Margot Bloomstein: Trustworthy – Episode 103

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After showing up in the content strategy world and generously sharing her expertise for more than 20 years, Margot Bloomstein has earned the trust of this community.

Margot’s new book, Trustworthy, shows you how to earn the trust of your customers and users.

As reliance on experts fades and is replaced with crowd-sourced trust, the work of content strategists must evolve to account for these new dynamics.

We talked about:

• the cynical era we live in and its implications for business
• our turn from trusted sources to distributed, democratized sources of expertise
• the corrosive effects of “marinating in a culture of gaslighting”
• how to help people learn to trust themselves again and to once again value good sources of information
• the three hallmarks of her approach to developing trustworthiness:
  • voice – engaging users with content that sounds and feels familiar
  • volume – understanding how much content is enough
  • vulnerability – how to own up to stumbles and big mistakes and how to communicate in ways that build rapport
• examples of how “all businesses, regardless of their size or industry or budget, have the opportunity to engage in the work of rebuilding trust and gaining consumer confidence”
• the importance of undergirding trust-building work with a message architecture
• the shift over the past 20+ years in the understanding for the role of content on the web, from an experience that content creators thought they could control to the modern understanding that users bring a lot to content interactions
• her observation that content strategists are more empowered than we might think
• how content strategists can apply her insights to cultivate more trust in our work

Margot’s bio

Margot Bloomstein is one of the most prominent voices in the content strategy industry. She is the author of Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap and Content Strategy at Work: Real-World Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project and the principal of Appropriate, Inc., a brand and content strategy consultancy based in Boston. As a speaker and strategic adviser, she has worked with marketing teams in a range of organizations over the past two decades. The creator of BrandSort, she developed the popular message architecture-driven approach to content strategy. Margot teaches in the content strategy graduate program at FH Joanneum University in Graz, Austria, and lectures around the world about brand-driven content strategy and designing for trust.

Connect with Margot online

• Appropriate, Inc.
• Twitter

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 103. Nowadays, trust is hard to come by. With authoritative figures like Walter Cronkite fading into ancient history, experts are dismissed, and people are reluctant to accept information from unknown sources. These dynamics create a number of challenges for content strategists. Margot Bloomstein’s new book, Trustworthy, shows how to create strategies that meet users on this challenging new terrain, how to get their attention, and how to earn their trust.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hey everyone, welcome to episode number 103 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really delighted today to have with us Margot Bloomstein. Margot is the principal at Appropriate Inc, a consulting agency, but you probably know her, if you’ve ever been to any content strategy conference or your content design, any design conference, you’ve probably seen her on the slate. She teaches workshops all the time, you might’ve seen her in one of those. But anyhow, welcome Margot, tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.

Margot:
Thanks so much, I am thrilled to be here, thrilled to be talking with you, because I know we’ve crossed paths at different conferences and different meetups, and also so excited to finally be meeting with you here. I’ve been busy, as everybody has been, with work, life, re-entry to both of those things and all, and figuring out what’s next post-Trustworthy, that’s been my big focus over the past few years.

Larry:
Nice. And that’s not the only reason I wanted to have you on, but your new book is amazing. And so I want to focus the conversation today on Trustworthy, and trustworthiness, and trust, and all the things that go around that. We live in a little bit of a trust-challenged era. Is that what led to the book? Tell me the origin story.

Margot:
Yeah, that’s a fair description. I think “trust-challenged” is maybe a nice way of saying increasingly cynical era, and we’ve seen how that affects today every industry, certainly every industry or business that engages in marketing, or wants to establish expertise and authority and engage with an audience, needs to contend with the issue that that audience has grown increasingly cynical. And that was a problem that I was noticing at first in the political arena over the past several years, past few election cycles, certainly on the national level in the US, and I wondered if the problems that I was seeing were going to affect the types of organizations with whom I work, which are largely not in the political arena, but our retailers and in higher ed and financial services and healthcare and all.

Margot:
And I wondered if the problems that I was seeing around people pushing back on expertise, saying if it feels right in my gut, it must be true, if it feels right, it probably is right, and walling themselves off to new information, I wondered if that was going to affect the organizations with whom I partner, and it turns out it does. So I think this is the central issue, this is probably the biggest animating issue driving so much of our work now as marketers and content strategists, content designers, anybody that works in graphic design, communication design, user experience design, if we don’t contend with that issue of why and how our audiences are walling themselves off to new information, it’s a waste of our time and effort and clients’ budgets to continue to create and publish that new information.

Larry:
No, I was going to mention this later in the conversation but I’m going to bring it up now, because I think it’s in the conclusion of the book, you talk about, we used to have Walter Cronkite, now we have each other. We crowdsource our authority, along with that trust, I guess. And to what you were just saying, that’s what we’re getting at, is that we’ve gone from having trusted figures to needing to have trusted processes or stuff in place. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Margot:
Yeah, and I think that’s a really good way to look at it, that we used to have Walter Cronkite, and now we have each other. I think that’s a good way of capturing, I hate to say the rise of social media because it sounds so fuddy-duddy and antiquated, but when we used to turn to outside sources for expertise, sometimes, recently, over the past 10 years, we’ve gotten increasingly smacked down by those sources of expertise because they’ve been inconsistent, they’ve shifted gears wildly, we don’t know always who to trust anymore. And then people looked instead to more distributed democratized sources of expertise through social media, through ratings and reviews, maybe on Yelp, and Amazon and whatnot, hotels.com, only to realize that some of those reviews were being gamed by the very organizations reviewing them, or being reviewed. And then that’s when people started to pull back more to say, well you can’t trust anybody, the stuff that I think that my friends are just sharing in my newsfeed, no, an algorithm is driving that. If I can’t trust anybody, if everybody lies to you, you better just pull in.

Margot:
But the problem with that, the problem when people say, well, I’m just going to go with my gut, is that when we’ve been marinating in a culture of gaslighting from politicians, and media, and media that enables those politicians, when we’ve been immersed in that culture telling us, don’t believe anybody but me, don’t trust the evidence of your own senses, turns out we’ve lost a lot of our gut instincts and our ability to evaluate information. And I think that there’s a real opportunity now for businesses to jump back into that fray and say, well if our audiences have lost confidence, are losing ability to make good decisions, how do we help re-nurture, regrow that confidence? How do we earn back their trust by encouraging them to trust themselves again, and teach people how to self-educate, how to evaluate information, how to seek out and become loyal again to good sources of information that aren’t telling them things to be taken as gospel, but rather giving them information so that they can make better choices and continue to gather information so that they can make good decisions and feel good about the decisions they make.

Larry:
The way you’re talking about this, I realize that the nice little shift you made there from, it was externally facing, focused on the customers and their issues with trust, and then how can companies win it back? That gets at a couple things, one, the conversational nature of modern media. I think there’s some, and I’d love if we could get to that at some point, but it also gets to like, okay, you’re a business. How do you do this? And your book does a beautiful job of setting that out. You have three main subjects, the voice, volume, and vulnerability is the three main organizing schemes. Can you talk a little bit about each of those and how, or maybe in order, first voice, that’s something that’s probably a good starting point with content strategists too because everybody has the content voice and tone guide.

Margot:
Right, right, that’s true. So that’s probably a familiar area to many people that work in this space. We know a lot about the importance of helping an organization, helping a brand develop a distinct and consistent voice. And what I look at within that framework guiding the book, of voice, volume, and vulnerability, I look at how organizations that are successful in building trust invest in creating a consistent and familiar voice, how they use jargon strategically, how they ensure that their audiences feel comfortable with them through the use of jargon, how they’re using it to meet people where they are and bring them to where they need to be, maybe in terms of growing their own level of knowledge and technical expertise. And I dig into examples from MailChimp and from Banana Republic, the early days of Banana Republic, and Crutchfield Electronics, there are a wealth of good examples out there that I’ve tried to surface here.

Margot:
And the second section on volume, I’m digging into that question that I think plagues many of us of, how much is enough? How much do you need to say, how much do you need to write, how long should a blog post be, and how frequently should you post, but also how many images should be in a photo gallery, and how detailed should your images and diagrams be to help people feel confident that they have enough information. And I look at how we can test that, and how organizations do test that, in the context of content audits and user research, and by gathering examples from organizations like gov.uk, how they’ve gone through a content audit process and developed new thinking and new practices around determining the right volume of content that many of us, I think, are pretty well acquainted with, as well as organizations that are on the other end of the spectrum, that publish a lot across a lot of different platforms, maybe from many different authors within a distributed publishing culture.

Margot:
So organizations like America’s Test Kitchen, Crutchfield Electronics that I mentioned before, and others that are trying to determine how much does their audience need to renew their trust in their own knowledge, and then engage in a more trusting way with the organization that is acting as the publisher. And we see how, in response to that question of how do we quantify this, how do we show the value of our work, we see how we can measure the impact of enough content in the rate of product returns. And the amount of time people spend on site, maybe waffling back and forth over a purchase in their card, a potential purchase, and how much time people spend with customer service, so all other areas that we can easily quantify.

Margot:
In the third section of the boo, I look at how vulnerability plays into our ability to develop trust, develop rapport with an audience. And I look at that through a few different lenses. One, the kind of vulnerability that brands experience when maybe they’ve messed up and they need to apologize. Maybe the CEO has done something incredibly boneheaded, or they’ve realized that they need to stumble back with their collective tails between their legs from manufacturing problems, or being caught doing something really, really wrong in maybe their supply chain, what that looks like, the nature of apology, but also how content plays into that as far as the amount of content we need to offer our audiences, the level of detail and information, and then how content helps drive accountability.

Margot:
I also look at vulnerability from the angle of how we build rapport through developing empathy and compassion with our audiences, how we share, how we make our values visible, and that has become, over the past several months since Trustworthy came out, I think that has become an increasingly important topic as more and more organizations realize that their employees may be leaving, they’re looking around at the very least, they’ve started to realize that in the wake of a year, maybe, working from home, that their skills and their talents are portable, and they’re not going to necessarily go to the highest bidder, but they do want to go to an organization where they feel like their values resonate, where the organization has made their values visible, and they feel like their work aligns with those values.

Margot:
So I look at what it means for organizations to share those qualities that differentiate them, to go public with their politics and wade into that territory that used to be foreboden for business, but why today it is increasingly foolish to say that business should stay above politics. And that it is foolhardy and impractical, and frankly a sign of privilege, to say that you’re not going to wade into the politics that very much affect your target audience. So I look at what it can look like when a business does that, and how they can reap tremendous rewards from it.

Larry:
Yeah. That very last point, I don’t know if you want to go there, but Basecamp, their famous memo about, nope, we just don’t talk politics here, and if you do, you’re being disruptive and we’re going to ask you to stop. That seems like the opposite of vulnerability. And there’s plenty of other examples like that. But I guess the more general point there is that each of those points that you just mentioned, and each of the examples you just gave, you didn’t say it explicitly but I think one of the things that I really appreciate about the book is it’s very principles based, that everybody’s going to do this differently, somebody is going to have long form content that they publish every day, like America’s Test Kitchen, the ridiculous detail they go into, that’s just what their people expect, whereas MailChimp is maybe a little quicker, tidier, and to the point.

Larry:
What’s the variety of ways in which folks who are building trust right, walk me through a little bit, how do you find the right voice? How do you find the right volume of stuff to publish, and the things related to that, and then the right amount of vulnerability. That last one in particular seems quite interesting.

Margot:
Yeah. And frankly, as you were just saying around the example of Basecamp, yes, I think that their response is foolish and shortsighted, but maybe most importantly it’s also bad business. Whether that is how you’re engaging with employees and potential employees or customers and potential customers, it’s shortsighted and bad business and that should be a big red flag to any organization with shareholders or outside investors.

Margot:
I think going back, though, to your question around the examples here, and the lessons that readers and organizations can take from them. As I was writing Trustworthy I worked with a wonderful developmental editor who kept me honest about this. I wanted to make sure that I was pulling in a really, really broad array of examples so that anybody reading this would be able to see themselves in it, see their own needs in it, and I guess also the opposite. I never want somebody to leave one of my talks, or workshops, or a book and say, well that’s great, if you’ve got a tremendous budget, or if you’re a really sexy retail brand, it doesn’t really fit for me. I don’t think anybody can read this and get away from realizing that all businesses, regardless of their size or industry or budget, have the opportunity to engage in the work of rebuilding trust and gaining consumer confidence. They have the opportunity to do so and the responsibility to do so.

Margot:
And I think you do that by starting, I would say the first step is by starting with voice, and determining what makes your business, your brand, your organization, unique. What do you do? What qualities do you own in the hearts and minds of your target audience better than your closest competitor, better than anybody else that is trying to cloth, or for mind share and heart share. And I think by starting with that, then you can start to figure out, what are your communication goals? What are the qualities that better describe you, and maybe the qualities that you don’t want to have associated with you, that maybe better describe a competitor. And then what are the more aspirational qualities? And that process is really how you develop a message architecture. And that’s a lot of what I wrote about in Content Strategy at Work.

Margot:
But I think that process of first developing a message architecture, that allows you to prioritize or determine the hierarchy or priority of qualities that you want to communicate so that you can then document them in an editorial style guide, figure out how at that next tactical level, everybody can make good on it, regardless of their level of marketing expertise and their familiarity with style guidelines. I think from there you can also start to figure out, well what are the right content types that best project, maybe it’s innovation, or reliability, or being community minded, do those qualities mean that you should double down on white papers or throw a lot more effort into social media and that kind of engagement. I think understanding first who you are and what you’re trying to communicate can then help you figure out the right voice, right style and tone, the right content types, the right editorial calendar on which to update those content types, but I think it all starts really with that message architecture.

Larry:
That’s funny, before we went on the air I pulled down my copy of Content Strategy at Work thinking, oh yeah, I should have both books handy. But now you’re making me wonder, is this just an evolution of that? Because it strikes me that I did not do this as I was reading the book, but now I want to go back and plug everything into, how does this contribute to my messaging architecture? Is that one way you could look at this?

Margot:
I think building trust is really the next step of mature content strategy, for most organizations, I would say. I will say there are many things in Content Strategy at Work that still hold true, but many things that, I mean, that came out, I think, before we, it predates responsive web design, was 2012, so I think we were still trying to figure out a lot of things around modern content management. It predates headless CMS, so yeah, there’s some things that deserve to be preserved in amber there.

Larry:
Yeah. Hey, now I want to circle back. We brought it, you started with a bunch of stuff about the end user, and now we’re talking about the things that companies can do, but a theme that I identified, I went back actually and was like, how much does she talk about empowerment in this book? Because I kept becoming aware of you either explicitly mentioning that term, or talking about ways to empower the end user. In most cases I think it’s the end user, but I think you also talk about enterprise users as well. Was that a conscious thing, or am I just reading something into the book?

Margot:
No, I think that that’s accurate. I think that one of the issues that we struggle with as people who work for brands, work on behalf of brands in helping them better engage with their audiences, or for that matter work with brands to help their content creators better engage with those audiences, one of the big challenges is the issue of control. And in the early days of the web, back in ye olde internet days, I think people thought that we could control so much more of the users’ experience, and then we swung away from brochureware and realized that people were bringing their own baggage, and you can plan for hardware and software but you can’t plan for the wetware of users, and users are going to do crazy fun things that you’d never imagined in your wildest dreams, and they’re going to bring their own ideas to anything that you could possibly publish or create for them, and that’s not a bad thing.

Margot:
But I think as we realize how users get information, how people navigate a complex media world and a variety of inputs to make the so many decisions that they make through the course of their days, we have to acknowledge that, whether as people or as the brands that we represent, we are not the protagonists in the lives of our users. Hopefully we’re not the antagonist, but we’re not always the protagonist in the story, sometimes we’re just a bit player, and that’s okay. I think, though, the more that we can offer our users, the more that we can offer our audiences, consumers, readers, citizens, control over how they get information, and the more that we can empower them with tools to make better choices, get information from high quality sources and sit with ideas, let them percolate, the more we help them make good decisions, the more we help them feel more confident. And it’s that crisis of confidence that has really stoked our issues around trust and cynicism.

Larry:
That completely and perfectly answers my question, because now I like totally get it, and the thing that I was inferring is exactly what you were intending. So yeah, I’m glad to hear I read the book right.

Margot:
You picked up what I was laying down, yeah.

Larry:
But along those same lines, and this wouldn’t be an official podcast episode without a little bit of navel gazing. A famously disempowered group, at least in our own minds, is content strategists. We’re always fighting for a seat at the table, or trying to get budget or staff, or just trying to be understood as a discipline. Have you given much thought to that, about how, and it almost seems to me like we could apply these things in our messaging architecture about how we present ourselves as a profession to the rest of the design and business world. Does that make sense, or any thoughts on that?

Margot:
I guess I push back at the idea that we are disempowered. I mean, I’ve been working in this industry for about 20 years now, a little bit longer, and over that time I’ve seen how we’ve gone from not necessarily having a seat at the table, to building out bigger tables where content strategy was not just a part of creative execution, but really focused on the strategy through maybe business strategy and direct business consulting, to help scope out initiatives to ensure that, whether it was an account manager that was just getting guidance from a perspective client of saying, “I need a new site, I need it to look different,” to also be able to push back and say, “Well then it probably needs to also say something different, needs to sound different. Maybe it needs to use other modes of communication as well.” Boom, that’s content strategy.

Margot:
I think we’ve always had power as long as we’ve had access to an opportunity to communicate. So we’ve always had power when we’ve been able to arm account managers with the right types of questions to ask, when we’ve been able to set up more meetings with our colleagues to bring them into our process to say, here’s where I am, here’s where my work intersects yours, these are the types of questions that I have for you, let me know what questions you have for me so that we’re able to work more effectively collaboratively. I think we’ve always had power as long as we’ve had those opportunities to communicate, but sometimes we have to work harder to find those opportunities, and to find and cultivate interested audiences within our organizations, certainly within our different client organizations, and that isn’t always easy, but I think it’s certainly worthwhile.

Margot:
That said, I do think taking this approach of building trust by first focusing on developing a consistent voice so that your colleagues do know that when you’re talking about a message architecture, when you’re talking about a content audit, when you’re bringing your jargon to them, that you’re taking the time to educate them on what that is, and knowing that it won’t change day to day, or deliverable to deliverable. That’s one way that we build trust, by exposing our own personal roadmaps through projects, whether it’s hanging it up outside your cube or having more open office hours on Slack now with colleagues, that brings them into that process as well. And then by sharing the right volume of information, the right level of detail so that they can feel comfortable and confident that they know where you’re going and they know where to reach out to you in the process, I think that helps.

Margot:
And then finally that third V around vulnerability, being able to make our values visible so that clients always know that what you’re going to fight for on a project, the non-negotiables around, maybe it’s having to establish a message architecture before you can possibly consider conducting any kind of qualitative and quantitative content audit. I know that’s oftentimes been a non-negotiable for me, or ensuring that your colleagues know that, for your own career growth and your own goals within the industry, that whatever types of projects you’re on the lookout for, where they should bring you in, because those are where you feel like you can add the most value.

Margot:
I think being vulnerable with our goals and making our values visible, whether you’re a big organization, whether you’re a governmental entity, whether you work in public health or you’re a small retailer, or you’re just an individual playing your role on a team, I think that can only help, because it goes back to opening those lines of communication, that yes, sometimes draws scrutiny. Usually people don’t laugh at you for sharing your values or your goals. If they do it probably tells you more about them than you. But I think that that risk that we take of sharing, just as when a brand does it, it helps them find their people, it helps them draw their audience closer. And I think when we as content strategists and content designers and consultants do it, it helps us draw our colleagues closer, to have a more collaborative, richer experience.

Larry:
Thanks for pushing back, because you both reminded us of how far we’ve come and how much power we actually do have, and how we have earned our seat at the table, but you also gave some good practical steps for maybe pushing it a little further along too, so cool. I can’t believe it, Margot, we’re already coming up close to time. These always go way too fast. But I want to make sure, before we wrap, is there anything last, anything that’s come up in the conversation or that’s just on your mind about content strategy or trust in general that you want to make sure we cover before we wrap?

Margot:
I guess I would say, and this is a recurring theme in the book, but I think it’s also something that has come up a lot at different meetups, and whatnot, where I’ve had the opportunity to speak, is that, yes, this is big work. Saying that there is a problem around cynicism and trust in our society that has caused our economy to slow down long before the pandemic, has caused marketing to fall flat, those are big problems, and content strategy cannot save it all. Content strategy can’t do all the work, but it doesn’t mean that we are freed from doing the work that we can do. It doesn’t mean that we are freed from saying, this problem is too big, I can’t do this all on my own. Well, that’s fine, I think that’s a good place to start to say, well, let me do the things that I can do, because this is a big problem and it’s my problem too.

Larry:
Nice. Thank you for that, that was great. Hey, and the very last thing I want to make sure, I want to make sure everybody, I’ll put this in the show notes, but for the people who are watching on video, I’m holding up the book now to the screen, but I’ll also put this in the notes, but make sure you get a copy of the book, it’s really brilliant. I took my first plane trip, my first post-pandemic plane trip over the weekend, and it was a fantastic way to fill that flight up, so thanks for that, Margot. And I know you’re still teaching workshops, if people want to develop their trust capability at their place. What’s the best way for folks to learn about what you’re up to and to follow you online?

Margot:
You can always find an updated calendar of what’s coming up next online at appropriateinc.com. Appropriatinc.com/trustworthy, where you can find out more about the book, and yeah, you can always find me on Twitter, probably way too much, @MBloomstein.

Larry:
Excellent. Well thanks so much, Margot, fantastic conversation, I really enjoyed it.

Margot:
Thank you, this has been so much fun.