Hilary Marsh: Digital Councils for Better Content Strategy – Episode 194

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Organizations of all types and sizes struggle with presenting their content so that it both makes sense to readers and aligns with the organization’s intentions.

Hilary Marsh introduced the concept of the “digital council” to address this issue. Councils can take many forms, depending on the nature of the organization, but the intent always is to glue back together content that has been disconnected by organizational silos.

We talked about:

• her background as a content strategy practitioner and community builder
• the focus of her practice on professional-association industry
• her assertion that “content is the way our work is manifested in the world”
• the urgent challenge of aligning an organization’s content when it’s created and shared by a variety of people and roles
• the three kinds of “glue” she sees that can reconnect disconnected content:
  1. taxonomy
  2. internal communications
  3. groups of people who come together to make decisions
• how content strategy is like conducting an orchestration
• her inclusion of content people at all levels in an organization in content strategy
• the framework she uses to help organization prioritize content initiatives
• how she sorts out the work of subject matter experts versus the work of content practitioners
• the role of internal communications in her content strategy work
• the quizzical looks she gets when she talks about content strategy as an HR practice
• the enduring value of an association content research study that she conducted several years ago with Carrie Hane and Dina Lewis
• the many ways in which a digital council can manifest in an organization

Hilary’s bio

Hilary Marsh is president and chief strategist of Content Company, a content and digital strategy consultancy. She helps content-rich organizations get better results from their content by improving their practices (and their people, processes, and cultures). Content Company’s clients include Allstate, American Bar Association, American College of Cardiology, American Medical Association, Estée Lauder, Endocrine Society, Fulbright Teachers Exchange, Institute of Food Technologists, Intuit, NORC at the University of Chicago, Syracuse University, and Walgreens.

Hilary has been a leading content strategy practitioner, mentor, and professor since 1999. She has taught at Kent State University, the University of Strasbourg, Society for Technical Communications, and University of Applied Sciences FH Joanneum in Graz, Austria. She also offers a public online content strategy course at Firehead training.

Hilary has been published, quoted, and her work cited in major industry publications including Content Strategy for the Web, Content Strategy at Work, and reports from Prophet/Altimeter, and she is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences including Confab, the IA Conference, Lavacon, and the STC Summit, as well as numerous global meetups. Hilary is a co-author of a major study about content strategy adoption and maturity in associations. She leads the 1,700-member international content strategy community at content-strategy.com.

Connect with Hilary online

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• hilary at contentcompany dot biz
• Content-Strategy.com community

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 194. Even the smallest organization has several different people and business units communicating with its customers and members. Orchestrating a modern organization’s content so that it makes sense to everyone who reads it and that it aligns to the organization’s intent is an urgent challenge. Hilary Marsh introduced the idea of “content councils” to address this issue, to glue back together content disconnected by organizational silos.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 194 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Hilary Marsh. Hilary has been doing content strategy as long as anybody I know and has had the title, I think, as long as anyone I know. So she’s a true veteran and a real leader and guidepost for the profession. She’s currently the president and chief strategist at The Content Company, and she’s known for so many things. She runs a community for content strategists, she’s done some kind of groundbreaking research about association content strategy with some colleagues. Anyhow, welcome to the show, Hilary. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.

Hilary:
Sure. So just quickly, my background is in doing content strategy, hiring people to do content strategy, leading teams, teaching content strategy, mentoring people, speaking at conferences, and as you said, fostering communities so that other people have an avenue and a platform to learn from each other and share with each other because conferences are awesome, but then they’re done. And so, how do we keep those interactions and those conversations going? And an online community is the best way I know how to do it. So there are good communities. I used to run one on LinkedIn and I kind of abandoned that community because LinkedIn’s group management tools just really got terrible. And there’s also a really active, wonderful group on Facebook, but I know a lot of people are leaving Facebook and there’s Slack, but Slack’s interface isn’t good for everyone. So I started a community on a different platform, as well.

Larry:
And I’ll link that in the show notes as well, because a really good community, and you do events, and I’ve met so many people the last couple of years who either discovered or developed their career because of that. So thanks for your work on that front. But I wanted to talk to you today about another thing you’ve been up to lately.

Hilary:
Oh, yeah.

Larry:
You told me a while back about your, either call it a digital council or content council, but I think we’re all familiar with the problem with silos and working with a variety of colleagues across an organization and all of the… It sounds like your council addresses both those and a lot of other issues that content strategists face constantly. So tell me a little bit about the origin of this council idea and what are the issues it’s designed to address.

Hilary:
Sure. Well, so I need to take a tiny step back. For the most part, my clients that I work with are professional associations. So they’re in a medical profession, a legal profession, an engineering profession. They could be doing any kind of work, real estate profession. And I worked for five years for the National Association of Realtors, which is how I got involved in this industry, if you will, the association industry and the association profession. And so, I work with associations and I also work with corporate intranets, which are shockingly similar, but we can maybe get to that or talk about it offline. So in the association world, there are staff people who keep the trains running, there are member volunteers who sometimes sort of influence or dictate what the program should be or sometimes create the content that is of the problem or of the issue.

Hilary:
I like to say that content is the way our work is manifested in the world, because any program, product, service, anything that an association would offer, or really any organization manifests itself in the world as words and pictures and audio and video, even if it’s a physical product, at the end of the day, it’s still in the world as content and associations for the most part, the things that they do, conferences, courses, publications, original research, all those advocacy work, all those kinds of things are content. But everyone creates it individually. Every member, volunteer, committee, every staff department creates them alone, so it’s literally those silos and associations because of the layer of volunteers. The departments do a good job about having back and forth and interactions with the volunteer committees that they are attached to, but they don’t remember to do very much or do enough internal communications across departments.

Hilary:
They don’t plan content together, they don’t write it from a common voice and tone guide, they just sort of do their own thing and that’s fine. So the picture before the internet existed. Every department would create what they created and mail a newsletter or give it a brochure to an audience, and they didn’t have to worry about what everybody else was doing, even if they could have or should have back then, the deficit for not doing that or the drawback for not doing that wasn’t as clear. And then the internet came along, and at this point, it came along a long time ago, but it hasn’t transformed always how departments work together or don’t work together. And because of that, the differences are much clearer and more evident to the audience because it all lives next to each other on the homepage, it all might be included in one newsletter or multiple separate newsletters that never mention each other.

Hilary:
I had one client who said, “Subscribe to our newsletters,” and it was only the ones that their department created. So everybody sees themselves as separate with these blinders on. And it’s not that it’s not good, it’s just not connected. So how do we connect the content? And there’s sort of, I say that there’s three kinds of glue. One is taxonomy. So, if you’re producing content on the same topic, it could be tagged even if nobody knew that in department A, knew that department B was also producing content on the same topic, if it was at least connected in related content. If you’re interested in this, here’s more on this topic or more for this audience or more for this purpose. Taxonomy can be your friend there. And getting everybody to agree on the same terms for the taxonomy, that’s a whole separate effort, usually one that I’m involved with on a pretty superficial level, and I entrust that to folks with much more specialized expertise than I’ve got.

Hilary:
The second one is internal communications, like a content calendar and that kind of thing. And the third one is creating groups of people who come together to make decisions about policies. What content should be public? What should be password protected? Where do we have too much content? Where do we have a gap? When we’re creating content for different audiences, which audiences are the most important? So that’s not for me as the consultant to say, and it’s not for the particular client who hired me to make that determination. It’s got to be a cross-departmental team that makes decisions like that. So they’ve got to be people who are close enough to the content to be aware of the pain points and the process and how things work, but also who have enough organizational X perspective to be willing and able to work with their peers and colleagues to make organization-wide decisions.

Hilary:
So I liken content strategy to an orchestra. So, in an orchestra, you have violins and brass instruments and reeds, etc., etc. If each of them, each the musicians, this talented expert, has gone through years of training, and they’re all amazing, but if everybody played their own song at the same time, it would be noise and cacophony to the audience. In the same vein, if every section did its own thing at the same time, then it would still be noise to the audience. And that, in fact, is the reality far too often. So, content strategy is like an orchestra conductor, but I don’t think that it’s for one person or one group to decide for everyone. It’s that one group to facilitate the conversations inside so that you start to help people from each department see the holisticness of what they do and what they should do.

Larry:
Interesting. So this sounds like where the council comes in.

Hilary:
Yeah.

Larry:
You mentioned the need for orchestration, these three kinds of glue that can stitch it together. And from what you just said, it doesn’t sound like there’s and no organization yet has its chief content officer. We’re all still waiting for that. So, in the meantime, it sounds like your council might be the kind of mechanism that can do some of that orchestration. Was that the intent?

Hilary:
Yes. And they need to be at the right organizational level in terms of hierarchy, if they’re too low, if they’re a content creator, and we involve content creators in a group as well, because they need to not only know, be informed, but they need to buy in, and they need to weigh in because, if we get it wrong because we’re not close enough to their daily lives, then it’s hard for them to follow something that’s not practical.

Hilary:
And then we have the executives who have to buy in and bless policies, especially if it’s going to result in any kind of organizational change. But the people doing the work need to be in sort of a middle/high level, a director, a VP kind of level, depending on the complexity and size of the organization, because those people are familiar enough with what their teams are doing and also have the ear of the folks above them. And if as a group, a cross-functional team, if they agree and say, “This is what we think we should do in terms of operationalizing things,” the management team, the executive team, is not going to say no, because all the folks who need to buy in have said “Yes, this is what we collectively decided.”

Hilary:
So there’s a lot of value to a council and there’s sort of different phases. There’s the set the policies and make decisions together phase, and then there’s the evaluate high level requests and that request based on strategic goals, because if somebody comes in with a new initiative or new functionality or a whole new section, that they want to shift the website or add this to the plate of the collective organization. Who’s going to decide which projects then have to take a step back or get delayed because this new thing now is important?

Larry:
As you’re talking about that, well, first of all, you’re reminding me of governance there, that that’s like.

Hilary:
It’s all governance.

Larry:
Yeah, it’s all governance all the time, because who decides is such a crucial thing about it. But also I love that layer-

Hilary:
But the answer is sort of like we decide, so how do we get to that place of we decide that’s what it is.

Larry:
Interesting. Because “we” is a big word in organizational culture, there’s so much to get, just politics and power and all the things that we all wrestle with all day. How, I guess, back to your council concept. Is this a mechanism by which you can do, I don’t know, power-sharing and more collaborative kind of engagement of those key stakeholders that make this happen?

Hilary:
Yeah. So what I typically do is establish frameworks. So here’s an example. When we decide who are our most important audiences, it’s a tricky, tricky thing because department X will say one thing, department Y will say it’s something else, but organizationally, we have to prioritize our audiences. And it’s my job as the consultant to help them create a framework for them to do it. Is it the biggest audience? Is it the one that brings us the most money? Is it the most loyal one? It can’t be everyone.

Hilary:
So what are the factors that we want to use to consider that question of audience prioritization? And then once we prioritize the audience, then we can look at the content, for example, and say, “Do we have enough for these people? Do we have too much? Is the content we’re creating for this audience being used as much as the content for the other audience?” And we can ask much more intelligent questions. And a council might be asking the questions. They’re not going to be the ones doing the daily work. It would be the content strategy team doing the daily work, but they’re really an important vetting body that has to then agree and then go carry that message back to their department. “Hey, put the brakes on this one. We’re going to wait on this initiative,” because they’ve got the internal authority in their own department to be able to do that.

Larry:
Yeah, as you say that, the way that mechanism works now is that there’s… Because it’s framed or positioned as a framework that sort of like, I don’t know, takes some of the political peril out of it, seems like maybe, and the fact that it’s a collaborative decision that… And the makeup of these councils. Do you have to have equal representation across the org for it to really work?

Hilary:
Well, usually there’s one person from every major content creating department. So you don’t necessarily need legal if legal’s not doing it. Sometimes IT is involved, for example, and sometimes they’re not. It depends on the organization. You don’t need facilities because they don’t create content. So it’s external-facing departments who are creating content.

Larry:
Got it. So, anybody who needs content to communicate with their stakeholders. And that was interesting too. You mentioned earlier in the setup that it sounds like a lot of them are better at communicating with and coordinating with the volunteers around their purview than… Or, traditionally, maybe they have been better at that than in communicating with each other.

Hilary:
Yes. And that’s really tricky because a member volunteer is sort of like the US House of Representatives or the collective set of member volunteers. So if your next door neighbor got elected to the House of Representatives, they’re not just a person on the block anymore. They know the internal lingo, they understand how things work, they understand the pushes and pulls in those internal government kind of dynamics that I don’t understand because I’m not in the House of Representatives.

Hilary:
And it might be US or state or city, it doesn’t matter, but you get the idea. So, if they’re sort of separate, the danger is that if the department uses the committee as the focus group, that’s not the same as the typical, average everyday member, they’re different. And so they are… Associations like to say that they’re member driven, and typically what they mean is that they’re driven by the member volunteers. That is the dynamic. The other analogy I draw is teachers. So, my son’s third grade teacher reminded me that he’s always a third grade teacher, but my son was only in third grade one time. So it’s a similar kind of dynamic there too. So where do, as the parent override what the teacher wants and the teacher knows what third-graders need, but they don’t know your kid. And so there’s lots of similar kinds of dynamics at play.

Larry:
And you multiply that across any org because each person has their one lens on it.

Hilary:
Yes.

Larry:
Well, I guess, it sounds like this is a way to bring not multiple focuses, but getting people to drop their magnifying glass and talk to each other for a little bit.

Hilary:
Yeah, yeah. There’s a reason that an organization, and this is true also for other organizations outside the association world, but the associations have that member volunteer lens or layer, which is just different and special, but it’s similar kinds of things are true for plenty of other organizations too. Who are they beholden to? Who are their stakeholders? And on all those kinds of things.

Larry:
I want to back up. When we first started talking about this, you talked about the kinds of glue, and it seems like most of what we’ve been talking about is the group dynamics and the group interactions, but some of the more, I don’t know, implementation things like taxonomy, like crafting a taxonomy and agreeing on terminology, that’s a classic, just challenge in this kind of thing. So what’s the role of the council in that kind of activity in a thing like taxonomy or terminology alignment?

Hilary:
They may not. They may not, it might be members, in a lot of cases, members. So I just finished working with an association that was a medical specialty, and it was the doctors who had to agree on the terms. The staff are good at producing conferences and doing the work of the organization, facilitating the creation of new clinical guidelines and producing publications. And they may be doctors, but they may not be doctors, because they’re people who are professionals in executing the work. So those kinds of cases, usually you have to involve the member, you have to involve the subject-matter experts. But the problem is that the magazine’s got a taxonomy, the education people have a taxonomy, the website has a taxonomy, etc., etc. And I’ve seen a dozen. So you have to bring them together and facilitate the conversations about that.

Larry:
Yeah, I guess that’s what I was getting at. And actually it occurs to me, we should have put a legend at the top of this, that when you talk about members, those are your subject-matter experts that’s in this world. And I think most content people are familiar with that notion of capturing and articulating subject matter expertise in a way that’s better articulated than some subject matter experts are capable of. I think that’s our whole job. Right?

Hilary:
Right. And you have the facets. For example, I find that a lot of associations will focus on the topic facet, but they leave behind the audience facet, which is so super important, maybe geographic, maybe activity, maybe other things besides just the topic alone, because all of those filters will let you do something like personalize the content.

Larry:
And that’s like our subject matter expertise, is accounting for all that stuff.

Hilary:
Right.

Larry:
Because we were talking, I can’t remember if we talked about this before I hit record, but anyhow, that notion that your content is just the expression, not just it is the expression of your business and what you’re doing.

Hilary:
Yeah, no, we said that. I said that at the beginning, the content is the way your work is manifested in the world. And I said that, I created that little mantra meme phrase because when I would say, “Well, content strategy,” people producing events said, “Well, you’re not talking to me,” people producing advocacy work, “Well, that’s not content,” so many of the people producing content didn’t understand that I mean them, I mean them. And so I had to figure out how to make it clear that we’re not talking about something that the communications or media or public affairs people do over there. It’s all of our work because this is how it manifests online or in the world.

Larry:
That reminds me of the second kind of glue you mentioned is the internal communications.

Hilary:
Yep.

Larry:
That this council facilitates that kind of thing. Because I think you said something about an editorial calendar, that’s a classic one. What are the kinds of techniques or artifacts are there that facilitate that? The expression of the taxonomy? Or just tell me a little bit more about how the internal communication, how the council facilitates that.

Hilary:
Well, I think there’s a whole bunch of different things. To a large degree, it’s about trust. So each of them needs to figure out how to communicate the collective decisions to their own people. And then, when a particular set of work is done, they need to go shop it up, shop it to the people above them, get their blessing, and then it becomes the organizational policy that you communicated however, you do that. And then sometimes there are opportunities to get involved directly in communicating things to the organization itself. So, when I worked for the National Association of Realtors, we went through a big effort of creating these empathy-based personas and what I now have come to call audience engagement journeys. And I created a life-size cutout of each of them, wrote a tiny script and had them introduce themselves. I had a staff person read each one introducing the personas to the staff at an all-staff meeting. And that was really effective, because then the idea that the persona is your audience standing in front of you is made concrete.

Larry:
I love that. I got to see, I don’t know if you’ve listened to it, but a couple of episodes back, I had Rafaëla Ellensburg. She’s a content engineer at a big grocery store chain here in the Netherlands, and she said they have a room there that’s just like all about their customers. And I’m picturing your personas now standing in that room alongside of… That kind of artifact. That’s really interesting. It also reminds me of like, are people learning how to better communicate in general across departments and silos and kind of up and down and across the organization because of this council mechanism. Is it kind of a forcing function to get people to think more broadly about communication?

Hilary:
But it’s not only the council alone. So, a few years ago, I did a study with Carrie Hane and Dina Lewis on content strategy, adoption and maturity in associations. And the challenge we had was coming up with a survey so we could ask associations, “Are you doing this work?” So that we could sort of understand what their maturity level is. But one of the things that we three identified is that if somebody is responsible for creating content or managing content or facilitating member-created content, for example, their job description might have to change because accountability for content use, accountability for collaboration, accountability for content success, setting goals and determining who the audience is and then understanding did it work. That has to be part of people’s job descriptions. So the council’s part of it, but it’s certainly not the whole thing.

Larry:
Interesting. That’s another way to get it ensconced in the culture. Well, that kind of-

Hilary:
The culture. That word culture, I cannot stress enough.

Larry:
Exactly. It’s like you always need mechanisms to affect it because it’s a big one. And so that’s really interesting, that content strategy as an HR practice.

Hilary:
I always say content strategy is an HR issue, and I always get a quizzical look because people don’t realize that thing. But if you’re going to want people to collaborate, then their boss has to measure them at least in part on did you collaborate? Otherwise, they’re plenty busy with other stuff. And if it’s not something they’re going to be held accountable for, it’s going to fall by the wayside.

Larry:
Yeah, that’s really good. Sorry, go ahead.

Hilary:
Whether they want to or not, it’s not a question of want to, it’s a question of delivering what they’re supposed to deliver.

Larry:
Definitely.

Hilary:
And working in a way they’re supposed to work.

Larry:
Exactly. The very definition of a job description. Hey, Hilary, I can’t believe it. I warned you ahead of time. These always go way too fast.

Hilary:
Oh, yeah.

Larry:
But we’re coming up close to time, but before we wrap up, is there anything you want to revisit from the conversation or just want to make sure we share before we wrap up?

Hilary:
Well, I have to say that that study people have told me is really useful. Even if you’re not in the association profession, it costs $10 if you’re not a member of the organization that funded it. So it’s a very inexpensive thing. And even though it’s a few years old, it’s super helpful. And in addition to the study, in order to help people place themselves on this kind of maturity scale, and it’s totally simple, beginner, intermediate, advanced, we have a little assessment tool, and I wrote an article kind of outlining steps about how to make progress once you determine where your organization’s biggest pain points are. So there’s that.

Larry:
Yeah, I’ll link to that. I dropped the 10 bucks, I think, four or five years ago. Whenever it came out, and it was totally worth it. Yeah, and I totally agree, and I’m really curious, I’m going to revisit it now because it’s been a while.

Hilary:
Yeah.

Larry:
I want to go see what nuggets I might’ve missed.

Hilary:
And the, let me just say one more thing. The digital council might not be something that even makes sense if your organization is just starting on your content strategy journey. And it will depend on the volume, the size of your organization, the nature of what it is you’re talking about and what you’re producing. So it doesn’t make sense for everyone all the time, but especially in an intermediate or advanced organization that’s producing lots of different kinds of content from lots of different sources, developing a body like that. So I actually co-led a workshop about this just recently, and in preparation for that, we interviewed six different people to find out what that meant or what that looked like at their organization. So somebody called it a community of practice, so it could be called different things and cast a little bit differently in different organizations, but it’s still the same kind of concept.

Larry:
Yeah. And I love the way you just tied together that the notion of maturity and the idea of the council that you need to understand your maturity as an organization before you do anything.

Hilary:
The content strategy maturity, right?

Larry:
Yeah, the content strategy maturity.

Hilary:
Yeah.

Larry:
Yeah. Thanks. Oh, hey, one very last thing, Hilary, if folks want to connect and learn more about the council or just connect with you online, what’s the best way to find you?

Hilary:
My email address is Hilary, with one L, @contentcompany.biz. I’m on LinkedIn, I’m still hanging out on Twitter a little bit. And I have this community at Content-Strategy.com, so you can certainly find me there as well.

Larry:
Yeah, I will-

Hilary:
And it’s free to join.

Larry:
Yep. And I will, again, reiterate my enthusiasm for that community, and I’ll put all that in the show notes as well. Well, thank you so much, Hilary. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Hilary:
Thank you.