Dutch retailer Albert Heijn is probably the first company in the Netherlands to establish Content Engineering as a functional expertise.
In her role as Content Engineering Consultant at the retailer, Rafaela Ellensburg is the first and still only one working with this focus. This year she’s working hard to make the leap from content-as-a-liability to content-as-a-service, and she’s learned quite a bit along the way.
In a recent member call, Rafaela shared her lessons learned, her holistic view on content and why structured content is the basis for scalable digital customer experiences.
Read moreHow do you identify and remove the barriers to strong, effective content work?
This is the focus of Rachel McConnell’s recent book 'Leading Content Design', which shares how to create common standards, improve collaboration, iron out wrinkles in the design process, and build advocacy—so you can lead your team with impact.
Rachel works as Head of UX content at Flo, a women’s health app and was previously in various content roles at BT. In a recent member call, she shared her thinking behind the work and introduced us to her work on content operations.
Read moreHow do you best provide organisations with a no nonsense way to gather and organise content?
This was the original problem that Alice Deer and her co-founder Angus Edwardson set out to solve some 10 years, when they founded a software firm called Gather. Quickly it became GatherContent and their initial approach was to provide an easy way to collect and structure client content. Painlessly was the keyword back then, where many customers were profoundly loud about how their disliked working with content in their CMS.
Fast forward to today, and Alice has been the CEO in a small business with 20 employees for 10 years. In this function, Alice has been going through all the typical entrepreneurial roles of hiring, dealing with finance, marketing and naturally also speaking with customers.
Earlier this month another big milestone was achieved as GatherContent was acquired by Bynder, so now her role is shifting once again. Now she is General Manager in the GatherContent part of the bigger business based out of her home in Brighton, UK. She is also our expert of the month.
Read moreWhile we have been producing digital content for more than two decades, Content Operations (ContentOps) remains an emerging practice which many organisations haven’t yet fully taken to heart. There’s related terms like content strategy, there’s plenty of tools that look at topics like content marketing, but what about the actual operations of your digital content?
To address the challenges that come with content operations at scale, there’s a shift happening in the tech landscape, or more specifically in your content toolstack. Creating content on the web is far from the same as it used to be just a few years ago and the recent acquisition of GatherContent by Bynder, signals stronger future investments in this area and perhaps the arrival of next level content operations.
Read moreIn late 2020, IT analyst firm Gartner made the blunt prediction that ‘The Future of Business Is Composable’. A few months later, at the beginning of 2021, Gartner then also introduced the term ‘composable’ to the CMS marketplace with a splash in their annual Market Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms.
To Gartner, a “composable business means creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks” and many in our industry translated this to moving away from the large software suites or what’s also known as the monoliths.
This is largely a response to increased customers expectations, demands on shortening project cycles, increased technical debt and finally a growing demand to fit into the existing tech stack. In other words, composability has become a big thing, and many vendors have seized the momentum to also talk about how composability is key for commerce, but what about content?
As we look towards 2022, composable content management is likely to become a key requirement and we already see vendors picking up on the emerging trend.
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 moreGreat content doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It gets bogged down in teams, organizations, silos, and process.
Beth Dunn is a content leader, speaker, coach and author of the new book Cultivating Content Design. In the book, Beth helps you break the vacuum seal and bring unity and joy back to content. She gives you the power to fundamentally change your organization’s approach to great content—with the tools and team you already have.
Read moreContent design and how it helps deliver successful digital products at Mastercard was the topic of our recent member conference call. Heading up the Content Design practice at Mastercard's Tech Hub in New York City Melinda Belcher shared her perspectives and made a fitting comparison to the UX space as a part of the conversation.
Her challenge is delivering content at scale and content design is clearly an emerging term that’s resonating with many. Let’s look at how they do it at Mastercard and what you might learn from it.
Read moreChange is hard. Even if the outcome of change is known to be positive, convincing people to use new technology, follow different processes and work together differently is often met with questioning, resistance, and much sighing.
This is understandable because any worthwhile change takes a lot of time and effort, which can mean a lot of money too. Even if investing in change means gaining long-term efficiencies and economies of scale, it can still seem too daunting a prospect to commit to.
This is one of the greatest challenges with content operations - securing buy-in from leadership and getting the organisation committed to long-term change management.
Read moreIt seems content management has been dealing with the paradox of opportunity and frustration since the inception of the World Wide Web.
Douglas Adams was right - it is fun for nerds like us. To our credit, we spend a lot of time discussing these problems at length, and actually trying to build products and practices to address them - and in many ways, the underlying technologies and frameworks are vastly more effective to what passed for state of the art only a few years ago.
However, despite these advancements in technologies and methodologies which have made scaling these operations cheaper, faster, and far more capable, it’s clear from the research in the market; over time a similar percentage of organizations still have sub-par customer experience and despite falling prices for tools and services, overall costs for customer experience delivery still remain high.
In this post Mark Demeny from Contentful tries to break these problems down from a wider, strategic view, to a more tactical level.
Read moreContent strategy has been around for a while as a term, but personally I do think that the pandemic has shown the importance of communications and specifically content.
As Hilary Marsh said in our recent member conference call:
Content is everyone’s work
Read moreThere’s good news at the moment: Digital strategies and playbooks which used to be just gathering dust are now being put to good use. Also, silos which have so far made internal collaboration difficult are coming down. And perhaps most importantly, the importance of the digital mindset is no longer questioned.
Ashley Budd from Cornell eloquently summed it up our member conference call yesterday:
We can’t rely on the content strategy of the past
Read moreThe usual trouble when it comes to digital projects tends to be around a slower than expected time-to-market for new projects, an unhealthy appetite for one-ring-to-rule-them-all monolithic vendors, and being locked-in on platforms you no longer or indeed never liked. Sound familiar?
San Francisco-based software firm Contentstack tries to tackle the problems coupled with the increasing demands from customers to deliver digital content experiences by taking a different approach than just going headless.
Read moreLife as a content professional is so much more than writing. It’s moved way beyond the words.
The words will always be a large part of what I do, whether that’s writing, editing, or reviewing. But increasingly, much more now needs to happen before the words are published, and again after.
Read moreWhen you have a lot of content contributors - people creating content and adding that content to digital channels - you need a way to keep them all on the same (metaphorical) page. When they’re all in different departments and different countries, with different skill levels, working on separate but interconnected sites, in multiple languages, things can devolve into chaos pretty quickly.
Alignment will bring a consistent voice to every web page and every channel, and keep quality standards higher for writing, imagery, and other content, but finding a how-to guide has been hard. This is my attempt to create one
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