Erin Golden: The Evolution of Content Strategy – Episode 78

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Erin Golden and her colleagues have created a model that shows the evolution of the practice of content strategy.

Drawing on the Kardashev scale – an astrophysics method for measuring a civilization’s level of technological advancement – they rank content strategy practice along a 1-to-5 range. K1 represents the first stage, when content strategists were mostly concerned with putting words on webpages instead of in paper documents. K5 represents the science-fiction-ey AI future of the practice.

This reflection on the advancement of the discipline has led Erin to bolster her own professional toolkit, adding to her content skills new practices like UX research.

Erin and I talked about:

• her background in the government, nonprofit, and higher education world as a information architects, user experience designer, content management specialist, and copywriter
• her current interest in the intersection of content strategy with user and audience research and how to incorporate data of all types into her work
• how she and a colleague apply the Kardashev scale as a model for evolution of content strategy practice maturity
• the five stages along the Kardashev scale:
  • K1: copywriting, moving words from paper to the web
  • K2: content strategy emerges as an alternative to inserting content into designed boxes
  • K3: content ecosystem approach, SEO and content marketing
  • K4: product experience, structured content, moving away from page-based models, arrival of content design
  • K5: the AI era, implications for the future
• how different organizations and business units can be at different points along the K scale at any one point in time
• her propensity to push new content practices and tools
• how her “content first” approach is validated by the maxim, “form follows function”
• how the current era might actually be better described as “research first”
• the crucial role of research and content strategy in the early phases of product design
• the evolution of editorial decision making in the digital era to better focus on user needs and to manage content across its lifecycle
• the occasional lack of clarity around who is leading the dance between content strategists and SEO practitioners
• her observation the the convergence of disciplines allied with content strategy – information architecture, SEO, UX design – points to the benefits of being a generalist
• her belief that structured and atomic content are key to the future of content production and delivery

Erin’s Bio

Erin Golden is a senior content strategist and experience designer at Publicis Sapient where she helps lead the experience design capability for the company while partnering with clients to advance their digital strategies. Based in Washington, D.C., Erin has worked in content and digital strategy for more than a decade with experience in government, nonprofit, and higher education. She has held a range of titles including copywriter, content management specialist, information architect, and user experience designer. She is passionate about audience and user research and enjoys working with teams to integrate research and measurement into their process.

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Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

The discipline of content strategy has been around for about 20 years now. It’s evolved a lot over that time span. From its humble beginnings as a practice devoted to translating print content into web pages, content strategy has grown into a sophisticated multi-disciplinary business practice. Nowadays content strategists contribute to digital products that we could not have imagined 20 years ago. Erin Golden and her colleagues at Publicis Sapient have come up with an innovative model to illustrate this evolution.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 78 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Erin Golden. Erin is an experience designer and a content strategist at the agency Publicis Sapient. I believe you’re in the D.C. area, but Publicis Sapient is all over the world, right? Well, anyhow, welcome Erin. And tell the folks a little bit more about what you do there at Publicis Sapient.

Erin:
Thanks, Larry. I’m thrilled to be here. As you mentioned, I’m a content strategist and experienced designer and you are correct. Publicis Sapient is a global company, but I am located in the D.C. area and I’ve been in the D.C. area for most of my career. And therefore it’s probably not surprising that I’ve spent a lot of time in the government, the nonprofit world, also quite a bit of higher education. I’ve held a bunch of different titles within content strategy and UX design. I’ve been an information architects, a user experience designer, a content management specialist, a copywriter. So I’ve kind of done a range of different things and I’m experienced in leading projects anywhere from the discovery phase all the way through development. And, as of late, I’m really passionate about where content strategy is intersecting with user and audience research. I’m into learning more about how I can incorporate all types of data into my practice.

Larry:
Cool. Yeah. And I think we’re all wrestling with that, but one of the… I want to back up quickly to why I wanted to have you on the show. Because you did this great… You and Wendy Johansson also from Publicis Sapient did this great presentation at the Design and Content Conference. It was about a couple of weeks ago. And you talked about… Because when you were just describing your diverse background and how you came to where you are today, there’s sort of a bigger way to look at that. And you and Wendy did that in that presentation. You looked at the evolution of content strategy practice and juxtaposing it with this Kardashev scale, which is cosmological astronomical concept for the development of… maturity of… Or the development of galactic systems. But I loved the way you applied that. Tell me a little bit about how you and Wendy came to arrive at that model and for the folks who weren’t at the conference, maybe just a quick overview of what you talked about.

Erin:
Sure. Right. So my colleague, Wendy Johansson and I presented a version of content strategy and design evolution using the Kardashev scale as a metaphor. As you suggested, it was a theory developed by an astrophysicist, I think in the sixties, Nikolai Kardashev. And the theory was basically that a culture’s status can be determined by the amount of energy it has harnessed and the amount of technological abilities it has developed as a result of that energy. So in short, social systems that demonstrate strong technological capabilities are considered to be more advanced. So that’s the basis of the theory. And how it came into my life and Wendy’s life is our Chief Experience Officer at Publicis Sapient, John Maeda actually developed a metaphor using the Kardashev scale for digital business transformation in a macro way.

Erin:
And he did that to contextualize what we mean when we say digital business transformation (DBT). And as Wendy and I were talking about the evolution of practice, we realized like, “Hey, John’s idea around Kardashev and DBT makes a lot of sense, but how can we dig a little bit deeper and how can we look at it a little more closely from a content strategy perspective?” And so we did. And the scale for those who weren’t able to see the presentation is a five-level scale. And it’s essentially a maturity model is what we have developed. So level one through level five, and we talked through where we thought content strategy was at each of those levels.

Larry:
Right. And the way… It was both historical and developmental in that for each decade, you said, “In the 90s, we were doing it this way. In the early 2000s, we were doing it this way. And now the last…” Can you just outline each of those five stages that you identify?

Erin:
Sure. Right. And the decades thing I think happens to be more coincidental than anything. It’s not something we would necessarily say, “Oh…” Because the truth is you can exist at any point on the scale today. I think in the description of it, in land the metaphor, it’s helpful to understand some of that time-based context. But we want to understand that not everyone… There’s a lot of K1 today. So to explain what that means, K1-K5, the way we talked about it was K1 from a content strategy perspective was really grounded in the copywriting discipline. And this speaks to a time where content strategy was just emerging as a discipline or hadn’t even emerged yet I guess. It was things… You were transferring information and content from paper to the web. And essentially if you were involved in any kind of online production, it was generally in the form of copywriting.

Erin:
And then as we moved sort of into the K2 phase, this is where we solve the discipline of content strategy emerge in earnest. And I think in a lot of ways that that came out of writers being forced to fit their content into a design after the design had already been created. And understanding that not only was that a backwards way of doing things, we should stop and think about our editorial process, stop and think about what we are creating. Just because we’ve moved from a print structure to sort of a seemingly endless horizon of online world, that does not mean we should just create and create and create. So that was kind of moving from K1 to K2 and asking some of those questions around content strategy.

Erin:
The K3 was getting in the social and commerce phase of the web. So leaving behind web 2.0, moving into more of the participatory web landscape. And from the content strategy perspective, we talked about this meaning really having to understand your content ecosystem and reckoning with the idea that it’s no longer sufficient to just push, push, push. Pull has to start to happen. This is where we started to see SEO really come into the conversation. This is where content marketing grew into the conversation. And understanding what those journeys look like that the journey does not begin on your homepage. It does not likely begin on your landing page. And really reckoning with that reality.

Erin:
K4 is, I guess, where big tech is today. We were calling this product experiences. And I think from the content perspective, that means more of a structured style of content development and content management. Getting into atomic content strategies, moving away from the page-based model of content development and content publication. And also this is where I think content design has come into play in earnest, where we’re starting to understand that we need to explore content and user research together, understand that we’re producing for people and humans with needs and how to understand what those needs and preferences and expectations are in order to deliver the right content. We are understanding it’s no longer sufficient to produce from such an organizational perspective.

Erin:
And then K5, it was kind of held out as the AI, sort of artificial intelligence era. And we talked about this in many ways and not knowing what this means. But having some conversation around as artificial intelligence grows, what does that mean for content strategy? How will our jobs begin to be affected? And that was really just an unknown part of the conversation that was fun to have, but it raises some important questions as well.

Larry:
Yeah. When you got to that part during the presentation, I was like, “Oh no, this is the dystopic future coming, and the robots are going to put us all out of jobs.” I don’t think that’s going to happen, but it’s like the way you set it up… I don’t know if you meant to do it that way, but I was kind of like, “Oh my God, where is this going?” But I love the way that that… One thing you mentioned that this is very much like a maturity model and there’s a lot of folks in content strategy have developed various maturity models and approaches. But I think of Jared Spool’s approach to UX maturity. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen him present on that. I’ve seen him talk about it a few times, and he’s careful to point out that from any one product or business unit or wherever, you can have different levels of maturity at different places in an organization, or even across a product team or another team.

Larry:
So there’s that evolutionary model, but then there’s not not everybody’s going to be at K1, 2, 3, 4, 5 at the same time. Have you observed that and have you figured out how to… It seems like there’s some reconciliation that needs to happen if you have people on different pages.

Erin:
Sure. I’ve experienced it. Short answer is, I wish I had the answer of how to resolve this, but I think we’re all working through this in different ways right now. To answer your question around Jared Spool’s work, I’ve seen that presentation. I’ve followed his thinking and his work there, and I’ve been certainly inspired by it. And what I appreciate around how he talks about maturity models, is what I appreciate around how John Maeda talks about maturity models and talks about the Kardashev scale is a normalization that we are not all in the same place. And that is okay. I tend to think… Even when we talked about the K scale and the conference and even when you and I have had a conversation about it, you tend to get into this reminiscy… “This was funny and fun.” When there was no responsive web and you had one webpage. We can talk about those and laugh about it.

Erin:
But the thing is it’s not meant to shame an organization or a group for not being further along in the scale. I think it’s just meant as a reality check for us to say, “Okay, where are we? And what are the possibilities? And what is the value of moving towards those possibilities?” And I think that’s the conversation that you have to have inside of an organization. And I think what you have to bring to that conversation is maybe any number of maturity models where the organization can see themselves reflected depending on what you’re trying to solve.

Erin:
With regard to content, I think it’s exactly the same thing. We can point out some of the realities that have differentiated the arrows as a way of talking about the value of working differently and of accepting new skills into our practice and understanding what that will do for us, what that will do for our customers, and our users.

Larry:
Yeah, exactly. I think you’re getting at one of my favorite things about content strategy practice. I think at its foundation, it’s very pragmatic. You work with what you got and if you have whatever the dynamic is, if a business isn’t funded enough or trained enough to get up a level or two, where you’d like to see them, you just kind of work with what you have. Does that resonate with you?

Erin:
It certainly does because you have to do what you have to do. However, I like to push and I like to find the space, the project, the section to say, “What if we did this?” And that’s what I really like about some of new, not so new ideas that have come into the software development world and have started to trickle in to content and into UX around managing uncertainty, around exploring the value of solutions, around creating feedback loops. So I like to push and see where we can bring in a new tool, where we can bring in a new methodology, and what we can learn from that. And incrementally advance if there’s not an opportunity to advance more wholistically.

Larry:
Yeah. No, that makes… I think, I was maybe being too passive and accepting of it… Because at the user end, you definitely want it to be pull. You want to be pulled by the users to what they need and deserve. Whereas on the inside as a practitioner, it’s more like, “No, I know better ways to do this and I’m going to help you identify those and push forward.” One thing you said and apropos of that, this might connect, when you were talking about I think it was stage two in Kardashev scale, where you’re just starting to get this notion of, “No, this isn’t about filling a field that somebody put in a CMS.” And we talked earlier before the show about your notion of content first and how taking a genuinely content first approach. I think that’s one of the earliest evolutionary stages, as a practitioner, when you get to where you can confidently go in and say, “That’s a beautiful design, but here’s the content we got. . .” Can you speak to that?

Erin:
Sure. Right. I thought a lot about content first since you and I last had a conversation because it did kind of hit me. Content first… I’ve worked in a lot of information-rich experiences with folks who understand content first. So I feel lucky in that way. So my autopilot content-first response is valid. I’m firmly in the camp that form follows function. When we seek to create any sort of visual or verbal experience, we have to ask, “What is the substance of this experience and how can we design around that?” Otherwise you risk the containers being all wrong, as you suggested. And this is what content strategy was born out of, in many ways.

Erin:
So when I think of content first, I think of that idea of form follows function. But one thing I would like to raise is, I wonder if we’re moving into a new era of research first. I think if we get into the idea as I was alluding to earlier of, “What does it mean when information is the product?” And I think that we’ve existed in a world… The product and business world, you’ve long had to understand what is the value of the solution I’m creating? How is it going to resonate with my users, but yet in the more information-rich experiences in the public sector that I’ve worked in others, we’ve existed allowing this idea that users will come to us and sort through what’s there and then determine if it fits their needs or not.

Erin:
Okay. So I think we are moving out of that era to more of a research-first era and beginning to apply the industry adage, I guess, build the right thing, build the thing right.

Larry:
Yep. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Erin:
I think that there is a collective understanding of the role of content practitioners in the “build the right thing” part of the process. And that’s why I’m leaning into an idea… Understanding, yes, content first when you were building the thing, but the role of research and content strategy in the first part of the phase, in the “build the right thing” part of the phase, if that makes.

Larry:
Right. No, that makes perfect sense. I think, there’s so many ways to organize at the highest level kind of what we do. And that British design council, Double Diamond of discover, define, develop, deliver. That’s kind of what you’re getting at there. It also though… But you’re just reminding me, I actually wrote down this quote from our conversation a week or so ago, you said, “The war will be won by understanding users.” And a huge amount of that work in the discover and define stage is all about listening to users and doing more research. And you’ve talked already a little bit about research. Tell me how I’m almost in an embarrassed way about how we used to just crank out content. You’d just get an idea and you’d kind of do it like, I came out of journalism. You assign the story, you write the story, and boom, there it goes. Now it’s like, “Wait a minute.” So tell me more about how, how your practice has changed as you’ve had this of user-centric, research-based approach.

Erin:
I think that’s exactly it. I think we all came out… Not all of us. I think many of us came out of the journalistic way of working where you get to decide what should we write about. Of course, do you want to understand what resonates with your readers at some level and I’m not dismissing that. But I think in the information landscape, it’s becoming obvious that we can not flood our platforms and our systems with whatever is important to the organization. And it’s becoming obvious because of how much competition there is for eyeballs and traffic.

Erin:
So I think that we are beginning to understand that what happens around editorial decision making, that needs to draw from a stronger feedback loop with our audiences and with our customers. And get that machine up and running so that we can understand what are the needs and how can we deliver on that. And starting to also step away I think from the idea that once something is published, it needs to stay exactly that way for a long time. I’m wondering if we can start to accept iteration even at the content level. And so moving away from some of these ideas around how we decide what to produce and what the life cycle looks like for that piece of content. How often are we going back and taking feedback and making changes?

Larry:
Right. I think that’s a fundamental change that, again, in terms of your maturity model, we’re all at different places in our maturity towards recognizing that, that you don’t just create a piece of content, put it there, and it’s there forever. That the evolution of I think… I don’t know if you do much SEO work at Publicis Sapient, but that’s a place where that shows up a lot. And that there’s often been in that world, a concern with, “Oh my God, we got to harvest all the long tail search results, so we need all this content out there.”

Larry:
But I think increasingly… I don’t follow it as closely as I used to, but my hunch is that I’m seeing many more of my long term search inquiries and Google point me to a bigger page. And Google has this new thing. I don’t know exactly how they’re doing it, but they’re highlighting the content of the page that answers your query. So you don’t need separate pages anymore to address that. This kind of gets at. I don’t know if you follow Gerry McGovern, but Gerry is like, “Look, you guys, 90 percent of the content on the web is crap. Get rid of it, and just give the users what they want.”

Erin:
Yeah. I think that… I agree. I think the how of doing that obviously is the hard part. I’ve had the great fortune to work with some very smart SEO colleagues. And bringing SEO data and the practice of SEO into our content strategy and content development practice has been an adventure at times, trying to figure out who is leading the dance here. And reckoning with that and dealing with what we’re understanding about usage, what we can or cannot gather about user intent from that data, how we can triangulate with data that can inform those sorts of things. So the more inputs we have does not always seem to make it easier.

Larry:
Right. Well, and that’s the generic problem you alluded to earlier that we’re all just inundated with information and how is that additional piece of information wherever it comes from, in whatever context, how is that actually going to help? In this case, you’re talking about the content strategy practitioner as the user of some new SEO practice or content marketing thing or something like that. Yeah. I used to do a lot of SEO for many years, but it started back in the late nineties. And one of the things I loved about it right from the get-go is it was the most user-focused customer-centric business practice out there. You had to get inside your user’s brain to have any success.

Larry:
And I think about 10 or 15 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, the SEO practitioners really recognized that satisfying user intent is how you curry favor with Google. And that brings us right back to your interest in user research and user centricity. Do you see all this stuff? I guess we talked about this and SEO is one of these allied practices along with information architecture and just user experience design in general. Do you see all these sort of allied fields converging? Or how does that manifest in your work?

Erin:
In my experience, I’ve seen them converging. I have had… And some of that is my own doing. Whenever I’ have tried to specialize, it never seems to stick. You know, I’m always kind of expanding the horizon of what I feel is important to know to do my best work. So writing led to content strategy, and visual design led me to UX and IA, and now UX has really led me toward a deeper interest in research and data. All of that has led me towards an interest in lean and agile and design thinking. So I guess I can only talk about my experience, but I do think that there is some energy around generalizing being important right now and being able to come in to a team or an engagement or a meeting and have an understanding end-to-end about what experience means.

Erin:
So that’s how I approach my work. I think looking at it in a little more… At face value, I think most people would agree that there’s overlap between several parts of the discipline, but I don’t want to dismiss the idea of specializing at any one step or in any one facet. Because I know that there is value in deep understanding as well. So I think it kind of depends on how you like to work and maybe it depends on your organization or your team. I can only speak to my experience. I have a hard time gate keeping between all of these different disciplines or facets.

Larry:
Yep. No, I struggle with the same thing. And I sometimes wonder if I’m an idiot for having cast as wide a net as I have over in the field of content strategy and my current approach to it. But at the same time, you just talked about a lot of the benefits of being a generalist and having… I think it’s being able to make those connections that results in better content strategy practice. And things like if you understand what the SEOs want and how information architects organize things, how user experience designers understand their users… If you understand all that stuff, you’re going to be a better content strategist, but you certainly won’t be acknowledged as any kind of a specialist.

Erin:
Right. Right. And I guess that’s the trade-off that we have to make. I start to see it as having a full command of the questions that can be asked and the way they can be answered in order to produce the right thing and to produce it well. That’s kind of where I am is what do we need to learn and how can we learn it? And that’s the question that guides me towards all of these different places.

Larry:
I think I’m seeing where your interest in research is coming from. You kind of just described the need for that. Hey, Erin, I noticed we’re already coming up on time. These always go so quickly, but before we wrap up, I always like to make sure, is there anything last, anything that we haven’t talked about or that’s just on your mind that you want to share with the folks before we close?

Erin:
The time did fly by. I think in terms of what we haven’t… I think we’ve talked about a lot of important things and and had a chance to discuss a lot of what I’ve been thinking about. I will just throw the other angle that we had discussed at one point that I’d love to come back to at some point and I’m continuing to learn about. Because I’ve talked a lot about what’s important to me at the product level and how product and content are merging in my world right now. There’s also the more specialized parts of this. And for me right now, that’s structured and atomic content and what that means and where that’s going and what that’s going to mean for how we produce and deliver content in experiences and potentially in other contexts.

Larry:
Yeah, no, I think you’re absolutely right. And we’re on the exact same wavelength there, that operating from a non-presentation-specific body of content to create the right user experiences. You get into things like personalization, but not even just personalization, but just creating a decent website or a good app or whatever it is you’re trying to do. That operating from sensibly organized, structured content is – that’s just how we’re going to be operating in the future. And that all of these things we’re talking about are going to adapt and change and grow and slide further down the Kardashev scale as we figure them out.

Erin:
That’s right. That’s where I have my eye on in another phase of evolution. So that’s what I’m looking out for right now.

Larry:
Cool. Well, how can we follow your evolution, Erin? Are you active on social media or where would you like to connect with folks?

Erin:
Yeah, I’m really enjoying Twitter and I can be found at @ErinGoldenXD.

Larry:
XD. Okay. Got you. And I’ll get that in the show notes as well. Well, thanks so much, Erin. I really enjoyed the conversation. This is fun stuff and you’re right. We need to have a couple of more conversations about this as well.

Erin:
It’s been an absolute pleasure, Larry. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Larry:
You bet.