By Janus Boye
Nicole France is Evangelist, Director of Content at Contentful
Do you remember plasma globes? Mainly used back in school as a fun thing in physics and also known for the tricks that can be performed on them by users moving their hands around them.
To Nicole France, content is similar to that old invention by Nikola Tesla when he was experimenting with high-frequency electric currents in a glass vacuum tube. Content also has tremendous energy and it can go in all kinds of directions. It’s something everybody think they can play with and certainly have an opinion about, but it takes quite some work to make something useful out of it.
Nicole has a background as an analyst with both Gartner and Constellation Research, she’s also been almost 6 years with Fujitsu, worked in both the US and Europe and now she’s Evangelist, Director of Content at Contentful.
She’s also our expert of the month.
20+ years of bouncing back and forth in content roles
Where most industry analysts join with industry experience, say after having risen to managerial positions in larger firms, Nicole actually jumped straight into the analyst trade after completing her BA in Political Economy from the University of California, Berkeley back in 1997.
At G2 Research, she quickly became responsible for Consulting and Systems Integration research, including syndicated research and consulting projects. G2 Research was then acquired by Gartner and Nicole ended up relocating with Gartner to both Paris and London as Research Director responsible for managing the European IT services research agenda.
In 2006, she then decided to make a move to the other side of the table, so to speak. Joining Fujitsu in London as Head of Market Intelligence, she helped establish a marketing intelligence function and team. Later she moved into senior marketing roles.
More recently, she was Manager, Thought Leadership at Cisco for almost 3 years and prior to her current role, she was back as an analyst, this time with Constellation Research.
Finally, her current role Evangelist, Director of Content sees her evangelising different ways of thinking about content and new approaches to operations at headless content management vendor Contentful.
So, what does research, marketing intelligence, marketing and thought leadership have in common? Content!
What is content really?
Content, in particular digital content, is something we’ve covered extensively in our group meetings since the beginning of our community. We’ve had plenty of discussions around the definition of terms, like content strategy, content operations, and even content design, but what is content really?
In an enterprise context, Nicole has previously used this simple take on content
“Content is the story a company tells about itself”
But in our recent conversation, she shortened it further to:
“Content is all about having something to say”
As she elaborated, it’s all about having a conversation, but you can’t have that without having something to say. Fundamentally having something to say, is a point of view - not just opinion, but analysis, observation, experience and even sometimes research. Content is rooted in a thought process and various points that can be debated along the way. Having something to say is how we uncover our own thinking and determine what’s the best way forward.
Once you have something to say, you can tell a story, and only then should you get into the how.
How to do content
The how is something they are very focused on at Contentful. Both how you do content and how you use it. Since the start-up days when Contentful initially came out in beta back in 2013, much prior to Nicole joining in 2021, they’ve been very focused on creating the tools to make content easy to use it, anywhere you want.
The effect of a conducting object (a hand) touching the plasma globe. By Diliff - Own work, CC BY 2.5
To Nicole, the how starts with developing your point of view. It’s like that plasma globe, full of energy and difficult to control. It takes tremendous work and unfortunately often when marketing teams talk about content, it’s all about format, channels, campaigns and they sometimes get overly focused on the output and less so on the story. That’s a potential disconnect to look out for and Nicole advices to focus on what you are trying to say.
The critical point to keep in mind, besides the marketing goals and tech discussions that can sometimes distract, is what Nicole calls the power source that feeds into all of this. If you don’t have that, then the channels and your tools will matter less.
Being a problem evangelist for content
In her current role, as a evangelist for content, she also added the word problem as a prefix. As she said:
“Everyone thinks they know the problem they are trying to solve, but it’s actually hard to diagnose”
Her role is an evolution of what she was doing in her previous role in product marketing. Now her job is to help the business to develop and build on the Contentful point of view. Contentful is quite rooted in the developer mindset, but the impact is extensive and also touches how organisations think about content. From the big ideas to the mundane stuff, Nicole still wants to understand content better and what it means to organisations.
This curiosity often starts with articulating a vision for what companies want to do, including how they think about what content is, where it sits in the organisation and how they manage it. Then it’s about going from the art of the possible to a pathway of getting there.
Learn more about Nicole France
You can naturally connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter, but you can also meet her and continue the conversation in the CMS Expert group.