Content Strategy Insights

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/

Carlos Evia teaches structured content authoring using DITA and similar tools at Virginia Tech. Structured authoring offers a number of benefits, most notably easy content re-use. By carefully structuring content as it goes into a repository, it can be used later in a variety of publications and applications. Structured authoring has its roots in the technical communications field. As other fields discover the benefits of structured content, interest in the practice has grown. This led Carlos and his colleagues on the DITA Technical Committee to develop a less-technical version of the DITA standard - Lightweight DITA - that can be used by marketers and other non-technical content creators. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/carlos-evia/

Michael Andrews literally wrote the book on metadata for web content (actually two books). Metadata puts the structure in structured content. It helps both humans and computers understand what your content is about and how it relates to other content. It ensures that your content is always up to date, easy to find, and able to be tailored to your customers' unique needs. In today's hyper-connected and ever-evolving digital media landscape, every online publisher needs a content metadata strategy. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/michael-andrews/

Regardless of your job title, if you are the word person on a design team, you are a designer first and a writer second. Scott Kubie shows you how to collaborate with your tech and design colleagues while you get the writing done. ` ` https://ellessmedia.com/csi/scott-kubie/

Ilarna Nche is an award-winning expert on the technical aspects of building voice applications for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Samsung Bixby. She designs and develops voice apps for clients who want to capitalize on the branding power that voice products bring to digital content mix. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ilarna-nche/

Designing voice conversations requires new skills and new ways of thinking about how people interact with your digital product. Rebecca Evanhoe and Diana Deibel are experts in this new approach to interaction design. Like many content strategists, they are learning on the fly. And they are constantly studying the steady stream of research in their field. They'll share their discoveries in a book, Conversations With Things, in the spring of 2021. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/conv-design/

Hannah Kirk has great ideas about how technical writing and content strategy can support each other. She's not a typical tech writer. She loves and appreciates technical documentation and enjoys practicing it. But she has always been more interested in strategy. And she has always spent a lot of time thinking behind how content is organized. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/hannah-kirk/

Carrie Hane sees content strategy as a complex information ecosystem, not a simple stream of publications. Looking at content strategy as a system helps her give her clients a more complete picture of how content works. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/carrie-hane/