Are your content development processes manual, inconsistent, or unable to scale up to meet larger demands? If so, you may be ready to look into a smart content solution. Smart content — or content that’s semantically structured, modular, and flexible — can help increase efficiency in content production.
With the holidays coming up, people start thinking about food and planning meals. The approach you take when preparing a holiday meal has a lot of similarities to a content strategy project.
In episode 84 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe talks with Val Swisher of Content Rules about why companies fail and how to succeed at delivering personalized experiences at scale.
“It all has to be completely standardized in order to be successful. There have to be small, individual, standardized chunks of content that are devoid of format that can be mixed and matched. Then the output can be personalized to the person who asked for it and sent to them at that moment in time.”
—Val Swisher
In episode 83 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Jake Campbell talk about the next generation of DITA. What happens when you need to update your existing DITA structure?
“When you’re building everything out the first time around, you can do as much user acceptance testing as you want—but the best user acceptance testing is going to be live testing.”
—Jake Campbell
In a content strategy project, it’s important to be aware of the monsters lurking in the shadows and waiting to pounce on your project. Here are the gruesome details:
In episode 82 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Bill Swallow talk about taking a phased approach to content strategy when you have limited resources and how you can prioritize that approach.
“It’s really easy to allow your scope to expand. Try to keep it finite. Try to keep the phases small.”
—Elizabeth Patterson
Implementing a content strategy in a single department is a great way to get your feet wet, but doesn’t mean you solve all of your content problems. All customer-facing content needs to be findable and usable. Your clients and prospects expect a seamless user experience across all of your content. If you aren’t delivering on that expectation, it may be time to implement an enterprise content strategy by expanding your current content strategy across your entire organization.
In episode 81 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Alan Pringle discuss document ownership and the role it plays in content development workflows and governance.
“You’ve got to quit the focus on the tools. The tools are not going to solve mindset problems. Those are two distinct different things. You’re talking about technology, and you’re talking about culture. Culture is a lot harder to change.”
—Alan Pringle
Are you considering a transition to DITA XML and wondering where to get started? LearningDITA.com provides free e-learning courses on the foundational aspects of DITA. Each lesson includes instructions, practice exercises, and quizzes to test your knowledge, supplemented with additional resources.
In episode 80 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Sarah O’Keefe discuss information architecture in DITA XML and other forms.
“You have to look at information architecture in metadata starting from a taxonomy point of view. This means you are looking at the structure of the content as well as the organization of the data that’s used for search and filtering.”
—Gretyl Kinsey
