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Content operations Localization Podcast Podcast transcript

Conquering content localization: strategies for success (podcast)

Translation troubles? This podcast is for you! In episode 173 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and special guest Mike McDermott, Director of Language Services at MadTranslations, share strategies for overcoming common content localization challenges and unlocking new market opportunities.

Mike McDermott: It gets very cumbersome to continually do these manual steps to get to a translation update. Once the authoring is done, ideally you just send it right through translation and the process starts.

Bill Swallow: So from an agile point of view, I am assuming that you’re talking about not necessarily translating an entire publication from page one to page 300, but you’re saying as soon as a particular chunk of content is done and “blessed,” let’s say, by reviewers in the native language, then it can immediately go off to translation even if other portions are still in progress.

Mike McDermott: Exactly. That’s what working in this semantic content and these types of environments will do for a content creator. You don’t need to wait for the final piece of content to be finalized to get things into translation.

Bill Swallow
September 9, 2024
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Content operations Localization Podcast Podcast transcript

Cutting technical debt with replatforming (podcast)

When organizations replatform from one content management system to another, unchecked technical debt can weigh down the new system. In contrast, strategic replatforming can be a tool for reducing technical debt. In episode 172 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow share how to set your replatforming project up for success.

Here’s the real question I think you have to ask before replatforming—is the platform actually the problem? Is it legitimately broken? As Bill said, has it evolved away from the business requirements to a point where it no longer meet your needs? Or there are some other questions to ask, such as, what are your processes around that platform? Do you have weird, annoying, and inefficient processes?

— Sarah O’Keefe

Sarah O'Keefe
August 19, 2024
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Content operations Industry insights Podcast Podcast transcript

The challenges of content operations across the enterprise (podcast)

In episode 167 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe, Alan Pringle, and Bill Swallow discuss the difficulties organizations encounter when they try to create a unified content experience for their end users.

AP: Technical content, your tech content or product content, wants to convey knowledge so the user or reader can do whatever thing that they need to do. Learning content is about improving performance. And with your knowledge base content, it’s when, “I need to solve this very specific problem.” So those are the distinctions that I see among those three types.

SO: Okay, and from a customer point of view, what does this mean?

AP: Well, in reality, I don’t think the customers care. They want the information available, and they want it in the formats they want it in. And also, they want the right information so they can either get that thing done, improve their performance, or solve a specific problem.

Sarah O'Keefe
June 3, 2024
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Content operations Content strategy Podcast Podcast transcript

What’s next after LearningDITA? (podcast)

If you’ve taken the courses at LearningDITA.com and you’re interested in starting a DITA project, check out episode 163 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast where Bill Swallow and Sarah O’Keefe talk about the steps you can take to get funding.

“Showing up with cookies never hurts, but what is your executive’s motivation from a business point of view? What are they trying to accomplish in their goals for this next quarter or month or year, and so on? You need to show them, assuming that you can, that moving to structured content, moving to DITA, and changing tools is going to help achieve those business goals.”

— Sarah O’Keefe

Bill Swallow
March 18, 2024
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Content strategy Podcast Podcast transcript

Brewing a better content strategy through single sourcing (podcast)

In episode 162 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar discuss the benefits of single sourcing as part of your content strategy through the example of two things they love: coffee and beer.

“We know companies that have moved away from a do-it-yourself approach because they had maybe two or three different people putting in half to almost full-time work on the publishing system and not on other facets of the company’s core business or the writing. They were simply there to keep everything working. It just blows my mind that on a scale where you have hundreds of writers contributing content, you are saying, Okay, you three people are going to be solely responsible for keeping this thing up and running so that they can produce their content, rather than having a system that’s designed to keep itself up and running.”

— Bill Swallow

Christine Cuellar
February 19, 2024
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Content strategy Industry insights Podcast Podcast transcript

Adapt to evolving content careers with guest Jack Molisani (podcast)

In episode 151 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and podcast guest, Jack Molisani discuss how content careers have changed through the pandemic, layoffs, quiet quitting, and AI, and what you should do to stay ahead of the curve.

“Rather than applying for a job […] you want companies to come to you and say, ‘Hey, will you come work for us?’ The only way they’re going to do that is if you write articles, if you’re speaking at conferences, and if you position yourself as an expert in your field.”

— Jack Molisani

Bill Swallow
September 11, 2023
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Learning content Podcast Podcast transcript

Optimize learning and training content through content operations (podcast)

In episode 145 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar discuss the impact content operations has on your learning and training content, and how to make the most out of this valuable asset. 

“If the company is looking to implement something within a specific time frame for a very specific business need, and that gets delayed at the beginning when training is being developed, it’s going to snowball down. So, your six-week delay on getting content out the door might turn into a six-month delay on getting the program rolled out.”

— Bill Swallow

Christine Cuellar
June 5, 2023
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Podcast

The challenges of replatforming content (podcast)

In episode 130 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Sarah O’Keefe talk about the challenges of replatforming content from one system to another.

Links are always a problem, especially cross-document links. Reusable content tends to be handled differently in different systems, or almost the same, but not quite, which is almost worse.

—Sarah O’Keefe

Bill Swallow
October 24, 2022
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Podcast Podcast transcript

Prerequisites for efficient content operations (podcast)

In episode 129 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow discuss the prerequisites for efficient content operations and the pitfalls from not following them.

Mayhem, chaos, cost overruns, work, rework, delays. I mean, these things, they’re expensive. And they’re not just expensive, they’re soul sucking for everybody involved in the project. And it doesn’t have to be that way if this thing is planned and executed at the right level.

—Sarah O’Keefe

Bill Swallow
October 10, 2022
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Podcast Podcast transcript

Content ops stakeholders: Content consumers (podcast)

In episode 121 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow talk about content consumers as content ops stakeholders.

“If you look up a restaurant on your phone and go to view the menu, most of the time, that menu is going to be a PDF. And you are sitting there, zooming in, scrolling around, and pinching, and trying to read this menu that really should have just been a responsive HTML page.”

– Bill Swallow

Alan Pringle
June 13, 2022
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