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
In episode 99 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and special guest Larry Kunz of Extreme Networks talk about the evolution of smart, structured content.
“I’m a huge believer in big picture. We really need to stand back and ask ourselves, ‘What is this really all about? What are we trying to accomplish?’ It’s not about the content. It’s about the customer.”
– Larry Kunz
Getting started with a content strategy project can be intimidating. There are a lot of unknowns and changes that will take place. How do you ensure the changes you are making address your company’s needs and requirements?
How do you recognize content redundancy? Chris Hill of DCL and Alan Pringle discuss content reuse and share some great insights about managing reuse as part of your content strategy.
“You are going to be reducing your localization costs, because every time you reuse and reduce the amount of source content, you are doing the same exact thing in every language that you’re translating to.”
–Alan Pringle
Enterprise content strategy means including all customer-facing content in your planning. Our enterprise content strategy maturity model provides requirements for that strategy. This article focuses on content integration. How do you unify content across disparate content teams and technology stacks?
Does your website include content from multiple departments? If so, you need an enterprise content strategy rather than a departmental strategy. Enterprise content strategy addresses each content type as part of the overall user experience.
In this presentation, Elizabeth Patterson explores how to build a holistic content strategy across your customer-facing content groups.
“Your content needs to be searchable, it needs to be consistent, and prospects need to be able to find it efficiently.”
—Elizabeth Patterson
First published in Intercom (October 2020) by the Society for Technical Communication.
Scalable content requires you to assess your content lifecycle, identify points of friction, and remove them.
Company growth magnifies the challenges of information enablement. When you grow, you add products, product variants, markets, and languages—and each of those factors adds complexity. Process inefficiencies in your content lifecycle are multiplied for every new language or customer segment.
As a result, content scalability—increasing content throughput without increasing resources—becomes critical. Consider a simple localization example: when you translate, you have a few manual workarounds that require 1 hour of work per 100 pages of translated content. So if you translate 100 pages of content into 8 languages, you have 8 hours of workarounds. But as your content load grows, you are shipping 1,000 pages of content per month and translating into 20 languages. Suddenly, you are facing 200 hours of manual workarounds per month—the equivalent of one full-time person per year.
In episode 94 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and David Turner of DCL take a look at content migration and discuss all of the players and parts involved.
“It’s not just about moving the content and loading it to the new system. You actually have to transform the content from the unstructured formats.”
–David Turner, DCL
Structured content authoring tools behave differently than traditional tools like Microsoft Word, which causes difficulty or reluctance among authors to use them. Structured content imposes strict rules around content purpose (semantics) and placement. These tools diverge from the traditional WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) look and feel, which can be jarring for many authors. Fortunately, many structured authoring tools can be modified to feel less imposing.
In episode 92 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Alan Pringle share how you get started with a content strategy project and what you can do if you really don’t have a solid grasp on your needs.
“It’s about opening yourself up to getting feedback from someone who’s done this stuff before, and may come up with some solutions that you didn’t necessarily consider in your own thinking.”
–Alan Pringle
