Rahel Anne Bailie has earned the title Content Empress.

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

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

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/rahel-bailie/

Noz Urbina can help you navigate the hype around personalization and create genuinely helpful customized content experiences.

Noz focuses on the fundamentals that create useful, usable adaptive content. He starts with customer journey mapping and persona creation to develop an evidence-based picture of his users. Then he builds modularized content models that address those user needs.

The result is a human-centered content system that serves up content tailored to answer users' questions wherever they are in their journey.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/noz-urbina/

Orchestrating the strategy, design, and software work that comes with enterprise-scale digital projects is a complex and painstaking mission. It's hard to imagine a team better equipped to take on these challenges than the founders of Autogram.

Karen McGrane, Ethan Marcotte, and Jeff Eaton have each mastered huge swaths of digital business practice.

Karen built the venerable UX and content practices at Razorfish and has arguably done more enterprise content strategy work than anyone else on the planet. It's hard to find a content strategist who doesn't cite her as a mentor or source of inspiration.

Ethan introduced the now-ubiquitous practice of responsive web design ten years ago. He's working now to develop a holistic approach to creating design systems.

Jeff is an accomplished web developer and content management systems expert who has guided the content strategy for many of the largest sites on the web.

Together they help digital teams collaborate more effectively.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/autogram/

Carmen Martinez and Paulo Azevedo combine her linguistics and ethnography skills with his computing and product skills to create computer interactions that feel almost human.

Carmen and Paulo collaborate to design conversation experiences for FlixBus, a company that helps millions of travelers around the world book bus travel.

It's hard to create natural-feeling conversations between humans and computers, but they get better at it with every product launch.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/flixbus/

Sara Wachter-Boettcher helps design and content professionals discover and express their leadership ability.

Leaders can come from anywhere. You don't have to be in a management role. With some personal work and a little courage, you can lead from wherever you are in the digital design and content world.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sara-w-b/

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.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/scott-abel/

David Dylan Thomas can help you tame the unconscious biases that can undermine your design decision-making.

These biases are strong. You may never conquer them all. But recognizing them and accounting for them in your content strategy and design work can mitigate the hazards they present.

You need to be on your toes at every turn to account for these cognitive biases. They can affect the products and experiences you design, your collaborations with your team, and your own behavior. Dave's book shows you how to deal with each of these challenges.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/david-dylan-thomas-2/

Andrea Volpini creates products that help search engines and other computers find your web content.

Adding semantic meaning to your content helps artificial intelligence agents and other computers understand how your information relates to other content on the web.

Revealing these relationships helps both computers and the human users who rely on them find and use your content.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/andrea-volpini/

Erin Golden and her colleagues have created a model that shows the evolution of the practice of content strategy.

Drawing on the Kardashev scale – an astrophysics method for measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement – they rank content strategy practice along a 1-to-5 range. K1 represents the first stage, when content strategists were mostly concerned with putting words on webpages instead of in paper documents. K5 represents the science-fiction-ey AI future of the practice.

This reflection on the advancement of the discipline has led Erin to bolster her own professional toolkit, adding to her content skills new practices like UX research.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/erin-golden/

Erin Golden

Erin Golden and her colleagues have created a model that shows the evolution of the practice of content strategy.

Drawing on the Kardashev scale – an astrophysics method for measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement – they rank content strategy practice along a 1-to-5 range. K1 represents the first stage, when content strategists were mostly concerned with putting words on webpages instead of in paper documents. K5 represents the science-fiction-ey AI future of the practice.

This reflection on the advancement of the discipline has led Erin to bolster her own professional toolkit, adding to her content skills new practices like UX research.

Erin and I talked about:

her background in the government, nonprofit, and higher education world as a information architects, user experience designer, content management specialist, and copywriter

her current interest in the intersection of content strategy with user and audience research and how to incorporate data of all types into her work

how she and a colleague apply the Kardashev scale as a model for evolution of content strategy practice maturity

the five stages along the Kardashev scale:

K1: copywriting, moving words from paper to the web

K2: content strategy emerges as an alternative to inserting content into designed boxes

K3: content ecosystem approach, SEO and content marketing

K4: product experience, structured content, moving away from page-based models, arrival of content design

K5: the AI era, implications for the future

how different organizations and business units can be at different points along the K scale at any one point in time

her propensity to push new content practices and tools

how her "content first" approach is validated by the maxim, "form follows function"

how the current era might actually be better described as "research first"

the crucial role of research and content strategy in the early phases of product design

the evolution of editorial decision making in the digital era to better focus on user needs and to manage content across its lifecycle

the occasional lack of clarity around who is leading the dance between content strategists and SEO practitioners

her observation the the convergence of disciplines allied with content strategy - information architecture, SEO, UX design - points to the benefits of being a generalist

her belief that structured and atomic content are key to the future of content production and delivery

Erin's Bio

Erin Golden is a senior content strategist and experience designer at Publicis Sapient where she helps lead the experience design capability for the company while partnering with clients to advance their digital strategies. Based in Washington, D.C., Erin has worked in content and digital strategy for more than a decade with experience in government, nonprofit, and higher education. She has held a range of titles including copywriter, content management specialist, information architect, and user experience designer. She is passionate about audience and user research and enjoys working with teams to integrate research and measurement into their process.

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Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation

https://youtu.be/y8r8IV8VId4

Podcast Intro Transcript

The discipline of content strategy has been around for about 20 years now. It's evolved a lot over that time span. From its humble beginnings as a practice devoted to translating print content into web pages, content strategy has grown into a sophisticated multi-disciplinary business practice. Nowadays content strategists contribute to digital products...