The Content Strategy Podcast

Bram Wessel is a co-founder of Factor, a Seattle-based consultancy that brings user-centered design principles and practice to enterprise-scale information problems. In this episode, he breaks down the types of taxonomy problems many large orgs face, including problems with findability, site search, and navigation. Bram’s work aims to cater to how customers think, applying user research to ensure everyone is speaking the same language through information.

Abby Covert, better known as Abby the IA, returns to the show for a repeat appearance to talk about information architecture, her influential book, How to Make Sense of Any Mess, and life in the design world as a new mom (congratulations!). In this episode, she breaks down the steps to information architecture as outlined in her book, and shares some real-world stories of sensemaking from her readers.

Ryan Skinner is the principal marketing analyst at Forrester, where he advises enterprise clients on content marketing activities through a strategic lens. In this episode, he and Kristina talk about the blind spots marketers (or sometimes entire companies) have when it comes to the customer experience, specifically in creating content that ties back to both the user needs and business goals. Ryan offers advice for those tasked with shifting an organization to a more strategic approach to content as a business asset, including specific examples of things to start on first. Kristina also pitches an exciting new idea for podcast merch. (Okay, we’ll tell you. It’s a bobble head.)

Christine is the Service Director of Content Strategy and Operations at SiriusDecisions. In this week’s podcast, she describes the Content Transformation Roadmap she uses to identify the strategy, people, processes, and technology needed to achieve these milestones. She also shares some thoughts on the definitions of “content marketing” and “content strategy” in B2B environments. (Kristina gets VERY excited.)

This week, Kristina discovers that user-centered SEO isn’t just some magic you sprinkle on finished web copy right before hitting publish. After clashing on projects and stepping on each others’ toes, Chris Corak (an SEO) and Rebekah Baggs (a content and UX strategist) found smarter ways to integrate their work and create helpful, relevant web experiences that are search-engine friendly, too.

Dana DiTomaso joins Kristina this week to stray only slightly from the topic of content strategy—this time diving into the world of marketing and measuring content performance. As president and partner at Kick Point, an Edmonton-based digital marketing agency, Dana works with clients to untangle their varied and sometimes disjointed marketing efforts. In this episode, she shares specific tools her team uses to analyze content consumption and build more data-based and customer-centric marketing strategies.

Mike Petroff and Aaron Baker have teamed up to create a custom editorial analytics dashboard called “Scoop,” which they use to serve the content teams at Harvard University and the online version of The Harvard Gazette. Their goal? To give power back to the content creators, using data to answer their questions and help make informed decisions about content. Instead of just number crunching, they’re able to use data to tell a cohesive story about content performance and get to the questions that really matter, like “Is this content really working?” and “What do our users actually need?”

This week, Tina O’Shea (Director, Content Design & Strategy at QuickBooks) talks in depth about how content design went from being “just writing the words” to a key part of the QuickBooks product design process. She describes her team structure, and how she won executive support for their contributions to design. She also digs into how they created the QuickBooks voice and tone guide—and how they’re making sure it’s getting used across the global company. 

Author, publisher, conference organizer, and all-around renaissance man Lou Rosenfeld talks shop about writing the first book on IA, watching the evolution of design practices, and how he’s helping to keep people at the forefront of their respective industries.

Cruce Saunders joins Kristina this week to talk about multi-channel content publishing at the enterprise level. He describes how enterprises are starting (or hopefully starting) to take a more holistic approach to their content and customer experiences, moving away from the “content center of excellence” approach present in so many large organizations. He also shares some thoughts on content marketing in general—what’s working and what isn’t.