In episode 139 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Keith Anderson dive into their experiences with structured content, DITA, and user content.
“My definition of context is anything that affects the cognitive processing of information. […] So, whether you’re consuming information by reading or listening, there are so many factors that affect how you process the context of the content.”
In episode 138 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Christine Cuellar talk about a common content strategy trap: what happens when information architecture (IA) is missing, and why you need IA.
“Without IA, you can’t get the most value out of your content. When we think about things like the time it takes to create your content, or getting benefits out of it like reuse, saving money on your translation costs, saving time to market on your translation, all of these things really make your content work for your organization. If you don’t have solid IA in place, it’s going to be really hard to do those things and truly get that value out of your content.”
In episode 137 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and guest Larry Swanson talk about the fragmentation of content over the past 30 years, from the delivery of books to UX writing.
“What are the changes that this fragmentation has introduced from a business or an economic point of view? One is the notion that we’re all publishers now. This is where the whole field of content marketing comes from — this notion that it’s a better way to promote yourself if you demonstrate expertise around what you’re doing.”
In episode 136 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle unveils horror stories of content ops gone horribly wrong.
In episode 135 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and new team member, Christine Cuellar, talk about who Scriptorium is and how we use content to optimize your business.
In episode 134 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and guest Jodi Shimp talk about the role of content strategy in UX teams.
In episode 133 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and guest Carrie Hane of Sanity talk about headless CMSs.
If your organization isn’t already going down this route, it will probably go there soon. Whenever it’s time to get a new CMS or change hosts. It’s usually triggered on the IT side to switch to it. But like I said, the developers love the flexibility and ease of this decoupled tool. Yeah, it’s really technology driven, but it’s a real opportunity for everyone in an organization to rethink how they’re creating and using content.
—Carrie Hane
In episode 132 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and guest Jo Lam of Paligo dispel misconceptions and myths about structured content.
“Science and history shows us that structured content, structured authoring, is actually very intuitive. And if I may rewind back to, say, the paleolithic era where we first started using a lot of symbols, and then eventually converting them into what we now know as letters. Understanding patterns on an extremely micro level, and that’s how we actually learn to read and write.”
—Jo Lam
In episode 131 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and guest Keith Schengili-Roberts discuss the techcomm job market.
Most of the jobs I see are industry experience … is helpful. Medical device is very helpful. PS, we’d love it if you had these tools. It’s common not to require the tools. It’s common to require domain knowledge and then say tools are a nice-to-have or a strongly preferred, but not an absolute requirement.
—Keith Schengili-Roberts
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
In episode 128 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe talks with guest Chip Gettinger of RWS about why companies are replatforming structured content by moving it into a new component content management system (CCMS).
I find there’s some business change that’s happened to spark this replatforming. One is mergers and acquisitions, where two companies get together, there are two CCMSs, and one basically is chosen.
—Chip Gettinger, RWS
In episode 127 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Alan Pringle talk about the challenges of aligning learning content with structured content workflows.
We’ve seen a little bit of a trend where we think about learning content and structure almost as mortal enemies, and we see some degree of resistance to wanting to use structured content for learning and training materials. And we want to dig into a little bit of why that might be.
—Gretyl Kinsey
In episode 126 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Stefan Gentz of Adobe discuss Industry 4.0.
In episode 125 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Amy Williams of DCL talk about digital transformation projects and how structured content provides the foundation for those efforts.
If, as a company, you start to think and plan and build processes with the digital innovation, you really start to future-proof for yourself, because you’re going to become more agile, more flexible.
– Amy Williams
In episode 123 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Gretyl Kinsey wrap up our series on content ops stakeholders and continue their discussion about content authors.
“When you are trying to get executive buy-in on something as a content creator, don’t focus on the tools and the nitty gritty of the tech. That is not the way to get the attention of executives. ”
– Alan Pringle
In episode 122 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Gretyl Kinsey talk about content authors as content ops stakeholders.
“I think it’s really important to note here, a lot of these resources are not human people. They are systems or databases that provide information. You pull information from these multiple sources and put it together to provide a really dynamic and personalized user experience for the people who are reading your content.”
– Alan Pringle
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
In episode 120 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Sarah O’Keefe discuss content ops stakeholders in risk management.
“Your regulatory environment for a single product could actually be different depending on where you’re selling it. You have to do things a certain way in Europe. You have to do things a certain way in the US.”
– Sarah O’Keefe
In episode 119 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Bob Johnson of Tahzoo discuss accessibility when authoring DITA content.
“By its very nature, DITA being strongly structured facilitates more accessible content.”
– Bob Johnson
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 117 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Patrick Bosek of Heretto continue their discussion about Content as a Service.
“Content as a Service is becoming a necessity to really deliver a strong customer experience from an answers and knowledge perspective.”
– Patrick Bosek
In episode 116 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Patrick Bosek of Heretto talk about Content as a Service.
“Do we still have places where building a static site or a static set of help materials makes a lot of sense? Totally. But there’s a natural aspect of dynamic changing content. If that content is going to be a little bit different based on who or where or when you access it, then you can’t build it statically. That’s one of the things you’ll never get from a PDF.”
– Patrick Bosek
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
