Content Strategy Insights

Crafting your identity as a leader is a lot like creating your superhero persona. You need to be able to discover your authentic identity and pursue a clear mission, and to do that you need to understand your unique superpowers. In her new book The Leader's Journey, Donna Lichaw draws on her experience as an executive coach and shows how she helps leaders transform themselves into true workplace superheroes. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/donna-lichaw/

Content work is never done. Among the most common, and challenging, types of content work are big transformation projects that consolidate, reorganize, and re-conceptualize big web properties. Hinrich von Haaren has worked on many content transformation projects, including the famous GOV.UK website makeover in the early 2010s. His new book, Content Transformation, is a manual for managing these big, complicated projects. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/hinrich-von-haaren/

As strategists and designers, we often facilitate gatherings of stakeholders with a variety of priorities and approaches. There can be a temptation in such groups to leap into action and start building solutions and creating content right away. A good facilitator like Adam Lawrence can redirect this natural human enthusiasm to bring focus to our equally natural curiosity and humility, which almost always results in better products that address customers' actual problems. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/adam-lawrence/

The web has changed a lot over the past 25 years. Or maybe it hasn't. Enterprise content architectures are maturing and finally beginning to separate content from its presentation. But old-fashioned artifacts like PDF files still abound, and authors still expect WYSIWYG editing experiences. And when Karen McGrane reflects on her work 25 years ago at Razorfish she's struck by how the team structures and business practices they adopted there are still relevant today. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/karen-mcgrane/

As the field of content design has matured, leaders have emerged to guide their teams as well as the profession as a whole. Both at LinkedIn, where she leads the content design team, and through her avid participation in the content community, Keri Maijala has helped shape the craft of content-design leadership. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/keri-maijala/

Margo Stern has landed desirable jobs at several prominent companies - places like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Peleton. She has also built multiple content design teams in those same organizations. Now she's writing a book to share both her job-hunting expertise and her extensive content hiring experience. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/margo-stern/

Humans are notoriously fickle creatures, hard-wired to behave in unpredictable ways. This makes experience design work challenging for both managers and practitioners. Vidhika Bansal has led both UX research and content design teams. Her unique background in both the behavioral sciences and UX design gives her a unique toolkit for bridging the gaps between unpredictable human behavior and useful digital experiences. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/vidhika-bansal/

The emergence of design systems has created new content strategy and content management needs. As a long-time UX practitioner, content strategy evangelist, and content systems expert, Michael Andrews is uniquely qualified to talk about how to manage content in these new systems. So far, the most important lesson he has learned from working with content in design systems:  Don't forget to apply the basic content strategy lessons we've learned over the past 20 years. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/michael-andrews-2/

The podcast explores the evolution of content audits and inventories, highlighting the importance of analyzing audit data for actionable strategies. It delves into the differences between content inventories and audits, emphasizing the qualitative analysis for aligning content with business objectives. The discussion also covers the value of content audits in enhancing content quality, user experience, and strategic planning. Overall, it offers insights on optimizing content strategies for better results.

When your organization talks about "bringing your whole self to work," they're likely picturing an idealized version of you, not the complex human that you actually are. Eileen Webb helps people and teams build better relationships at work by connecting them with their actual authentic selves. Her approach isn't touchy-feely, summer-camp trust-fall theater. It's pragmatic professional-development work that can remove obstacles to collaboration and build trust among teams. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/eileen-webb/