Content Strategy Insights
Conversations with content strategists from all crafts (strategy, design, engineering, operations, etc.) and backgrounds (enterprise, agencies, UX, content design, technical communication, marketing, SEO, publishing, journalism, etc.).
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Gladys Diandoki: Content Design Leadership Built on Strategy and Research
03/27/2024
Gladys Diandoki: Content Design Leadership Built on Strategy and Research
Gladys Diandoki brings a strong research mindset and a consistent focus on strategy to her content work. Her approach results in both solid design results and an increased appreciation for content design among her colleagues and clients. It's not only her clients who benefit from her work. Gladys is also an active leader in the field, speaking regularly at conferences, writing, and hosting gatherings like the "Beyond The Cover" book club. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/gladys-diandoki/
/episode/index/show/ellessmedia/id/30572063
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Wojtek Aleksander: Inclusive Content Design in Poland
03/13/2024
Wojtek Aleksander: Inclusive Content Design in Poland
Wojtek Aleksander is a business-focused, inclusive content designer based in Poland. Working in a profession in which English-language educational materials dominate, he addressed the need for Polish-language content guidance by writing "UX Writing: The Power of Language in Digital Products." One big challenge he faces when crafting inclusive content in Polish is working with the language's strongly gendered and inflected grammar. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/wojtek-aleksander/
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Barbara Blythe: Content Design Operations at Cisco
03/06/2024
Barbara Blythe: Content Design Operations at Cisco
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/
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Nicole Michaelis: Thoughtful Content Design Leadership
02/27/2024
Nicole Michaelis: Thoughtful Content Design Leadership
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/
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Terry Roach: Building Ontology-Based Enterprise Operating Models
02/22/2024
Terry Roach: Building Ontology-Based Enterprise Operating Models
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/
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Anna Potapova and Arnaud Frattini: Content Design in China
02/14/2024
Anna Potapova and Arnaud Frattini: Content Design in China
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/
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Sophie Tahran: Org Design for Content-Design Orgs
01/31/2024
Sophie Tahran: Org Design for Content-Design Orgs
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/
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Matt Hayes: Enterprise-Scale Content Design at LinkedIn
01/23/2024
Matt Hayes: Enterprise-Scale Content Design at LinkedIn
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/
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Jorge Arango: Duly Noted
01/18/2024
Jorge Arango: Duly Noted
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/
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Peter Compo: The Emergent Approach to Strategy
01/10/2024
Peter Compo: The Emergent Approach to Strategy
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/
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Relly Annett-Baker: Stalwart Advocate for UX Content
01/03/2024
Relly Annett-Baker: Stalwart Advocate for UX Content
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/
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Jason Barnard: Conversations with Google's Knowledge Graph
12/21/2023
Jason Barnard: Conversations with Google's Knowledge Graph
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/
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Melinda Belcher: Inspirational Design Leadership
12/11/2023
Melinda Belcher: Inspirational Design Leadership
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/
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Scott Abel: Content Unification from The Content Wrangler
12/06/2023
Scott Abel: Content Unification from The Content Wrangler
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/
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Dan Mall: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice
11/28/2023
Dan Mall: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice
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/
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Jarno van Driel: Semantics, Accessibility, and SEO
11/21/2023
Jarno van Driel: Semantics, Accessibility, and SEO
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/
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Steve Portigal: Interviewing Users
11/15/2023
Steve Portigal: Interviewing Users
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/
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Michael Reid: English-Language Privilege
11/07/2023
Michael Reid: English-Language Privilege
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/
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Lo Etheridge: Human-centered Federation for Headless CMSs
10/29/2023
Lo Etheridge: Human-centered Federation for Headless CMSs
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/
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Sana Remekie: Content Orchestration for the Composable Web
10/18/2023
Sana Remekie: Content Orchestration for the Composable Web
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/
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Katariina Kari: Knowledge Graph and Ontology Practice at IKEA
10/10/2023
Katariina Kari: Knowledge Graph and Ontology Practice at IKEA
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/
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Jenny Scribani: A Messaging Framework for Content Practitioners
10/04/2023
Jenny Scribani: A Messaging Framework for Content Practitioners
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/
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Ann Rockley: Wellness Strategies for Content Professionals
09/27/2023
Ann Rockley: Wellness Strategies for Content Professionals
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/
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Alli Mooney: Executive-level Content Design Leadership
09/21/2023
Alli Mooney: Executive-level Content Design Leadership
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/
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Ginny Redish: Content, Usability, and UX Pioneer
09/13/2023
Ginny Redish: Content, Usability, and UX Pioneer
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/
/episode/index/show/ellessmedia/id/28020315
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Elizabeth McGuane: Design by Definition
09/06/2023
Elizabeth McGuane: Design by Definition
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/
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Abby Covert: Democratizing Information Architecture
08/30/2023
Abby Covert: Democratizing Information Architecture
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/
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Stephanie Lucas: Content Design and Trust at LinkedIn
08/23/2023
Stephanie Lucas: Content Design and Trust at LinkedIn
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/
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Selene De La Cruz: Building Trust with Content Design
08/08/2023
Selene De La Cruz: Building Trust with Content Design
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/
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Donna Lichaw: The Leader’s Journey
08/02/2023
Donna Lichaw: The Leader’s Journey
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/
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