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Content strategy

Content strategy Podcast Podcast transcript

Tool or trap? Find the problem, then the platform

Tempted to jump straight to a new tool to solve your content problems? In this episode, Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow share real-world stories that show how premature solutioning without proper analysis can lead to costly misalignment, poor adoption, and missed opportunities for company-wide operational improvement.

Bill Swallow: On paper, it looked like a perfect solution. But everyone, including the people who greenlit the project, hated it. Absolutely hated it. Why? It was difficult to use, very slow, and very buggy. Sometimes it would crash and leave processes running, so you couldn’t relaunch it. There was no easy way to use it. So everyone bypassed using it at every opportunity.

Alan Pringle: It sounds to me like there was a bit of a fixation. This product checked all the boxes without actually doing any in-depth analysis of what was needed, much less actually thinking about what users needed and how that product could fill those needs.

Bill Swallow
June 2, 2025
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Content strategy Localization

Going global: Getting started with content localization

Have you been asked to deliver your content in another language but don’t know where to begin? The decisions you make early on when designing and developing your content can make or break your translation and production processes. It’s very hard (and expensive) to make changes as you run into problems during translation or production. It’s even worse when the problems are discovered by the consumers!

Let’s begin with some definitions and then take a look at what you can do to prepare for localization and how translators perform their work.

Bill Swallow
May 12, 2025
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Content operations Content strategy Industry insights Webinar

Bridging technical and marketing content (webinar)

In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series, Scriptorium CEO Sarah O’Keefe interviewed special guest Alyssa Fox, Senior VP of Marketing at The CapStreet Group. Discover critical enterprise content strategy insights that Alyssa has gathered throughout her journey from technical writer to marketing executive.

In this webinar, viewers learn:

  • The broader picture of enterprise content operations
  • Strategies for integrating technical and marketing content
  • Best practices for using technical content as a marketing asset

Sarah O'Keefe
November 18, 2024
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Content strategy Podcast Podcast transcript

Survive the descent: planning your content ops exit strategy

Whether you’re surviving a content operations project or a journey through treacherous caverns, it’s crucial to plan your way out before you begin. In episode 176 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Christine Cuellar unpack the parallels between navigating horror-filled caves and building a content ops exit strategy.

Alan Pringle: When you’re choosing tools, if you end up something that is super proprietary, has its own file formats, and so on, that means it’s probably gonna be harder to extract your content from that system. A good example of this is those of you with Samsung Android phones. You have got this proprietary layer where it may even insert things into your source code that is very particular to that product line. So look at how proprietary your tool or toolchain is and how hard it’s going to be to export. That should be an early question you ask during even the RFP process. How do people get out of your system? I realize that sounds absolutely bat-you-know-what to be telling people to be thinking about something like that when you’re just getting rolling–

Christine Cuellar: Appropriate for a cave analogy, right?

Alan Pringle: Yes, true. But you should be, you absolutely should be.

Christine Cuellar
October 7, 2024
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Content operations Content strategy Localization

Technical debt in content operations

Technical debt, hereafter called “content debt,” is “the implied cost of future reworking required when choosing an easy but limited solution instead of a better approach that could take more time,” Wikipedia, “Technical debt.”. Like financial debt, content debt isn’t always a bad thing. You can use a loan to buy a house right away (at least in the U.S.) and then pay off the debt over time while living in the house. Content debt allows you to create something quickly instead of doing it exactly right and taking much longer. 

Too much content debt, though, will hamstring your work. The trick is to find the Goldilocks solution.

Sarah O'Keefe
July 29, 2024
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Content strategy Localization Podcast Podcast transcript

Accelerate global growth with a content localization strategy

In episode 170 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar dive into the world of content localization strategy. Learn about the obstacles organizations face from initial planning to implementation, when and how organizations should consider localization, localization trends, and more.

Localization is generally a key business driver. Are you positioning your products, services, what have you for one market, one language, and that’s all? Are you looking at diversifying that? Are you looking to expand into foreign markets? Are you looking to hit multilingual people in the same market? All of those factors. Ideally as a company, you’re looking at this from the beginning as part of your business strategy.

— Bill Swallow

Christine Cuellar
July 15, 2024
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Content operations Content strategy

What does it all mean?! Foundations of an enterprise content strategy

In the wide world of content, we’ve got a lot of terms. Some may be new to you, and others have contested definitions, which makes clear communication—typically our bread and butter—a challenge. If you’re exploring efficiency in your organization’s content processes, this post clarifies the foundational concepts of an enterprise content strategy.

Christine Cuellar
June 10, 2024
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Content strategy Industry insights Podcast Podcast transcript

Self-service content in the age of AI with Patrick Bosek

In episode 165 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and guest Patrick Bosek of Heretto discuss how the role of customer self service is evolving in the age of AI.

I think that this comes back to the same thing that it came back to at every technological shift, which is more about being ready with your content than it is about having your content in the perfect format, system, set of technologies, or whatever it may be. The first thing that I think either of us will say, and a lot of people in the industry will tell you, is that you need to structure your content.

— Patrick Bosek

Sarah O'Keefe
April 29, 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 operations Content strategy White papers

The business case for content operations

This content was first published in Content Operations from Start to Scale: Perspectives from Industry Experts, Dr. Carlos Evia, editor; Virginia Tech Publishing.

We have an ingrained mental model of writers as introverted hermits, toiling away in solitude. Eventually, they produce manuscripts, which are fed into a publishing pipeline for editing and production. This model might hold for some fiction writers, but content production looks very different for marketing and technical efforts.

Sarah O'Keefe
January 16, 2024
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Content operations Content strategy Podcast Podcast transcript

Ask Alan Anything: Resolving pain in content operations (podcast, part 2)

In episode 156 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and Christine Cuellar are back discussing more pain points that Scriptorium has resolved. Discover the impact of office politics on content operations, what to do when your non-technical team is moving to structured content, and more.

“Here’s the thing. Skepticism is healthy. If people are trying to poke holes in this new process, sometimes they can actually uncover things that are not being addressed. That is real, that is useful. So don’t confuse that with people who were being a-holes and just being contrary for the sake of being contrary. Those are two different things, and you’ve got to be sure you understand those two things.”

— Alan Pringle

Christine Cuellar
November 27, 2023
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Content operations Content strategy Podcast Podcast transcript

Ask Alan Anything: Resolving pain in content operations (podcast, part 1)

In episode 155 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and Christine Cuellar dig into pain points that Scriptorium has helped organizations resolve since 1997.

“The amount of time content creators spend on formatting and for little payoff, it’s just… the numbers don’t add up. Especially in the 21st century now that we have so many automated ways to publish things to multiple channels, if you are futzing and tinkering with formatting trying to deliver to multiple channels, I can say with a great degree of certainty, you are absolutely doing it wrong.”

— Alan Pringle

Christine Cuellar
November 13, 2023
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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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