The holidays are quickly approaching, and true to form, Scriptorium is all about the food! From time to time we use food analogies to explain various facets of content strategy. I have collected a few for you to enjoy.
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
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
A wise woman recently said, “replatforming structured content is annoying and expensive.” This is doubly so when it comes to localization.
Replatforming nearly always involves content change—the new system may store content differently or require a different format or structure. Although the changes may affect your existing localization process, some of these changes may be for the better.
In episode 118 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Sarah O’Keefe discuss content ops stakeholders in tech support.
“If you are delivering multi-hundred page PDFs to your tech support people, then I can assure you that your tech support people hate you. Opening a 600 page document and then having to search through it while you’re on the phone under all this pressure is not the experience that you want.”
– Sarah O’Keefe
In episode 115 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Sarah O’Keefe discuss content ops stakeholders in localization.
“Using baseball examples isn’t going to work well in a country where baseball is not a thing. So you have to think about that. Does your text, does your content, do your examples work and are they appropriate in your target language and culture?”
– Sarah O’Keefe
In episode 112 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Bill Swallow discuss content scalability.
“As you start approaching a greater percentage of bells and whistles in your process, the more work it takes to get each bell or whistle in place.”
– Bill Swallow
In episode 107 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Gretyl Kinsey are back for another episode in our Content strategy pitfalls series. They talk about what can have happen when you lack a unified content strategy.
“One way to get funding in place is to start the conversation among different groups. Get these groups together and start talking about what their ultimate goals are with their content strategy and their content operations. That way you can have multiple voices coming together and asking for a larger pool of money that can be shared.”
– Bill Swallow
In this presentation, Bill Swallow explores the weird yet effective applications of smart content in groups outside of techcomm.
“Moving to smart content or intelligent content has largely so far been driven by efficiency. But the places that are looking at using smarter content now are less interested in the efficiency of that content. They’re more interested in the value that it’s going to bring.”
– Bill Swallow
In episode 100 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and special guest Jodi Shimp discuss their experience with digital transformation and implementing a new content strategy at Crown Equipment Corporation.
“The initial and earliest win in the project was the go-ahead to even bring on consultants to help us determine what the scope would be and what the true need would be across all the different groups.”
– Jodi Shimp
