Rahel Anne Bailie: The Content Empress – Episode 86

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Rahel Anne Bailie has earned the title Content Empress.

One of the original cohort of content strategists, over the past couple of decades she has become a leading expert on content operations.

While she focuses on content, she might better be described as a business analyst and consultant who helps companies with their digital transformation.

We talked about:

• her title of “Content Empress” and its origins, as well as its convenient over-arching-ness for the many roles she has served
• the first time she was called a “content strategist” in 2002, long before it was a popular term
• her take on the difference between content strategy and content design
• the difficulty of explaining how a content strategist differs from a content creator
• her recent blog post on the history of content strategy
• how complexity drives the need for content strategy
• the origins in stories of old computer manuals of how she thinks about modular content
• the two sides of content: copy plus the technical things that give it more power
• the importance of content models in a flexible, agile content system
• structured authoring for complex environments
• the devolution of product user-interface content – e.g., the loss of single sourcing as UI content moved from the tech comms department to product teams
• single sourcing, the idea of a single source of content truth, and how it’s a bit of a lost art
• how PayPal was able to respond quickly to their customer’s needs during the pandemic because of the agility afforded by their use of single-sourcing
• how to sell content strategy: you have to focus on cost savings, not ROI, and the importance of accounting for all of the costs your content incurs
• the equation that underlies “information enablement”: content + data = information
• the importance of understanding the fundamental nature of content, especially being able to explain it to technologists, who tend to focus on the shiny new stuff over the boring proven stuff
• the dearth of educational sources for learning content strategy
• her work with the Content Strategy Alliance on their new content strategy curriculum and their efforts to create a certification program
• her take on the future of content strategy: more complexity around personalization, growth, scale, and other big issues driving the need for better strategies and plans
• the importance of content even in systems that don’t appear at first to be content-driven
• her big aha! moment that content strategy is useless with its operationalization

Rahel’s bio

Founder of Content, Seriously, a London, UK based consultancy. Seasoned consultant developing content strategies for efficient and effective content operations. Instructor in FH-Joanneum’s Content Strategy Master’s Programme in Austria. Co-author of “Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits” and “The Language of Content Strategy”; contributor to several other books. Over 30 years of experience in content, including corporate communications, technical communication, localization management, and content strategy. Lover of gin, Scrabble, and dancing.

Follow Rahel on social media

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Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro

In a field that struggles with what to call itself and how to assign labels to its practitioners, Rahel Bailie has carved out a unique role for herself: Content Empress. The title started as a joke – and as a way distinguish her from a student who had already claimed the title Content Queen. But it truly fits. Rahel was one of the very first content folks to identify as a content strategist. She has pioneered many modern content practices. And she is widely regarded as the world’s leading expert on content operations.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 86 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really delighted today to have with us, Rahel Bailie. Rahel, in a field that’s struggling sometimes with titles and identifications, Rahel has the perfect label for herself. She’s the Content Empress. I’m very delighted to welcome Rahel to the show. Rahel, tell the folks a little bit more about your title and your work in the content world.

Rahel:
Well, the title started as a joke between me and one of my colleagues, because he said, “You’re the Content Queen.” I said, “No. I can’t be the Content Queen because one of my students, her name is Irene and so she calls herself Irene, the Content Queen.” Sorry, I’m a content plebe. He went, “No, no. You’re the Content Empress, then.” And so, that’s kind of stuck. Other people started using it so it became… It started as a joke but it distinguishes me because I have started shying away from titles like, do I do content operations? Do I do content strategy? Am I a management consultant? Am I a digital transformation consultant? I’m the Content Empress, it incorporates all or any of those things that you want to put into there.

Larry:
I think that’s perfect, because we all struggle with the imprecision of these labels that we’ve got to identify ourselves. I think most people would think of you, like if you made somebody identify you, “Oh, she’s a content strategist.”

Rahel:
Yes.

Larry:
Have you ever actually held that title? And I know you-

Rahel:
Oh, yes.

Larry:
Yeah, you must have. When did you first identify as such, as a content strategist?

Rahel:
Oh, my goodness. I remember back in about 2001, 2002, calling myself a content strategist but nobody knew what that meant. They would say, “Well, no, no, we want somebody to help us figure out our content.” I don’t know, a tech writer? I dropped that, and then I started calling myself a content management consultant but then everyone thought I wrote code and I thought, “Okay. No, I’m on the content side, and I do analyze content and I think of systematizing content.”

Rahel:
I went back to content strategy and then content strategy became a thing. It caught up with not just me, but there were a number of us calling ourselves that. I was calling myself a content strategist long before it was a popular term. Then it started… In the UK, you’ve got content strategy and content design and content design is where you actually create the content.

Rahel:
I design systems, I don’t write content except example content like, here’s how to apply your content model. This is how you would take this piece and chop it up. Here, they call those folks who are really concerned about the UX of content, they call them content designers. In North America, everyone is called a content strategist, whether you’re a content designer over here or a content strategist over here.

Rahel:
Over in North America, you are just a content strategist. It became really hard to distinguish between what I did and what other content strategists do and some people still don’t get it. There are agencies that really go, “You do what?” Because for them there’s, if you look at that a list of professions and there’s always right at the very bottom, it was writing and editing. That’s what they think that all content people do is writing and editing. When you don’t have that context, you shy away from the term and think, “Okay, what do I do?”

Larry:
We’ve all been struggling with that for literally decades now and no resolution, but the work seems to be increasingly appreciated. This brings me back around to why I wanted to have you on the show. I’ve been trying to make up an excuse for months. I’ve been trying to figure out how to get you on the show.

Larry:
Then you wrote this piece recently about the history of content strategy and I thought, “Boom. That’s it, that’s how I can get… ” I think a lot of this stuff we’re talking about, like how did we get here? How did we end up in this place where we have titles that are not precise, like what’s going on?

Larry:
One of the ways to look at that is historically, and to look back at the origins of the field. Tell me a little bit… Well, first of all, I’m curious, you wrote this post and it’s like, “Oh my God, it’s like 10,000 words long.” You just sat down to just do a bullet pointed list or something. Tell me about that.

Rahel:
Well, a few years ago, about 10 years ago now I guess is Firehead, on their site, firehead.net. They’re a content recruiting company. They wrote an article on the history of content strategy. As soon as they wrote it… The person who wrote it, I have to say, she’s got a good journalism background but not really a content person but she just did some research and she found a certain set of facts. Because she wasn’t in the industry, there were a lot of things that were missing or she got wrong and a number of people got offended because they were left out or because something had been misquoted or the emphasis was in the wrong place. They left it up, but had all these things in the comments. My point was, that nobody’s going to read the comments and they’re going to start quoting this from the original article.

Rahel:
I was asked to do, so there’s this organization called the Content Strategy Alliance. They wanted to do a course on the history of content strategy, a short course, but the introduction. I thought, “Where do I send them?” You don’t have a book on the history of this profession. I thought, “Okay, I’m going to ask Firehead and CJ Walker, if I can take that and use it to flush it out and incorporate the things from the comments and add in other things that I knew.”

Rahel:
I don’t really come from that background. I have an academic background but not a journalism background. It was amazing to me when I started because I kept digging deeper and deeper and this would lead me to that and that would lead me to that. Then I would ask so, and so a question, and then they would give me more information. I was trying to piece this all together and it came out with 8,500 words or something like that and I went, “Whoa, that was a month of my life.” Okay. Now I understand how much work goes into these long reads.

Larry:
I love that you started with the Vannevar Bush essay in 1945. I do think that’s the origin document of hypermedia and modern information architecture.

Rahel:
It’s true. I can’t lay claim to that. It was Don Day who put that into a comment. This is a part I think where me writing it came in handy because I know people on the agency side and the pure play website and so on. Then I know people that come from that technical background and that computing side and structured content. Don Day came up with that and I went, “He’s absolutely right.” Way back then when they didn’t even have the means, they were thinking of, “How do we do this?”

Larry:
Exactly. I love that, because… Then when you wrote that article, I immediately, after that because two of the people who were most influenced by him are more modern. They brought it into the modern era, like Ted Nelson and his Xanadu Project and he invented the concept of hypertext and hypermedia, and then Doug Engelbart. Those two, like Ted Nelson was the hippie visionary and Doug Engelbart was the mission-driven organizational dude. That gets into like, there’s a lot of antecedents to content strategy.

Larry:
The visionary view of the future which Engelbart had as well, he had this real strong vision of things. Like, to you, to what you just said, you’ve mentioned a few things already like management consulting and technology. There’s all these threads that come in because publishing used to just you know, the content used to be about publishing stuff or making movies or whatever it was. Now we’re in this situation where, is it this complexity? Is it this convergence of technology and stuff that makes content strategy necessary?

Rahel:
I’m glad you mentioned the word complexity because it is exactly that. If you think about… I was there during the transition from writers writing things out and then giving them to typist type up and then they would send the proofs off to the printer and so on. Then we switched from that to word processing and when you made that switch, all of a sudden, things became possible. These possibilities opened up because it wasn’t in a fixed format on a page, whatever kind of tape or whatever you use. Now, it’s something that you can link together in different ways or if you needed to take out a sentence. We were having these discussions at Phillips Electronics where these were when computers were still made in Canada. We would have these user guides that had to go with the books, had to go with the laptops.

Rahel:
When they came out with the… Or they had desktops and then they came out with a laptop. It was only one sentence per book that was changed. The translators wanting to send it out, nine different languages, the entire book to be translated again and I said, “It’s only this one sentence that changed. Why don’t we just change that one sentence and we can pop it in?” You couldn’t do that before. You’d have to at least type over the page and so on. We could just get these things in and out in no time by manipulating the texts and it was great. When I discovered HTML, I was like, “Whoa, finally, this is the way I think, and now there’s a technology that can accommodate it.” Where there were other people who were very linear who really couldn’t cope with that. I had one boss who said like, “This newfangled stuff is just going to make us into fancy proofreaders.” I was like, “Oh.”

Larry:
I think to this day people still struggle with that. It seems like that. What you’re getting at there is like the separation of content from its presentation and we live in swim in that all day, and it’s just like second nature to us. That comes slowly to other people.

Rahel:
There’s an editorial side and a technical side to content. This is copy. Copy is what people read. The technical side is what makes it into content. You marry those two sides together and then you get content. It’s the copy plus the metadata, the copy plus the schema, the copy plus all these underlying things. If you don’t have those underlying things, then you might as well write a note on a piece of paper and put it in somebody’s pocket because nobody’s going to be able to find it.

Larry:
Exactly. You’re reminding me of, I haven’t published it yet but I had Noz Urbina. Well, it’ll be published by the time this comes out. I had Noz Urbina on the show last week, I think. He talks about the difference between clay and Legos as your model for how to-

Rahel:
Yes.

Larry:
I know you two have worked together on stuff. Does that resonate with you? That seems like a perfect image.

Rahel:
Yes. We often use Lego as an example of having a content that’s interoperable. Because you can have a huge bucket of Lego and you know that they all fit together. You don’t have to start figuring out which ones fit and which ones don’t fit. When you plan your content, you have to plan it in those same chunks. This is why you have content models, because this gives you the form that you can use to build things. If you want it to be flexible and agile, then you need to honor and respect the form that you build it in. Some people will say, “Well, that’s stifling our creativity.” Or, “We don’t want the content to be that prescribed.” It’s like, the reason you can plug something in, you can buy something online and take it home and plug it in and know that it will work is because there’s a standard, right?

Larry:
Yeah.

Rahel:
We have a standard.

Larry:
To that example you gave a few minutes ago of the manual changing like, no, we have laptops now, as well as desktops. We have to republish the whole manual? Why don’t we just…

Rahel:
Exactly. An agency would just say, ‘Oh, we have, another campaign, let’s bring in another agency and bring them in.” A marketing department, for example. The tech comm-ers has never had that luxury. They had to figure out how to make it work. That’s where you came up with your FrameMakers and your RoboHelps and your Flares and all of those, that class of product. The class of product was structured authoring for complex environments.

Rahel:
It’s not about the fact that it happened to be technical content, it’s that department that was starved and needed to scale. That’s what I look at it as. They started doing content strategy way before anyone else knew what content strategy was. Because they had to be able to just pump out reams and reams and reams of content. I had this chat with a guy from Adobe and he said, “You take any website, any website. 20% is marketing material, 80%, the support material.”

Rahel:
It’s your specs, it’s your knowledge-base, it’s your training, it’s your, how to get set up. It’s all that kind of stuff the tech writers do. How many people in marketing and what’s their budget compared to how many people in tech-comm and their budgets? It’s not the fact that it’s technical documentation. If you were to flip it and you were to say, “Marketing, your budget’s cut by 80%. Tech-comm, your budget’s increased by 80%.” You would’ve seen these changes happening in marketing instead of in tech-comm.

Larry:
Interesting. Well, that gets to the threads that make up the fabric of modern content strategy. You’ve got the technical stuff, and both technical content strategy but also like the rise of CMSs and the technical management of the editorial side of things. Then you have that marketing stuff going on. Then now increasingly the newest thread, I think, is this notion of product content strategy. The UX strings and all that. Do you see that all coming together or will those threads still be identifiable or will this all converge at some point?

Rahel:
That opens such a can of worms. Because if you think about it, UX writing used to be called embedded assistance and tech writers did it. Then somewhere along the line, you had interaction design and things like that. Then you had UX people doing it, but of course they can’t write. Now you’ve got UX writers who do it, but without the benefit of all the structured content.

Rahel:
We’ve devolved into this area, so they can write on brand. It drives me crazy because it’s like, I don’t want to see an, “Oops that’s not your fault, it’s ours. Tell me what to do. Tell me.” The tech writer goes, “Actually, this is a problem, and it’s because the developer was too lazy to fix it, so you need to go and do that.” We don’t say it that way but they tell you what to do, at least.

Rahel:
Because that’s the way we were trained. You’ve got things that are moving. They’re moving in and out of different departments. Now, UX folks use or one of these things to store things. All the content that’s in the prototypes get stored in a silo, and then it’s built into two different places and you go, “Well, what happened to all that single sourcing, to all that good stuff?”

Rahel:
It’s not being used anymore for that. It’s being used for other stuff like API documentation and so on. It’s a real time of flux right now. I think actually, the more complex it gets, the more you’re going to need tech writers because when you’re doing AI strings, guess where they’re stored? Excel spreadsheets, right?

Larry:
Yeah. I’ve seen them.

Rahel:
They’ll go like, “Oh, we figured out how to do this really efficiently in an Excel Spreadsheet.” I’m just like you know, face-palm. because it’s not really efficient. It would be efficient if that were in a repository with all the other strings and you knew where everything was and you could single source it and so on and so forth. Who knows how to do that? The tech writers. At some point they’re going to have to get involved because you’re going to get people who will throw up their hands and go like, “Oh, that XML stuff. Oh, boring. I don’t want to deal with it.” Like, why?

Larry:
There’s a whole bunch in what you just said. First of all, I want to have you go back a little bit in define single sourcing. Because I think that’s such an important concept in the tech content world that’s a really and it gets to what you’re talking about that like a canonical repository to work from would be the ideal. The UX folks are just, well, there’s at least a plugin for Figma now that can handle text strings independently of the design process. There’s still obviously some work to do there. Talk a little bit about single sourcing and the importance of that idea.

Rahel:
They used to call it definitive source of truth or single source of truth, or various other terms. Here’s a little story from a gig that I did at a bank where they had interfaces where a developer had to go in and change a word. If you change them from “log on” to “log in,”” he told the developer and he would go in and he would find all the places and he would update it. Then that got really boring.

Rahel:
He built a little interface where somebody could go in and change that themselves and it would change it all over the place, single sourcing. However, it was in a silo so you say, “Okay.” When you change that from “log on” to “log in,”” how does that change in all of the online help? Oh, I never thought about that.

Rahel:
How long have you been doing this? Seven years. Seven years he hadn’t thought about all of the disconnects between his silo and the big body of documentation. We know how to do this, I mean, we’ve been doing it for years. You throw something into, I hate to use the word DITA, because they’re going to be people who right away go, “Oh yeah, they’re pushing DITA again.”

Rahel:
I mean, it’s the best standard we have right now, so this is the one I’m plugging. You would put it in there and there was a field for that and you could draw it into the hundred places you had to put it. When you needed change it, you change it there, you change in your documentation and in your interface. Changing the code everywhere.

Rahel:
We have known how to do this since the 1990s, but that has been lost. Everyone wants, “Oh, XML, that’s so old, so boring. Can we have something more modern? Can’t we have something that’s like, can’t we deal with JSON?” We go, “Oh, isn’t there a like a cool company that’s doing this?”

Rahel:
I’m going, I’m relatively well connected in the industry. I talk to these writers and it’s a shit show in the back end. They might go to these conferences and go, “Ta-da.” It’s all binder twine and mechanical turks in the background. I think what’s happened is that the COVID crisis exposed everybody’s dirty laundry. Because when you look at someplace like PayPal that could pivot on a dime, why? They have structured content, they have a single source of truth.

Rahel:
They went from being a small business, that’s where they make good money really is, small businesses that use PayPal as a payment gateway. When it became, “Hey, there’s no payments happening because everyone’s in lockdown and losing their jobs.” The government is giving these relief funds. We can turn ourselves on a dime into the relief fund provider to the small businesses because they all have accounts with us. We have to write a bit of content, structure it, push it out, done.

Rahel:
Then you have other places who are like, “We need COVID information tomorrow. We need three agile teams working 80 hours a week for five weeks. Yay, we did it.” And you think, “You know what, if you’d listened six months ago, when somebody said to you, you need to get your content in order, you’re racking up too much content depth. They wouldn’t have been exposed.” We, in the industry, we can look at that and go, “Yeah, they didn’t have theirs in order.” Look how long it took them. Look at that. You know where the bodies are buried.

Larry:
That’s an interesting to me. So much of this has been figured out. I sometimes feel that we’re as a discipline, as a professional practice we could be communicating. As soon as soon as you talked about that PayPal story, I’m like, “Can you write a white paper or a blog post about that so I can point?”

Larry:
Because people are always asking me for examples of like, “Yeah, that all sounds great, Larry, but what’s the point?” I’m like, “Well, you can pivot on a dime like PayPal did and capitalize and take advantage of this situation or you can spend a couple million bucks on developers.” It’s like, your choice. Can you speak about like how the selling of content strategy.?

Rahel:
You have to sell it on cost savings. It used to be that you couldn’t sell it on internal rate of return. You can either ROI, you can spend money to make money or you can spend money to save money. ROI versus the IRR. You couldn’t sell an IRR before. They would say, “Yeah, you know, it doesn’t matter if it takes somebody 100 clicks to do something.” That was the case at one point that it was appalling, 100 clicks to get an image online. Well, it doesn’t really matter. Because we’ve got people doing that and that’s fine. If they’re suffering, but we don’t have to spend money, we’re okay with it. Where we want to spend money is on the things where it means somebody will buy this product.

Rahel:
Okay, fine. Now, when they look at the cost, because more complexity means you need more resources. Do you want to hire another 100 people, another 200 people? Do you want to spend another million and a half? You want to spend another five million on bringing the resources to maintain the content? It’s not even that content creation, because if you think of content as a supply chain, I create it, I publish it. We’re done. That’s like the marketing thing. They don’t really reuse campaigns. It’s like, “We did a campaign now, we’re done. Park that, let’s do the next one.” Okay, fine. In the other 80%, you are churning through content, version two, version 12, version 24, version 48.

Rahel:
If you don’t get it right at the beginning, now you’re updating 48 versions across four product lines. Noz and I, in our book, we said there was one example where, by the time you’re done in this many products and that many products and that many product lines and that many countries and that many variants. 12,000 times that piece of content gets used or those four pieces of content get used.

Rahel:
When you take that and you kind of go, “All right. Now I created this content and now I have to update it.” First of all, I have to go find the content, then I have to check around to make sure that’s the actual latest content. Then I have to do all the things I would do when I get creative. Now I have to do that 12 times because we’ve got 12 versions of it. Because of the 12 countries, the 12 markets or 12 products or whatever it may be. You have this, the cost of original content creation, the cost of the maintenance and then the cost of the publishing. Because once you actually done all the maintenance on it, the cost of pushing them through your CMS is relatively cheap.

Larry:
That’s an interesting, this comes up a lot is sort of the accounting of content. I know you’ve talked about this and Noz and Cruce Saunders, talks about the importance of looking at content as a valuable asset. I don’t think accountants look at it that way. There’s no place in the balance sheet. There’s plenty of places in the P and L to account for content creation cost and content management cost. Like, why aren’t we showing up – as I think we should – in the balance sheet for a company, what’s going on there?

Rahel:
Well, this is the interesting part is that, going back to your point about product content, if you don’t have content, you don’t have a product. In a lot of cases, no content equals no product. You took all the content out, you’re left with a bunch of pretty colors and lines and a couple of images. If you don’t count images as content, which we do, if they have meaning. What do you do? You have to have content. When you put it that way. Do you know who Salim Ismail is?

Larry:
I know the name.

Rahel:
Singularity University. I met him many, many years ago.

Larry:
He’s the info-enablement, or what’s the term he uses?

Rahel:
Yes, information enablement. If you want to grow, especially if you want to grow exponentially, you have to have information enablement. I’m not going to tell you how to do it because everybody does it differently, but you have to be able to enable your information. Your information is content plus data, so content and data is information. You have to be able to use your data really quickly, smart and get insights and so on. You have to be able to use your content to communicate, and you have to be able to get it out there. If it’s in your product, you have to be on the ball with that.

Rahel:
You can’t be fiddling around in some corner and somebody goes on vacation. It’s like, “Oops, I locked my Google drive. Oops.” That won’t fly. You have to have, you know, and developers will tell you, use GitHub. Content is not code. That falls apart pretty quickly. You need to have proper production-grade content tools, and we don’t. We use tools that’s meant for casual business use, Word, Google Docs.

Larry:
That’s interesting because that’s another convergence of threads that I think could be given more attention. Because like what you’re just talking about, because there are editorial systems that have version control and stuff like that and collaboration things. The way GitHub works, it’s more, it’s just like a developer model for how to do that kind of stuff.

Rahel:
That’s what they know, so that’s what they recommend.

Larry:
Yeah, exactly.

Rahel:
Without realizing. I say data’s is easy because a number in a spreadsheet is a number in a spreadsheet. As soon as you say that number equals, like 12 equals December. What does that mean? Now there’s a bunch of things into it? December could mean Christmas, it could be Independence Day. It could mean the tourists are coming. It could mean I need to book early. It could mean I’m going skiing. It could mean so many things. You put two numbers together, you’ve got two numbers. You could add them, multiply them, whatever.

Rahel:
You put two sentences together, oh, you’ve got, who knows? Sexism, racism. Because there’s nuance. There’s meaning, there’s layers of meaning to it that you don’t have with data. You have to manage it differently. They are two different things. The fact that they happen to both get published on a webpage or in a database somewhere, that’s incidental.

Larry:
You’re getting at, like some of the biggest threads that I think, it’s like so much the human stuff. It’s the human stuff and the technical stuff coming together. We’re in a culture, especially a business culture where the tech folks seem to have a little financial and numbers advantage over the content folks. How do you reconcile that? How do we get that?

Rahel:
Oh, my gosh. If I told you how many times that they wanted to send in a consultant from, name your big consultancy, who “knows content? I asked questions and I can tell you that they don’t know squat. They know data, but they don’t know content and they want to bring them in because they’re from a big name agency. They think they just want to come in and make a mess. Then we’re going to still be in that same mess. The writers and the content designers are still going to be suffering because it’s just a different mess. Because even if they go and they ask them questions, they’re not asking the right questions. They don’t know the fundamental underpinnings of content to be able to say, “Let’s remediate this.”

Larry:
Yeah. How do you educate people to have that, like somebody who comes to content strategy from journalism or someplace and say, “Oh, and here’s what you need to know to win that argument or to make that case.”

Rahel:
That’s really hard because the biggest gatekeepers are often technologists. They will argue, one guy who’s like a little small team and they were going to sort out like, do natural language translations in many languages. It’s like, “Okay, Google has hundreds of people working on this and they know that they’re not going to crack this code, but you’re going to crack this code? Oh, right. Yeah. Tell me about it.”

Rahel:
When you would say to them, “Actually, you know what, maybe we should just clean up the fundamentals first.” I was like, “Oh no, that’s boring. It’s boring. We don’t want to do that. Let’s do the shiny stuff.” It’s just, it becomes really frustrating. To explain it to somebody, it’s like, “Okay, well, it’s like saying, explain to me how to be a doctor.” Just like, and give me your elevator pitch. Tell me how to do plastic surgery. It’s like, yeah.

Larry:
No, I get that. I think this is kind of getting back to the origins of the discipline. It’s a necessary discipline because of all these interlinking complexities that are like, you just reminded me when you talked about NLP, that one of the newer threads or the newest threads that I’m discovering and exploring about content strategy is the idea of conversation design and voice user interfaces.

Rahel:
Automatic writing, that’s the next one. They’re not going to deal with content people at all, because it’s all going to be automatic writing.

Larry:
The techies are going to glom onto that right away.

Rahel:
Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I spend a lot of my time going, “No.”

Larry:
To what you were just talking about, that example you just gave of like, convincing the guy with the five-person tech team that he’s going to compete with Alexa or something like that. That ain’t going to happen. I just learned there’s 12,000 people working on Alexa, probably half of whom are developers. That’s just one and Google and Bixby and, yeah.

Rahel:
The only thing was like, even though they’re talking about this translation, it’s like, “Okay, who do you think writes the original strings?” The people who report to me, and they have an Excel spreadsheet.

Larry:
It always comes back to spreadsheets in this world, but in that world and in the voice interface world, and this is something I’m just prying relentlessly to get to is like, the content that they’re doing. It’s like, they’ll do some natural language understanding and understanding query and then some magic AI thing in the background. Then they do some natural language generation and spit out some content. I’m like, “Well, that seems really useful. Can we use that elsewhere?” Or, “How are you integrating that? How are we aligning it with our style with our other content?” Have you had to deal with that at all?

Rahel:
Yes. That’s a whole other podcast. I’ll give you the name of somebody.

Larry:
Yeah. Again, I guess the general point is that, this is some crazy complex stuff and we’re just all doing our best to stitch it together.

Rahel:
Yeah. This is the funny thing is, I don’t have a master’s degree or a PhD. I’ve got a bachelor’s and even in that, it was before the internet. Really, it was well, well, yeah, just about, I finished my degree about the time the internet came about. Or no, about the time the web came about. It doesn’t really have anything to do with what I actually do for a living. I was like creative writing and women’s studies, like go figure. Nobody teaches this stuff anywhere. When you have to start doing it, you go, “Okay, where do I learn this?” Well, the universities aren’t teaching it yet.

Rahel:
You have to learn it on your own or learn it from people, or learn it by, in my case, supervising people who are telling me what the problems are. From that, I extrapolate the theories, find it. Then you go and you know it so well after a while that you can start teaching it. Because you’ve been there, done that, and now somebody is teaching it. Content strategy has been a little bit like that. Is that the people who are teaching it now, we figured it out on our own because there was no place to learn it. In fact, there’s still only one place in the world to get a master’s degree on it.

Larry:
Robert’s program in Graz, right?

Rahel:
Yeah.

Larry:
Yeah, that’s it. What about, you mentioned earlier the Content Strategy Alliance. Have you all done any work there on curriculum, or like what a program might look like if somebody did offer it?

Rahel:
Yeah. They are putting together a curriculum right now. I’ve written two modules, and I’m writing a third module for it. They are putting together, so I’m doing like the history of, and then the introduction to content strategy, like what is content strategy. Then when they go into the fundamentals, the foundation courses about inventories and audits and analysis and so on. Then it gets more into some technical stuff. They’re going to have that certified through an American certification body. It’ll be, you can get accreditation on it.

Larry:
There’s accrediting bodies for accrediting bodies. I love how meta that is.

Rahel:
It’s hard in the United States. I teach a two-day course in the UK and we have it accredited through the UK Accrediting Body. If you want to do your, like if you’re a project manager and you need to take a certain number of credits per year and they can be on anything. This body decides which things you can take and get credit for. People can take my course and get credit for it.

Rahel:
That’s the kind of body that they’re working through in the US. It’s a bunch of people that came together and said, “You know, we should have an association. We are losing out by not having an association.” It’s like speaking with a project manager and you go, “Okay, I need somebody with a PRINCE2 certification.” You know why you need it, you know what it is, and you know what that person’s supposed to be able to do. If they can’t deliver on it, you have a benchmark against which you can measure it. We don’t have that because we don’t have an association.

Larry:
The content strategy alliance, that’s the closest we have right now. I know that, that’s not like a paid membership thing or anything. It’s pretty low key at this point. Is there plans?

Rahel:
Yeah.

Larry:
Are there plans to expand it or?

Rahel:
Well, once they have this accreditation program, I think it’ll start to take off. Because a lot of people came together, they donated their templates from their work. A lot of us who are seasoned professionals and we have a kind of a vested interest in knowing that somebody has that accreditation, that they know what they’re talking about. I remember when usability first started that whole thing in the late 1990s. You wanted to know, I remember asking somebody about a wireframe . . . like in a super set of wireframes. I got something different and I was like, “That’s not a wireframe.” “Well, yes, it is.”

Rahel:
Well, in his world, it was, but in my role, it wasn’t. Now we know, like you hire an information architect or a UX designer and you know what they should be able to deliver. When they come with their portfolio, they’re showing you what you expect to see. In content strategy, what are you going to show? A bunch of spreadsheets with redacted, everything redacted because you’re under NDA? How do you know that the person knows or at least the theory behind it?

Larry:
I love that you’re doing that, that you’re teasing out those individual skills that make up the practice and able to articulate it in a way that like, “Yep, we accredit you. You can do this.” Assuming that takes hold, and we have a bunch of accredited folks pretty much on the same page, practicing content strategy. I know we started with the history, but now I’m really curious about the future of content strategy. What do you think our prospects are?

Rahel:
Well, I think that it’s going to become, you know, we talked about complexity and things are getting more and more complex. Right now, the Holy Grail is personalization and growth and scale. You can’t do that without a sound strategy. You just can’t. There are people who go like, “We don’t pay for strategies.” Or, “We don’t believe in strategies.” Well, if you don’t believe in planning, it’s like, think of something that’s more traditional. A car. if you don’t have a plan for the car, you could end up with the steering wheel on the roof because somebody decided, “Let’s stick it up there.” It’s like, “Yeah, whatever. Okay, good.”

Rahel:
What makes it possible for you to go to a car at a rental place and get the keys and get in and just do a quick check and go? Because you know what to expect. They planned that out. It didn’t just happen by magic. People who say that we don’t want a content strategy. Well, how do you think this is going to happen? By magic? The little fairy dust, the little content fairies will come and sprinkle fairy dust and voila, you have a strategy. There’s a lot that goes into a strategy, particularly when it’s more complex.

Rahel:
If you’re the local dry cleaner, you don’t need a content strategy. Although my content queen Irene, she did a content strategy for my hairdresser because she wanted to come to London and experience content strategy. He owns two businesses. They’re, you know, one’s for women’s hairdressing and one’s for men’s hair systems when they’re balding. He’s got quite a good concern on there and we had to separate the two brands and we had to have the messaging architecture. She did a full thing on there. That’s from the very basic for a small business. You can imagine once you get into the multinationals, how complex that could be.

Larry:
It’s probably not a straight line. It’s probably a logarithmic scale of complexity and issues.

Rahel:
Oh, yeah.

Larry:
Like when you’re talking about like, well, you’ve mentioned a couple of things. First, just localization as a concern. That’s a huge argument for a lot of this stuff we’ve been talking about. Now personalization, this recurring trend. Do you see other stuff coming up that’ll help us make our case like, “Boy, if you’d had a content strategy, I sure would’ve been a lot easier to make that transition.”

Rahel:
Oh, yes. I did content a strategy a number of years ago for a company that had, think of them as a mini Amazon. You know how Amazon is going into certain verticals, they’re going into building supplies, they’re going into healthcare and so on? This company had a few hundred thousand products, they were going to go to over half a million or three quarters of a million products over a certain stagger. They asked me how much do you think you can get us ahead? I went like, probably 5%, thinking probably 10% but I don’t want to overstate it. Let’s say 5% conservatively. They had this mantra that was every 5%, it equals 50 million pounds. When they heard 5%, ding, ding, ding.

Rahel:
I just looked at things like, “Okay, you don’t have any schema.” Of course, none of your contents are going to come up in search because you don’t have any schema tags on there. You can’t come up in the shopping thing because you don’t have certain things in there. You have this system, so you can design a building or design something. Their design, let’s call it that . . . it’s very sophisticated.

Rahel:
You have all sorts of people working on this together so that you don’t run your beams to the elevator shop by accident. It’s like, so while you’re doing that, you are picking your materials. The material for them is, they’re not in a store, they’re picking it by a part number, by an image, by specs, by a short description, by a long description, by all your attributes.

Rahel:
Because now, it’s not just, I’m going to put up this dry wall and have this insulation. It’s like, if you use this dry wall, you have to use that insulation because you were required by law to have an energy rating of 85%. It’s become very sophisticated, all that is content, it’s all content. If you don’t have your ducks in a row, if you don’t have it structured to the nth degree, you can’t feed your content into a system like that. By necessity, you have to do that. It’s like, “Well, do you have a product or don’t you have a product?”

Larry:
That’s perfect. I usually try to keep these around a half hour. We’ve gone a little bit over that, but I’m totally fine with that. I do want to keep it on the reasonable length side, and I could talk to you forever about this stuff. Before we start to wrap up, I just want to make sure, is there anything last, anything that’s on your mind about content strategy or just in general about the internet and the state of things or just anything that’s come up in the conversation that you want to follow up on?

Rahel:
Well, there’s something that was a big aha moment for me recently. I’ve been talking about content operations for decades, but I think that was a term that used to go in one ear and out the other, because people didn’t really have any mental model for it. Now that we have dev ops and design ops and user ops and everything has an ops now, why do we do a content strategy? Strategy is basically a plan, so I can create you a strategy, give it to you, you pay me and then you put it in a drawer. That’s worthless because it’s sitting in a drawer.

Rahel:
Why do you do it? Because you want to operationalize your content. We do content strategy for content ops, and content ops until now has been that techie, boring, whatever stuff. It needs to have its place in the sun. That’s kind of my mission for the next five years, is to put content operations on the map and show how operationalizing your content will help you scale, grow, manage your risk, have better user experience, more personalization, better brand trust and all of that good stuff.

Larry:
One thing I want to maybe just put in a plug for you being preemptively, I’m already starting to see content ops equated to old publishing processes, just like, “Hey, I got an idea. Let’s develop it, let’s do it.” Just kind of that, uni-linear flow thing of content, whereas genuine content strategy-based content ops is more than that. Are you already thinking about how to address that?

Rahel:
Yes. I use traditional management consulting techniques of a gap analysis. First of all, what do you need? You don’t want to over-engineer it. You don’t want to under-engineer it. You have to have the right things for the right tool. If you’re a journalism company or a newspaper company, you’re going to have a completely different operational model than what we just talked about with the design building software. You’re going to have a different thing if you’re an eCommerce retailer. You’re going to have a completely different operational model if you’ve got a lot of UX content.

Rahel:
Each thing that you do is going to have a slightly different need. Then you have to build a model that takes into account all of those little pockets of content in your organization. That’s going to be a different size for each one. Do you need it operationalized or not? That kind of thing.

Larry:
That speaks to this need for a bunch of accredited, highly skilled people out there to do that.

Rahel:
Yes.

Larry:
If it’s all going to be bespoke every time you do it, you want to have that. Well, thanks so much. Thanks so much. One last thing, what’s the best place for folks to stay in touch with you? Social media or where do you like to connect with folks?

Rahel:
[apologies: we had a Zoom problem here] I’m Rahel A B – very simple. That’s Rahelab and I publish things on SlideShare under that same tag. I’m on Medium under that same tag. Yeah, you can find me in most places under that tag.

Larry:
Okay, great. I’ll get those in the show notes as well. Well, thanks again, Rahel, great conversation. I really enjoyed talking with you.

Rahel:
Thank you for having me.