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Tag: smart content

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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Boston DITA User’s Group monthly meeting

Are your content development processes manual, inconsistent, or unable to scale to meet larger demands? Gretyl Kinsey is presenting Expanding smart content across the enterprise during April’s meeting. Get practical tips for expanding smart content operations across the enterprise, even in the face of challenges such as budget constraints, change resistance, company politics, and more.

Join the meeting.

ScriptoriumTech
April 1, 2022
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Webinar

Smarter content in weird places (webinar)

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

Bill Swallow
September 20, 2021
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Podcast Podcast transcript

The evolution of smart content (podcast)

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

Alan Pringle
July 26, 2021
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Podcast Podcast transcript

Moving to structured content: Expectations vs. reality (podcast)

In episode 76 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Alan Pringle talk about expectations versus realities of tools when moving to smart structured content.

“You can have different people using different tools and still pour all of the content into the single content management system. People connect to it differently based on the authoring tool that they prefer, and what works best for them.”

—Alan Pringle

Alan Pringle
May 18, 2020
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Smart content

Smarter marcom content

Smarter marcom content has advantages, but marketers are used to writing and formatting content at the same time. Smart content separates writing and formatting. Although getting used to this separation may take some effort, the benefits are well worth it.

Most content has an implicit structure. For example, a white paper usually starts by stating a problem, then describes a possible solution, and then mentions a product that can help you with that approach.  A good marketing writer understands the implicit structure of a typical document, but the structure may not be clearly stated or outlined anywhere. With smart content, you take a document’s implicit structure and spell it out explicitly.

The tags in smart content capture the structure explicitly. Once you have your tagged document, you can process the information in lots of interesting ways (reuse, multichannel publishing, and much more). 

Smart content separates formatting and content.  In tools like InDesign or Word, you write and format  at the same time. In a smart content tool, you typically focus only on the content sequence and not on the formatting. As a marketing writer, I can tell you this is a big adjustment.  But there are huge benefits. Once you create smart content, the separation of content and formatting makes it much easier for you and others to reuse content. Reuse improves the consistency of your messaging across the company. Smart marcom content also allows you to spend more time creating the text, videos, and other promotional content rather than spending time focusing on the organizational structure.  

As you get started, there will be a learning curve. Having smart, structured marcom content can save your business time and money. Benefits such as simplifying rebranding, search engine optimization, time, and reuse make the switch worth it. 

 

ScriptoriumTech
September 3, 2019
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