Content Strategy Insights

Over the past five years, Lisa Jennings Young has pioneered the adoption of AI tools in content-design practices at Twitter and Microsoft.  Lisa has watched in real time the realization of the benefits of natural-language AI tools to help govern and create content, as well as to assist with content-design research and operations. https://contentandai.com/lisa-jennings-young/

Navigating the complex and multifaceted online media landscape can be a disjointed and disorienting experience. Scott Abel has a method for smoothing out online customers' experiences. His "content unification" approach benefits both the organizations that create content experiences and the customers who are navigating them. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/scott-abel-2/

At Trusted Shops, Claudia Francesca Mueller and her colleagues have built an AI-powered chatbot called Piuma that lets non-writers access content guidance through a natural-language interface. It took just a few weeks to launch the initial version of Piuma, building the chat interface with Voiceflow and using the LangChain development framework to access both their content design guidance and Open...

The basics of building a design system are fairly simple. Ensconcing a system in an organization's culture so that it's actually adopted and used is a more complex undertaking. Dan Mall takes a content-first approach as he helps organizations evolve their design systems from projects to products and ultimately to firmly embedded practices that let teams deliver the efficiency and consistency benef...

Kurt Cagle has been reporting on and participating in the tech world for several decades. He's never seen anything like the pace of change around AI. His advice for staying ready to work with AI: stay nimble, pay attention to what's going on, don't get tied to any one technology, and always bear in mind that your work will have an impact. https://contentandai.com/kurt-cagle/

Jarno van Driel is a true pioneer on the semantic web. Even before you could add machine-readable semantic markup to webpages, he was discovering ways to help search engines understand what web pages were about. Much of that success grew out of his early focus on accessibility and usability. When semantic markup was introduced, he was among the first cadre of experts on RDFa, Microdata, schema.org...

"Leading-edge technology" may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you walk into an IKEA store, but maybe it should be.  IKEA is using AI technologies across its vast collection of businesses to deliver better content experiences to its customers. Tane Piper leads an engineering team at Inter IKEA - the business unit that owns the IKEA brand - that is building their next generation of co...

To conduct a good research-focused interview, you need to cultivate a professional interviewing mindset. Steve Portigal has been doing this for years, and he has written a book to help other researchers and designers conduct better interviews. Now in its second edition, Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, covers interviewing techniques, of course, but also research best practic...

The arrival of AI affects every area and aspect of content practice. In the technical documentation field, Sarah O'Keefe sees three immediate impacts on the work she does for her clients: how AI agents can support technical documentation workflows, the ability to create content with generative AI, and the ways that AI is changing the delivery of technical content. And wherever she looks in the con...

Modern content projects begin with research to create lifelike customer personas and build detailed customer journey maps. Whether you're on a tight budget or have a team of UX researchers at your disposal, AI can help accelerate and improve the development of these personas and journey maps.  Noz Urbina has developed the RAUX (Rapid AI-powered UX) method to help omnichannel content strategists de...

Michael Reid is a consultant who helps organizations with their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. A linquist by training, he is extremely attuned to the role of language in his work, which led to his explorations of the privilege given to English-language speakers in our modern,  hyper-connected world. His discoveries can help content professionals of all kinds identify and address the dy...

Most of us are learning about AI on the fly and just got started in the past year or two.  Paco Nathan has been working with AI since the 1980s and has been doing digital business nearly as long. His background in both the technical and commercial sides of artificial intelligence give him a unique perspective on the field that can help newcomers like me and you get oriented to this new landscape....

The arrival of decoupled content architectures and headless CMSs creates a new set of challenges for content modelers, authors, administrators, and others who work with content systems. Lo Etheredge does developer relations for Hygraph, a headless CMS company. Dev rel folks don't typically drive organizational change and stakeholder alignment, but Lo's unique background in social work uniquely pre...

Dan McCreary has years of experience selling AI solutions to executives. He uses a metaphorical story to show the importance of making your enterprise as intelligent and nimble as possible. His story of the the evolutionary heritage of jellyfish and flatworms seemed to me like a great way to kick off this new podcast. https://contentandai.com/dan-mccreary/

Larry Swanson introduces this new podcast, which aims to demystify and democratize AI practices for content professionals.

The emergence of modular web architectures and complex digital experiences has created a need for new content-management practices and for new enterprise tools.  One of the most pressing new needs is the ability to orchestrate the assembly of content elements, which may come from a variety of sources and be used in a variety of distribution channels. Sana Remekie started her company, Conscia, to h...

Knowledge graphs let people and computers work from the same body of facts to create uniquely informative and powerful experiences. Katariina Kari and her colleagues at IKEA use ontologies and knowledge graphs to drive applications like recommendation systems and to streamline back-end processes like image recognition. Katariina balances her engineering expertise with a deep appreciation for the h...

Aligning brand messaging for a variety of customer segments across a number of communications channels is a complex endeavor. Jenny Scribani has developed a messaging framework that streamlines the process of communicating brand messaging to colleagues across a variety of content practices, letting them focus on the task at hand. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jenny-scribani/

Ann Rockley first took the title of "content strategist" in 1989. Over the next 30 years she pioneered content management, intelligent content, and many other practices we now take for granted. Until recently few knew that she accomplished all of that while managing health challenges that would have sidelined most people. Ann now focuses on health coaching and career mentoring, two intertwined pra...

Content leaders are beginning to ascend the corporate org chart. Alli Mooney is VP of Content Design at MasterCard, where she leads a large team of content designers and guides big organization-change initiatives. Like many content professionals, she began her career in publishing and journalism, but her path also included a stint in trend reporting, which lead to a variety of leadership roles at...

There are a lot of pioneers in the field of content strategy, but one of them can make a strong case for being a true original. Ginny Redish was among the cadre of usability-testing professionals who founded the discipline of UX design. She was making government content usable, readable, and accessible decades before the famous GOV.UK makeover. She was talking about content as conversation years b...

Content designers are word nerds by nature. Like many other craftspeople who are passionately immersed in their work, they can forget to step back and fully articulate what we are doing. Elizabeth McGuane has addressed this issue for the craft of content design. Her new book, Design by Definition, sets out the linguistic, rhetorical, and grammatical elements of content design and shows how they wo...

As the digital practices have grown and evolved over the past few decades, the job title "information architect" has become less common. That doesn't necessarily mean that the work isn't being done, but IA is now often in the province of a designer, content strategist, or other practitioner. Abby Covert sees this situation as both a sign of progress and as an opportunity to more deliberately democ...

Designing for trust is a team effort, and it's crucial to keep everyone aligned on such  important work.  At LinkedIn, the trust team has created a framework to guide that alignment. The RISE framework is built on an acronym that describes how LinkedIn wants its members to feel: respected, informed, safe, and empowered. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/stephanie-lucas/

Before you let a business manage your hard-earned money, you need to trust them. Selene De La Cruz and her colleagues at Robinhood have developed principles-backed practices that earn the trust of customers who use Robinhood's brokerages services. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/selene-de-la-cruz/