Content Strategy Insights

Noz Urbina can help you navigate the hype around personalization and create genuinely helpful customized content experiences. Noz focuses on the fundamentals that create useful, usable adaptive content. He starts with customer journey mapping and persona creation to develop an evidence-based picture of his users. Then he builds modularized content models that address those user needs. The result is a human-centered content system that serves up content tailored to answer users' questions wherever they are in their journey. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/noz-urbina/

Orchestrating the strategy, design, and software work that comes with enterprise-scale digital projects is a complex and painstaking mission. It's hard to imagine a team better equipped to take on these challenges than the founders of Autogram. Karen McGrane, Ethan Marcotte, and Jeff Eaton have each mastered huge swaths of digital business practice. Karen built the venerable UX and content practices at Razorfish and has arguably done more enterprise content strategy work than anyone else on the planet. It's hard to find a content strategist who doesn't cite her as a mentor or source of inspiration. Ethan introduced the now-ubiquitous practice of responsive web design ten years ago. He's working now to develop a holistic approach to creating design systems. Jeff is an accomplished web developer and content management systems expert who has guided the content strategy for many of the largest sites on the web. Together they help digital teams collaborate more effectively. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/autogram/

Carmen Martinez and Paulo Azevedo combine her linguistics and ethnography skills with his computing and product skills to create computer interactions that feel almost human. Carmen and Paulo collaborate to design conversation experiences for FlixBus, a company that helps millions of travelers around the world book bus travel. It's hard to create natural-feeling conversations between humans and computers, but they get better at it with every product launch. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/flixbus/

Sara Wachter-Boettcher helps design and content professionals discover and express their leadership ability. Leaders can come from anywhere. You don't have to be in a management role. With some personal work and a little courage, you can lead from wherever you are in the digital design and content world. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sara-w-b/

Scott Abel is a content strategy original. He first took the title of "content strategist" in 1999. Since then, Scott has practiced content strategy and become a leading voice for the discipline. When he's not running his consultancy, Scott organizes content events, publishes and writes books and articles, and keynotes and speaks at industry conferences. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/scott-abel/

David Dylan Thomas can help you tame the unconscious biases that can undermine your design decision-making. These biases are strong. You may never conquer them all. But recognizing them and accounting for them in your content strategy and design work can mitigate the hazards they present. You need to be on your toes at every turn to account for these cognitive biases. They can affect the products and experiences you design, your collaborations with your team, and your own behavior. Dave's book shows you how to deal with each of these challenges. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/david-dylan-thomas-2/

Andrea Volpini creates products that help search engines and other computers find your web content. Adding semantic meaning to your content helps artificial intelligence agents and other computers understand how your information relates to other content on the web. Revealing these relationships helps both computers and the human users who rely on them find and use your content. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/andrea-volpini/

Erin Golden and her colleagues have created a model that shows the evolution of the practice of content strategy. Drawing on the Kardashev scale – an astrophysics method for measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement – they rank content strategy practice along a 1-to-5 range. K1 represents the first stage, when content strategists were mostly concerned with putting words on webpages instead of in paper documents. K5 represents the science-fiction-ey AI future of the practice. This reflection on the advancement of the discipline has led Erin to bolster her own professional toolkit, adding to her content skills new practices like UX research. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/erin-golden/

Bob Kasenchak is an expert on taxonomy for web publishers. He's one of a handful of information architects who focuses on this powerful practice. A good taxonomy helps people find and navigate your content. It helps search engines index and list your content. It helps connect your content to similar content on the web. The process of building a taxonomy can help align different business units in your organization around a central knowledge model that can power a number of different information systems. People like Bob devote their careers to the practice of taxonomy. But you don't have become a professional to benefit from well-organized content. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/bob-kasenchak/

Laurah Mwirichia is a product-writing enthusiast. She loves her work and wants you to jump into this burgeoning field, too. Laurah applies her writing skills as a product writer at Square. She loves using words in her design practice there, and she enjoys her collaborations with her product and technical colleagues. She's gleaned a lot wisdom in her UX writing career and is eager to share it. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/laurah-mwirichia/