Content Strategy Insights

With more than a billion internet users and half of all global e-commerce transactions, digital business in China is huge.

Anna Potapova and Arnaud Frattini work in content roles at Alibaba, the biggest online merchant in China. Lately they have been looking beyond their desks, trying to connect with their peers at other companies and to develop a broader understanding of content practice in the country.

They've shared some of their discoveries in an article on content design in China, and they're building a new community to share practice ideas with other content strategists and designers.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/content-in-china/

Markus Edgar Hormess offers this advice: "Never prompt alone."

Markus was working with AI long before the current wave of excitement. He experimented with early versions of ChatGPT and quickly identified new opportunities to collaborate with both his human colleagues and his new AI coworkers.

He's currently building a community - Teaming with AI - to study and share these new practices and to explore the future of teamwork in the age of AI.

https://contentandai.com/markus-hormess/

A few years ago, Dan Porder was teaching poetry to university students. Now he's training large language models to generate useful, usable content for user experiences.

He's picked up new skills along the way, like Python programming, but much of his work still relies on well-established content and design crafts like content strategy and inclusive design.

https://contentandai.com/dan-porder/

As the field of content design grows and matures, so too do the organizations in which content designers practice.

At Condé Nast, the publisher of iconic brands like The New Yorker, WIRED, and Vogue, Sophie Tahran has built content-design orgs from one-person units to company-spanning teams.

Her latest work has been informed by original research that she conducted to learn more about how others design and manage their content-design organizations.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sophie-tahran/

In her work as a content designer at Indeed.com, Rebecca Nguyen is finding new opportunities to assume a leadership role on teams working with generative AI.

Rebecca feels fortunate to work with teams that recognize the value of writing and design skills. She's also finding that generative AI is the perfect place for content design to take the lead.

https://contentandai.com/rebecca-nguyen/

Matt Hayes is a staff content designer at LinkedIn, where he focuses on enterprise experience design and works closely with the design system team.

The content design team at LinkedIn is known in the industry as a small-but-mighty group that makes an outsized impact on their organization.

Among the secrets to their success: democratizating their content guidance, focusing on efficient decision-making, and working closely with their design-systems colleagues.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/matt-hayes/

May Habib is the CEO at Writer.com, a generative-AI platform that has been helping enterprises use generative AI since 2020.

Her company builds its own award-winning large language models and is pioneering approaches like "headless AI" to help employees across an enterprise use AI to be more creative and productive.

https://contentandai.com/may-habib/

The promise of computers augmenting our minds has been a long time coming. We're beginning to see better tools for extending human cognition, but good guidebooks for using them have been sparse.

Jorge Arango's new book, Duly Noted, fills this gap elegantly. It shows you how to extend your mind with connected digital notes that capture your thoughts and nourish them in a personal knowledge garden from which you can harvest and share your unique insights.

Through February 15, 2024, use the code ContentPod to get a 20% discount when you order the book at the Rosenfeld Media website.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jorge-arango/

Laura Costantino is watching the emergence of AI in content professions from two interesting and valuable perspectives: as a content designer working on LLMs at Google and as an active participant in the social-media communities where content professionals gathers.

In their work at Google, they have returned to their roots as a content strategist to manage the challenges that come with designing content at a massive scale.

Through their interactions in the community, they have had the chance to hear the concerns of content designers who are navigating the new world of AI - and to inspire them with advice and success stories.

https://contentandai.com/laura-costantino/

Peter Compo says that "the number one thing missing in most strategic plans is a strategy."

He's talking about the tendency of executives and managers to draft plans that present lists of goals and include a bullet point for every possible stakeholder in their purview.

Peter points out that true strategy involves tough trade-offs and lots of collaboration. His pragmatic approach lets strategic objectives emerge organically, includes a variety of stakeholders, and applies adaptive thinking to address questions that have no obvious answer.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/peter-compo/