How Humans Drive ContentOps (webinar)
Discover how human dynamics shape content operations in the next episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps webinar series! Host Sarah O’Keefe interviews Kristina Halvorson, the Founder and CEO of Brain Traffic, Button Events, and an experienced content strategist. From repairing cross-silo tensions to identifying intrinsic motivations, this webinar explores strategies for navigating the human side of content operations.
In this webinar, viewers learn how to:
- Address personalities, ambitions, and company culture
- Balance legacy knowledge as currency
- Foster effective collaboration
Resources
- Button2025 online content conference. Ready to learn more about content design? Register for this event!
- Get 10% off your LavaCon 2025 registration. LavaCon is a great event for networking with content professionals and finding insights from leading content experts. Use discount code TCW during checkout.
- If you’re looking for more great content ops insights, download our book, Content Transformation, 3rd Edition.
- Check out other episodes in our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series on YouTube.
Transcript:
Christine Cuellar: Hey there, and welcome to today’s episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps webinar series hosted by Sarah O’Keefe, the founder and CEO of Scriptorium. Today our topic is how Humans Drive Content Operations, and our guest today is Kristina Halvorson, who is the founder of Button Events and an experienced content strategist. We’re really excited to talk with her about this today. So without further ado, I’m going to hand things over to Sarah and Kristina. Over to you.
Sarah O’Keefe: Yeah, so we’re excited about this one. We wanted to get together and talk with Kristina Halvorson about ContentOps and the human factors that go into ContentOps. And I think it’s fair to say that Kristina, you and I are coming at this from, I don’t want to say opposing sides, but maybe opposite sides. We’re sitting inside enabling content product, technical learning content. You’re sitting inside marketing content and maybe UX content, and then things start to converge and it gets super weird. So the first place I wanted to start then was to ask the baseline question, which is, can we agree on a definition of ContentOps? So where do you start when somebody says, “What is ContentOps?” What’s your first answer?
Kristina Halvorson: Thanks Sarah. I don’t want to be somebody that joins a debate where they get asked a question and they just ignore it and start with a different answer. But I do want to just really quickly clarify. With my longtime consultancy, content strategy, Brain Traffic, we really have focused on big, large messy websites. And as time has evolved, a lot of what people think about websites, they do think about marketing content, but actually at Brain Traffic we came out of user experience design and discipline. And so most of our work is actually in UX and IA and consistency across different touch points. And so we’re not really so much content marketing. So I just wanted to clarify, so that when we get into definitions and talking about my experience and how companies are working and what ContentOps looks like across an enterprise in particular, that you understand where I’m coming from. Because it’s definitely not necessarily just sitting in marketing specifically. So having said that, marketing gets all the money. Marketing and tech, I’ll tell you what. So we’re usually sitting with the team that does not have all the money. So when I talk about ContentOps, really when I sit down with… The way that we tend to enter the conversation is that organizations will call us, and I know that this is the same for you, this will be interesting. And they’ll say, “Our content is so inconsistent and redundant and we have so much old content. It’s poorly organized and people can’t find what they’re looking for.” “And it’s because there are a million different departments and silos and roles and we’ve tacked all these other companies on and there’s just no consistency.” And so what we tend to talk about is the systems, in terms of just the workflow, the shared tech stacks, how people are defining their roles within an organization in terms of the people, the routines that are set up within organizations to ensure that content is cared for and maintained over time, to make sure that content that’s being created has a purpose and is going to be measured and paid attention to. So really when I talk about ContentOps, I’m talking about people, process and tech, and how do we create systems across an organization where there is some kind of consistency in routine and structure and substance.
SO: And I think interestingly, a lot of the solutions that we’re delivering I think are the same. But the problem set, the problem definition I think is actually different. The people that reach out to us, they talk to a certain extent about old content and drowning in content. But what’s more common is that they tell us that our current process is unsustainable. We cannot deliver. We have so much content and so many different platforms and so many different places that we’re authoring content, and it’s redundant and it’s duplicated and we’re siloed, so we hear some of that. But for the most part, they’re focused on the back end question of how do we get our arms around this thing and control it so that we can deliver a better user experience, but they’re not starting from the user experience is bad, they’re literally starting from, “We can’t do it.” And the most common triggers for that are some sort of scalability problem. The company is growing very quickly and as a result, the process that worked for two writers or five writers doesn’t work for 10 writers or 15 writers. So they’ve outgrown whatever that process was because the inefficiencies were okay on day one in a two-writer shop, but they’re not okay anymore. Very commonly that’s because of some sort of a merger. So we were two, but then we acquired another company and now we’re four, and then we acquired another one, now we’re eight and bad things are happening. And the other piece that’s ultimately very, very common is that it is a globalization localization problem. So the trigger is, we’ve been told we’re going into new markets and instead of needing occasionally some French for Canada, it’s we’re going into Europe, we need 28 languages. We just can’t, cannot do it. That’s long before you get to the question of is the UX any good? Is the delivery end of it any good? They’re back on, we can’t function and we can’t deliver. So from a ContentOps point of view, we usually define it as being, step one is you need a content strategy of some sort for all this content, for all this stuff that you have to manage. And step two is you have to make it happen. And ContentOps is the part where you say, “Okay, I have a strategy that looks like this. How do I actually apply the correct tools and technologies and processes?” I mean, the process people, technology’s, exactly, exactly the same. And we use that same model. Although sometimes post which is people, I don’t know, objective strategy, technology, something like that.
KH: Can I ask a question really quickly? When you about, when you say first of all you need a content strategy, there’s been so much hoopla about, we need a universal definition for content strategy, which pounding my fricking head against a wall.
SO: We do not have that kind of time today.
KH: We don’t have that kind of time, and I just don’t think it can exist for exactly what you just described. So when you say, I am curious and not like I want to challenge it, but I’m curious when you say, okay, first of all, you need a content strategy, can you… Because when you say you need a content strategy over here, and I’m saying you need a content strategy over here, the fact that we don’t have qualifiers for that is part of the ContentOps problem, because the right hand is not checking the left hand. So can you just quickly give an example of what is a content strategy? You got to know what is the content strategy, just a quick example.
SO: So it’s a horribly overloaded term and is very, very problematic because it got taken over by this idea of content marketing strategy, which is more or less-
KH: That we agree on. Yes.
SO: What content should we be creating in order to do the thing in order to sell? That’s content marketing strategy at a very high level.
KH: That’s right.
SO: The way we define content strategy is more along the lines of, what are the buckets of content that you need to be producing, and how are you going to do that at a high level? Not like what’s your tool, but rather what’s the big picture process? So to take an example of this, we deal with a lot of tech content, so in a lot of cases we have compliance issues. Okay, so if I’m doing some sort of machinery heavy industry, then I have product data by which I mean the dimensions of a particular product, the specifications. Those live in a product database somewhere or they should. And part of the content strategy is saying, “Okay, they live over there, that is the owner of that piece of content. We are going to use that content and pull it into our various kinds of documents and deliverables and websites and interactive things.”
“But what we’re not going to do is put it in an Excel spreadsheet, export that spreadsheet, send it over to another division, and then have them edit the spreadsheet so that the spreadsheet now becomes the source of truth. And then use that spreadsheet downstream in some weird process.” So content strategy is about defining what are the pieces of content we need, who are the owners of that content? And then big picture, where does that get deployed? So I’m talking like, this needs to go on our website somewhere, this needs to go into our training materials, this needs to go into the machine itself. It’s going to be on board in the firmware. So that is my really bad live definition of content strategy.
KH: Nope, that’s exactly what I asked for as an example. And what’s interesting to me is that, and I think that this is why we’re here, is that, for me, that is a mishmash of when I think about content strategy and ContentOps. Because the minute you start to talk about data points upon which we are going to be making decisions, data points that we share that will inform the choices that we make in terms of what content we create and where it’s going to go, knowing what those data points are, that is part of the content strategy. But the decision making process itself and the landing points where that content’s going to go, that’s ContentOps for me. The minute you start talking about process, the minute you start talking about which spreadsheets we are not going to use to house that content, the minute we start talking about roles and responsibilities, that to me is ContentOps. And the reason that I think about that is ContentOps is that that is a conversation that often ends up getting siloed in the tech department or the tech function and in the marketing function and in the design function and in the research function, that now everybody’s got their own conversation around process and content and roles and artifacts and where those things are going to live. And in my mind, especially if we’re talking about enterprise ContentOps, that conversation has got to be shared across those… That you can’t see all the hand gestures I’m making. Make them right up next to the camera. Those things have to be shared, and that is kind of like the holy grail, I think, that companies constantly need to be moving towards. Are they ever going to get there? Probably not enterprises, but within different business units and different functions, they should. It just depends on where you’re defining the boundaries of that. So anyway, I think that’s really, really interesting because I do think the way that we talk about and think about content strategy, because when we talk about it, we are talking about purpose, we are really talking about the why, but we’re talking also really about audience and audience intent. And not just from a sales perspective, but from, what problems are they trying to solve? So it can bleed over into help content. That’s when we talk about substance and structure, that’s what we’re talking about.
SO: So how do you define it starting at the beginning and how do you separate those things out? I take your point, I don’t really disagree. I just think it’s not as clean as I would sometimes like for it to be.
KH: Oh, it’s never going to be as clean as we want it to. It’s never going to be as clean. I think that what’s important when we dig into it, and I do want to make sure that we move over to why can’t we get everybody on the same page, because that’s the human side. The why is not going to be fixed by tech. Then the why is not going to be fixed by AI. It’s not going to be fixed by processes. It’s a human thing. So I do think that, I just want to say that we’re not getting, I don’t think we want to get mired or that we’re going to get mired into what is it. I actually think what’s really important when we are talking about the definition of content strategy not landing on and which definition wins, but what’s the input that people have? What are the problems that people are trying to solve? What’s most important to them when they’re talking about content? What are they struggling with when it comes to really understanding and establishing and implementing strategy? Those are the questions that I’m interested in. And I also really feel like as long as within an organization or business unit… I mean, I will say I think that when I talk about content strategy, I wrote a book content strategy for the web below these many years ago, and I talk about that as website content strategy now. I talk about enterprise content strategy, which I mean ContentOps. So I use qualifiers now. So I don’t think we can talk about content strategy at large. I just don’t think it’s a thing.
SO: So Rahel Bailie probably had the best definition of this. And in fact, our poll is based on a slide that she put together. So she talks about ContentOps as being operationalized and content strategy. That’s about the best I think that I’ve seen. So this slide-
KH: Well, yet we can sit here and poke holes in that too. I mean, don’t get me wrong. This is Rahel’s maturity model that you put up and she put this together, I don’t even know how many years ago, and I still use it to this day. I think it’s the best one that has ever been established. But when we talk about operationalized and content strategy, I mean, that gets messy in and of itself for all of the reasons that we just described. So again, I think that rather than worrying about coming up with the definition, I think it’s way more important that we work to create alignment on what we’re talking about when we talk about a thing within an organization. So I do just want to clarify that I think that this battle to come up with the right thing is just a waste of energy and time.
SO: Okay. So this is the content strategy maturity model that Rahel put together, and this is what your poll is based on, for those of you in the audience. So this is a pretty standard one to five, where one is the lowest level of maturity, five is the highest, and typically in a five you’re seeing content recognized as an asset, integration, things are appropriately managed across the organization at the enterprise or maybe not enterprise level. So that’s what we’re looking at here. And then I think, so looking at the poll results, that’s interesting. So only 5% are saying they’re strategic. They’re at that top level. The rest, the other four are a relatively even split from one to four. So roughly 22, 27, 25, and 20% from one to four, which means we’ve got everybody at every level here. And then I think that Christine, we had a second poll that was going to ask the question of where do you think you need to be? So we’ll go ahead and put that up.
KH: Hundred percent.
CC: And that poll is live right now.
SO: Well, that’s the live one right now. Yeah. So where are you right now? Oh, sorry, the other one. Okay, so Kristina, from your point of view, when people come into this, I mean, where are they? When you talk to people and they have their complaints about the universe and all the rest of it, are they typically in that level one or are they higher up and looking to move up? Or where do they fall in your experience?
KH: Well, at Brain Traffic we’ve been doing this for… I mean, we first started messing around in process and we started… Quick context. We started out doing content for websites specifically, and it did not take long for us to go, “Oh wait, it’s not the content, it’s the people.” It’s the process. And so pretty soon we were like, “We’re not doing any copywriting for your website unless you let us talk about strategy and process as well.” And so back then, everybody that came in, I mean, the internet had been commercialized for what, seven years. Everybody that came in was one to three, for sure. We didn’t talk to anybody that was at four or five. People who are at four and five don’t contact us because they don’t need us. At Brain Traffic what we have done for years is we go in and we start to untangle some of the 1 million issues that live within a content ecosystem, both the actual content itself and then the people and processes surrounding it. So I mean, I would say probably two or three, 95% of the time, those are the folks that come in. If people come in at one, we usually we’re just like, “You’re not ready for us.” So having said that, I don’t think that anybody’s going to be like 20% of all organizations are at level five because that really depends on the industry. What level is most of higher ed at? How about healthcare? Medical content, totally just got blown up. Thank you, AI. And so I don’t know, I would be very, very interested to see in the poll people who are coming in at each of these stages, which field they’re in, or which industry they’re in.
SO: Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, so looking at the poll, yeah, 36% say they should be strategic and only 5% said they were.
KH: Can I interrupt there really quickly?
SO: Mm-hmm.
KH: Or let me say, I’m going to interrupt there really quickly. So here’s what’s interesting to me about that. What percentage of those people were at four, saying they should be at five? Because as far as I’m concerned, whatever level people are at, what they should be wanting is the next level up. This is when companies come and they’re like, “We’re here. We self-diagnosed here and we need you to get us to five.” You can’t. You can’t just magically leapfrog over the stages of maturity. An 8-year-old cannot wake up in the morning and be 40. And so I am curious how people answered that question in terms of where they are now and where they think they should be.
SO: And actually I was going to ask you exactly that question. Since only 20% said they were already managed, if 38% say they should be strategic, it is more than just the fours going to five. But that brings us, I think, to the actual question, which is when you’re introducing these kinds of changes, when you’re going into an organization and saying, “Okay, it’s time for some ContentOps,” I know that we at least get positioned as tech people. We know a lot about a lot of different kinds of technologies, and over and over and over and over again in these meetings I say to people, “I know we look like tech consultants, but actually this is a people problem.” And they just give us this look, like, “Why?” So why is this? I mean, I know why I think it’s a people problem and it has to do with change management and people not liking change. But talk a little bit about that. What does that look like on your side of the fence? What are some of the people problems that you run into, that are going to cause challenges with ContentOps?
KH: Well, let me start with people. People are going to-
SO: Be people.
KH: All people. The end. Wasn’t that a great webinar? I remember very, very early days. That was a big thing that people said all the time. Content is a people problem. Content is a people problem.
SO: Everything is a people problem.
KH: That’s fair. People are a people problem.
SO: People.
KH: Let’s pivot. Let’s pivot into that part of the conversation. I mean, I’m the same. I don’t know how many times we have sat in a meeting with people and had to say, “I understand you want…” Or even early on when I asked you very early before we came on camera, I was like, “Let’s not talk about current Brain Traffic projects because Brain Traffic’s taking a break from consulting at the moment,” but I am talking about our 20 years of doing this work, so I just want to clarify. Every time people will call and say, “Oh, it’s our content. We need you to audit our 50,000 pieces of content and tell us what’s useful and what is it that we can actually use, and we need to…” By half an hour into the first call, I’m just like, “Yeah, your content is not the issue. The people and the process is actually the issue. And that’s really where if we’re going to look at your content, we need to look at those things too.” So what are the key problems that we see? Right hand not talking to the left hand. And again, that is just a problem in companies in general. But how many times are we like, “Whoa, it’s duplicate content over here and over here. Oh look, they’re investing whatever, $500,000 with this agency over here to be working on this help content. And they’ve launched this entire microsite to tackle this one specific issue that already exists in the help content.” That’s just two parts of the organization not talking to each other. And why aren’t they talking to each other? They’re probably not talking to each other because the people who are managing those specific initiatives or projects are so narrowly focused on whatever their marching orders are from their boss that it doesn’t even occur to them that there may be some kind of connection or problem for the person who’s coming online to try to solve the issue that both of these pieces of content are trying to solve. So I think part of it is just like people not being innately curious about what’s going on in other parts of the organization. Which makes me crazy. I think another problem is always, always, always leadership. I think that leadership to a person, and it just keeps getting worse as far as I’m concerned. It just has whiplash constantly about what’s important. Like right now, how many memos are we seeing getting leaked that are, “Use AI or you’re not going to get headcount.” Okay, I understand improving process, but also what were your thoughts about that 36 hours ago? And what’s your plan for it other than just dumping it onto everybody? Well now-
SO: Well, 36 hours ago, they didn’t know how to spell AI.
KH: Yeah, it was A1. That’s right.
SO: So leadership. I want to jump in on that because it’s hard to separate as you said. And I mean I struggle with this, separate the tools and the technology and all the rest of it. But a long time ago I went into an organization and they had 3D images, CAD, Computer Assisted Drawing. And they were using those images in their documentation, which went out via PDF and some other thing. I wave my hand, went out over there. Fine, okay. The images that were generated by the engineering drawings were not exactly what they needed in the docs. So what do you do with this, do you think? Perhaps you would go in and you would modify the engineering drawings so that you can have the user consumable version with whatever adjustments needed to be made, or perhaps you make an effort to keep the engineering drawings up to date so that you can just pull them in. But what actually happened was the engineering drawings got out of date, but then they were in the docs, so they had to be updated. And the upshot of this was that the tech writers, for a given document spent something like 800 to a thousand hours pulling the CAD images, pulling them into Illustrator and making manual updates so that they could get them into the books, so that the documentation would be accurate. So those Illustrator, not CAD would be better than the source files that we’re getting, which were out of date. And tying this to the humans, because the sounds like a technology problem, but it isn’t. Tying this to the humans. The actual conversation that happened with the chief engineering officer was, “Well, I’m not going to put my people on updating those images. What does that buy me?” And it was like, “Sir, it buys your organization a thousand hours because they were doing this insane work around because they couldn’t get access to the right place, to the right images, to the right editing rights to clean up this data or this content at the source, instead of pulling it downstream and then doing dumb things with it.” And ultimately that boiled down to a power struggle. The engineering guy didn’t want his people working on it and thought he was understaffed. And the tech writers, well, they had to deliver their books and so they did what it took, which was horrible and inefficient, but they made it work. And that’s a people problem. There was a technology solution, they just weren’t using it because people.
KH: So this is really interesting because I think that this goes beyond just communication challenges. This goes beyond even just a lack of curiosity about what’s happening within an organization. You described that as a power struggle, and we could get into some therapy conversations here because what drives power struggle? Ego. What’s behind ego? Fear and insecurity. And I think that when we see obstacles in ContentOps, which is when we start to see fights over who owns what? Who’s going to do what with what? Why we’re doing it? Where the people sit? Why they sit there? I mean, I think there are a lot of different human emotions driving that. I think that fear, that somebody is going to take their job or take the content or the data that they have put blood, sweat, tears, how many millions of dollars into, and screw it up or devalue it or break it somehow. I think that there are people who are really ambitious within organizations, who don’t care about necessarily even, I don’t know, long-term impact of their decisions and want short-term wins so that they can advance within their own careers. I think that there are people, if we flip over to the positive side, I think that there are people who want everybody to get along and so can really, really slow down processes because they want to get everything just right. They want to make sure that everyone is aligned. We were on a project that it was pretty straightforward. It was a massive, massive company and it was a big opportunity for them to really clean up their global nav header. And so it was some IA work, but it was also some terminology work. But the project lead was operating from this place of both fear and people pleasing. And she kept calling meetings and bringing more and more people in.
Well, I just want to get alignment. From almost like a, it was sort of a ContentOps mindset because she wanted to make sure that everybody was on the same page so that they were all making decisions from the same data set, because we’d done all this research that she wanted us to present over and over and over again. But of course the more people that she pulled in, with no context, had not been along for the journey, did not understand the core purpose of what we were going to do. And we’re coming at it from this very, very narrow, I own the menu label three levels down from that global nav, and if that changes it’s good. We ended up quitting the project because I was just like, “We are just spinning our wheels for months and none of this is going to change.” And so I think that any individual, or how an individual is managing a team of people, radically informs not only the processes that are not happening, not only how output is being measured in terms of effect and impact, and I don’t just mean quantitatively, I mean like output in anything strategically, tactically, artifact, otherwise. I don’t know how you can advance or mature within an organization if you do not have the appropriate… I mean, that’s what Rahel draws in her talks about in her maturity model. If you do not have the appropriate leadership recognition that a thousand hours to mess around with stupid CAD drawings is not a project. That is a symptom of a larger issue, which is an organization not recognizing content as an asset.
SO: The wrong behavior was being rewarded, right?
KH: Yes.
SO: So I think we struck a nerve with this because I’m looking at the questions that are coming in. There are two from what I’m only going to describe as extremely different organizations, but they’re ultimately asking almost the same question. So the first one says, operating in an environment with low content maturity and low capability teams responsible for content. So not content experts but subject matter experts. I’m interested in how to influence leadership, who are, and I swear I’m quoting this, desperate to hang onto their empires in developing structures, teams that help improve capabilities. So how do we get them to improve capabilities when they want to have their empires? Which means breaking down some of the silos. And then before we get to that, on the second one, any tips for overcoming a very large global company and looking at, I won’t identify them, but a very, very large global company that very much values silos and hierarchies and has a culture of not stepping on toes. We see everyone working on their own version of the same thing and no matter how much we call it out, we find it nearly impossible to get everyone on the same page and tackling issues as an overall strategy. So here you have two essentially case studies, two microcosms of what you’re talking about. So what would you say to these very different people who are facing apparently roughly the same issue?
KH: My first question is, are you clients? Have we worked with you? I feel like we’ve worked with you before. And I will say, I mean we have faced that situation a million times and how many podcasts, one-to-one conversations, group therapy sessions, conference talks, have I given around influence within an organization? And we, Button content design conference now, that’s a huge topic of conversation is how do content designers influence within their own product design teams? What you are facing right now, you cannot fix. You can’t fix it. What that is, that is a culture that is being shaped by leadership, and I guarantee that you are several levels down from the leadership who needs to be convinced. And so your best bet is to decide where you can live within the organization and feel satisfied and that something is good enough, and then to identify, okay, who do you need to work with in order to get to good enough? And typically what that could mean, and what I have seen made progress is two levels up. So your boss’s boss is probably somebody that you can influence. Because what can happen is, you can work with your boss to make a case, to get them on the same page, to influence them, to understand what can be changed within your fiefdom or within your business area of function. And then whatever can be improved there, take that to the next level. I’m going to tell a quick story real quick. We worked with a globally recognized brand, and we came in through their customer experience function. And the woman who had started the project, her boss reported to the CMO. And the CMO worked with and it was the website, it was their primary main brand website, and we were able to work with our client’s boss to get in front of the CMO as a third party consultant and to get the CMO on board with this idea of an enterprise content strategy that would lead to real organizational change when it came to what? ContentOps. It was the one time in my career I had two and a half hours in a room with the CMO, the chief digital officer, the chief operating officer, and the chief technology officer. Two and a half hours in a room with these four people. I gave my little presentation. We had really great conversation. I helped get everyone aligned. We came next steps. I walked out of there, I was like, “Oh my God, this is the best. My career, I have arrived. I did it.” 48 hours later, the chief digital officer resigned and the whole thing disappeared. All of it. It was gone. Gone. The whole thing. Years worth of work. That was a human being deciding they needed to move on. The fact that all of that work hinged on one person’s sponsorship is indicative of to how you can influence all the way to the top literally, and it’s still people.
SO: Yeah, So I wasn’t in that meeting.
KH: I don’t mean to discourage at all, and I never did say how can you influence. Never did get to that part.
SO: Yeah, so I wasn’t in that meeting, but I was in that meeting, right. I’ve been in that meeting, which is interesting.
KH: Can I take two more minutes to talk about what the actual influence was? Which was the question in the first place. Sorry.
SO: Yeah.
KH: The way to influence someone is to be quiet and to figure out what it is that they care about. Because they probably don’t care about what you care about at all.
SO: Check out what I wrote down on my notepad here. Let me see if Christine, if you can bring this up. It says, what do they care about?
KH: Exactly. You have to put your own agenda aside and create cases to that. So that what I talked to the CMO about before that meeting, what I talked to the CDO about, the CTO about, because I talked to all of them, totally different areas of focus, totally different. All of them pointing back to the same problem.
SO: Yeah. I think a couple of things-
KH: That’s so funny.
SO: Yeah, a couple of things on this. So one is you talked about span of control, although not in those words. The first part of this answer is, clean up your own department. Do what you can within your span of control to fix the things, and so that you can, instead of saying, “My stuff is a train wreck and so is everybody else, and now we’re going to do this unified project that’s going to require four major execs in a room.” You just say, “Look, I fixed all these things for me and I’d love to extend that over here and maybe this would be useful to you and some things like that.” But having done that, because that’s basically you saying, “I am a capable human being and I know how to fix these issues.” Because that gives you credibility. So that’s to me a step one, is do what you can with what you have available to you. Stepping outside of that, the next step is absolutely, what do they care about at the level that is capable of approving/slash funding the project that you want to do? Whatever enterprise level thing that looks like. Now those levers, it could be a lot of different things, so there’s no telling exactly what they care about. But right now in general, people are shifting and it’s going to be AI, but it’s not, I don’t think what you expect. People, end users, people on the internet, when they go looking for information, they are preferentially looking for information by typing a question into a chatbot. They think that’s more fun and more interesting and more accurate than using a search engine. All of these… I mean, fun is debatable, right? But the rest of it is not more accurate and it’s a hot mess, but also search is broken. So people are like, “Cool, I can use this AI thing, I can ask it a question. If I don’t get exactly what I want, I can ask a follow-up question.” And Jared Spool used to talk about ascend of information. As long as you feel as though you’re getting closer to the answer, you’ll keep going and you’ll keep asking questions and you’ll keep going. That used to work in search, but now search is broken. One of the things that you can use to sell enterprise level projects in a large enterprise is to say, “We will never have good results on people using our website and/or using their chatbot of choice, their LLM of choice, to access the information that we are producing as an organization unless we clean up our content.” So the short way of saying this is that whatever content debt you have, whatever deficiencies you have in your content will be exposed by the AI. There’s almost no way of getting around that short of, for example, locking it down, and if you lock it down, people can’t get to it. But it will expose your content debt. So if you have content debt, and I am 100% certain that every single person on this call, including me, has content debt in their content. If you have a lot of content debt, the AI will not perform on your content. That’s item one. The other thing that you can look at, it’s not quite as fun as AI and it doesn’t lead to buckets of money raining down on you quite as quickly. But the other place that we found that’s a good leverage point is actually taxonomy. The classification system. How do we organize our website but also how do we order organize our product families, our products, our product variants, our geographies, our this our that, because that feels less personal than content. And your taxonomy needs to be consistent or at least compatible across the organization. Or again, you can’t lift up your information in an organized manner into your website. So taxonomy by definition has to be departmental that feeds up into enterprise, or maybe enterprise that feeds down into departmental, and that gives you a point of leverage. And it doesn’t feel quite as bad as saying you’re doing content wrong. People don’t take taxonomy as personally because it’s a little more abstract. But right now today I would start with the AI issues because that’s what everybody’s paying attention to.
KH: That is so interesting to me. I feel like from what I’m seeing, AI, especially within content design, people are scrambling to figure out how to implement AI into their own workflow and into their team workflow, but that to me is still very much team focused. And so when we talk about ContentOps, we’re talking about ContentOps within the content design function, and not ContentOps across teams necessarily. So that’s really interesting to me. Although I do hear what you’re saying in terms of just focusing on the taxonomy, I’m literally processing as I’m talking. Which is never a good idea when you’re live in front of people. I think that I want to build on that to return to the questions because I feel like starting off an answer with you can’t is not appropriate. What you talked about at the very beginning, what you’re describing now is what we would call a pilot project. And that is oftentimes when we come in and people are just like, “We have to fix this thing.” What we say is, “Let’s work with you to identify a pilot project within your sphere of influence, within your budget, within your time constraints, within your resource constraints.” Let’s identify a pilot project based in fact on what we know people care about so that we’re working backwards from whatever strategy is driving your business areas priorities in that quarter or in that calendar year or in that fiscal year or whatever. And that is making sure that that project, that whatever data points come out on the other side of that project you know have a likely chance of having influence with the people you’re looking to influence. That is a great place to start. The one other thing I will say is that I have seen really work is to identify other people who think like you within other areas of the organization. It doesn’t have to be all areas of the organization. It can be one or it can be two, that are… So the person that said they work in an organization where there’s a culture of not stepping on toes, and everybody that they value hierarchy and different areas and their own teams and making sure that those silos are protected. I guarantee there are people sitting within those teams that think the way you do. So if you’re on site, grab coffee. If you’re not, get a… I had a British friend ask me for a Zoom cuppa this morning. We do Zoom wine here in the states, I don’t know. And say, identify what the shared problems are and maybe there is a project you can work on together to begin to say, “Look, here are the problems that we solved and here are the positive outcomes that we saw,” from whether it’s a bottom line dollar thing, it’s resource savings. Whether it’s an opportunity to implement AI within workflow specifically, that is also a real opportunity. And the other real benefit of that is that you don’t feel so freaking alone. You don’t feel like you see everything that’s going on and nobody cares. In content in particular, we are never going to be the sexy one that anybody is paying attention to. We never, ever, ever are because it’s just words and data. We know the importance of that. It’s basically the fuel of everything that we do, but we’re never going to be the hot ticket in town. And so it’s important that we find our co-sponsors, our champions, our peers throughout an organization, so that at the very least we feel like we’re all working towards something together.
SO: Yeah. All right. I’ve got a couple of really interesting questions and I want to try and get to all of them as we go. So if you’ve got something out there audience, jump in and we’ll try and get to it. But in a sideways sort of question, somebody wants to know, as a job seeker, how can I identify organizations that not only have healthy long-term strategic initiatives, but also the commitment to empower talent to reach them? So in other words, how do I find the good companies?
KH: I mean, I think two things. One, I know websites are… Who goes to websites anymore? We just go to Perplexity, we’re just going to ChatGPT, they’ll tell us everything. I often find that the more, and this is real, the more consistent content is across platforms, the more accessible the content is, the easier help content is to use, the healthier content cultures are within organizations. I don’t know how long that will be visible from a website or mobile site or whatever. The easier the app is to use, those are the healthier organizations. The organizations that are making you, prioritizing, getting you to sign up for a thing and then not reminding you that it’s going to renew. Or the organizations who are just constantly adding new features to a product to add new features or to constantly collect more data. Those are not going to be healthy organizations necessarily. So that’s one way, but another way, my job satisfaction when I had to start using LinkedIn really actively actually decreased. I am not a fan, but LinkedIn is going to be one of the best places that you can find a network to actually see and people who are writing about initiatives within their own organizations that they’re proud of. And if you see that in posts, if you see people talking about work that they’re excited about, that they’re proud of their teams for, that is a real signal as well. No matter what the size of the company.
SO: Yeah, I mean I think the answer is people. Make that connection, find the people, find your peers, cross connect to somebody. After doing that or additional to that, because I think that’s probably 90% of the answer, the other 10% is I would take a hard look, especially if it’s a publicly traded company, take a hard look at what they are saying about their strategic initiatives and priorities. Where do they say they’re going and big picture, see how content aligns with that. But I think Kristina is absolutely right that you start with the question of who they are and who the people are and who you can connect with there. I would also, you can take a look at turnover. Are they turning over and finally-
KH: Do they keep hiring and laying off, and hiring and laying off?
SO: And finally, as a consultant, I mean, I’m afraid we look at this the other way. We go and look at these websites and say, “Oh yeah, we can totally help them.” So a terrible, terrible website from my point of view is just an opportunity.
KH: Well, sure, but we’re the third-party consultant.
SO: We’re the third party.
KH: I can tell you there are companies that I would go to work for in a heartbeat based on what I see from their content across check points, truly. Just like they care about, those are the companies that care about ContentOps.
SO: Yeah. Okay, so another interesting one here, and this is I think more of a problem solving, a people problem-solving issue. This person is relatively new to build out self-service help content in a new organization. There’s strong support for treating the help center like a product or a platform, but is now navigating a lot of conflicting opinions on what good looks like. And she’s got a specific example about number of screenshots, too many, not so many. But the question is, how do you balance stakeholder expectations with content best practices, and how do you set standards that give clarity without sounding like a gatekeeper?
KH: I mean, my knee-jerk reaction is, have you done any testing? Have you asked people using the content itself what they find helpful? What kind of research do you have? Have you reached out to anybody in the organization to say, “Hey, I’ve got…” Because when you’re just operating with stakeholder opinions, there’s no… I’m a content person and I’m telling you that this is what the best practice is. You hired me to give you my expertise and I’m telling you that this is what we should do. That will work with some people. It will not work with most people. Especially people who are responsible for creating the illustrations or whatever and are like, “I really want you to include this with the help content or with the article.” I mean, your best bet, if they don’t care about best practices, if they don’t care about heuristics is to find somebody to do some testing and research with you. Another thing that you can do is, every company’s got key competitors or companies that they’re constantly referring to. Like, “We should be more like this,” or, “Did you see what this company did?” Whatever. You can go to those companies and say, “Oh, you know what? They’re not putting those with every help article. In fact, they don’t have any with the help, or whatever. Here’s what they’re doing.” And do just a quick presentation to say, “I looked at companies that we admire and here’s what they’re doing.” If they come back and they’re like, “Well, this could be a competitive differentiator.” And again, are they interested in time on page? Are they interested in reducing support calls? What are their metrics for success? Because then you’re going to want to demonstrate, here’s what people actually want and here’s what people will actually find useful. If you just think individually that it’s cluttering up a page and that’s just your opinion, I would push back a little bit and say, “Well, how do you know? Is it just your opinion or are you basing it on past experience? And if so, how do you pull that in a really demonstrable, measurable way?” [inaudible 00:54:13] part of the question.
SO: I think that’s it. And part of this is how many visuals should you have and how useful are they. I mean, again, I’m with you. In addition to that, I would probably take a hard look at a technology solution that allows you to show and hide the images selectively. Which means that the end user could say, “Don’t show me all these images and just make them all go away,” which would actually accommodate both sides of this. Some people want them, some people don’t. And we can have a lengthy argument about which one is better or worse, but I think there’s pros and cons on either side. So I might look for a way to accommodate it.
KH: And can I just push back on that a little bit because that would be in a conversation that something that will come up as an idea that, well, maybe this could fix it. And what that does is it sidesteps the issue of setting standards and tries to fix it with tech. That may be the absolute appropriate thing to do, but what the team then may do is, oh yeah, let’s go find tech for that. And then it completely is going to shift it from a content problem to a tech problem. And that’s not going to tackle or solve the question of, how do I set standards as the content person that they hired to help with this, without feeling like a gatekeeper? So that is a red flag that I would, if somebody brought that up as like, this is a content problem that we can fix with tech, that I think, like we said, is still a people problem. That the person responsible for the content is not going to be able to… And then also the thing is that person loses once it becomes a tech problem, in this instance, the content strategies just completely loses any part of- [inaudible 00:56:01]
SO: The problem I think that I’m wrestling with here is that I agree with you that they should do the research and see what the research gives them. Based on what I know about this kind of thing, I think you’re going to get some mixed results. And at that point, either you say, “I’m the content person, I get to decide, and it’s more efficient not to create all these images and try to maintain them, which is fair.” Or you try to accommodate it. But I think at the end of the day, you’re going to find that there’s not a clear answer, not a clear right or wrong here. And then you have to debate, do I want to set the standard? And my constant question is, is this the hill you want to die on?
KH: Totally.
SO: This is maybe not the hill. It’s not the right hill, because I think that while we shouldn’t have so many screenshots is probably defensible. I don’t think it’s compelling.
KH: Well, and I think another thing, this brings me actually to this idea of standards. I think that another thing that is really useful to think about, Lisa Welchman’s book, Managing Chaos is a classic when it comes to beginning to get your arms wrapped around what digital governance even means and what it looks like. And one of the things that she manages to do beautifully is to help the reader understand, to help us understand the difference between policies, standards, guidelines, and there was one other one. But the difference between standards is, this is something that has been established that leadership has signed off on, and that is actively enforced by governance across an organization. You’re not going to get fired for it. It’s not going to put us at legal risk, which is what policies are for. But this is the way that we do things and you got to do things like this. Guidelines are, these are best practices. This is how we recommend doing a thing. This is how, here’s our style guide. Here’s how we use the words. But that ultimately, it’s not a thing necessarily that the people who created those standards have control over. So when you’re talking about how do I create standards without seeming like a gatekeeper? The only way that you’re going to be perceived as a gatekeeper, is if you’re the one that’s just like, “I’m not publishing that. Go back and fix it. I’m not publishing that,” or, “I’m going to unpublish it,” or, “I’m not going to push this forward.” Then you’re the gatekeeper. Then people are going to be like, “You’re gatekeeping my content.” But if you’re creating standards and you’re like, “Look, this is the way that we do things or that I recommend that we do things or that the research bore out that we do things,” but that ultimately you don’t own the keys to the authoring, to the CMS, you did what you could.
SO: I think we’ll have to leave it there. You did what you could is probably the summary of this actual session. I’ve left Christine about 30 seconds. But Kristina, thank you so much. This was super fun. We should do it again sometime, and it’s always interesting to hear the similar but not identical perspective. So I really enjoyed it, and thank you for coming.
KH: I love talking to you, Sarah. Anytime.
SO: Anytime. All right, Christine, back to you.
CC:No worries. Yeah, thank you all so much for being here. Please don’t forget to drop us a note and let us know what you thought of today’s webinar and what else you’re looking for. We’d love to see that. Save the date for our next webinar, which is going to be July 23rd at our usual time, 11:00 AM Eastern. And thanks again for being here. Hope you have a great day.
About the author
