Scott Abel: The Content Wrangler – Episode 81

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Scott Abel is a content strategy original.

He first took the title of “content strategist” in 1999. Since then, Scott has practiced content strategy and become a leading voice for the discipline.

When he’s not running his consultancy, Scott organizes content events, publishes and writes books and articles, and keynotes and speaks at industry conferences.

Scott and I talked about:

• the serendipitous origins of his moniker, “The Content Wrangler”
• the gap between the popularity of the term “content strategy” and its actual adoption
• how he got his title at his first “content strategist” job in 1999
• the pragmatic business lessons he learned early in his career managing technical content for a pharmaceutical company
• how streamlining content workflows can save companies literally tens of millions of dollars
• how learning to go beyond grammar and other writerly concerns can help you move up from content creator to content strategist
• how the rise of e-commerce helped move modular content engineering principles and practices out of the technical content world and into broader use on the web
• how increasingly atomized/modularized/componentized content has made smarter content systems necessary
• how to deal with the main challenge in content strategy management: people
• how technically complex systems can enhance and augment human creativity
• an “Aha!” moment he had at iFixit about how to measure the ROI of content and how that insight improved the content practice there
• how the pedantic lessons he learned in Mrs. White’s Language Arts class ruined his ability to write SEO copy
• the importance of recognizing and demonstrating content as a valuable business asset
• the accounting challenges of getting content value accounted for on a company’s balance sheet
• the work of Salim Ismael around “information enablement” – a business practice that enables businesses to grow exponentially
• the uneven distribution in enterprises of expertise around structuring and scaling content
• why you need to connect with a leader in your company, ideally in the C-suite, who is scared to death that their company could become the next Blockbuster
• how the analogy of the human body’s immune response can explain the rejection of content strategy and other innovative business practices
• how content strategists can benefit from the neuroscience lessons in Carmen Simon’s book, Impossible to Ignore
• the importance of expanding our skills sets in the practice of content strategy
• the even-more-important task of clarifying and articulating our profession, a project that looks to Scott like “a content hairball waiting to be detangled”

Scott’s Bio

Affectionately known as “The Content Wrangler,” Scott Abel is the Founder and President of The Content Wrangler, an international content strategy consultancy that specializes in helping content-heavy organizations become information-enabled. Scott helps business leaders understand the need to operationalize their content, with a focus on standardizing and improving the way they author, maintain, localize, publish, deliver, and archive their information assets. In turn, this helps them become capable of serving up the right information, in the right format and language, to the right people and machines, on-demand, for any business reason necessary.

The Content Wrangler hosts content industry events including Technical Documentation Roundup, Content Strategy Applied USA and Information Development World and has produced a series of ten books (2018), The Content Wrangler Series of Content Strategy Books, the first of which is “The Language of Content Strategy.”

A formal journalism education, combined with 10+ years as a technical writer, makes Scott a natural choice for content professionals and organizations who need the tools to write content once and use it often. Scott is also an internationally recognized content strategist and vibrant speaker. He’s frequently employed as a keynote presenter at content industry events like Content Marketing World, Localization World London, Adobe Day, O’Reilly Fluentconf, Localization World Singapore, Technical Communication UK and LavaCon.

Scott is a founding member of Content Management Professionals and writes regularly for content industry publications and and was listed by eContent magazine as one of the top 50 content marketing resources on Twitter.

Follow Scott on the Web

• Email: scott@thecontentwrangler.com
• Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/scottabel
• LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottabel/
• Website: www.thecontentwrangler.com

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

One of the biggest problems we have as content strategists and practitioners is conveying the value of our work to our clients, colleagues, and bosses. Scott Abel has been wrestling with this for more than 20 years. The bad news is that he hasn’t yet found the silver bullet that magically solves the problem. The good news is that he has a wealth of experience and a number of success stories and other insights that can help us all show our CEOs, managers, and co-workers exactly how valuable our content strategy work is.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi, everyone, welcome to episode number 81 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I’m really excited today to have with us, Scott Abel. You probably know him best as The Content Wrangler. But Scott, tell the folks a little bit more about how you came to be known as The Content Wrangler and a little bit about your background in content strategy.

Scott:
Thanks for having me on today’s show, Larry. I appreciate it. My moniker, The Content Wrangler was actually kind of accidental branding, if you will. At the time, I was dating somebody who is intimately involved in the interior design industry, and at that time they were going through a Western phase where everything in our house had that South, Western flair to it. And so when I was naming my company, happened to be about the same time, I guess I glommed on to this whole Western idea and used the word wrangler, thinking about that aligned nicely. And then content was what I was doing, so Content Wrangler became my brand.

Scott:
And as soon as I put it out, people would come to me and say, “I’m a wrangler, that’s what I do, at least I try.”

Larry:
That’s funny. I do a lot of volunteer community event organizing, and all you can do is wrangle. There’s no management, there’s no official stuff, it’s just wrangling. So I love that label. Well, Scott, you’ve been doing this content strategy stuff as long as anyone, more than 20 years, I think, and content strategy, at this point now we’re just super popular, everybody loves us. Every company has a content strategist and really well entrenched content strategy, right?

Scott:
We wish. I think that the popularity, if that’s the word that we want to start with, of the term content strategy far outstrips the reality of content strategy. I think a lot of us glommed onto it. I mean, I did, I worked for a consulting firm and I was placed as a technical writer, medical writer kind of role at a pharmaceutical company. And the consulting company was acting as the broker between the contractor, myself and the company, the pharmaceutical company. And they asked me, “What title would you like?” So I started looking at the job description of what I was doing, and I thought, “This seems like lot of strategy. Oh, I didn’t know there was anything called content strategy, it just seems strategic.”

Scott:
The things they were trying to do or to accomplish sales in the most appropriate and quick manner possible. And in a pharmaceutical company, content plays a major role in sales because if your drug can’t be approved, and the approval process is a content laden, then you can’t sell your drugs. So the quicker that you master the content problems you have and get your content in shape for regulators to be able to review and eventually, hopefully, approve it, the better. And so it really was an accident, calling myself a content strategist. And so I told the business card maker at the consulting company, “I would like to be a content strategist.” And so that’s actually when my first business card, I have a picture of it on my blog, is from 1999 and I was listed as content strategist.

Larry:
Can I grab a picture of that for the show notes on the website? I’d love to-

Scott:
You can do that.

Larry:
Great.

Scott:
The thing about though was, it wasn’t that I was so forward thinking or anything, I just really thought I’m doing content work and I’m trying to help them with a strategy to meet the goals that they are trying to plan. Nobody asked me like, “Hey, can you develop a voice and tone for our regulatory approval documents?” There was no website at that time for this kind of material, there wasn’t the kind of advanced technologies that we have today. So really everything was about creating content, saving it as a PDF and sending it on to the next person for whatever they needed to do with it.

Scott:
And that strategically, it doesn’t sound like a big deal, you just write a document and save as PDF, but it turns out that the pharmaceutical documents were around 80,000 pages in length and that no one human at the Food and Drug Administration, which would be the client of the content team at the pharmaceutical company, there was no one person that would read that 8,000-page document. It needed to be busted into smaller pieces. And each of those pieces routed to the individuals responsible reviewing each part of the document.

Scott:
And so there was a big strategy to it because the government, the Food and Drug Administration’s run by the United States government required the content to be submitted in a way that a computer could automatically burst it into little pieces and route those pieces to the right people. So right off the bat, we had a strategic problem. We had to make our system align with the governments. It wasn’t a choice, it was a definite, “You must do this, go figure it out.” So my job became more of a strategist, and I think that’s how I found my way to the content strategy, was just totally accidental.

Larry:
So you weren’t just writing an 80,000 page document, you had to structure it in a way that the government could do what they needed to do with it, and it had to be structured in a way that complied with their exact way of doing things. I know other people who called themselves content strategists in the late ’90s, but they were more like an agency work and doing, I don’t know, more like website creative stuff. This is like you were back there at the dawn of technical content strategy, it sounds like that.

Scott:
Yeah. And there was also a recognition amongst the client, which in this case was a pharmaceutical company that the writers who were basically called medical writers, they’re like tech writers for medicine, if you will, they were part of the problem. And I don’t mean that to say that the individual people were problematic, although people can be an issue when you’re trying to standardize something, but what had happened was this push towards standardization, I.e. the Food and Drug Administration requires our content in this way, it’s not option. We’re not asking you, you don’t get to share your opinion, no one cares. It’s a big, big, big drug.

Scott:
And this drug was a Blockbuster drug that later sold $40 million a day in this product. And they had some pretty good analytics and they knew that this drug was worth about that much per day. So every single day that the content that’s required to get this drug approved was not in the hands of the FDA, the pharma companies saw that as a potential $40 million loss. So what was happening was the “content people” were more concerned about smooth segues between paragraphs, which was not a requirement from the Food and Drug Administration. So they would spend three days trying to figure out how to make these two paragraphs job better.

Scott:
And then eventually, management would come and say, “Why is it taking so long?” And they say, “Oh, you just don’t understand, to write strategically, we have to make all these decisions.” And they were like, “Yeah, because it is a $40 million a day problem, because if it’s not, we’ll just get rid of all of you and find people who can help us make $40 million a day.” And so it became a role of… the content strategist became a role of trying to educate the writers, why grammar, punctuation, and their knowledge of content was important, but wasn’t the be-all, end-all, the be-all, end-all was, “How do I get that drug into the submission form, the format that those required by the regulator and how do I give it to the regulators so that they don’t have any problems with it so that they can review it as quickly as possible and approve it?”

Scott:
At the same time, the President of the United States at that time was Bill Clinton. He had previously signed an act allowing for electronic signatures, which meant that PDF documents could be the official source of truth. You didn’t no longer had to print out stuff and have people sign it, you could actually sign electronically. So they were trying to speed all this up and they were doing this because we we’re in the middle of the AIDS pandemic. And so for a pharmaceutical company to blame the lack of progress on lifesaving medication on the lack of a smooth segue between two paragraphs, wasn’t really a great way to explain away their problems.

Scott:
And so investors, the people who run the company and who are the power players in the pharmaceutical industry, they said, “Solve the problem or we’re not going to give you money to try to solve this medical disease.” So your content problem is preventing you from solving a disease problem. That needs to go away because in the public eye, pharmaceutical companies were raping people with really expensive products, they were making tons of money as they still do today, and it’s sometimes seen as too much money, kind of a capitalist, negative view of medicine.

Scott:
And so what the pharma company wanted to do was think, “How can we strategically fix this problem, allow the writers to give us the information we need and the way that humans can do that, but process that information in a way that the machines that the FDA can burst the content into small pieces and route it for proper review, send it back to us electronically much quicker.” And now think about that. If I were to teach that team how to save 10 days, shave 10 days off their submission, if that drug was approved, they would have 10 days more at $40 million a day. So we’re talking about a $400 million improvement if we shaved 10 days off the problem.

Scott:
And it was taking 110 days to submit the information from the time they looked at the drug interactions with the last human being in their clinical trial, from the time that the FDA to approve the drug, it was an average of 110 days, so if you could just take 10 days off that. So you can imagine when I went to the powers that be and said, “The writers are the problem, they’re over there whining about the smooth segues between paragraphs and something about a semi-colon at the end of every bulleted list item, stuff I just don’t understand when I explain the problem. We have this global pandemic, that’s killing people off like crazy. We have no cure and you want to get this drug approved. Somebody needs to make a priority that it’s the strategy toward the business goal that matters. It’s not important all these other things that the content people want to introduce.”

Scott:
So it made me the enemy of the state, if you will, and the content. And I didn’t come in with that knowledge, it just seemed logical given the circumstances to focus on the strategic nature of the problem and not worry about the content challenges that we were all familiar with.

Larry:
You know, just that one story that has so many things germane to like what we all struggle with every day in content strategy practice now, but there’s two things I really want to tease out and explore a little more. One., and I wonder if this maybe second, is just that the challenges of dealing with creative people like writers in a business context, there’s an ongoing, not conflict, but just different things there. But the bigger thing I think is that you were lucky enough, I think to start out in a place where the value of the content was so clear, “Look, you guys, 10 days, that’s almost half a billion dollars, let’s get this together.”

Larry:
Has that lesson about the value of content, I mean, that an extreme example of it, but have you found similar stories like that in your career where it was so clear that the value of getting the content done and done right was just that clear?

Scott:
Yeah. This was the first time that I ever went to an interview, at the time, my mother had bought me a leather portfolio, a nice little leather satchel that’s oversized that we used to store all of our writing samples in. And we would bring them to our potential clients and say, “Look, all the things I’ve printed, they have my name on it. Look, I did all this, you should hire me.” And the very first thing that this particular job said was, “That’s all nice. We expect you to be able to do that. You can’t string a couple of sentences together into a paragraph without sounding like an idiot, you shouldn’t be here anyway. Here’s our big problem.”

Scott:
But they knew the problem. They knew what their problem was, but they did not have an engineering approach to the way that they manufactured content, and they needed to have the content be assembled in the same way that their pharmaceuticals were assembled, in a factory environment with just in-time delivery with minimal steps, with automation leading the way, but they just didn’t know how to do it because it was 1999, and there was really not that much guidance. And so I was just very fortunate to land on this project and also to land with the person who we now dubbed the, Christina Howard’s dubbed the mother of content strategy, and Rockley.

Scott:
She was the guiding force on this particular project and had been working at Apple, trying to solve similar kinds of content engineering problems. And she actually implemented this thing called the unified content strategy, which allowed the pharmaceutical company to produce content in one place and push it to multiple places, including to the FDA and the way that they needed it to be. The problem with the people, as you mentioned, were that they had been working as writers for a long time. So they had a preconceived notion of what it means to be a writer or a content person.

Scott:
And so when they realized that they were working on a strategically important project, they wanted to change their name from whatever medical writer to content strategist. It sounded better, Scott has it on his name badge, his business card, why can’t we have it too? But the problem was, they were so ingrained in what their value proposition was, spelling, grammar, linguistic mastery, punctuation, tone of voice, that they were unable to see the value of putting that in the back seat and trying to engineer a creative solution to the actual problem that the business had, which was the production of content was treated as a creative endeavor, as opposed to a manufacturing endeavor.

Scott:
And once I had that aha, that there were companies that wanted content manufactured, I realized, “This is how you can slip into this content strategy niche, and fill a void that is understood by some.” Of course, that’s why content strategy is not universally deployed in the same way, because it’s not universally understood. And the strategic nature is often overlooked or just tossed in there as an aside. It’s not really the problem they’re trying to solve.

Larry:
Right. And we talked about that when we had a little chat a week or two ago about this, and that’s again, it’s comes back to that, showing that value in that… Bbecause the stuff you were doing back then, this very modularized assemblable, kind of assembly line, amenable, manufacturable content, it seem like it was not a hard sell in that situation, especially a pharmaceutical company saw the value in doing that. Why have we had such a hard time as a larger profession selling? Because that’s a really great use case and probably the model sales scenario to get content strategy in there.

Larry:
Why do you think it’s been so hard to get people with a less urgent problem with that, to see the benefits of what we do?

Scott:
I think it might just be because we just took the normal paradigm, the pre-web paradigm of publishing content in a print form using the page analogy, and we just moved it to the web. And so what happened was at this time in 1999, if I needed some content for my team to be published to the intranet at the pharmaceutical company, I had to go to a person called the webmaster. And the webmaster would lecture me about, “Oh, how overwhelmed they are with all these requests for people to change stuff. Can’t you just write it right the first time?” And so the web wasn’t as modular as it is today.

Scott:
And what happened was e-commerce came along and they realized that, “We can’t wait for a webmaster to change the product page. We need to sell our products today and the products need to be modular so we can serve up the information in different ways, on different webpages and different configurations. And we can’t have one person doing it all or one team because it becomes a bottleneck.” And that’s what the medical writers were. The medical writers were a bottleneck because they were presented with this big empty canvas, much like a webmaster, “Here, this is the document, the end document that you need to create.” And then they had all these blank pages and they needed to fill them with content.

Scott:
And so of course, because there was a limited structure, just kind of the headings, if you will, everything else in between was up to the writer, which meant that there was never a model they were writing to. And you know, if you’re going to assemble a product, you’re going to assemble a product to a model, to a design. And so we started thinking about, “How could we incorporate design into the thinking about content?” And once we recognized that e-commerce might not have had the business driver that the pharmaceutical companies did, but they did have the sales driver. We recognized that there was a way to make some content people have to do content strategy in a modular way

Scott:
And that was by modularizing all the e-commerce components, which today you would never build an online catalog of millions of products and just let writers write whatever they want. Some people, the project . . . there, some people who decided the product description is a bulleted list. You just wouldn’t see that, you would see Amazon and their consistent formatting. You know what to expect every time you land on a page, are created in a modular structured way, because it’s the same model every time, while there may be components of content that are absent from one deliverable compared to another, that modularization made that absence or presence of the content possible because it made it rule based.

Scott:
It meant that we could say to the computer, “When you see this module in this situation, do this.” And that was the skill of the writer, the writer would try to figure that out in the old day and they would write all the stuff in the content. So a content creator would write all the instructions for how to do something and embedded in those instructions were lots of other miniature instructions, which could have been, and should have been modularized themselves. Once we started to atomize that content and modularize it, componentize it, we recognized that there have to be rules and a strategy for governing any of that, so that machines could deploy the rules on our behalf and ostensibly make those improvements that the clients needed, which were usually speed, time to market and sales.

Larry:
Right. The way you described that, it sounds like, did you learn any lessons in dealing with the writers at the pharma company, the major work when you started working with e-commerce folks, any easier, because I know writers want to have… There’s still plenty of opportunity to express yourself in writing like product description or all the stuff around e-commerce products. Were those similar problems and did lessons from one carry over into the next project or?

Scott:
They did, but people, as I like to say, are usually the problem. It’s not that all people are the problem, but on any given team, you’re going to find some naysayers or people who aren’t exactly sure, for whatever reason, by the way, sometimes very valid reasons, that they want to go along with this new way of doing things. After all, if they’re the number one pharmaceutical company and they’re working for the number one pharmaceutical company, and now I want to make these changes, “Why? We’re already number one, we are kicking butt, we sell lots of products. Clearly, what we did before worked just fine, why do I have to change?”

Scott:
So, I think the big lesson was, humans are creatures of habit and working for a science company, allowed scientists to explain that to us, luckily at a pharmaceutical company, there are some neuroscientists. So they would come down and explain like, “This is unusual. You could be upset with insert writer name here.” But it’s not that person’s problem, it’s a problem with people. People have been taught that their value is a certain way and that if they repeat the certain process, they’ll be rewarded over the time with the career and the eventual retirement, so on and so forth.

Scott:
So any little shake up along the way, created a problem. And since webmasters and agencies were the original owners of a lot of e-commerce websites, they didn’t want to change either because they’re human. And so I think that the content strategy people came in and what happened was, it just became co-opted by a bunch of people who do writing, copywriters and creative people. And it really should have been divided in multiple disciplines where there should be content engineers and content architects and terminologist and all different roles, which today now do exist, but at the time, they were pretty much unheard of.

Larry:
The way you just described that, it’s like two of those top level roles are like, you’re essentially in a lot of content strategy work, you’re really like a change management consultant and an organizational development person. But most people come to it from a writing career and maybe aren’t… I think we’ve done good jobs in a lot of places, but it seems almost everybody I can think of in content strategy, like 90% of the people anyway have come from writing or other creative backgrounds where so much of the actual work is this people’s stuff. And it’s about those issues of managing people and managing organizational change.

Larry:
I guess, do you have any advice or have you seen success stories of people who’ve made that transition more easily than others? Or do you have any advice about how to make that transition from being a content creator to a content strategy, genuinely strategic mindset?

Scott:
First, I would say there’s nothing wrong with being creative. We are not trying to do creativity, we’re trying to enhance it like augmenting human beings potential, making us quicker, leaner, meaner producers, by vectorizing and standardizing all the things that we do. And that means being able to think more creatively about solving the problem that you’re trying to solve. It also means that if you are in a situation where scaling matters, or scale the amount of information that is going to be exchanged between yourself and the people that you’re trying to communicate to is going to grow, especially at an exponential rate, it just doesn’t make sense to rely on the creativity of human beings, because we’re not fast enough, we need automation to help us.

Scott:
So I think my big aha was when a content person sees that their value can be augmented by machines and structure and rules and governance and things of that nature, instead of seeing it as crippling or as handicapping their creativity, they’re able to become a new role, maybe they become a content orchestrator or a content choreographer. They start to figure out, how will the content help the person accomplish their goal throughout their life cycle? And a great example is going to the airport. Going to the airport involves lots of different content touch points, each one different.

Scott:
You have to buy a ticket, you have to shop for a ticket and buy it, you might have to print it and transport it on a mobile device. When you get to the airport, you may have to show a physical thing like a passport, you may have to scan a thing like a driver’s license or a QR code. You may have to swipe the credit card, you may have to take a pencil, mind you, and fill out a form for your customs declaration. And you may have to verbally say something to another human being in order to get to the next step. All of those content pieces have to be choreographed for you to have a smooth entry into the airport and make it to your plane in order to get on your destination.

Scott:
And all of those different things involve content, and yet, there is no struggle with tone and voice when I’m trying to check into the airport, I’m not worried about the Oxford comma. These are all these busy things that people talk about that don’t have anything to do with that particular situation. So I think for people who are content purists and they love the creativity, they have to figure out how could they deploy their creativity in a way that solves the problem the organization really has.

Scott:
And sure, they may have some crappy content by the way that needs fixed, and that’s important too, but along the way, I think we have to figure out how do we weave ourselves in to those situations, to where we’re not just fixing up or putting Band-Aids on bad content, but instead helping an organization learn how to produce content at scale that’s high quality, that serves their needs, and that also allows them to grow in the future when things inevitably will change.

Larry:
Yeah. And the way you just said that out, it’s like, the thing that automation and scalability does, it really increases the impact of your writing. And it seems like writers are all smart, they’re going to… it’s probably not hard to explain that to people, but have you had good luck like showing writers, like, “Hey, if you just do things a little bit differently, worry less about the Oxford comma and more about content structure and metadata, things like that, and your words are going to have way more impact on the world.” Has that been like a selling point for you, like a career coach or something in that kind of way?

Scott:
The aha moment that I had on one team was when I showed one of my client’s writing teams, a company called iFixit, which created an online repair center, basically the world’s biggest and largest free online repair manual. At first, it was designed for iPhones and Apple products, because there were so many millions being sold and at such a high clip, and there weren’t enough people to repair them, there weren’t enough Apple authorized retailers to do it. And what happened at this company, iFixit was, they were able to create a topic, how to fix the screen on my iPhone 1, and publish that.

Scott:
And that URL also contained links to e-commerce things, like the parts and the tools that you would need in order to make that repair. So they publish the repair, they know how much it costs to write that content, they pay the writer to do it, they host it on the web, they had to take a photo or two. They knew their cost, but they also knew the ROI. If it costs them $500 to make that page and they sold 37,000 kits on how to fix the iPhone one screen. And let’s say they made $300,000 off that, they could determine the ROI, $500 cost, $300,000 profit.

Scott:
And they started ranking the writers by who was actually helping them sell, people started adjusting their skills to help the company sell stuff instead of worrying about whether or not they had written the bulleted list and the way that their fifth grade teacher taught them to.

Larry:
Interesting. I love that. I just want to go a little bit down a personal rabbit hole. I’ve studied a lot of ergonomics and old management history like Frederick Taylor and The Principles Of Scientific Management, and which was the foundation of all of modern, 20th century management, which is all about productivity increases on assembly lines and in factories and stuff. But nowadays, we have this cognitive economy where people are much more likely to be rewarded by, well, like what Dan Pink in his book, Drive, calls autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Larry:
So I’m just curious, it seems like there’s some reconciliation to be done between like the obvious benefits of assembly lining your… well, not assembly lining, but making it like a manufacturing model, like you were saying, like just in time, and iterative, and agile, and all those things. While at the same time, and this is related to the proclivities of a creative, to honor their desire for mastery, their need for purpose, and their need for… Does that make sense?

Scott:
It totally makes sense, but that’s not my job. I’m not there to babysit these people and hold their hands. If the HR people want to declare that this is a fair workplace where everyone gets a chance and you can just sit there and not be productive because we don’t want to hurt your feelings or whatever dumb rule they come up with, that’s fine. But think about it differently, let’s say I’m building the United States Olympic team for skiing I just dropped in a whole bunch of skiers. They go, “Here’s your ski, you make it work. Here’s all the skiers we have, you make the team work.” I’m cutting the people out that can’t cut it. The people that aren’t able to win the medals aren’t going to be on the team. The people who can’t follow the rules, who don’t show up on time, who don’t do the things I ask them to do will not be on the team.

Scott:
And I found that in many companies, there’s this hand-holding thing where they say, “We don’t want to dissuade them because they feel like… ” They feel. They feel, or they believe something. And I’m like, “Okay, but that’s not science and that’s not going to help you with your ROI problem.” So I feel like that’s an important thing to be empathetic and compassionate and aware of people and their needs, but I also think that’s not a business decision, a business decision is, you bring the right people in, to solve the right problem, in the right amount of time. And if you fail to do that, then you’re a poor leader.

Scott:
That means that you’re not a great leader. You might have great writers on your team, but you’re not leading the team toward the success that the company requires. And so sometimes, we have to make decisions to get rid of people who hang on too much to what their value is. I blame Mrs. White, by the way, for all these problems. Mrs. White, for the audience members listening today, was my fifth grade grammar teacher. She taught a class at the time called language arts, and that was in the 1970s.

Scott:
Language arts, is important to know, was not language science. Language arts was taught to students in the United States during the same time period that there was this popular television show on network TV called Star Trek, where a woman was a communication officer named O’Hara would touch an item in her ear and talk to people far away. There were medical staff members who would land on other planets with this black device they would hold in their hand, and they would use their fingers to manipulate information on a glass screen and get information, much like the iPad. And they all carried around this little thing called the… Oh, I can’t remember what it’s called now, the transcoder or something. But you flip it up and it was like a little Nokia phone.

Scott:
At that time period, those things were all science fiction. Nobody ever thought you would touch a thing in your ear and talk to people on another side of the world. Nobody ever thought there would be an iPad or an iPhone or any of these things, they were all science fiction. So the rules that we were taught back then were rules like this: Don’t ever use the same word more than two or three times in the first couple of paragraphs. First, that ambiguous rule isn’t even a rule because it’s two or three times, depending on who’s teaching the rule, in two or three paragraphs, that’s not very specific.

Scott:
They taught us those because in language arts, the next chapter in your book was going to be introduction to the thesaurus. So they were going to teach us about synonyms. So they taught us to be creative and use synonym in order to use thesaurus. Now, move ahead, you have Google rewarding you for using the same word. Using a different word every time means it’s not the same thing. So if you need to rank for search engine optimization, you have to use the same words precisely and strategically. Mrs. White never knew that, so she taught me rules that were irrelevant for the world in which I live, in which I’m trying to function, and so I’ve had to adjust her rules and forgive her because she couldn’t have known.

Scott:
But today, I think if she were alive, she would be first shocked that there was an iPhone, an iPad and Bluetooth. Definitely she would also want to teach us different rules. She would teach us rules about structure and consistency and knowledge graphs and things that are part and parcel to the world that we live in today. And I think content strategists, that’s the big problem. We were taught by people who were 20 or 30 years older than us rules that they were taught by people 20 or 30 years older than them, and they’ve just never been filtered out as what’s important and what’s not. And the content part keeps careening back to grammar, punctuation, linguistics, and tone of voice, which are all critical, but not content strategy.

Larry:
No. And you just listed a number of like important characteristics of modern content, that it’s modular and it has metadata attached to it. There’s other value besides the content itself in it. I’d love to circle back to that because I think that if we’re to have success as a profession, really helping people see and understand the value of content, like media companies, a movie production studio, that’s their value is a bunch of movies in a vault someplace. And you can argue that every major or decent-sized enterprise now is a publisher or a multimedia producer or whatever, creating a lot of stuff.

Larry:
I’m thinking, we’re always trying to get as high, up to the C suite or someplace, is content value? Are we going to show up in the balance sheet of a company? That’s where it seems like we could get some of this attention, some of the bigger attention that we need.

Scott:
I think you have a say. I have been one to say, and I’ve been quoted as saying many times that content is a business asset worthy of being efficiently and effectively managed in just the same way that you would the money in your 401(k) account for all of your employees. It wouldn’t be acceptable if you said to one of your employees who wanted to know what the balance of their 401(k) was, “I don’t know, Trisha, who used to work here used to store all this stuff in a file folder. We can’t find it on the LAN, so we didn’t know what the balance of your 401(k) is.” That would just not be acceptable. The same problem we have in a manufacturing environment, we have components that are used to assemble products that we then want to sell. We need to know how many pieces of each component we need in order to make how many products we want to sell.

Scott:
And in order to do that, we have to manage the inventory. We have to know how many, how much, when. All of these just-in-time things that require us to alter the way we think if we want to be able to do it at scale. And I think that’s the value for content people who want to see themselves valued, you have to find a company or organization that needs their content to perform in order for them to scale, in order for them to grow, in order for them to prosper. And so content, putting it on the balance sheet to me was a no brainer. I’m a very straightforward person. How hard can it be? Come up with a variance and fill on the spreadsheet, and then adjust the total.

Scott:
Well, it turns out that that might be Scott’s interesting idea, but people who are much more close to accounting and criminal law regarding financial institutions will tell you that, “Okay, so Scott, let’s say your company is not doing very well this year, you’ve got a $40 million deficit, and the only way that you can figure out how to solve it is to put some more money on the balance sheet.” So you go, “Good thing we have that $50 million worth of content, now we’re $10 million a month.” That’s not how that works and there’s no-

Larry:
Well, wait. But I totally hear you there, but there is this notion of, goodwill is a thing that shows up on balance sheet. Then there is other intellectual property that shows up as being of value. What’s the problem with content? Why are we having such a hard time working our way into the balance sheet?

Scott:
Well, maybe that’s the problem, is that the place that we originally jumped to is the balance sheet. And so people who manage the balance sheet, and I can’t remember, I’m probably going to say this incorrectly, but I want to say there’s some accounting board of standards or some standards organization for accounting people.

Larry:
Yeah, GAAP, G-A-A-P, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles is the overarching-

Scott:
And there’s some kind of rationale for why my idea doesn’t exactly align. But I think what you’re trying to get at is that content does have a value, so how do we determine that? So here’s the best way I’ve found, I inadvertently had hired somebody to speak at a conference that I own called The Intelligent Content Conference, with Ann Rockley, The Mother Of Content Strategy. We ran this event in the ’90s and later sold it to The Content Marketing Institute. But before we did, we had a guest featured speaker named Salim Ismail, who at the time was working to help some companies innovate content and use syndication to build solutions.

Scott:
So he would try to take existing content, mash it together in a mashup using if-this-then-that logic to create a new deliverable, a new set of content, if you will. Something like, whenever you see an article in The New York Times that has the word Challenger Shuttle in it and it also includes a picture, post that picture to Facebook or whatever, so that you can create all these new ways of thinking. Salim later went on to found Singularity University. It’s a Silicon Valley business school that does not exist to give you a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts or whatever.

Scott:
Only for one purpose does it exist, and that’s to create leaders of companies that can grow their company exponentially. It turns out that Salim and the people who study exponential growth organizations have identified 11 characteristics that companies that grow exponentially share. And one of them is the word information enabled, they are information enabled. And so now we have leaders of companies that are afraid of being disrupted by an innovative competition, as somebody who will sneak in and Uber the industry, And all of a sudden, they’re not number one anymore, they’re going out of business. They’re the new Kodak or the new Blockbuster.

Scott:
And these leaders don’t want to be that, they don’t want to go down with the ship. So they say to these consultants that want to help companies grow exponentially, “How do I become a company that’s information enabled?” So right now, we have C-level executives. They’re not asking for content strategy, because that doesn’t matter, that’s just some words we made up. What they’re asking is, “How do I grow my company and empower the content that I pay for and put it to work in any way I need to at any time, for any reason, right now, on demand? How do I do that?” And so that’s a much more complicated problem. It involves content logistics, content choreography, content engineering, content information management, information architecture, all the things that we’ve been talking about.

Scott:
But it also involves good quality content that’s written well and terminology management, and all the things that creative people want too, but they’re all going to be brought together in a way that’s meaningful for business leaders. And so I think what we have to do is figure out, how do we position ourselves to be the experts that they come to and ask. So here’s the question, if a CEO asked most of my content strategy brands, “Can you help us grow our company exponentially?” They wouldn’t know what the hell that he’s saying. Where does tone of voice fit in that? Where does brand strategy? It’s like, okay, that’s not the problem they’re trying to solve. They’re all things that have to be done, but that’s not their problem.

Scott:
So I think we have to align ourselves with organizations that are trying to change, that are trying to innovate, that are trying to automate. And we have to be able to take the lessons that we might’ve learned on a really small content project that’s only one department in some big company, and scale it up, and help a company be able to do it across the board. And increasingly, consumers expect this. So it’s not even an option really for our discipline. There’s no requirement that you survive in evolution, content strategy doesn’t have to be here three years from now, it could totally be killed off and it wouldn’t hurt anybody, but two or three people.

Scott:
And so, we want to find the value proposition, and I think that’s our goal, How do we slide ourselves into organizations that are trying to grow exponentially and share the lessons that we learned on smaller projects and be able to scale them up? If you could do that, you will be seen as part of the team that saves the company and helps it survive and thrive, which are really the two big things that CEOs care about. They want to keep the company wherever it is if they’re in good turf, and they usually are hired to improve the company in one way or another. No one’s ever hired to make a content better, this is nonsense people dream up that’s not, that’s not true. You can’t even get that in a CEO contract.

Larry:
Are there any examples of companies that are doing that, or that are on a track to do that to have that capability of exponential growth driven by content and good content practices?

Scott:
I would love to be able to say there’s one that’s like the Nirvana one that you could just show that does everything perfectly. But even the guy I mentioned earlier, Salim Ismail, and that he can invoke to believe in exponential growth and who study it and now sell services and teach other people how to do it, they have a problem defining the term information enabled. Much like many of our content friends, if you ask somebody, and I’ve done this, if you ask somebody, “Define the word taxonomy,” they will inadvertently start telling you why you need a taxonomy. That’s not the definition. So what does information enabled mean? What is information enablement? How do you get there? And it’s a whole bunch of things.

Scott:
And so you could say that a company like Uber, information enabled the taxi cab industry by using sensors, so there’s a piece of hardware, phones, there’s another piece of hardware, the internet of things, there’s big, huge piece of network of hardware, and all of the data points along the way. But information travels along with each one of those little points from the person who requests the car, from the availability of the driver to the price at the time, based on the demand. All these things are calculated based on if this, then that. If Scott wants a car and he’s here and there’s a car over there, Scott got this message. But we’re not waiting for some content people to type up that message, that message was written in advance.

Scott:
It has to be modularized, it has to be conditionalized, it has to be translated and localized into different languages. It has to be made accessible to people who are blind. There’s so many different things that we can’t just piece meal our way out of this by slapping Band-Aids on everything.

Larry:
Yeah. And all those things you just mentioned, boy, you better have that automated or else you’re going to have like a room full or a warehouse full of translators and accessibility experts.

Scott:
Yeah. Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute with Uber. So Uber may be very good at delivering the car, which is their main promise, but now Uber does delivery of food, Uber also hires people. I don’t know that their HR team can put together a candidate offer letter in 20 minutes or less, maybe it takes them three or four days. Maybe that’s why it’s difficult for them to hire all the right people they need because they’re not using the same techniques and strategies that one department of Uber uses to make revenue, they’re not borrowing those and using them in another department.

Scott:
For example, technical communicators at software companies often create modular content and they push it to multiple channels, so they’re ready for omnichannel. They’re ready for a multichannel because they designed all their content to be that way from the get go. They knew that they couldn’t predict all the different outcomes, all the different output formats they would need in the future. And yet, there could be a department right next door to them, let’s say, the e-learning team, who’s still doing it the hard way, who’s still trying to create one deliverable at a time with a team of people using the traditional methods.

Scott:
And they toss then, “Now we’re agile, therefore we’re faster.” But that’s not the same thing as being able to scale, having a scrum agile development mindset gets you closer to just in time delivery, but it doesn’t do the delivery for you. You still have to re-architect and re-imagine your content ecosystem. You have to be able to replace the tools and the processes and the standards to make it more future thinking, forward looking. And you need to be able to scale it across an organization, which is a challenge because of all the different people, which originally my complaint to begin with.

Larry:
Well, and in that example you just gave of even two departments that maybe share a cubicle farm are on different pages in terms of like their sophistication about this. I guess, how important is it to align this stuff? Because the customer doesn’t care how you organize internally or who’s doing what, they just hope and expect for at least similar sounding content across every way that they interact with you. But if you have those varying degrees and levels of maturity of practice inside, how are people like… because there’s a lot of successful companies out there, they must be at least putting some really serious Band-Aids on this or something.

Scott:
Almost everything is a serious Band-Aid, to be honest, I’d love to work with Kevin Nichols, who’s a content strategist, he used to be the content strategy director for SapientNitro which was an agency at the time, now, it’s been merged with a bigger agency and Kevin has his own company called AvenueCX. Kevin wrote a book called Enterprise Content Strategy: A Handbook for my company and XML Press. And that book sells really well, and people love it who are in the content industry, but there’s not very many people who read that book and then implemented an enterprise content strategy. And it’s because silos goon, people get in the way, politics get in the way.

Scott:
That’s why I argued earlier that you need a leader who’s already afraid that an innovative disruptor is going to kick the shit out of them. And that leader doesn’t want to disappear and go down as the leader who lost, they want to be victorious, they want to accomplish their goals. So if we can figure out how to align ourselves with them, we may stand a chance of defining information enablement and helping all the various disciplines that you pointed out, the learning people, the tech comm people, the UX people, the content designers, the graphic designers. We all are taught by different people, we’re taught different rules, we’re taught incongruencies and those things, then we doubled down on that.

Scott:
That’s our career, you’re not like us. So it’s okay that we’re different. It’s like, “No, it’s not okay that we’re different because I can’t put a bunch of different content together and produce a seamless content experience, because it seems like a bunch of different people slapped it together.” And that’s not acceptable to them.

Larry:
You’ve talked in the past and I think you alluded earlier to Blockbuster and the way they were just crushed by Netflix and other competitors. I don’t know if the content strategy could have saved them, but there must be a lot of companies for whom having a good enterprise content strategy in place could save them a lot of grief. And I think we too often pitch it as a benefit, like to what you were just saying, and I think people have more fear of failure and disappointment than they are of like incremental gains. And so if you can put the fear of God in him about like, “Well, if you want to be the next Blockbuster, great, but if not, here, adopt our content strategy.” Is there an argument like that we can make to any?

Scott:
There is, I don’t know that we’re the people to make the argument. I’m not saying we’re not, but somebody has to make it. One of the examples that the exponential business growth consulting industry and the folks from singularity university and Salim Ismail, what they learned when they studied companies that are successful that grow exponentially, is that they also understand that their company or their organization is very similar to the human body. And what I mean by that is, the human body has an immune system that protects it from outside. When an outsider enters the body, white cells approach and they try to discern, “Is this thing a friend or is this thing a foe?”

Scott:
If it’s a foe, the body will try to kill it because it’s not good for the immune system, it could be damaging to the body, it’s its job. If it’s good, it will leaThe Content Wranglerve it and let it coexist. Well, it turns out that there’s a similar thing that happens when content people or other people with different ideas come to a company and they go to a team and they say to the team, “Here’s what we need to do. In order to not be like Blockbuster, we should be like X, Y, Z company and do this.” And what happens is the people on the team are like white cells and they run up to the idea and they go, “Is this a friend or is this a foe?”

Scott:
Now, if it’s a foe, they won’t necessarily try to kill it like an immune system will, but they probably won’t be first to help you. They won’t go out of their way, they’re not active participants. They don’t have their heart in it, because it’s not really what they want to do. So if you go back to a medical example, I had cancer earlier. When you have cancer, you sometimes have to have something called chemotherapy or immunotherapy. The job of that immunotherapy is to kill the invading force. It’s not to be nice to it and try to convince it to go along with the program, because the outcome is, if you fail, you die.

Scott:
So the argument with these leaders is that if you go about this meandering, trying to put Band-Aids on stuff and not hurting people’s feelings and blah, blah, blah, instead, you don’t go and kill the problem, you’re going to become the next Blockbuster because the startup doesn’t have any of that legacy nonsense to hurdle. They’re starting from scratch with a new idea and a new concept that some people will think is stupid and maybe they’ll fail, but they don’t have any of the risks that you have as an established company. So the established leaders are the ones that I think can drive these changes, but they have to be motivated by fear and they have to be willing to kill the bad things and knock them out of the way in order to be successful, or, you see what happen.

Larry:
And the way you just said that out, you’re reminding me something like 90 plus percent of all startups fail. So there’s probably like, “Oh yeah, great. They’re coming after me, good luck with that pal.” And they’re not actually that worried. Yeah, interesting.

Scott:
I say, who they think is coming after them, Larry, for example, a manufacturer of a product like Procter & Gamble or a big manufacturer of electronics, they may not have ever thought of a company that sells products or distributes products as their competition in the past. But today, we have Amazon who by the way, knows how many of Procter & Gamble products are sold because they’re probably selling most of them. And now they’re saying, “Can’t we apply the same lessons that we’ve done with Amazon online to a factory and just make our own products.”

Scott:
All of a sudden, you’ve got a competitor that can not only figure out how to reverse engineer your shampoo, but they can find somebody else to make it and they can sell it and deliver it. So they’re not only going to come in and eat up your market, they’re going to eat up all your partners too. So this is the fear that the leaders that get it, they know, they know that their days are numbered and that lack of change is the thing that they cannot do. They need to change, but fear of change gets in the way, again, it’s the people.

Larry:
I think that’s come up in every single of my 81 episodes, is that this is mostly people concern and maybe we should all just go get psychology degrees, then come back, regroup the whole discipline.

Scott:
I think there’s some good thoughts behind that. You know the study of neuroscience, there are neuroscientists who study the impact of content on the human brain. One of those neuroscientists is named Dr. Carmen Simon. She wrote a book called Impossible to Ignore, which is loaded with secrets for content people who fancy themselves as smart enough to give advice to other people about content. What you will find is that some of the decisions that we make aren’t scientifically valid, they’re just things that we did that seemed to work okay, didn’t kill anybody, we didn’t get fired, so therefore, they must be good, which isn’t the same thing as measuring which one’s best.

Scott:
And so sometimes, the decisions that we make, where we put words on a page, for example, might help sell more products, but it also might alienate 40% of the audience. And now we can monitor them, we can watch their brain patterns, we can have an EKG and EEG and a temperature, pulse, and eye-tracking goggles, all on a human being and watch their behavior and their brain activity as we expose them to our brilliant content strategy deliverables. And it turns out that we’re not always right. So I think we could learn a lot from other disciplines and they could learn a lot from us.

Larry:
I totally agree. That’s like a whole… Scott, I usually try to keep these around half hour and we’re coming up on an hour, and I could go another five hours. But I think I’d love to start to try to wrap things up a little bit. Let me ask you first, is there anything that’s come up in this conversation or just on your mind that you want to make sure we get to before we wrap up?

Scott:
Yeah. I want people to understand that there’s nothing wrong with a person, an individual saying, “I really like writing and I fancy myself a strategic writer, and I’m going to call myself a content strategist or whatever,” but it shouldn’t be limited to that. This role should encompass others. It should include people who are color theorists and neuroscientists, and usability specialists, accessibility specialists, inclusive design folks, graphic design folks, augmented reality, all kinds of new things are coming into the equation. And we won’t always be called upon for our grammar prowess and our writing prowess.

Scott:
But I want people to understand that I’m not dismissing any of that, I’m just saying, that might not be enough to put your whole career on and expect that 20 years from now, we can come back and do a podcast about this again, and have the issues be the same, there are going to be totally different issues. And if we prepare ourselves and we think about scaling and we think about information enablement, we think about content choreography, those are bigger buckets that we fit in that don’t trap us in the glorified copywriter bucket.

Larry:
Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s right. And I think we’re at least crawling out of that bucket a little bit now, the glorified copywriter bucket, but we still have a lot of stuff to do, it sounds like.

Scott:
We are. I think that the challenge is, we also don’t really have an advocate or an evangelist for our industry has such, kind of a trade association that’s watching out for things, like the government defines what a concept strategist is and the National Bureau of Labor Statistics, there’s a job title and a description and it tells people what that job is and what people get paid, and who does that job, and what skills you need. There’s not really been a clear definition of any of that. And so you could see this by just searching Indeed or the job search engine of your choice for the words, content strategists, and then read all the different job descriptions. It’s a mishmash, it’s like a content hairball waiting to be detangled.

Larry:
I hate to do this, but I want to end with the content hairball as the enduring… No, I don’t want that to be the enduring image of this conversation, but I think you’re definitely right. And that’s a whole other conversation is like correctly labeling ourselves and portraying all that to the rest of the world. But well, thanks so much, Scott, it’s been a super-fun conversation and I can think of 20 more threads I want to explore. Can we come back and talk some more somewhere down the road?

Scott:
We can, and we can also invite some other folks to come and talk. I name-dropped a few folks that are not necessarily superstars in our content strategy ecosystem, but they’re all people that could help feed us the information that we need to become better at what we do, and to be able to evangelize our discipline in new and innovative ways. And I’d be happy to do that.

Larry:
Absolutely. I’ve been thinking about putting like some panels or something like that together, so we should definitely revisit that conversation.

Scott:
I look forward it.

Larry:
Yeah. Well, thanks so much, Scott. Super fun talking with you.

Scott:
Thanks a lot, Larry. I appreciate it.