Melanie Seibert is a senior content strategist on the UX team at WillowTree, a mobile-focused agency that creates apps, chatbots, websites, and other digital products for some of the world’s best-known companies. She also teaches content-strategy courses both online and in real life.

Melanie and I talked about both her work at WillowTree and her work as a content-strategy educator.

Melanie's Bio

Melanie is currently the Senior Content Strategist at WillowTree. She has also taught content strategy at General Assembly and helped create websites for Razorfish, Rackspace, and cPanel. She opines about content strategy on her blog Prose Kiln.

Video

Here's the video version of our conversation.

https://youtu.be/598RlxKMBtk

If I look a little bleary eyed it's because up I got up at 5:00 a.m. PST to prepare for our 9:00 EST call :)

Show Notes/"Transcript"

0:45 - Melanie's role at WillowTree - apps, chatbots, and websites, working on a UX design team of 15

1:45 - content strategy for mobile apps - push notifications, app store listings, and other factors in ASO - App Store Optimization - surprised how little info & interest there is on this in the field

3:50 omni-channel content -

5:00 - CMS for mobile-app dev? Contentful and similar - just a database for the content that provides API for the content -

6:05 - no-man's land between product and marketing - doesn't see consensus between the two - hasn't seen mobile-dev content eco-system that integrates. . . e.g., they use separate tools to send social-media messages - hasn't seen integration between product content in CMS and notification content - they use Urban Airship to send push notifications and other native-app content - they do iOS and Android

7:20 - vocabulary check-in - headless CMS (back-end only) - native mobile apps

8:30 - disconnect between product folks and marketing folks - she has done a lot of thinking and reading on distinction between marketing and product touchpoints - it's all one thing to the customer - to this point things have been siloed between product and marketing - they (WillowTree) have a robust product strategy process that figures out which products make sense for client and marketplace - lots of user research, competitive landscape, etc. - that top-level strategy often involves content - some content is integral to both product strategy and to marketing -

11:00 - branding - inherited? or unique to each product? depends on the client/project - e.g. Regal Cinemas & Windham Hotels - but also startups - so if branding not set yet, they can help, though not main area of focus - saying "We want to be doctors, not waiters" - bigger recommendations, not just doing what client first asks for -

12:40 - WillowTree - about 200 folks now - Charlottesville & Durham offices - growing rapidly - exciting clients and projects -

13:30 - kinds of apps they develop? operating procedures? all pretty customized now - every client is different - media clients have own editorial staff, e.g., but need help integrating mobile -

14:50 - process not cookie cutter, but there are four touch points she always considers (for more on this, check out her blog post series the mobile app content ecosystem):

1. app indexing - getting mobile content into Google index - so can send traffic directly to the app

2. product content - omnichannel content like form fields, error message

3. push notifications - now several notification types - many new ways to message people, even if push notifications turned off

4. app store optimization (which she mentioned earlier)

17:00 - tools set depends on client's existing (Exact Target, e.g.) - omnichannel always requires custom development - her UX team works with dev team to ensure consistency across platforms/channels - big dev team at WillowTree, over 100,