Marcelo Lewin: Content Modeling for Headless CMS – Episode 95

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Marcelo Lewin focuses on content modeling, a long-standing practice that is growing in importance as the need for intelligent content emerges.

Content modeling helps you manage your content separately from its presentation in any one medium. This skill is crucial in the new world of omnichannel content delivery, where your content is as likely to show up in a voice app or chatbot as in a mobile app or website.

Marcelo is a natural educator and evangelist who can help anyone – content creators, web developers, or business executives – appreciate the benefits of understanding your content’s purpose independent of its presentation in any one communication channel.

We talked about:

• his work at HeadlessCreator.com, which offers free courses for content modelers
• his take on the current state of the CMS market
• his perspective on the benefits of a headless CMS
• his theory about why organizations are slow to adopt headless solutions
• the main reason to go headless: the ability to build intelligent content
• his definition and description of content modeling
• the collaborative nature of any content modeling project – the need to involve subject matter experts, authors, developers, and others
• the importance of always staying focused on the intent and purpose of the content you are working with, not its presentation in a specific context
• the ongoing need to educate and evangelize this new way of handling content
• his perception that executives get the benefits of decoupled content systems more readily than authors and developers
• the importance of adopting good content modeling practice to future-proof your content investment

Marcelo’s bio

Marcelo is passionate about Content Modeling, Content Architecture, Content Strategy and Headless CMS technologies. He is the founder of HeadlessCreator.com, where you can enroll in free online courses about content modeling, headless CMS authoring, administration and development. He is also a Senior Content Solutions Architect for ServiceTitan. To learn more, visit HeadlessCreator.com.

Follow Marcelo online:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Facebook

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 95. Marcelo Lewin can help you navigate the new world of content management. In the modern omnichannel world, it’s important to store and manage your content in a way that lets you can present it in any number of channels: on a website, in a mobile app, or via a voice assistant. A headless CMS is the technology that makes this new way of managing content possible. Content modeling is the practice that ensures that your content’s purpose is clear wherever it appears.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 95 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Marcelo Lewin. Marcelo is the founder of Headless Creator. Marcelo, welcome first of all, and tell the folks a little bit more about Headless Creator and what you do there.

Marcelo:
Hi Larry. Thank you for inviting me. I’m very happy and honored to be on your podcast. 95 episodes. Wow. That’s a lot of episodes. I give you major kudos for total consistency on continuing a podcast. That’s a lot of shows you put on there, so awesome.

Larry:
Thanks.

Marcelo:
But thanks for inviting me. I appreciate it. Like you said, I’m the founder of HeadlessCreator.com. It’s a website that offers free courses supported by the community. Meaning that I have corporate support from the headless CMS companies to keep the website pretty much free. And people can attend courses on a variety of topics, all on headless CMSs content modeling, which is my passion. I also work as a senior content solutions architect for a major SAS company doing content modeling on a daily basis on a variety of projects. I really love content modeling. So that’s kind of like where I am today and there’s other stuff, but that’s where I’m at today.

Larry:
You are a busy guy. Thanks for taking the time. I’d love to start by talking about, just a little bit about the CMS environment and in particular headless CMS’s, because that’s how you identify and that’s sort of your milieu. Can you talk a little bit about how you see the landscape of content management systems these days?

Marcelo:
Well, I don’t know what your listener base is, it seems like it’s a lot on the content strategy side, but developers, anybody really getting into content today and specifically into content management systems, headless is the way to go. headless is pretty much the future. Once you truly understand you headless, it makes total sense why it’s becoming so popular and why the old traditional monolithic CMS is going away slowly, they still have a lot of people on regular CMS’s, old school CMS’s, whatever you want to call them. And why headless is really becoming the wave of the future. We no longer have web as a delivery channel, just web only just the browser, right? It used to be where everybody went to the browser and you research on it.

Marcelo:
But now everybody uses this at a minimum. We have other kinds of devices, let’s say an Alexa or anything else, right? Like a Google device. I forgot what they call that, but IoT devices, right? So there’s a variety of ways to get to content and with a headless CMS, because it completely decouples that delivery channel, which traditionally your monolithic CMS would come with the backend and the front end all tied together, forcing you to a particular way of doing things, it completely decouples that. And it allows you to focus on your content on the backend and create a content model that makes sense for your domain, for your business. But then on the front end, you can deliver that same content to multiple places. The other thing that’s really important with headless is the support for single source of truth. Right now, people well not right now, but people in traditional CMS’s, you end up duplicating content.

Marcelo:
And that may not seem like a big deal, but if you have, let’s say, 1,000 places where you have an address and now you have to update that address. Now you’ve got to have to go to 1,000 places. Where with a headless CMS, because it supports a single source of truth, and there is techniques to… Ways of supporting the single source of truth. But you go to one place update that address or that author name or whatever you’re updating and then it just automatically goes to all these places that you’re using that information. That’s why headless is really becoming the way forward.

Larry:
Yeah, I completely agree with that. That that’s the obvious way forward to deal with this omni-channel world that were in. But it’s… I think a lot of people in the content strategy world are frustrated with the slow adoption of it, because I think that has to do with a few things like the familiarity of the old school CMS’s and they are pretty robust well-developed systems at this point. But a lot of those things you’re talking about the ability to single source, all the crucial information that your customers need, and they don’t care whether they’re looking at a website or looking on a device or talking to a device or, who knows, gesturing at something, that could be different ways of getting that.

Larry:
But I guess, regardless of whether you’re in a CMS, a headless CMS, or a conventional monolithic CMS, you need to have a feel for how things manifest in there. And that’s where modeling comes in, right? No matter how you’re doing it, whether you’re in a conventional CMS or headless. Tell me a little bit about how you would define for somebody who’s new to the practice, what content modeling is.

Marcelo:
Yeah, definitely. What I want… I’ll touch up on that question real quick, but I want to go back to your comment, which I agree with the slow adoption of headless CMS. And I want to address that. Why that, I believe is happening. As great as headless CMS’s are, there are two things that radically need to change in people’s mind when they’re involved in a headless CMS project. The first part is the complete separation of design with the content. Most people go into creating content models, and we’re going to touch what a content model is, but they go into there by saying, look, here’s a webpage. I want this content model to reflect this webpage. Where what you need to do is not talk about what it looks like, but the intent of the content, what is the intent of this content?

Marcelo:
What are you trying to do with this? And you build language elements based on that intent, that then you create as objects in your headless CMS that represents the intent of the content, not how it looks. Because, for example, the intent of an author would be to give information about the author, right? But on the webpage, you’re going to have an image and you’re going to have the author’s name, and you’re going to have perhaps a description, but on a mobile device, you may have all of that and some links. And on an IoT device, which doesn’t display the image, you may have everything except the image, right? So what you need to do is focus on, okay, what is the intent of this author content and what is it that we have to hold and then how it’s displayed and where we deliver it is completely separate.

Marcelo:
So that’s the first reason I think the adoption is slower because people are used to just designing their CMS around how it looks on the web. And you have to move away from that. The second reason, I think, is because traditional CMS’s come with templates, but they’re forcing you in those templates. headless CMS’s don’t come with any front end. So that means that you could do whatever you want, you can create your content model, hold all the information, but to deliver it you’re always going to have to coat something, there aren’t templates for you. Now that are starting scripts you can do, but in general you don’t have templates. And that turns off some people because they go, well, I just need a template I don’t care what it looks like, because I’m okay with this template. So with a headless CMS, you’re not going to have that.

Marcelo:
So I think the fact that you have to involve developers on your front end delivery channel, and the fact that you’ve got to think differently about your content and separate that design and how it looks from the intent of what you’re trying to portray with that content is what is making it probably go a little bit slower, but in the end, once people get it it’s going to take off and this is going to take over.

Marcelo:
And I think there’s going to come a time where we’re going to have these templates based on the language that you want. That you’ll be able to add and manipulate to a headless CMS. But I think at the end of the day, users that are involved in headless CMS projects need to understand that your mindset is going to have to change from how your content looks to what is the essence of that content and what is the intent and purpose of that content. And then that’s what’s stored in your headless CMS. So anyway, I just wanted to address because I think that’s what it… I don’t know if you have any opinions on that too.

Larry:
Actually one thing that has helped me wrap my head around headless over the last, I don’t know, four or five years is that notion of that it all happens in one place, in a monolithic CMS, and you’re kind of decoupling each part of it from that monolith is how I’ve been able to understand it. So you have that, what you’re talking about, the templates those are authoring templates, how the information gets into that CMS. And then you used to think about, great it’s in there you just hit publish and a webpage shows up. Nowadays it’s like, no, it’s in there and you can do a webpage if you want, if you have a web team developing web templates, or it can go to the Alexa team, or it can go to wherever. So having those three kinds of things like the authoring, the input experience, the storage and management experience and then the display experience kind of be separated out. That’s how I separate it out in my mind.

Marcelo:
Yep. Makes total sense. Yeah definitely.

Larry:
And to do that requires, well I guess there’s always been content models, like you were alluding to earlier, the CMS’s come out of the box, you inherit a content model when you buy a CMS, they have a way of doing things and you can modify that, right? Yeah and they kind of force you into it. So talk a little bit about… And this is in many ways potentially very liberating for content people. I mean it certainly is very liberating to separate the content from its presentation and even a little bit from its authoring. There’s a lot you can do in the middle, now. And that’s where modeling comes in, I think. How was this going to look in the system. Now tell me a little bit about how you… How do you create those models? And what do they look like?

Marcelo:
Yeah, definitely. So I think the first thing that users need to understand is, A content model is created so you can build intelligent content. What is intelligent content? It’s content that is self-describing, that a machine can look at and understand what it is. In a traditional CMS you have a blob basically, a rich text field maybe some extra fields, but at the end of the day, there is no relationship between anything. So a blog article is just a blog article. You don’t know really what the title is, you don’t know who the authors are, there’s no direct connection and relationship between all that. And that’s just on a blog article, but you can get really sophisticated and more complicated with products and a variety of other things. So for example, a knowledge base that has maybe FAQ’s. Well, what is the relationship between the FAQ and the question in the answer? And do you need to reuse that question and answer any other types of documents?

Marcelo:
So a content model is a diagram that really puts together a bunch of content types. And content types could represent a full document or could represent a partial, a part of a document. So let’s take, for example, an FAQ, let’s say you have a knowledge base. And you have FAQ’s on a variety of different FAQs, which consists of a variety of questions and answers. Well, the document is the FAQ, right? So you create an FAQ document, but that document may be made up of two content types, the FAQ, which holds all the questions, any concept called questions, which holds questions and answers, right? And then maybe a relationship between the FAQ content type, and the questions content type, which is a one to many, meaning one FAQ could have many questions.

Marcelo:
Why would you separate it like that? Well, now, you know that this document, the FAQ, isn’t just an HTML document If we put it in terms of web. But the essence is it’s a grouping of a bunch of questions and they address a particular subject area, right? So for example, you may have a lot of questions that says, how do I add users? Or how do I manage users in my system, as an example. That’s an FAQ. And then maybe 20 questions related to that with answers. But now you can take those answers, those questions that are separated, and there’s a relationship and use them in let’s say your release notes, or you can use them in another part of the website because it supports single source of truth. And now it’s its own little thing that you can build a relationship to.

Marcelo:
So content modeling is really taking an unstructured document, analyzing it, breaking it apart into objects called content types, building relationships, connecting those content types together and what are the relationships of those? And then putting it back together into a full document. The nice thing is now you can use all those parts, all those objects that are connected via relationships, you can use them anywhere you want.

Marcelo:
So if you create, if you have a product that has, that belongs to a company, well the product is an object, the company is another object. You put them together and that is your product you display, but you can also use that company somewhere else for example. Let’s say that company also writes blog articles for you. Not only do they sell products, but they also write blog articles. Well, now you can create a relationship between a article content type and the company. And say that the article has a company, but a product also has a company. You can see how you can build all these relationships. And now you update the company content type entry, and it updates both in product and in article, single sources of truth.

Larry:
Right, and that benefit, you kind of see that in the old monolith… I mean that actually manifests a fair amount in old monolithic content management systems, but there’s something uniquely elegant about its expression in headless CMS. And I think that kind of gets to how people work together. I think you used to have publishing teams essentially, working in a CMS and kind of going through that whole flow you just described. And I guess this is where the necessity of modeling comes in is that you have to do a little bit of extra work to get these benefits you just described. And so to do that work, you need to know the end use of it. You need to know how the content creators work, you need to know how you’re going to manage it and store it. So this sounds like it’s maybe a little more collaborative than old-school content management.

Marcelo:
It is very collaborative. When you go through a content modeling session, you need to bring in a variety of stakeholders. Obviously you need the architect that understands how to content model, but you need a subject or domain expert, right? An SME. To be there to understand, okay, what are we going to model here? So for example, I have a client where we’re modeling logistics. And they literally move ships from route to route to route. They call them legs. A route can have many legs, and each leg will be traveled via ship in between a variety of ports. So all of this, you need some sort of expert, right? Because I know how to create content models, that then they can use all that information to present on the web or on mobile device, but I don’t understand how that works. So we bring in, for example in this case, somebody that understands logistics really well, understands the business really well.

Marcelo:
You want to bring in an author because content models will affect how their offering experience works, right? And then you also have to bring in developers because developers need to then at the end of the day go and query all this information and present it in a delivery channel. And the balance is striking the right balance, where the author is happy and the developer’s happy. Because sometimes things you put you give to the author goes counter what the developer needs, and vice versa. So it’s striking that balance between do we have a model here that works for the developer to get all the information they need to get to present it in all of the delivery channels, but also, do we have a content model that gives the author a good authoring experience that they don’t have to do 100 clicks?

Marcelo:
They don’t have to go and create this here, and create it there and create it there. Now I have to attach . . . do we have that? So it’s always striking that balance to keep everybody as happy as possible. But at the end of the day, what you need to focus when you’re content modeling and drive everybody back to, is what is the purpose of this content? What is the intent?

Marcelo:
And I’ll give you an example where I had a person, we did a content model and they had the ability to create tables, but they wanted to make sure that they weren’t doing whatever they wanted to, and he’s used to changing colors. And he came to me and goes, well can I change a color on this? And I was like, no, we’re not… That’s the content model doesn’t track changing of colors, because changing of colors is a design thing. Has nothing to do with… And he goes, but I want things in red. I’m like, okay, I understand you want things in red, but why do you want things in red? What does that really mean? What is the purpose of red? He goes, what do you mean? I go, why are we changing things red? If everything’s black and this one word is red, why? Oh, because it’s important. I go, okay. So the intent of a red word is importance.

Marcelo:
So what we’re going to do is create a content model that supports the communication element, important. So when you create your text and you want something to be important, you will mark it as important. Now, the fact that important on the web browser is red has nothing to do with you as a content author. That’s decided by how we’re going to display it. But on the mobile device, that important word could be blue and in an IoT device, because it’s spoken, that important word maybe will be emphasized more by the IoT device as opposed to showing in red.

Marcelo:
So they quickly understood that, okay, I don’t really need the flexibility to make this red or make this big, or make it small, what I need to understand is why are we making it red? Why are we making it bold, or why are we making it big. Because that’s the intent, then you build in your content model objects that represent intent. Your authors will always author information in the CMS with intent, not with design, and then that content model and the content in it will scale forever through your 100 redesigns. Because today you may want to represent the word in red, that’s important, but tomorrow we all know marketing changes constantly, it’ll be blue, underlined with a squiggly pink line or whatever, right? As a silly example. But do we now support that in the CMS? No, we just say, Hey, this is important. This word is important. Mark it as important. The front end decides how to display that.

Larry:
The way you just described that. I think one of the generic benefits of modeling your content that comes up all the time is future-proofing it. You never know how you emphasize things in a new platform or a different context. So that seems really important. I also love, as an old time a content person who for many years just filled in boxes that developers had created, I have got to say that I love that it’s more collaborative these days. But also have you worked a lot with the authors? Because that’s a way different authoring experience from the old, like WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get. Like in WordPress is a classic example that anybody can crank that up in five minutes and get started. And part of the appeal of that for an individual author and maybe a small-scale business is, Wow, I can see what I’ve done immediately. And they’re just looking at a website. Have you had experience kind of convincing authors to think about that process differently?

Marcelo:
Every single day. I mean I’m not kidding you. Every day at the end of the day, they go, well, where do I put my HTML? There is no HTML here, you’re putting content. Or where do I put the table with the border? I go, there is no table with a border. There is a table that has headers and it has rows and columns. And you build the relationship. The front end decides. So honestly, as a content modeling architect, part of your job is not just to create the content model, but is to educate and evangelize the new way of doing. Instead of you have to tell people, look, I understand, you’re always thinking in terms of design and how it looks, but that’s going to change and it’ll change not only tomorrow for your same device, but it will change for all the delivery channels.

Marcelo:
So for example, you may have content that not only is displayed on the website and our IoT device, but in a chat bot, right? So remember, we go back to the example of FAQ, an FAQ has many questions. But now because we have questions as a separate object, that maybe is tagged with some metadata, we can now use those questions to answer… Those questions have answers, right? We can now use those questions, not only in FAQ’s, but to drive a conversation inside a chat bot, because it has metadata with it, right? So that’s the key. And as a content a modeler, you have to not only guide people through creating a scalable content model, but also teach them a lot about new ways of thinking, of how do you manage content, especially authors.

Marcelo:
And I probably say three to four times a day, I’ll say, hey we’re not talking about design remember, we’re talking about the intent of the content. And they always go, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re right. You’re right. But they understand it, but it’s the instinct. But, but I want red, I want border, I want blue, you know?

Marcelo:
So yes a lot of this right now is a lot of education we have to do. And a lot of evangelizing because some of them will say this is too complicated. This doesn’t make sense. We’ve done it for 10 years this way. Why can’t we just do it this way? And a lot of them want to create, and I’ve seen where people use a headless CMS, oh, we’re on a headless CMS! Then you look at their content model and basically it’s a regular CMS. Because they just have a rich text field where they get to do whatever they want.

Larry:
And that gets into… That education and evangelism you talked mostly about authors there because that’s the question I asked, but there’s a whole lot. There’s both the out to the side, out to the designers and developers, they’re working in a different way as well. But one I’m really curious about is going up, like up to the decision makers about this is a new way of thinking about it. In fact, I think one of the obstacles I see to headless adoption is that you don’t just buy a CMS and then hire some content creators and maybe an administrator to run the system. You have to really fundamentally rethink, because you have this decoupled or separate CMS, and then you have to build the front end. So you have to hire a bunch of JavaScript or React or front end talent, and then reeducate your folks. Have you had any experience that convincing the check writers and decision makers about this stuff?

Marcelo:
I think for the check writers and decision-makers, it makes a bit more sense because you’re able to separate the concerns and say, Look, we’re going to invest in the infrastructure and the base of the pyramid here, but all the other stuff we can always upgrade and we won’t have to redo this infrastructure. So I think from their perspective, it makes a lot of sense.

Marcelo:
I think they get onboard a bit quicker than maybe authors, just because they’re used to the traditional CMS, but at the end of the day, right now where we’re at with headless CMS is, especially in the United States. Europe is a bit more ahead of the curve on that. Obviously a lot of the headless CMS companies are from Europe, but most of my customers that I help on content modeling, they’re in Europe, they’re in Denmark, Germany, England. They’re all there basically. I only have one client in the United States, to be honest with you. I mean, there’s many more, but I’m just saying from my client base. But I think they do get it already. I don’t think it requires that much convincing for them. I think it’s more on probably the developer side and the authoring side.

Larry:
Now I’m really curious about the difference between Europe and America in headless adoption. What do you think is going on there?

Marcelo:
Well I think a lot of the companies are in Europe that make the headless CMS’s, right? So I really don’t know why Europe is adopting it faster. All I know based on just my experience is that definitely I’m getting a lot more customers from Europe than I am from the United States. It could be that in the U.S. the traditional CMS’s are still pretty strong out in the industry. But yeah, that’s my experience right now.

Larry:
Yeah, no that’s it. Cause I’m just thinking, especially here on the West coast of the U.S. that’s supposedly the cool leading-edge tech stuff, and yet we’re behind on that. Anyhow, that’ll be another episode down the road someplace.

Larry:
Marcelo, I noticed we’re coming up close to time already, but I always like to give my guests an opportunity. . . Is there anything last, anything that’s come up in this conversation that you want to follow up on or anything that’s just on your mind about content modeling or headless CMSs and the web in general?

Marcelo:
Yeah, I think nothing extra, but just to reiterate that, I think people need to understand, to truly make content scalable and easier to maintain in your enterprise, you need to think of when you’re creating content models and when you’re creating your project, think of the intent of the content, the purpose of it, why it exists. And don’t only think of what it looks like today in the web, but are you going to have other delivery channels in the future that you don’t even know? For example, are you going to go virtual reality? Do you need to present content there? Is there going to be anything else in the future that we don’t even know exist, where we’re going to maybe need to bring in content. Do we need to integrate part of this content into other systems? Do other systems require this information?

Marcelo:
Because when you’re building your content model, you want to take all of that into account, not just the fact that I need a landing page today. But what’s in this landing page, what is the intent of all this information? And, yes, it is a little bit more work than just saying, hey let’s just add three rich text fields and let me do what I want. Of course, that’s five minutes from the developer perspective is not going to be a big deal, but then you’re going to end up with a mess and you’re not going to end up with intelligent content. At the end of the day, you want to have intelligent structure content that you can build relationships with in between them and reuse across your organization. That’s the key. If you can get into that mindset, everything just falls into place from there.

Larry:
That’s a great articulation of the benefits of this, because it does seem like, why would you create the same content over and over again and build it separately for different systems. So yeah, that was a great summary of that. Well, thanks so much Marcelo. Oh, one last thing. What’s the best way for people to stay in touch with you and Headless Creator?

Marcelo:
Oh yeah. Sure, thanks. Just visit HeadlessCreator.com, that’s my site. Feel free to register for the site. It’s free, 100% free, and I also have a Slack channel, but feel free, just go to HeadlessCreator.com, register there and you can follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, it’s all HeadlessCreator. But HeadlessCreator.com is the best place to go.

Larry:
Great. Well Thanks so much, Marcelo, I really enjoyed the conversation.

Marcelo:
Thanks, Larry. Me too. I really appreciate it. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you so much.