Content Strategy Insights

SEO has always been difficult, but generative AI takes things to an entirely new level.

Duane Forrester has been immersed in the search world for more than 20 years, including stints as the Product Manager for the Bing Webmaster Program and Vice President of Industry Insights at Yext, where he developed company AI strategy. He also helped launch the schema.org structured-data standard.

Duane offers plenty of AI-specific advice about how to navigate the new search landscape. But he also says that the foundations of good SEO are still grounded in timeless digital best practices: understanding your customers' needs and intentions and consistently giving them good content and helpful user experiences.

https://contentandai.com/duane-forrester/

Content is a precious business asset and should be treated as such in enterprise accounting records.

Cruce Saunders has been making the case for content as a financial asset for many years, arguing that much of it should be accounted for like the durable machinery that powers a factory, not like an ephemeral one-time business expense.

He still sees a lot of work ahead, but Cruce is more hopeful lately that coordinated efforts by content leaders can get content out of the expense category and into an asset category on the corporate balance sheet.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/cruce-saunders/

New AI products like Microsoft's Copilot can be powerful productivity enhancers, but if designers aren't careful they can inadvertently introduce into the product the bias and other hazards that can come with large language models.

As a content designer working on Microsoft's Copilot for Sales product, Leah Krauss helps her colleagues understand and follow the responsible-AI principles that the company has developed.

Leah's advocacy helps her design and product teams create a product that balances the need for transparency about the use of AI with the prerogative to keep customers in flow as they use the product.

https://contentandai.com/leah-krauss/ ‎

Twenty years ago at IBM, the company's commitment to user-focused content led to the decision to develop a standard way of structuring content so that it could be used in multiple channels.

Michael Priestley was uniquely positioned to lead the effort to create the corporate standard that became DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/michael-priestley/

As the founder of the long-standing LavaCon conference and the principal at a technical content staffing agency, Jack Molisani gets a deeply informed view of the world of technical communication.

While he sees the opportunities that generative AI presents, he raises several concerns for technical content strategy practitioners, among them the inaccuracy of generative AI content and the inability of AI tools to comprehend subtle human communication clues.

https://contentandai.com/jack-molisani/

Serving personalized content about thousands of products to millions of people requires a sophisticated content operation.

At Albert Heijn, the big grocery store chain in the Netherlands, Rafaëla Ellensburg established a content engineering practice that lets the company deliver personalize-able omnichannel content at scale.

In the process, she also created a content engineering practice guild, positioned content within the company as an important enterprise asset, and began developing the semantic practices that will take their content operations into the future.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/rafaela-ellensburg/

Over the past 25 years, Lisa Welchman has established and codified the field of digital governance.

With an enterprise consulting career that spans the emergence of the web, the arrival of social media, and the rise of mobile computing, she is uniquely positioned to help digital practitioners, managers, and executives understand and manage the governance issues that arise with the arrival of generative AI.

Lisa is the author of the leading book in her field, Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design.

https://contentandai.com/lisa-welchman/

Pavel Samsonov is a UX designer with a deep appreciation of content.

His content-first approach to design is driven by his observation that navigating digital experiences is about accessing content, not clicking buttons.

Pavel has also cultivated a deep awareness of the semantic environments that he and his colleagues navigate and he uses that awareness to align and motivate stakeholders.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/pavel-samsonov/

Scalable content personalization systems create huge value for businesses. Like most valuable endeavors, they're really hard to do well.

Jeffrey MacIntyre orchestrates the activities - terminology and taxonomy work, metadata strategy, information architecture, and more - that help businesses build content operations that deliver the customer-focused experiences that consumers expect.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jeffrey-macintyre/

LLM-based conversational tools are revolutionizing all parts of the content ecosystem, including blogs by independent professionals.

Rob Hoeijmakers is an independent web strategist based in Amsterdam. He's using AI tools like Whisper and Perplexity to streamline and improve his research and writing workflows.

This lets him spend more time on his websites' information architecture and improves the business results he gets from his blog.

https://contentandai.com/rob-hoeijmakers/