Jack Molisani: Content Strategy Events – Episode 66

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Jack Molisani knows how to put on an engaging and edifying professional conference.

He founded and organizes the LavaCon technical content strategy conference, which draws hundreds of content professionals to cities like New Orleans and Portland each year.

Jack has experimented over the years with virtualizing parts of his conferences, and he shares in this episode his discoveries about how to run online events.

Jack and I talked about:

• the origins of the LavaCon conference
• his conscious choice to host LavaCon in smaller cities like New Orleans and Portland
• how he puts together the slate of speakers for LavaCon each year
• trends in content strategy – chatbots last year, structured content this year
• the history of content strategy and technical communication conferences
• his definition of content strategy
• the need for a content champion above the content silos, a UN of content, headed by a Chief Content Officer
• the challenges facing the conference industry
• how to virtualize conferences
• supporting small businesses during the current COVID-19 pandemic
• DITA and other good skills – like public speaking and improv – to study during the current downtime
• his generous offer to review resumes for job seekers (details below)

Jacks’ Bio

Jack Molisani is the president of ProSpring Technical Staffing, an employment agency specializing in content professionals:

He’s the author of Be The Captain of Your Career: A New Approach to Career Planning and Advancement, which hit #5 on Amazon’s Career and Resume Best Seller list.

Jack also produces the LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and Technical Communication Management, to be held in New Orleans 25-28 October 2020.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Karen McGrane: Content In the Zombie Apocalypse
• Minimum Viable Infrastructure for Enterprise Content, by Sarah O’Keefe
• The LavaCon YouTube channel with free content:
• The LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy
• LinkedIn Content Strategy Group

Free resume reviews or if your company needs staffing help: Jack@ProspringStaffing.com

Podcast Intro Transcript

When you attend a professional conference, you may not think about the details that happen behind the scenes. Jack Molisani definitely thinks about them. As the organizer of the LavaCon content strategy conference, he seeks out interesting locations, scours the profession for the best speakers, and follows industry trends, aiming to create gatherings that are both enjoyable and enlightening. Jack has been virtualizing parts of his events for years, so he also has some great thoughts on the current shift to online events.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 66 of The Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Jack Molisani. He runs a staffing agency for content professionals and other technical professionals. He’s written a book about how to manage a technical career. But I think he’s probably best known as the founder and the organizer of the LavaCon conference. Let me welcome you to the show Jack and please tell the folks a little bit more about yourself and how LavaCon came to be in particular. That’s what I’m interested in anyway.

Jack:
Sure. This is a fun story. Harken back to 1998, the Society for Technical Communications annual leadership summit. Someone had observed that at the time, none of the chapters in the Pacific Rim countries ever got to go to their own regional conferences because they were always held mainland US. So someone made the suggestion have a combined region, seven region annual conference, hold it smack dab in the middle of Hawaii. And I raised my hand, “I’ll run that one.” And it was a one-time event. And at the end of it, we had it in the fall of 2000 . . . conference. We expected about 140 people. 560 showed up.

Jack:
Everyone kept saying, “I can’t wait until the next one.” I’m going, “There is no next one.” I can’t wait until the next year. I’m going, “Hmm, maybe there’s an opportunity here.” So I got together some seed money and in 2002, started my on conference on content strategy talent management. There were plenty of conferences out there, the STC conference, but never sessions for those of us with a little gray in our temples.

Jack:
So we started strategy and planning and that’s how the conference started. And that worked great until 2008 when the economy crashed and I couldn’t get people to Hawaii if my life depended on it. So that’s when I started bringing the conference to the mainland US cities, but fun, walkable cities with great food like New Orleans and Portland and Austin, live music, and it’s worked out pretty well so far.

Larry:
Nice. So you’ve really … Yeah, I have only been to the one LavaCon in Portland last fall and I can attest to the fun of it and the choice of venue. A lot of people would end up in the Bay area or New York or the bigger venues. I love that you’ve chosen that. You’ve obviously been very thoughtful about putting that together. I’m curious how it evolved, that initial decision to go to the smaller places and the walkable cities. The venue selection is one of many factors. What else was going on in there?

Jack:
All right. So there’s three facets to that question. How we got to New Orleans was I went to school in New Orleans and I was a fan there and the city is near and dear to my heart. So after [Hurricane] Katrina, I brought my conference to New Orleans to help the city recover as soon as I could to help my city with their convention dollars. But then we found out it was so fun and the food was so amazing, everybody kept saying, “When are we going back?” So we’ve been going back almost every other year. So I’ve been going back and forth between New Orleans and Portland, New Orleans-Austin, New Orleans and other venues.

Jack:
Okay, part of your question was why do these smaller venues? When my conference was in Hawaii, we were known for Aloha spirit, the local regional foods, the local culture and that became almost part of my branding and I wanted to preserve that because that was part (1) my branding, (2) fun and (3) nobody else was doing that. So it differentiated us from other conferences.

Jack:
I wanted to go where fun, walkable places. I didn’t want to be in an airport Hilton somewhere. I wanted to be in the Gas Lamp district of San Diego, walking distance in Austin, listen to live music coming out of all the bars and restaurants. The same thing in New Orleans. You can’t throw a stick without hitting a bar or restaurant or live music. So all those locations had a culture that we wanted to be part of.

Larry:
Yeah. I think that probably affects who shows up, but I think another huge consideration in attending a conference is who’s speaking? And that’s something, I’ve been really impressed with the slate of speakers you’ve had at LavaCon over the years. I’m really curious how, I assume your curation of speakers and the folks you’ve recruited and the topics of interest to your attendees, tell me all the, not everything, but tell me how your speaker roster comes together.

Jack:
Sure. Again, several aspects of this. One is we publish a call for speakers and people just show up. But then I also go out and I hand-choose people or I invite them I should say. When choosing speakers from both those pools, I look at five things. Is the person well-known in our industry? Kristina Halvorson wrote the book on web content strategy. Last year we had Karen McGrane who wrote the book on mobile content strategy. Noz Urbina and Sarah O’Keefe who wrote books on content strategy. Everybody knows who these names are. Andrea Ames. Everybody including . . . Andrea loves the Andrea and Joe Gollner, fantastic speaker on the leading edge of the industry I want at my conference.

Jack:
Second, is the person at a well-known company that we would want? For example, until this year, I didn’t know who the head of content strategy at Salesforce is, but boy I’d love to know what they’re doing. Salesforce is huge and they’re growing like gangbusters, so that. So are they from a big company? We got the vice president reached out to me from NBC Universal, the vice president of content strategy and marketing saying, “Can we be one of your speakers?” I went, “Yeah!”

Jack:
So part of this is just us, this is going onto our 18th year now and we’re getting well-known enough that people are coming to me. People are reaching out to me on LinkedIn, too. Last year, Michael O’Donnell, who is the vice president of global content marketing at Dunn & Bradstreet, reached out to me and said, “You want to be a speaker? And he goes, “Sure.” So it’s just through networking and reaching out.

Jack:
I’ll tell you, here’s someone want to get as a speaker who have not yet gotten is I would love to have the head of content strategy from either Telemundo or what was the other Spanish speaking language? Univision.

Larry:
Oh Univision. Yeah.

Jack:
Yeah because one … and the head of content strategy at Nickelodeon – because they are creating content for the next generation of content consumers. I want to know what’s in their head. I’m sure they have tales to tell. Same thing, trying to get away from this English-centric view of the world. How do you create content in multiple languages? One year, we almost got him, but he had to cancel because of budget cuts was the head of content strategy at the United Nations. Because on their website, daily, they publish news in eight languages in real time. I would love to know what tools they were using and who curates that and how long do they keep it up and where does the content come from? I still want to get him back.

Jack:
But this is the kind of thing. And then finally, I look at where is the industry going? So when I heard that last year that Facebook was dropping something like $60 million into AR and VR research, I went, “Hmm.” And I know somebody at Facebook, said, “Jonathan, can you introduce me to the person in charge of the AR/VR content strategy at Facebook?” And he did and she spoke at my conference. Oh my God. They’re setting up virtual chatrooms where you put on your AR goggles and go interact with an avatar. Oh my God. That’s a virtual conference right there and you get to choose your avatar or your own face. Wow. I want to know what Facebook is doing with AR/VR. So being connected to those kind of people is another way that I find speakers.

Larry:
A quick follow along to that, as you put together the program for 2020, I’m curious, what are the big trends you see coming? What are the things we’ll all be talking about a year from now because we learned about it at LavaCon?

Jack:
Interesting. Last year, everybody was talking about chatbots. Chatbots, chatbot, bots, bots, bots, bots, bots, bots. And it was a flash in the pan. They’re still there, but they weren’t this new bells ring and the clouds part and we have a new communication channel that we will concentrate on. Yes. But Karen McGrane, and if you want to go to the LavaCon website, lavacon.org, there’s a free recording of her speaking on the home page, talking about moving your content into a structured authoring. Many large companies are, but her talk oddly enough called Content in the Zombie Apocalypse, which I think is very appropriate right now, it used to be that every time a new publishing paradigm came around, management ran around like the sky is falling, the sky is falling. Oh, we’ve got to publish to PDF.

Jack:
No. It’s okay. And then it was mobile. And then it was responsive. And now it’s Google Glass and who knows what? She goes, “If you put your content, if you future proof your content by putting it in a structured authoring database, it doesn’t matter what the next publishing paradigm is.” You could be publishing on jumbotrons or she said, when toaster printers come out. Your content is ready. Moving away from only doing the structured content if you’re translating because remember, in the olden days, the only way it was cost-effective to move your content to structured authoring, is the cost savings on localization.

Jack:
But we’re moving away from that. The cost is coming down to the point where content re-use and getting authors away from formatting because in structured authoring, you format when you publish it, right? So if the content is on a laptop, you can see three columns. If it’s on a tablet you’d see two columns. On a phone you see one column. So it’s formatted when you publish it, not when you author it. So they’re seeing all sorts of cost savings on the front end by taking the formatting part out of the authoring process.

Larry:
I think to me, that seems like one of the big contributions of the technical content world to the whole, the bigger discipline of content strategy. You all have been doing that for 20, 30, 40 years and I think a lot of that stuff, just CCMS’s and DITA and XML formats and those are the kinds of underlying technologies that enable that kind of nicely, semantically structured content to underlie whatever it is you’re up to, which kind of reminds me.

Larry:
You said you’ve been doing LavaCon for 18 years. That must be the oldest content strategy conference out there. Is it? There’s been design conferences and web development, that kind of stuff. But in terms of a conference and like you said, it’s different from STC or the others, are you unique in that regard? Do you think you pioneered this?

Jack:
Difficult to say because when my conference started, it was conference on technical communication management. We were doing content strategy 18 years ago, but we didn’t call it content strategy. It was a few years later before that term became widely a thing, but we had sessions on DITA over 10 years ago. We had structured authoring before that. We had SGML going back decades.

Jack:
What was interesting is at least my conference and I think other conferences followed suit, where it wasn’t enough just to do managing technical writing projects because then we had social media. Okay, what is social media? All right? And then we had mobile. Okay, what is mobile? So it was almost like a dual track where you had all the management stuff and the strategy stuff, plus the latest tools and technology, right?

Jack:
So while there were conferences out there on marketing and there were conferences out there on project management and there were conferences out there on writing, mine was a meta-conference where we had if you needed to go to one place, you could only go to one conference a year and you needed to stay up-to-date on managing and managing your team and managing the latest technology and what’s coming down the road and what should I be budgeting for 10 years from now? LavaCon fit that.

Jack:
So I don’t know if we’re uniquely in there because content strategy means different things to different people. For example, Confab is actually larger than LavaCon is, but they focus solely on web content strategy, where my conference focuses on multichannel, so we do web and print and PDF and mobile and whatever. So there’s several of us out there, just what meets your organization’s needs best.

Larry:
Yeah and I picture a lot of amoebas navigating this world and merging and blobbing together. Because last year at Confab, I don’t know if you went, but there was a lot of stuff about UX writing and product content strategy and that seems to be not infiltrating, but becoming an important part of that world. One way to think about that is a website is just another digital product in some sense. So I think that might be part of where that came from. But there was a lot of explicit product/UX content there, as well.

Larry:
It’s interesting, let me ask you, I try to ask everybody this, how would you define … If you’re at a cocktail party with some neophyte who knows nothing about the field, how would you describe content strategy to them?

Jack:
I’d describe it with an analogy. Take a company like Cisco Systems that has 200 products, each of which needs a sales brochure, installation guide, a web page, a tech support page. Multiply that by the 27 languages they translate worldwide, it would be absolutely impossible to keep all that content around in Microsoft clouds. So some clever person will take all that content and put it into a database and tag it so it can be spit out when they want it, where they want it, in the country they want it, on the device they want it. A person who does that is a content strategist. And my conferences on content strategy and digital publishing.

Larry:
Nice. That’s a great … And I think if you went to a marketing conference, you’d get a whole other thing and even at Confab, you’d get a different …

Jack:
Yeah.

Larry:
Yeah. I think what you just said, the scope of what you just said, that spans a huge amount. You’ve talked, I’ve heard you talk in other podcasts and talks about the need for a CCO, somebody like a Chief Content Officer, somebody ideally in the C suite. But tell me about your … have you seen … tell me where you perceive that need coming from and have you seen success stories in that regard? Are there people doing that or organizations doing that I mean?

Jack:
I’m happy to announce there is now a LinkedIn group called Chief Content Officer. So yes, it has gained traction. The reason why I advocate for a Chief Content Officer and I originally for this from Alan. What’s Alan’s last name? One of my students.

Larry:
Pringle? The guy at . . .

Jack:
Not Pringle.

Larry:
Okay yeah. Sorry.

Jack:
Porter, Alan Porter, was that so often return on investment for a content initiative doesn’t come out of the department that’s spending. For example, if the IT department is implementing this, so the translation costs. So they go, “Well why am I going to spend the money if I’m not going to see a return? So you need somebody, a mentor, a champion above all the content silos to bring them all together like the United Nations of content, everybody around the table with the equal pull. And so you have IT and tech support and training and marketing and tech com, the content’s customer success officer all on the same page being led by above with someone whose got the pursestrings.

Jack:
And LavaCon has a YouTube channel and Noz Urbina did a keynote on Storming The Castle: How To Reach Those Who Have the Power and Pursestrings. And you can find that talk on our YouTube channel [actually Vimeo].

Larry:
I’ll link to it in the show notes, yeah.

Jack:
Okay? All of our keynotes the past five years and what’s interesting about LavaCon is I don’t have one keynote that’s there and talks learnedly, I meet so many people, I go “Oh my God. Everybody needs to hear this. Oh my God everybody needs to hear this.” And TED talks – technology, entertainment, design talks – are 18 minutes long because it’s long enough to be substantial, but short enough not to lose people’s interest or enough that they listen to it on a walk or a jog.

Jack:
So all of my featured keynote talks are 18 minutes long and I tend to instead of one hour 18 minute talk and they’re all available from our YouTube channel.

Larry:
Great. I love that. That’s 18 years ago when you started, you had more like 50-minute sessions with a Q&A and that has evolved. I think there’s so many things going on there, just the rise of social media and just information overload and decreasing attention spans. There’s so many things in there. And it sounds like that’s working for you.

Jack:
We’ve grown on average 20% per year, per year for the past 18 years. I will tell you, getting back to something you were asking about earlier about in-person versus virtual conferences …

Larry:
Right. I wanted to get back to that for sure. Yes. Thank you.

Jack:
So we are currently mid-April. April 15th we recorded we recorded this and everyone’s at home online on lock-down and hopefully, this will lift soon. The conference is not until the end of October, which is seven and a half months from now. So I am hoping that things will calm down enough that people will show up in person because we’re going to be in New Orleans, which is also a hot spot. So it has to calm down.

Jack:
So one, we’re going to be in Austin, Texas, next year. So this morning, I reached out to the convention center in Austin, going, “If we move our conference from New Orleans. Two, a lot of conferences today are moving to virtual. They don’t have time to switch. They’re too soon.” So I’m going to two conferences over the next two months. I’m speaking at one of those conferences.

Jack:
You know what? So much of the value at conferences is talking about the industry. One of the tag lines from my conference was fun . . . Come talk to people. Find out what the head of the industry from Amazon or Salesforce is doing. How did you handle this? What worked? What didn’t? . . . coined a term hallway track. Just bumping into people the hallway and making connections. I think we’re going to lose that if we go to a pure virtual event.

Larry:
Have you tried to … I was listening to oh, Jorge Arango had Abby Covert on his podcast the other day, recently, and she talked about they did their information architecture conference or one of those conferences virtually. And they had Zoom breakout rooms and Slack channels and things like that. Have you experimented with … There’s a lot of technology things, but yeah, you’re right, that’s always my favorite track at any conference is the corridor track, the hallway track. That’s where, I don’t know 80% of the good stuff is. But have you tried to mimic, or not mimic, but replicate or approximate that?

Jack:
I have to report that LavaCon has had a virtual track for over five years now and it was led by Phylise Banner and Adobe Connect. And there’s a whole chat window where you can chat with other participants and Phylise would relay questions from the speaker to the audience and back again. So we brought them fully into the conference experience. Joe Glickman would take a camera and go out into the exhibit hall, would go out into the breaks. We would do … we always have a karaoke night, story telling night, other fun networking events and we would Facebook Live those. Anybody who wanted to be a part of the conference experience could be.

Jack:
I can tell you, just last night the San Diego STC chapter had a live virtual social networking event on Zoom, broken out into sub chatrooms and sub chat channels on Slack. So yes, we are … what do you call that? Not experimenting with, but prototyping these various virtual networking venues. Yeah.

Larry:
I think it’s really interesting. I’m sure we’re all doing a lot of this now. I went to church with my family on Sunday morning and I was really impressed with the Zoom production that they put on to run a church service. By the same token, I’ve seen other similar kinds of events that were klunkily run. So I think there’s probably a huge amount of learning going on right now. Do you have any sources you go to or models that you see as folks who are handling that kind of stuff really well?

Jack:
I have to admit that I was fairly fortunate to have Phylise Banner as my virtual track producer. She’s not only got a degree in distance learning, she teaches distance learning. And she’s just taken a job at the STC for them, so I’m going to have to replace her. But I’ve had excellent tutors over the past few years. Like I said, we are just now going into other events producing, so I’m actually going to go as an attendee and as a speaker. One of my favorite sayings is the definition of expert is someone who’s made all the mistakes possible to get in the field, assuming you don’t keep repeating them. And learning from the mistakes of others is faster than making them all yourself.

Jack:
So both as an attendee and a speaker at these other events, I’m going to see what worked, what didn’t and that way I can replicate that in my event come October. So I’m really hoping that we’re going to have an in-person event and then those who don’t feel comfortable can attend virtually. And we’ve always recorded, we live-streamed one whole track with all the keynotes and all the breakouts in that one track and then recorded the other ones. So after the conference you can go back and watch the ones that you didn’t see in person. So the whole conference is available virtually either live or on Memorex.

Larry:
That’s one thing that’s occurred to me. I’m not an epidemiologist or public health expert, but it seems to me that one likely outcome over the next year or year and a half is that we’ll have this situation where there are people who have been exposed to the disease and have immunity to it and so there’ll be this a little bit bifurcated society as we all try to come back together. But there might very well be the opportunity to have some people who are safe and comfortable assembling in person. And I kind of like that hybrid model, which is kind of what you’ve done the last five years, right?

Jack:
Right.

Larry:
Yeah. Cool.

Jack:
You know we could have a vaccine by then. We could have immunity. You have to show your immunity card to get into the event, who knows? Like I said, I’ve got a whole seven and a half months before my event. I’m just going to sit back and wait and see. I’m happy to report that none of the … we’ve offered buy one get one free pricing until we publish the program. And I opened normal registration the day before they declared lockdown. So everyone is on wait and see right now, including me. So we’re just going to see what happens. Either way, the conference will go on, live or virtual, in person. Maybe there’s three of us there to run things or we do it from home. It just depends on how the next three months go.

Larry:
Yeah. I’m all of a sudden thinking … I consume a lot of music online, too, and there’s been a lot of interesting studios with the musicians all six feet apart from one another, doing … we’ll see. And you’re going to be way ahead of me on that, in terms of that. Hey Jack, I notice we’re coming up close to time and I always like to give my guests a chance. Is there anything that’s come up during the conversation or just anything last that’s on your mind about running a conference or content strategy that you want to make sure we share with our folks?

Jack:
A related thing is to keep in mind small businesses. Because those are the ones that are most at risk of not surviving the next few months. Musicians in New Orleans, drag queens in New Orleans who are doing their show from their living room with their Venmo ID, so tip them five bucks. Share the love, especially if you’re one of the few that are currently employed. Take care of the friends who aren’t because we’ll get through this, but we’ve got to get through it together.

Jack:
So as content strategy goes, for those of you who don’t know DITA scriptorium offers learning DITA duck, learning DITA live. Either way just Google search learning DITA and it’s a free way to get your feet wet because even though you’re not doing it now, you will probably in your future. So start now, especially if you have all this free time on your hands. You could be sitting watching TV or you could be learning DITA.

Larry:
That’s right. I think that’s something that we all have ambitions of that during this time, oh good, I can finally do that. And DITA, is that … I know in the technical content strategy world, that’s, it’s not a default, it’s super common technology.

Jack:
Common.

Larry:
To implement structured content. I love that idea, though, to learn DITA. Are there other skills or technologies that you think are really hot or interesting right now that people would benefit from learning?

Jack:
Yes and two things that I tell everybody that will make your careers. Take a public speaking class like Toastmasters. Really kind of difficult to do right now unless you do it virtually or take and improv course, which again hard to do right now unless you do it virtually. Because the whole part about improv is being in the moment, listening to what the other person has to say, not what you’re thinking about, and then adding to it. So it’s a great way to be part of the conversation.

Jack:
So many content strategists are introverts and they just want to sit in their cube and work on taxonomies and other big words. You could have the best content strategies in the world, but if you can’t sell it, if you can’t get funding for it, it’s not going to go anywhere. So you need to have those people skills in addition to the technology chops. That’s my word of advice.

Larry:
No, that makes sense because you could have all the great ideas and knowledge in the world, but if you can’t sell it. And not just presenting it at a conference, but selling your colleagues and boss on the ideas, right?

Jack:
Correct.

Larry:
Yeah. Got you. Cool.

Jack:
And speak at conferences. I know at my conference, even though our slate is full for this year, we accept full-time speakers, I mean brand new speakers. Everyone’s got to start somewhere. We offer speech coaching and slide design coaching. But it gets so much easier the more you do it. So volunteer to speak at your local organizations. Attend a Meetup when speaking six feet apart. Again, a lot of this I’m taking the longer-term view, just not what to do over the next four weeks. Attend Meetups.

Jack:
So many people are degrading … I use the term degrading … into chatting only from a distance. I think we’ve missed something when we rely solely on social media to communicate. And plus, take example. I’m a recruiter. I know people from various conferences. If I get a content strategy job in Milwaukee, I think Molly Barrett. If I need a marketing person in San Diego, I go to Bonnie Graham. It’s only because I have these face-to-face interactions that I know what they’re good at, what they’re not good at and they’re memorable which I don’t necessarily get if someone just emails me a resume. I’m definitely a proponent for in-person and social networking once it’s safe to do so again.

Larry:
Yes. I’m looking forward to that, as well. Well thanks so much Jack. It’s been a really great conversation. I really enjoyed catching up with you. I can think of … there’s 10 more conversations just unfolded in the last five minutes I’d love to follow up with you on. So thanks again.

Jack:
One last thing. I am a professional recruiter. And if anybody wants me to review their resume, I’d be happy to do it for free. It’s my way of giving back. In the notes, we’ll put my email address which is jack@prospringstaffing.com and we’ll end on that.

Larry:
Sweet. Thanks so much. Very generous of you, Jack. I’ll definitely put that in the show notes.

Jack:
All right.

Larry:
Well thanks.

Jack:
Okay. Thank you, Larry.

Larry:
See you.

Jack:
Cheers.