Laura Robertson: In Search of a Content-First CMS – Episode 45

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Do you love your CMS? Laura Robertson asked the audience at her Confab 2019 talk whether any of them loved their CMS. In a room of 750 people, only one hand went up. This sad state of affairs has prompted Laura to reflect deeply on content management systems.

Laura and I talked about:

• her content strategy practice in London, working mostly with non-profit organizations
• where there is room for improvement in content management systems:
  • most CMSs were designed to publish websites and web pages, whereas now we publish to many different platforms, voice, social media, email, and apps and other ways to deliver content
  • most CMSs have been developed tech-first, not content-first
  • which results in systems-led attitudes, seeing content as an add-on to a tech system
• her experience with several CMSs, and her discovery of the same issues and related organizational cultural issues
• how content strategy is largely about people
• how traditional CMSs fail to consider the needs of authors, editors, and other back-end users
• how there’s no easy fix to this problem because it’s not just a technical issue
• how you can’t always blame the tech, that technical people with content skills can overcome many of the issues in current CMSs
• how the conversation around CMSs tends to focus on technical issues and how we as content people could spend more time at tech events and otherwise reaching out to our tech colleagues
• how our use of tools like Google Docs might help start conversations around workflow improvements in CMSs
• how closing the actual physical distance between content people and CMS administrators, actually working side-by-side, can improve our experience with CMSs
• how to move content concerns up sooner in the sequence of building a website
• the importance of including content strategy as early as possible in website and other projects
• her favorite quote from Carrie Hane and Mike Atherton’s Designing Connected Content: “You want to build your tool to fit the model, not model your content to fit the tool.”
• the importance of a content-first approach to content system design
• how starting with a focus on content models, users needs, and internal users and starting with a blank canvas can improve content systems
• Karen McGrane’s famous Content in a Zombie Apocalypse talk and how we need to stop thinking in terms of blobs and more about chunks of content
• how newer technical solutions are starting to embrace concepts like domain models and modular content
• the emergence of tools like GatherContent and Contentful and how they help the authoring process
• the enduring attitudinal issue of content being the poor relation of design and development
• the importance of continuing to try to work our way into the conversation with the tech folks so that more hands

Laura’s Bio

Laura is a content strategist at Contentious, the London-based agency she co-founded. She helps non-profits and campaigners with their content strategy, focusing on shifting to a more modular and user-centered approach (and eradicating double spaces along the way!).

She believes in putting content first and people and planet at the heart of everything. Laura speaks French and Spanish and has lived in Argentina, Colombia, France and Mexico.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 45 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Laura Robertson. Laura is a Content Strategist and Co-founder at Contentious, an Agency in London. And I met her at a conference a few weeks ago and we had… She did a lightning talk about CMSs and there are others, maybe a little bit of room for improvement there. And so that’s why I invited Laura on the show. So welcome Laura. You want to tell the folks a little bit more about yourself and what you’re up to?

Laura:
Thanks so much Larry. Yeah, it’s great to be here. Thank you very much for having me. I’m over here in London and I’ve been running Contentious for almost three years now and we do content strategy work with mostly nonprofits and campaigners. So looking at how those organizations can use content to achieve their goals, which are often about inspiring support and changing people’s minds. So yeah, it’s really interesting, really rewarding and very lucky to have some super clients doing really great work around the world. We met a confab which was that the first time I had been over for that conference and yeah, I was very pleased to be able to give my lightning talk.

Larry:
Yeah. And you’re in that talk was extremely well received. I saw a lot of heads nodding in the audience as you spoke about… And I don’t want to dwell on this too long because I want to be solutions oriented here, but there is a few problems with the current slate of CMSs that we have to choose from. And then just on the off chance that somebody listening to just know what CMS is, Content Management System. That’s the typical way that enterprises of all sizes manage the online content that they publish and share. Tell me a little bit about your day… Not to recap the whole talk, but just a couple of the top level points about where there’s room for improvement.

Laura:
Right. Okay. So I mean, I think the first thing to mention, I guess would be that in my lightning talk, I asked the confab audience of 750 ish content specialists, if anyone loved their Content Management System and only one person put their hand up. And I know-

Larry:
And that was Greg Dunlap.

Laura:
That Greg Dunlap. He has got interesting things to say about this topic also. I had asked the same question at the website meetup in London and nobody had raised their hand. And that just strikes me as a really sad state of affairs. I guess there are a few things about the sort of the traditional CMS that I think are not working as well as they can maybe. And that’s because these systems were designed for publishing to websites and the creating web pages which at the time was great. But it’s 2019 now. And that’s not really the brief. We’re having to develop content to go to lots of different platforms. We’ve got voice to think about now and social media and emails and Apps and all of these different ways of delivering content to our audiences.

Laura:
So it’s the wrong paradigm I guess, and a lot of them have also been developed technology first as opposed to content first. They’re trying to do quite different things. I guess they’ve got these two jobs. So they have to take care of all the technical stuff of running a website and manage the content. And the technical, I think often supersedes just because of the way Internet evolved. And then what that creates, I find these systems led attitudes where people see content as an add-on to a technical discipline as opposed to a strategic specialist activity, which is then not conducive to getting content, the investment and the love that it really needs to thrive.

Larry:
Exactly. And do you… So how many different CMSs have you tried, what’s your sample size?

Laura:
My number. So I have worked with… I mean probably five to 10, I guess different systems, and then also different versions of the same system. So a few and obviously there are lots of lots out there. But yeah, I’ve worked for some of the big ones. I’ve worked with some smaller, less known ones that had been developed by smaller organizations. So a bit of a range in there. And yeah, I think I find these common issues across the board and in the content culture of the organizations that are using these different systems.

Larry:
Yeah, that’s what’s in this… Well, this is now episode 45. The thing that comes up over and over again in all these interviews, I said, “Content strategy is mostly about people and they’re helping them do stuff and technologies, there’s the whole… Well, what’s interesting too is that the whole discipline of UX is grown up alongside of content strategy in the tour co-mingled in a lot of ways.” And you hope that at this point with all that emphasis on human centered design and user experience and customer experience and all these things that the technology would have caught up. But it seems like we’re mostly dealing with sort of evolution of existing pipe worms instead of… Do you think we need to just start from scratch?

Laura:
Yeah. Good question. But yeah, I think that’s such a good point that it is about the people. I suppose, yeah one of the things that you find with these traditional content management systems is that, things like the sort of the internal user experience, I guess, it’s not necessarily considered. So you’ve got these content people who are trying to do their best work, but the editorial interface, maybe not especially friendly, the whole experience is not a good one. And putting things like workflow and governance into practice using these systems is quite difficult. And yeah, I mean, I think there are some different approaches I guess in terms of what we do about this.

Laura:
And I think the thing to say is that, I mean, I do not have a simple answer. Yes there’s no easy fix because, it’s not just a technical issue. It’s also cultural and a lot of this stuff is quite ingrained. But I think starting from scratch is potentially a good option. You can customize, right? You can take an existing system and you can and there are lots of things that you can do to improve the system, to make it more fit for purpose, to make that all three new experience, a better one.

Laura:
There are all kinds of features that you can, that you can add. But I still don’t really know any content people who choose to work in the CMS when they’re creating and editing and managing the content,

Larry:
Right. That’s such a common thing to have your workflow. A lot of it’s happening in Google Docs or Word or with a mark down or something and then you dump it into the CMS where wouldn’t it be a lot better to have CMS next thing supported and a lot of them claim to do. For example, Greg, the guy we mentioned earlier, I ran into him right after you’re talking in the lobby and he said something like, “Don’t hate the CMS, hate your agency.” Because… And maybe that gets to like a people thing on the technology side that they’re not… You’re like workflow focus and ever or whatever…

Laura:
Yeah. I think it absolutely does in a way. I agree with Greg’s point actually. And it’s easy to blame the tech in some ways. And actually, I was thinking just earlier about the best CMS I’ve ever worked with and that was born out of a really close working relationship with the developer who sat down and also the person managing that project was a content person with technical skills as opposed to a technical person with some content skills. So yeah, I guess that sort of Greg’s point sort of chimes with that, which is actually, if you can create those collaborations and have the technical and the content collaborate on creating the system, then you end up with something that is definitely better.

Larry:
Right. And yeah, I’m wondering, so my… I took a break from the podcast over the Christmas holidays and one of the things I came up with in that kind of reflection period at my intent now is to democratize content strategy. Because it’s still a newish discipline. A lot of people don’t understand it. And part of my goal is to help people understand it. It sounds like a really important audience that maybe I should spend more time on is the technicians were building this CMSs.

Laura:
Yeah. And yeah, I mean I think that was one of the things that, I guess I wanted to say about this topic is that, at the moment the conversation around improving these systems or developing new ones, seems to be quite a lot about the technical efficiencies. That’s where the focus is. And I see lots of technical people talking to other technical people and technical people getting together for conferences and talking about this stuff. It’s so busy, it’s kind of its own the agenda.

Laura:
But I think that the thing that would be great to see a bit more of, and I’m pretty sure people like Greg actually, and his colleague, Jeff Eaton already doing a lot of this and is getting involved in that conversation and going along to those events, which is turning up to do for, or whatever it is. And Yeah, making sure that as content strategists we’re in the room and we are involved in thinking about how we improve these solutions that ultimately we all have to work with them. So yeah, I think that’s… I pretty on board with that and I like that.

Larry:
I think that’s starting to happen. What you just described, I had my last guest in episode 44. It was Mike Atherton also from London. He was over in Seattle. He was here for Confab actually. And it was great, but he said only 30 people showed up for his talk. And I’m like, “Really? You’re Mike Atherton,” It’s like the place should have been packed. So there’s still some evangelism to be done in that community. But I wonder, have you thought at all… Like I’ve spent a lot of time in the WordPress world and they’re all excited about Headless CMSs the REST API and React and other JavaScript frameworks and things like that. So they… And CSS and they just geek out about the layout things and things like that. And I’m like, have you thought about, or have you had any success in getting folks of that mindset excited about content?

Laura:
Good question. I think it’s a real challenge and I think that, I mean its something that I’m really keen to do more of, which is one of the reasons why it’s great to be talking to you today on the podcast. But yeah, to have some more of those conversations with those people. I think the challenge, particularly for me is that I would not describe myself as a technical content strategist. I’m much more on at the creative, strategic and just content strategy. And so yeah, there’s always like this some fear for me I suppose around going into that environment and trying to bridge the sort of always the language defied, right? Because we all have our… Whether we like it or not, we have our own kind of… I don’t want to say jogging but in this context as just being jogging used in obviously.

Laura:
We have our own language that you speak that makes sense to us and with anything like this where you’re trying to come together with some people you might think slightly differently to you or take a different approach. Yeah, that can be daunting. It can be a daunting thing. So yeah, creating some spaces where those conversations can happen and, people on both sides feel comfortable to show up and to bring their opinions, to work on something together, I think this would be great.

Larry:
Yeah. I’m also want to brainstorm with you . . . for example, like those guys, for all of their immersion in the technologies and things, they’re curious. Most of them are curious helpful people who genuinely want to help and they’re just stuck with the same. So I’m just trying to think of like, how can we have a conversation, for example, like conversations about workflow and the authoring experience. Because that’s such… You’re on the creative end and that’s such a… Do you find that you’re working like outside of the CMS to be creative and have you seen ways that, if only my CMS did this, I could just be in here all the time?

Laura:
Yeah, I mean, I definitely do. I mean I have this whole long list of attributes and things, it’s like asking myself, hold on a minute, why… What is it about Google Docs that makes it a good place to create content? And how can we translate some of that into whenever CMS you might be using, I think there is a lot of potential to… Yeah, absolutely. Kind of super guests so you can see that the CMS. I think that the challenges sometimes around the prioritization of that work. I know for a lot of the organizations that I work with, it just gets pushed down the pecking order because they’re very focused on delivering for their external uses, but building in some workflow capability to their CMS is something that they often struggle to create a budget line for say.

Laura:
So again we get into this like making the case and why that stuff, there are efficiencies to be made there as well, and why it’s important for your content editors to have good tools to work with and those kinds of things. So that’s one side of it. And then I think the other side is there’s often I think some distance not always, but distance between content people and technical people. I just by actual physical distance, and the example I gave earlier about my favorite situation, I sat next to the developer who was working on that… He was just in the seat next to me.

Laura:
And so we were able to just have these conversations like, “Oh, this has come up and how possible is this? And would you be willing to try this for me and in both directions as well.” So I think that is something that does really work because they are figuring out ways to close that gap, whether it be about actually getting yourself in the same spaces as the technical people or just having more frequent contact. Yeah I think that’s definitely a way forward.

Larry:
Right. Now that makes perfect. And that resonates with things that a few other guests on the show said about that if you just spend a little time with people it’s like, oh that’s a concern. I didn’t know that. And in effect… I think it’s common. I don’t know how you guys work at Contentious, but a lot of agencies are… Some of the more progressive like, and even back in the late ’90s, I was talking to a friend who worked at an old agency called CRO type.

Larry:
Even back then their teams consisted of technical people, content people, design people and client people all working, sitting at the same desk practically and doing that. And that was, and that seems to be the best way to do it, but I think some of this, like if you’re doing client work, there may just be… You’re not on the side all the time or if you’re in a big enterprise, the IT people are going to hold the building maybe. Is that what you see?

Laura:
Yeah. Right. I mean, there are a multitude of different scenarios and different setups. But, yeah, I think for me, from my experience, if that example of me sitting next to my technical counterpart, is the exception rather than the rule. And those things are often a little bit siloed for whatever reason. So yeah, I think I see that as being one of the issues. And then there’s that thing that I touched on earlier, because of the way the Internet developed and because lots of people still see it as being this is a technical thing that needs a technical solution.

Laura:
We need to get to technical people in to deliver that. And then what happens is you get into that classic, and yeah, we should probably have some content for this website. So they can also be the sort of chronological, like this sort of issue with around timings where the developers have been gone by the time you arrive and that house is already built and it turns out that none of the furniture in it.

Larry:
Got It. That’s the perfect analogy. And I want to go back to something you said a little bit ago about making the case for it. I had another guest on it, maybe a year ago. Jared Spool, the UX Guru, we were talking about that and he was talking about… I was asking him like, in terms of user experience in his experience in working with content management, similar kinds of systems, he said that 90% of the UX needs to happen at that back end level. Like the author experience, the administrative experience that the finance stock is like, you just adopt best practices, be as creative as you can and what’s appropriate to the content you’re delivering. But most of the real human work should be on the back end, but it seems like that’s not yet the case with a lot of CMSs.

Laura:
Right. Yeah, I mean that’s such an interesting, that’s a nice little quote there and I love it. I think that is still not happening as much as it should do. And I think you also see like in the same thing… This thing where a lot of content strategy needs to happen in the back end and early on in order to end up with a really effective website that’s going to deliver for your business and your users. And so there’s still this thing around like retrofitting either that stuff that Jared talks about the user experience of the back end or the sorts of the user experience in that content and that’s bad.

Larry:
There we go. You don’t want to go through, so I read… Because I almost feel like it’s like a downer. I was like talking about the run, but like patient of your talk at contract to me was, you used this great metaphor like you’ve got dump the CMS, it was like the relationship metaphors. So who’s your dream boat? What’s your dream content management solution look like?

Laura:
Yeah, it just been in so many painful relationships with CMSs. But yeah, I mean, I guess… I mean there’s a quote from Kerry Haigh and Mike Atherton’s Book designing connected to content which I really love, which I think sums it up quite nicely and it’s, you want to build your tool to fit the model not model your content to fit the tool. And so I think that whichever way you decide to go in terms of the technical implementation, so whichever CMS you choose, whether it’s one of the big off the shelf ones you decide to go with what or a smaller thing.

Laura:
Or cross CMS which is one that I’m quite excited about, or completely custom build your own thing or go for a decoupled system, which is what I was talking about. It comes up. I think the important thing is that you start with your content and, and you build the content first so that what you end up with is suitable for the stuff that you need it to ultimately communicate. And that you’re not shoehorning, trying to shoehorn your content into a system that isn’t designed for it.

Laura:
So I think, starting with a blank sheet is a great way to go and doing that in tandem with some, the really robust content strategy process where you do have that content model to work from and you do know what the aims of the site are and you know who your end users are, you know who your internal users are, you know what their needs are because you’ve spoken to them. And then you’re in a situation where, especially just you have to key in this scenario, I think you’ve probably got plenty of budget to create my dream boat CMS. Then I guess that would be how I would approach it.

Laura:
So it would be starting with a blank canvas where I can say, okay, this is what I know about my content because I’ve done the work. This is what I know about my audience because I’ve done the work. This is what I know about my internal users and what their needs are because I don’t work. And then bringing all those together and specking it a technical solution, there’s fixed all of those things. As opposed to building something that may or may not. Yeah. It’s like, yeah. How’d you do that?

Larry:
Yeah. I’m getting more hopeful now because a lot of this stuff you just talked about are things that we’ve all felt it and this really reacted against for a long time. But now we have concrete explanations. For example, a lot of the talk about content first has been at the page level and you need to abandon wireframes to get real content, and then built back from that. But in the designing connected content book, their domain modeling there, it’s at a bigger level. It’s like the whole domain of content that you’re working with and overlaying that on the solution to have that match up with the content management solution.

Larry:
You come up with that, I don’t know, that seems like maybe a good leverage point with these developers say, “Hey, here’s the domain we’re operating in and here’s,” and you can almost make that generic. Because there’s this sort of, just that idea of domains and entities and relationships between them that’s very much like it comes out of it from there. They’re both information architects and it comes out of that world, which is just familiar to a lot of people in the tech world. So maybe there’s some hope.

Laura:
Absolutely. I mean, I think that definitely is and yeah, there are people out there in an amazing community, like Kerry and Mike who are writing books like that. And sharing all this fantastic knowledge and this great thinking. So yeah, and I mean… I always remember Kerry Haigh’s content in a Zombie Apocalypse talk from about five years ago where, she was like, “We need to start thinking about the content in terms of blobs and start thinking about chunks.” And I feel like progress is being made on that front just in terms of… We’re learning, right? I mean we’re learning and we’re also educating other people and we’re out there advocating for this stuff.

Laura:
And I think that they’re all kind of things that are happening. And I guess you can see it in some of the newer technical solutions that are being developed the kind of that approach. Working from a domain model or in thinking about your content in a more modular way. Those things, I see them starting to really creep in now. You’ve got tools that can gather content and content fall that are really prioritizing the editor experience and creating user friendly interfaces for people to work in. And you’ve got CMSs being developed that are really building themselves as being content first. So yeah, I’m definitely hopeful.

Laura:
I think the thing that I… For me, it’s one of the really big challenges is that there’s all this great progress being made and there’s more progress that can be made on the sort of… On the technical front, on a practical level, which is great because you do when people pick things up and we learn as we do things but there’s still this attitudinal issue where why is content still so often in organizations considered the poor relation of design and development maybe. And why do I still people calling me saying, “I hear you are good with words. I’m not your website in four weeks. Can you write all the content for it for me?” And you just go, I mean, “Yes, I can help you with that” Why didn’t you call me 6 months ago.

Larry:
Exactly.

Laura:
I think it’s a bit of a chicken, and an egg thing because I think that the progress is being made, the stuff that we are seeing happening with some of these new systems that are being developed with these folks that have been published on the topic, that stuff will have a positive influence on the cultural stuff. So, but yeah, I mean, I guess for my liking, that’s happening a bit slowly. And yeah, that’s the thing that’s hard to change because culture is a tricky one.

Larry:
Okay. That’s the urge, people issues are always the challenging stuff. We’re coming upon time, Laura, I want to… I always like to give my guests one last opportunity. Is there anything last, anything that we haven’t talked about or anything that’s just on your mind about content strategy these days, if you’d like to share with my folks?

Laura:
So I guess the thing that’s on my mind is that… I mean I guess related to this and this, the thing that I said earlier about really making sure that we as content strategists are advocating for the user experience of creators and editors and managers whenever we can. And so, yeah, just continuing to do that, to do that work, and also getting more involved in the conversation with, with technical people. So that we hopefully in the future I can ask a question that I asked at confab to an audience of content experts and perhaps see a few more hands going in the air. That’s my wish. But I think there’s definitely hope.

Larry:
Okay. Yeah. Where is our lovable CMS? I hope it’s out there somewhere. Well, thanks so much, Laura. This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you coming on.

Laura:
Thanks so much for having me. It’s been really great speaking to you again.