a number of communications channels is a complex endeavor.

Jenny Scribani has developed a messaging framework that streamlines the process of communicating brand messaging to colleagues across a variety of content practices, letting them focus on the task at hand.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jenny-scribani/