Content Strategy Insights

Ann Rockley first took the title of "content strategist" in 1989. Over the next 30 years she pioneered content management, intelligent content, and many other practices we now take for granted.

Until recently few knew that she accomplished all of that while managing health challenges that would have sidelined most people.

Ann now focuses on health coaching and career mentoring, two intertwined practices that help her clients, most of whom are content professionals, manage their health and wellness and thrive at work.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ann-rockley/

Content leaders are beginning to ascend the corporate org chart.

Alli Mooney is VP of Content Design at MasterCard, where she leads a large team of content designers and guides big organization-change initiatives.

Like many content professionals, she began her career in publishing and journalism, but her path also included a stint in trend reporting, which lead to a variety of leadership roles at Google.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/alli-mooney/ 

There are a lot of pioneers in the field of content strategy, but one of them can make a strong case for being a true original.

Ginny Redish was among the cadre of usability-testing professionals who founded the discipline of UX design.

She was making government content usable, readable, and accessible decades before the famous GOV.UK makeover.

She was talking about content as conversation years before chatbots and voice assistants became common.

Her book, Letting Go of the Words, guided content practitioners and UX designers in the decade before the second wave of UX writing and content design books arrived.

It's truly difficult to find an aspect of modern content practice that Ginny hasn't influenced or informed.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ginny-redish/

Content designers are word nerds by nature. Like many other craftspeople who are passionately immersed in their work, they can forget to step back and fully articulate what we are doing.

Elizabeth McGuane has addressed this issue for the craft of content design. Her new book, Design by Definition, sets out the linguistic, rhetorical, and grammatical elements of content design and shows how they work together in design projects.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/elizabeth-mcguane/

As the digital practices have grown and evolved over the past few decades, the job title "information architect" has become less common. That doesn't necessarily mean that the work isn't being done, but IA is now often in the province of a designer, content strategist, or other practitioner.

Abby Covert sees this situation as both a sign of progress and as an opportunity to more deliberately democratize the craft of information architecture.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/abby-covert/

Designing for trust is a team effort, and it's crucial to keep everyone aligned on such  important work. 

At LinkedIn, the trust team has created a framework to guide that alignment. The RISE framework is built on an acronym that describes how LinkedIn wants its members to feel: respected, informed, safe, and empowered.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/stephanie-lucas/

Before you let a business manage your hard-earned money, you need to trust them.

Selene De La Cruz and her colleagues at Robinhood have developed principles-backed practices that earn the trust of customers who use Robinhood's brokerages services.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/selene-de-la-cruz/

Crafting your identity as a leader is a lot like creating your superhero persona. You need to be able to discover your authentic identity and pursue a clear mission, and to do that you need to understand your unique superpowers.

In her new book The Leader's Journey, Donna Lichaw draws on her experience as an executive coach and shows how she helps leaders transform themselves into true workplace superheroes.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/donna-lichaw/

Content work is never done. Among the most common, and challenging, types of content work are big transformation projects that consolidate, reorganize, and re-conceptualize big web properties.

Hinrich von Haaren has worked on many content transformation projects, including the famous GOV.UK website makeover in the early 2010s.

His new book, Content Transformation, is a manual for managing these big, complicated projects.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/hinrich-von-haaren/

As strategists and designers, we often facilitate gatherings of stakeholders with a variety of priorities and approaches.

There can be a temptation in such groups to leap into action and start building solutions and creating content right away.

A good facilitator like Adam Lawrence can redirect this natural human enthusiasm to bring focus to our equally natural curiosity and humility, which almost always results in better products that address customers' actual problems.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/adam-lawrence/

The web has changed a lot over the past 25 years. Or maybe it hasn't.

Enterprise content architectures are maturing and finally beginning to separate content from its presentation. But old-fashioned artifacts like PDF files still abound, and authors still expect WYSIWYG editing experiences.

And when Karen McGrane reflects on her work 25 years ago at Razorfish she's struck by how the team structures and business practices they adopted there are still relevant today.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/karen-mcgrane/

As the field of content design has matured, leaders have emerged to guide their teams as well as the profession as a whole.

Both at LinkedIn, where she leads the content design team, and through her avid participation in the content community, Keri Maijala has helped shape the craft of content-design leadership.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/keri-maijala/

Margo Stern has landed desirable jobs at several prominent companies - places like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Peleton.

She has also built multiple content design teams in those same organizations.

Now she's writing a book to share both her job-hunting expertise and her extensive content hiring experience.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/margo-stern/

Humans are notoriously fickle creatures, hard-wired to behave in unpredictable ways. This makes experience design work challenging for both managers and practitioners.

Vidhika Bansal has led both UX research and content design teams. Her unique background in both the behavioral sciences and UX design gives her a unique toolkit for bridging the gaps between unpredictable human behavior and useful digital experiences.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/vidhika-bansal/

The emergence of design systems has created new content strategy and content management needs.

As a long-time UX practitioner, content strategy evangelist, and content systems expert, Michael Andrews is uniquely qualified to talk about how to manage content in these new systems.

So far, the most important lesson he has learned from working with content in design systems:  Don't forget to apply the basic content strategy lessons we've learned over the past 20 years.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/michael-andrews-2/

Paula Land wrote the definitive guide to content audits and inventories almost ten years ago. A lot has changed since then.

The new edition of "Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook for Content Analysis" has been extensively updated to account for the evolution of auditing practice, including 100 pages of new content and a new emphasis on the importance of analyzing and operationalizing the results of content audits.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/paula-land-2/

When your organization talks about "bringing your whole self to work," they're likely picturing an idealized version of you, not the complex human that you actually are.

Eileen Webb helps people and teams build better relationships at work by connecting them with their actual authentic selves.

Her approach isn't touchy-feely, summer-camp trust-fall theater. It's pragmatic professional-development work that can remove obstacles to collaboration and build trust among teams.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/eileen-webb/

Designing content for immersive experiences has been around longer than you might think.

Many people jump straight to modern VR headsets when they think about immersive digital experiences, but the craft of immersive content design also shows up in applications like location-aware text alerts and games like Pokemon Go.

Preston So has just written the first book on immersive content design, drawing on his unique background in programming, product management, design, and content strategy. 

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/preston-so-2/

Building a content design team is typically a long process. At Hotjar, Kaysie Garza has had the chance to build a new content-design practice with two colleagues at her side from the very beginning. 

Hotjar offers a variety of research products, so Kaysie and her team have also been able to inform their work with plenty of research insights.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/kaysie-garza/

Content has always been a key element of any design system, but content designers have only recently become part of these system teams. It's still early days, but the role of content in design systems is evolving rapidly. Rebekah Wolf has been part of that evolution through her work as a content designer on Microsoft's Fluent design system. She has also built a professional community around the subject with the Design System Content Club Slack that she founded and facilitates. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/rebekah-wolf/