Andrea Ames: Content Strategy Leadership – Episode 63

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Andrea Ames has been a content leader for more than 35 years.

From her early work as a technical writer, she has gone on to guide huge content teams and to become an advisor to other content leaders.

Some folks might get jaded after three and a half decades in huge enterprises. Not Andrea.  Her enthusiasm for her work is always contagious and inspiring.

Nowadays she focuses on helping content professionals become more effective and businesses more successful.

Andrea and I talked about:

• her background in technical communications
• her work at IBM, first as an information architect and later as a content strategist, and
• how being a “pattern-oriented person” suited her for her information-architecture work at IBM
• the challenges of working at a huge scale on digital content experiences, helping 2,000 to 4,000 content creators be strategic and consistent
• different uses of the term “information architecture” at IBM and the ensuing “mud wrestling around terminology” and ultimate agreements and alignment on it
• how stakeholder relationship management is the key to content strategy
• her approach to selling ideas to stakeholders, asking:
• • “Am I the right person to be making the ask?”
  • “How do I relate to the people around me and especially the stakeholders to whom I am trying to sell something?”
• how she instills and develops professionalism in her teammates, which gives them the credibility to influence their colleagues
• the importance of being experimental as you try to implement ideas, because “there is no one right answer”
• her “quarterly exec technique” – a quick chat at least once a quarter with the highest-level executive that you can get access to – ask them about their biggest challenges and then experiment with content ideas that can help address it
• the importance of building a personal brand
• the benefits of having a polarizing personality – helps sort out who wants to work with you – “be the team member you want to have on your team”
• how to navigate these dynamics when you’re in a more junior role
• the importance when you are in a strategic role of making sure that the folks doing the implementing get credit for their work
• the importance of tying content activities to business results
• the role of content in a digital business: “That’s the conversation. That’s the relationship with your customer.”

Andrea’s Bio

Recognized in 2018 by Relevance as one of the Top 25 Marketing Thought Leaders, in 2017 by [A] as one of the Top 25 Masters of Multichannel, and in 2016 by MindTouch as one of the Top 25 Content Strategy Influencers, Andrea Ames is a sought-after keynote speaker, workshop leader, consultant, and coach, as well as the author of numerous journal and magazine articles and two award-winning books.

A 35+-year veteran in post-sales customer and content experience and the founder and CEO of Idyll Point™ Group — a customer retention and content experience strategy consulting and coaching firm — Andrea’s passion is helping digital businesses to grow through retention revenue by making their customers wildly successful with their offerings.

Andrea is the Executive Editor of STC’s Intercom magazine, as well as a Certified Online Training Professional (COTP) and the curriculum designer and Program Chair for the UCSC in Silicon Valley certificate program in technical writing and communication, where she also teaches content design and architecture, human factors, and usability courses. She is a Fellow and past President of STC, a Distinguished Engineer of the ACM (the first content professional to achieve this distinction), a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a member of numerous other professional associations.

You can connect with her on LinkedIn, where she is most active, or on Facebook, Instagram (@alames), or Twitter (@aames).

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

If you’re looking for practical advice about how to be a more effective content-strategy leader, Andrea Ames has got you covered. Andrea has more than 35 years of experience in technical writing, information architecture, content strategy, and organizational leadership. Nowadays, she helps other content professionals develop the skills and the mindset that help them thrive in a modern, collaborative workplace. Andrea’s enthusiasm for this work is contagious, and I hope you catch some of it in this episode.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 63 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Andrea Ames. Andrea is just a longstanding leader in the field of technical communication and content strategy. Andrea, welcome to the show, and tell the folks a little bit more about your background.

Andrea:
Thanks so much. I’m excited to be here. So as we’ve mentioned before this started, I have a long and checkered past, but at the moment I run a business called Idyll Point Group, and we help businesses to leverage what I call retention revenue. And we do that by helping their teams, especially the folks who are doing some user experience work, but primarily content, to deliver against business results, like product adoption, customer retention, and building evangelism and advocacy. So we’re looking at content not as the end, but the means to get to the objectives of content, which in my mind in a post-sales context is really about customer attention, customer success.

Larry:
Yeah. And you didn’t just make this up out of thin air. As you mentioned-

Andrea:
Of course I did.

Larry:
But your background is so interesting. You’ve been doing this stuff as long as anyone I’ve met anyway, and not to out you as a fellow old person or anything.

Andrea:
I started when I was two.

Larry:
Okay. Oh, well that explains, okay. Yes. But you started, so how did it start? Old school technical communication back in the ’80s?

Andrea:
Well, yeah, interestingly I was working as a technical writer for about two years before I realized it was a thing. I was working at Temple University in Philadelphia, writing custom documentation for their custom programs. The group I worked for actually wrote software to assign medical rotations in the medical school, and so on. And I wrote the documentation and actually sat through the rotation assignments and helped the clerical person who ran the software, so I was kind of onsite support as well.

Andrea:
And I was a computer science major. I’d moved from biology pre-vet to computer science. Clearly a geek, love tech, loves science, and was in the library one day and found an issue of technical communication, which is the STC’S journal and said, “Wow, there’s a name for this thing that I do.” And immediately changed my major to English and signed up for the master’s program at Drexel in technical communication and decided, ah, that’s what I do, I’m a technical communicator. So as I found in many of the technical writers and technical communicators in my generation, I got here by accident.

Larry:
I don’t think I’ve had anybody on this podcast who intentionally set out to do what they ended up doing as I talk to them about what they’re up to. So I love that about this profession. We’re not like doctors or lawyers or electricians. It’s like we’re all just figuring it out as we go, which is great. I love that.

Larry:
And you mentioned your longstanding involvement. So I was not trying to pigeonhole people, I’m trying to characterize you, but you’re genuinely a leader in this field and you’ve done, from that early start in the STC, the Society for Technical Communication, you’ve been involved there as a leader. But then that sort of culminated. You kind of, not fit it, but you sort of had this, I think of it as like a punctuation mark on your career, that 15 years you’ve spent at IBM where you really kind of codified and clarified and set out a whole bunch of the principles I think that really underlie a lot of what modern content strategies are doing. Can you tell me a little bit about what you did at IBM and how that informs your work now?

Andrea:
Sure. When I was hired at IBM, I was actually hired as an information architect and I was the first one, at least in my division and from what I could see in, again in the way I define information architecture, I was probably the first one at IBM. And I loved that job so much. I was in the information management organization and we were just breaking new ground in terms of how our users were finding and using content and the experience around that content. So I really looked at that information architecture job as a content experience design job to a large degree.

Andrea:
Ton of our content was moving online. We were delivering so much more of it, not even in PDFs but in essentially websites of content back in the early 2000s. And it was definitely a scale I had never worked at before in terms of the amount of content in IBM. The problems, thus, are scaled to match the challenges that our users are having and that IBM was having in terms of delivering that much content to people in a way that it was intelligible, find-able, and in a way that it integrated with other products within IBM.

Andrea:
So even though I was scoped to one division, that was my area of responsibility, we did a lot of work to think about how our content would integrate with other divisions’ content when IBM customers purchased products from across divisions and how do we make that experience similar? How do we make all of that content integrate in a way that it looks like the products were meant to work together. And often we were the glue. We were the integration point in the early days. In fact, just a few years after I joined, IBM started a big initiative with its products to look at how they integrated into solutions. But that was actually a few years after I joined and the content folks were already looking at that. So it was definitely a time when IBM was really starting to put a lot of focus on that online or digital content experience.

Andrea:
And I organize the socks in my drawer. I am very much a pattern-oriented person I think in terms of models and abstractions, and so to me it was just like a open field of different bits of information that I could pull together and help other people understand better and teach them how to create experiences that actually had patterns underlying them so that more and more teams could create experiences that were similar enough and following some patterns that we knew were helping our users be successful with that content.

Andrea:
My organization was roughly 250 people, and at the time we had probably between two and four thousand content creators within the product teams. That’s a lot of people to try to educate and enable to be able to deliver content that actually followed a strategy, and so on. And I’m not even talking about all the underlying infrastructure, and so on. My focus, my experience, my passion is really more around the experience and the design. And so it was very interesting. A lot of challenges but super interesting. And my job there and from the product team perspective evolved into a corporate job where my 100% of my job was really to build models, educate people, coach people and teach them how to be strategic and do information architecture, and so on, within their individual teams.

Larry:
So you said this was the early 2000s you do it. This is where a lot of this started. That’s so early in this to have because to this day people can have so many issues with silos and creating that consistency across big huge teams like that. One question occurs to me in there, because the way you describe information architecture, I think that’s how many, if not most of us in the field kind of think about it now. And it kind of goes back to the polar bear book and then the way content people think about information architecture. But it also occurs to me that you’re at IBM, a place that has a couple of computer programmers, and they have a different look at information architecture. Did you have to do some sort of melding and aligning with those folks?

Andrea:
Well, it’s really interesting that you bring that up because in the information management space, which is the division I was in, so our products were content management and databases, information architecture was what I would call data architecture. And they were looking at enterprise architecture, enterprise data and information architecture from a product perspective. So not only from our products perspective and the folks who are building our products or database and and content management products, but also our services organization who would co go into a client engagement and call themselves information architects. And again, they were talking about corporate enterprise information, like employee data, and so on. They were not talking about books and help and that sort of information architecture. So there was actually, right up to this day, not even just in the early days, but especially in the early days, there were a lot of terminology discussions, let’s put it that way. Little mud wrestling around terminology.

Larry:
No, that was part of my question about it because content strategists are so good at sorting that kind of stuff out, but that’s so interesting that it sounds like you did sort it out and yet it’s still a thing that each of those, the data guys, the sales guys and the content strategists still have a slightly different take on it. But did you kind of get to a point where you understood each other and you weren’t…

Andrea:
Yes. And at a very high level of abstraction, if you look at the hundred thousand foot view, they’re essentially the same. We’re looking at patterns in data and content and information, and we’re looking at metadata, and so on, it’s really not that different. And so if you can have a conversation at that very high level of abstraction point, you can see where you agree. It’s just like politics today, which we don’t want to get into, but I like to think of it as, or corporate politics for that matter. I like to think of it as how do we find the places where we agree and understand one another even if when you get down to the details, we’re doing something that looks really different, we really aren’t. At a high level, we really agree and share a lot of mental models and structures and concepts across, not only sort of the consulting side and the product implementation side, but also the content implementation side.

Larry:
Right, and there’s some work entailed in getting that everybody on the same page on that. Can you tell me a little bit about the stakeholder whisperer tricks that you have, or whatever, about how to get folks speaking a different yet common language and getting up to the a hundred thousand foot but coming down into the details. Tell me your management tricks.

Andrea:
Yeah, I love how you put that because really the stakeholder relationship management is the core in my view. If I were to give you the definition of content strategy, so much of it comes down to managing those relationships and it’s really, there’s two sides to it. One is I like to say, “Am I the right person to be making the ask?” So what is my credibility? What is my persona, my brand, my personality, the personal culture that I create around myself as a content leader? And that’s the core, by the way, of my coaching program. So this is much of what I do with my consulting and coaching clients today.

Andrea:
And then the other piece is, how do I relate to the people around me and especially the stakeholders to whom I am trying to sell something? And so many employees do not think of themselves as salespeople, and yet we sell ideas all day long. That is most of what I did. In fact, I had several people ask me when I was at IBM, “What do you do? What do you write?” And I said, “Well, I write PowerPoint, that is my new writing medium. And what I do is influence people.” I’m just trying to get them to change their behavior to buy my initiative, whatever that is. If I want resources to do something new or I want to change direction in the strategy or I want to change priorities, I am selling those ideas to people. And if I want them to buy those ideas, whether that’s real money or just support to let me go do what I want to do and take resources off another project, that is key to what we do as content strategists.

Andrea:
And really it all comes back to, my number one secret is you’ve got to be the right person to make the ask. If you don’t have the know, like and trust factor, so just like a business. In fact, that’s most of the consulting and coaching I do today is really around teaching content teams to operate like businesses within the larger organization. So what’s your marketing strategy? How do you market yourself and what you do to the people around you that may not be an overt external marketing campaign. It might just be positioning yourself and setting yourself up to be a thought leader. How do you do that? Well, you make sure you know what you’re talking about. So you’re learning your delivering when you say you’re going to deliver, you’re acting very professional.

Andrea:
So many of the folks… Oh actually, I can remember, one year I kicked off my team with a whole half day workshop on professionalism because we at IBM, we hired a lot of people right out of school. I’d say 90 to 95% of IBM’s recruiting was colleges and universities and we were hiring them either through an internship or directly out of school, so they didn’t have any experience working on a team or operating within a corporate environment.

Andrea:
And I kicked my team off in January one year with a half-day workshop about what it means to be professional. And a lot of that was how do you show up? How do you not just say this isn’t part of my job description, but how do you focus on doing the right things? How do you say no to the right things? Or say no to the wrong things, how do you say no in the right way to the wrong things? And how do you prioritize and really grow the know, like and trust factor with the people around you on your team? And it’s not something that they teach you in college, or even in grad school. It’s something you kind of have to learn on the job. And yet for you to become a credible salesperson within your organization, you’ve got to be that person with the credibility. You’ve got to be the person that people trust. And so there’s a whole sales methodology behind that that makes you the right person.

Larry:
Somebody that people, my first career was in book publishing and I was a sales guy, so I’ve always been. But a huge number of my friends in the writing, so many people come to content strategy out of a writing field. And apart from the market, the marketing copywriters are fine, but there’s a lot of writers who are not averse but not super native to sales and marketing kind of approach to things.

Andrea:
Yes.

Larry:
So there’s that. There’s also, you’re kind of putting a metal level on top of content strategy for me. Like Christina Halverson would say, “It’s like getting the right content, the right person, the right time, most useful, usable way.” But you’re like, “Great, how do you get that result? What are the people skills that you need to do that?”

Andrea:
Yes. Exactly.

Larry:
Does that make sense? Yeah.

Andrea:
People and organizational skills. So often we have the right people skills, but the organization isn’t imbuing that person with the right authority because that role doesn’t exist. People don’t acknowledge that there’s a thing called content strategy and someone who does it. If I’m going to do strategy, if I’m going to be setting priorities for the organization, and so on, somebody needs to kind of follow along with that or it’s not going to result in any kind of implementation or business results. And yet many organizations want that, but they don’t give that person, or those people, or that role, the authority it needs to be able to drive the execution. So there’s a lot of organizational aspect to it as well.

Larry:
Yeah. And I know this is your whole life right now, teaching people how to do this. But I’m just wondering if there are, because it occurs to me as we were talking that if you have like just two or three tips to help people who are, not – timid isn’t the right word – but I think there’s not a lot of permission given to a lot of content writers.

Larry:
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, a lot of content people have just been taking assignments. There’s an assignment editor role in a lot of newsrooms. And what you’re talking about, it’s kind of like you’re… I’m going to just make a wild guess here and think that you’re one of those people who seeks forgiveness and doesn’t ask permission.

Andrea:
Amen, brother.

Larry:
Okay, yeah. But I guess I’m trying to figure out a few tips to empower people who are not as gifted as you. And I think I’m kind of in our field, not anywhere near your level, but kind of in the same family of not seeking permission, just going out there doing that. But for people who need permission, how would you tell them to say if you’re going to do this content work, here’s how to go make it happen.

Andrea:
So I think the first thing I would say is be experimental. Don’t rely on, or don’t wait for having the right answer because I’m going to tell you right now, there is no one right answer. So let’s throw that away, that idea that there’s one right answer to every problem that you are experiencing and before you can move forward, you have to have the right answer. One of the things that I think characterized my time at IBM is I came in operating like a consultant. I had been a consultant for eight years before I joined IBM and I looked at IBM as a sandbox. I didn’t look at it as a job where I had to know everything. I looked at it as a sandbox where I could play an experiment and take some cool ideas. I had with a lot of the startups I worked with and say, “Will this work at scale?”

Andrea:
When I left IBM, I think we had something like 250 million individual English URLs in our main information center, which didn’t even have every product in it, and that’s a lot of content. And then most of that content would get translated into anywhere from eight to 12, up to maybe 35, different languages. That’s a lot of URLs. That’s a lot of pages. And so I think when you’re dealing with things at that scale, if you are waiting to have *the* right answer, you are never going to do anything. You’re never going to get off the dime because you can’t know if it’s going to work at that scale. So you have to start small, try many things, get some small successes. That’s how you build those relationships with your stakeholders as well. Start with a small idea, get a quick win for them, figure out what’s actually challenging them.

Andrea:
I have a technique that I call the quarterly exec technique, which is go talk to your biggest exec, pick your highest exec, that kind of recognizes your team as being part of their world, and ask them every quarter, “What are the three things keeping you up at night?” And then see where content can maybe lend a hand to resolve some of that or at least ease some of that pain. Now often one or two of those things won’t have any real relationship to content, but I found that at least one, every single conversation I had there was something I could take back and say, “Hmm, I think if we did this we can show a direct result of easing that challenge for that VP through some content initiative.”

Andrea:
And if I can do that, I can then go back to that executive and say, “Hey, here’s what you told me last quarter. Did you know we’re doing this thing? Here are the results we’re seeing.” So here’s another tip. You got to measure things. You are never going to be able to truly demonstrate the results you’re having if you don’t have any data, which means you got to measure stuff before you do anything, and then you’ve got to measure as you’re implementing these small initiatives to see what’s really resulting in the outcome you want. Often we’ll do some things and get maybe some outcomes we don’t want.

Andrea:
So I think it’s really about really understanding your audience and knowing what their challenges are, making connections between those challenges and where content can help and support. Think small at first, get some quick wins so you can demonstrate to your team because you’ve got to get them on board as well if you’re going to, again, try to create some solutions at scale, you’re not going to be able to implement that on your own. So your team needs to believe in you that you’re the right person to lead them. Your execs need to believe in you and believe that you’re the right person to be able to drive that kind of an initiative. Your manager needs to believe in you that you should be spending your time on this kind of initiative. So having a little personal brand around trust and being knowledgeable and being professional, meeting your commitments and following up, and so on, that’s key.

Andrea:
And then be experimental. Be a little bit of a wild card. I think that’s a good thing. I will tell you, you also don’t want to try to get everyone to like you. When I was at IBM, there were two kinds of people besides me, the people who are dying to work on my team and the people who ran screaming from the room. And I’m okay with that. I actually want to be polarizing. I want people to want to work with me passionately or not want to work with me passionately. If you’ve got people in the middle, those people are not going to help your team. And if people do not want to take risks and be experimental and be a little crazy and fringy around the edges, then they’re probably not the right people to be on a team that’s trying to push new horizons, that’s trying out new initiatives that’s being experimental. So you don’t really want those people on your team anyway.

Andrea:
So show up with that. Be the person that you want on your team. When you’re in business, they say, “Be the customer you want to attract.” You want to be the team member you want to have on your team. So do you want someone who’s kind of, “Eh, I don’t really know. I show up at the meetings and don’t really pay attention,” or do you want that crazy passionate person? I think you probably want that crazy passionate person. And if you’re showing up as the person you want on your team, other people are going to want you on their team, like your execs and your management, and so on. So there’s a few things off the top of my head in no organized fashion at all.

Larry:
No, but that’s super helpful. And I love that last point. I think there’s one little, not concern but just observation to make it that there are going to be times, especially in a more junior role or something where you still need to include and accommodate and account for the people who aren’t ready to jump on your team. Any quick thoughts about that?

Andrea:
So I think you need to, especially when you’re more junior, definitely try to embrace that being the person you want to be on your team. So how do you make your team lead look good? How do you make your manager look good? They’re your audience initially. What are their concerns? What are they worried about? How can you pitch in and help make their project successful, make their life easier? Because then, again, that’s the kind of person when you are leading, you want to be on your team, you want them looking out for how to make your project successful. And once you get to that point where you’re the leader, then it’s not about you anymore. It’s about the fact that your team did this work for you. So you need to be sure you’re acknowledging what they are bringing to it. You’re the visionary, you’re creating the excitement and frankly, if you get on a team that’s big enough, it’s mostly other people doing the actual work.

Andrea:
So you’re that usually the idea guy or girl, and you’re usually the person who has the vision and you’re communicating that vision and you’re rallying the troops and you’re getting them excited. That’s kind of my secret sauce. That’s my zone of genius. My zone of genius is not implementing at all. And figure out what are your strengths, play to those and then make sure you’re giving credit to the people who are implementing, who are taking your ideas forward, who are making them real, who are making them better in the implementation and adding to and creating that great synergy with your ideas.

Larry:
Great. Perfect. Hey, this always happens, we’re coming up on time. But I like to keep these around 30 minutes, but I don’t want to cut you short either. If there’s anything last or anything that’s occurred to you during the conversation, just anything on your mind that you want to make sure you share with the folks.

Andrea:
So kind of along the lines of being a little crazy. I think my big soapbox recently is a little controversial. It’s probably going to be a little polarizing for some people, but especially if there are businesses listening to this podcast, business leaders and not just content people, I think something that we need to keep in mind is that content is not the end; it is the means. So really all of us, from the business leader down to the writer, even though the writer feels like the content is the end, that’s the thing that we’re producing, really what you’re producing is a business outcome. That should be your goal and the content is the vehicle for getting to that business outcome.

Andrea:
As a business, you should not care about content. Content is just a way to get to whatever your business goals are. If it’s marketing content, it may be lead generation. It may be building your business to appear to be a thought leader. If you’re on the post-sale side, it may be prior to adoption. It may be customer retention. It may be building true advocates who’d be willing to refer your business or your products to other potential customers. And content is super powerful in a digital business. That’s the conversation. That’s the relationship with your customer. If you sit and really think about your business, how much personal interaction are you having with your customers? If you’re small, maybe there’s more. As you grow, there’s a lot less. So that content is super, super powerful. But we need to execute that power, or shoot that power out of the cannon with the target of a business objective, not just creating content.

Andrea:
Creating content is all well and good, but what we’re really trying to achieve is customer success. We want to make sure the customers who need our products hear about it and buy it, and we want to make sure those customers are super successful because that’s what’s going to make them love us, want to buy more, want to spend more money, wants to refer their friends and neighbors and other businesses, and so on. So to me, content’s super powerful, but I think need to stop trying to give our businesses and our executives the PhD in content. And instead, we need to start adopting their success criteria and figure out how content is driving them to be successful, which is business results, not content results.

Andrea:
So I’ll just throw that out there as my most recent soapbox and say, again, and I’m finding with my clients, I’ll just say this, I’m finding with my clients that they are so much more successful, truly becoming, moving from an order taking cost center type organization to a strategic revenue generating organization. And don’t we all want our organizations to recognize us as strategic revenue-generating organizations, creating business results? Who wouldn’t want that? They’re getting more respect, they’re getting more recognition, they’re happier, they’re getting more resources, they’re able to do more initiatives that they are directing. It’s win-win all the way around if we get ourselves aligned with the right things and we build our organization around alignment with those things. So we’re building the right skills and roles and so on. So there you go. There’s my soapbox message for the day.

Larry:
That’s a perfect soapbox to step on to end. Well, thanks so much, Andrea. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me.

Andrea:
Well, this is super fun. Thank you so much for inviting me. I really appreciate it.