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.
Read more“Great. Now you can ask ‘would you like fries with that ?’ in seven languages”
This is what CJ Walker’s family and friends jokingly told her when she graduated as a linguist. Back then in the ’90s, the job market wasn’t exactly booming with demand for people trained at modelling and documenting language, but much has fortunately happened since then.
Following extensive work on user manuals and technical communication jobs at Alcatel, HP, the European Union, and Microsoft, in 2007 she founded Firehead, to focus exclusively on content recruitment and training. Since then, she has actively helped shape the content strategy community, trained and placed people in content jobs around the world.
She also helped organise the very first content strategy conference in Paris in 2010 and is our expert of the month.
Read moreThis is not just any random piece of content you might find on the Web. You probably found it by clicking a link from another site or from an email, but I assure you that I wrote it.
Just to clarify, given the huge rise in content, much of it written by machines, this piece of content is actually written by a human and based on a collaboration led by Angus Edwardson from GatherContent and several of our peer group members who work with content and content creators every day.
As you’ll see, content is not just content and while this specific piece of content might look timeless on your screen (you didn’t print it, did you?), much is changing when it comes to how we work with content and how we consume content.
Read moreWe have talked about being data-driven for years now, but for most of us, there is still a long way to go. Especially social media have given us easy access to a lot of different metrics. The issue is that almost all of these are volume-based:
Read moreI suspect we might be reaching an inflection point in the evolution of content technology. We might be reaching the point where vendors stop pretending that servicing large web properties from a single CMS is a good idea, and instead they begin to embrace and even celebrate the idea of orchestrating content from multiple providers.
Read moreWorse still is when a gatekeeper seeks to maintain broken aspects of the business’ status quo to serve their own self-interest, thereby failing in their duty to the institution or other partners. Stewards are “possibility engineers”. Gatekeepers are “progress suppressors”. Be a steward not a gatekeeper when working in partnerships.
Read moreIn 2018 many people have re-considered their love-hate relationship with social media following the scandals surrounding Facebook. Digital strategist and award-winning thought leader on social media Sharon O’Dea recommends that communicators and marketers try and do the same for 2019:
Read moreIf you google “communication tips”, you will get a large number of articles such as “Three ways to use [insert latest hot digital tool]”. While simple tips like these are great, they usually won’t help you beyond the current season. In times of constant change, we also need something more substantial that we can strive towards.
Read moreWhen launching a new website, we will usually have a well thought strategy in place, but afterwards tools and strategies for keeping track of the content will be missing. This has consequences that accumulate when we are unaware of them.
Read moreSearch engine optimisation (SEO) is widely known as a tactical discipline focused on optimising for Google and ensuring that at least some of your content gets found.
At recent J. Boye group meetings, I’ve noticed that SEO has become a much more strategic topic and even a driving force when it comes to content strategy. In other words, SEO informs content creation and curation including the decisions on what goes on the website.
Read moreSearch engine optimization (SEO) is consistently ranked as one of the most effective digital marketing methods, but if your organization has websites in several countries, how do you prioritize SEO efforts and make sure you get the most value for your brand? Often large organizations with global reach experience new sorts of problems that small organizations don’t see.
Read moreIn most communication departments focus is shifting from quantity to quality. The development is no surprise, since the web is overflowing with content, and every second an article tumbles into the abyss of yesterday. As a result the concept of evergreen content is more popular than ever.
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