Tent Talks Featuring Meghan Casey: From Strategy to Execution: Content Modeling Essentials

[00:00:34] Chicago Camps: What initially drew you to the field of Content Strategy and how has your journey evolved from your early days at BrainTraffic to founding Do Better Content Consulting?

[00:00:43] Meghan Casey: Before I got into calling myself or having the job title Content Strategist, I had roles like Communications Manager, Website Editor, Marketing manager, internal comms, all of those kinds of things.

And one of the common themes when I would do that work is that I was often asked by people to do very tactical thing. And then I would ask them all kinds of questions about like, why are we doing this and who is the audience and what do we hope to achieve and what are your key messages and like all of these kinds of things that a lot of the time they didn’t have the answers to and they didn’t really understand why I needed them.

And around 2008 is when Kristina Halvorson from Brain Traffic started figuring all that stuff out, Content Strategy. And I was like, yes. That is what I want to do. That is what’s missing. That is what I like.

So fast forward at that point, just a few months, and I went to work at Brain Traffic. I was hired initially as a web writer because the Content Strategy part of her business was just getting started.

But very quickly it became apparent that the strategy part is what I wanted to do and was good at and ended up being a content strategist at Brain Traffic starting in 2008. And from there. Things just continued to evolve. The work that we did for our client helped inform Content Strategy for the web, which is a book that Christina and Melissa Rach wrote.

And over time, just developing more and more experience and tools and templates and methodologies for doing this kind of work. In 2015, after returning to Brain Traffic, I wrote the Content Strategy Toolkit, which takes Content Strategy for the web and the methodology and the philosophy and adds in like real practical practices.

How do we do this stuff in our work? And so I published that, and that really helped to accelerate, I think, my career and my reputation as someone who knows stuff. And eventually, I left Brain Traffic and decided to start my own company six years ago now, Do Better Content Consulting, published the second edition of the book, and just continue to work with really awesome clients to solve problems that content contributes to.

Which can be all manner of problems from business problems to people in process problems to all kinds of things and content is a key part of that. It’s been a wild ride and I’ve really enjoyed the ride.

There are times like this with AI is the new bright, shiny thing. And it’s obviously way bigger, but it reminds me a little bit of the 2000 oughts and early teens, when every single CEO and executive and whatever was like, drop everything, we wanted everything to be an app. And we had to think about strategically, do we need an app? And trying to ask them what problems is it that you think AI can solve for you? Because it doesn’t just replace people.

[00:03:43] Chicago Camps: For someone new to content modeling, can you explain it in simple terms and why it’s crucial for various roles from executives to content creators?

[00:03:52] Meghan Casey: The way that I’ve been explaining it to people is that the content model sits between the front end experience, so what the people that interact with your website, your app, your whatever thing that is.

And the back end experience of the content management system where people put content into a system that can be displayed. The content model is what helps you figure out what to display and how it all relates together. And in order to do that, you also need to do the structuring of the content. So the structured content piece that is what are the different chunks that make up various content types, how they relate to each other, all of those nitty gritty details so that we can figure out what formations our content can take in various contexts. And it’s crucial for a lot of reasons.

One, just the thing to say to executives is that more often than not, people are reinventing the wheel 800 times a year, writing about the same product or the same bio, even for a, for an executive or a speaker or whatever, we were continuing to write the same content over and over again.

Because either nobody’s sharing what they’ve written in the past, which sucks in and of itself, so that’s a time suck to rewrite it or try to find it, but also you end up with different versions of things, which, you know, It’s not great. So it’s really important from just the resource perspective, the money, the bottom line, and how you’re spending your time and doing it smartly to the making sure you’re delivering consistent information to folks, to helping the people who work on content not have to spin their wheels over and over or not feel confident in what they’re putting together and all of those kinds of things.

That definition seems to be working with folks so far. I have a few slides that I sometimes will walk through and talk about how the structured content piece is like the magic layer that helps all of those things together. For some people, you can also talk about domain modeling, but on a smaller scale, the domain for your product might be slightly more expansive than what your content model might be for a product.

Let’s even take something like a bio. If you’re really thinking about a content model and structuring content, you might have five versions of your CEO’s bio. For different context or audiences. So let’s say they’re going out and talking to the association of whatever kind of work you do, you might have a paragraph in there that does something else.

If it’s more, oh, they’re serving on this board of directors for a non profit, maybe you pull in more family information. But still you’ve got a centralized source of truth about that person that you can sort of pull different pieces of it to create the bio that tells the story you want it to tell at that certain time.

But it’s all true and it’s not inconsistent.

[00:06:50] Chicago Camps: How does content modeling enhance the experience for both the audience consuming the content and the team creating it? Can you share some examples from your work?

[00:06:58] Meghan Casey: I talked about this a little bit already, but really hit on some stuff is that it helps us from the internal pushing the content out perspective, provide consistent, accurate, and relevant content. We can prevent things like conflicting information in various places, which can be annoying at the very best, but also really dangerous at the very worst. I have an example from a client where they were like, Oh, wow, we really need to get our stuff in order because they’re a medical facility or medical organization.

And they found that the recovery after surgery instructions that were published on their website were drastically different from the ones that they handed to the patient when they left the clinic. And there were things in there that were drastically different and not like it was old stuff that was getting handed out that the protocol had changed , but it never got updated in whatever system they’re using to create those things.

Just things like that, that’s a risk thing also, in addition to people being confused. I know we’ve all been to a website where they tell us something and then we get an email and something different, maybe about a return process or any number of things. So making sure that we’re consistent and accurate, I think can be really important.

Also can help us think through where we might want to serve up a bit of content that would be helpful in the context of whatever somebody is doing. So we’re not thinking quite so linearly or what are some things that would be helpful to them that we can parse out of say a longer product page or something like that and provide it in a place that makes more sense.

[00:08:34] Chicago Camps: In your experience, what are some of the biggest challenges teams face when trying to implement content modeling and how can they overcome these obstacles?

[00:08:43] Meghan Casey: I think one of the biggest ones is just the enormity of it all. It just seems really hard. Like you talk about the benefit of, Oh, if you did this, then you wouldn’t have to recreate product content 15,000 different times on 15 different teams.

And people are like, that would be great. I don’t want to do that. But we also don’t have the time, or they think they don’t have the time or leadership isn’t giving them the time to stop for a minute and do the work that allows them to solve that problem through a content model, structured content, that sort of thing.

 A lot of it is just not being able to stop in order to do the work that’s going to make them more efficient in the future. And one of the ways I think to overcome that particular challenge is to pick a little small pilot and demonstrate this is what we did. We took this specific product line and we gave that group that works on this mostly permission to slow down and do this content sort of thinking really digging deep into the content project, built a little database, could be an air cable for now, I don’t know, and just demonstrate how much easier it is for people to do their jobs with access to this information.

Do some light user research, watching people do their jobs, and then be able to go to leadership and say, Hey, Okay. So when Sally has to write a product description for a social media post, here are the 15 places that Sally has to look, or ask a leader to go out to the website and then look at social media and then look at a brochure and find all the different places where stuff is inconsistent, maybe inaccurate or wrong and be like, wouldn’t you like to fix this?

So it’s making it real for folks. For people who are used to writing content for websites, I think part of it is just changing the way people think about content. So people are thinking about say a department page as just a page about a department and FAQs is the thing that goes on that page that they would write an author as part of that page content, but we can get people to start thinking about things like when we write about a department, we have an overview, we have testimonials from people who have graduated, we have these different pieces and just helping people think about it in a more chunked out way can just start the process, which I think can be really helpful. And you can start with the Word document that the template with, here’s each of our section.

So like easy things to nudge people in the right direction. One of the other ones I thought about is that there sometimes seems to be a disconnect between content people and maybe visual design and sometimes even UX design about you can’t just go straight to, Oh, let me make this page in a way that looks really beautiful without thinking about what is the actual content that I need to design for.

And I think a lot of times we’re pressed to get to pretty, not because we think of that, but the leaders think about that, show me what it’s going to look like. And then we miss a whole bunch of steps in between about, okay, but what is the actual content and how will we ensure that we can display this content here because it comes from this place or all of those things, it’s just like disconnect about how content comes to be.

And a lot of people don’t have to do that work. So they’re just, Oh, I made the place for the content to go, good luck to you. And I agree that content modeling in some ways can help or structured content can help with that.

Or just content design in general can help with that because I think organizations are mostly getting better, but it still happens instead of saying, okay, who all do we need to accommodate on this page internally, what are the user needs that we want this page to solve?

What are the tasks that this, and then you can alleviate a little bit of that, but then you still end up with the, “in the newsfeed” at the bottom of the page or the “letter from the CEO” or whatever thing that nobody really cares about. Like pick your battle.

[00:12:42] Chicago Camps: What are some effective collaborative strategies you’ve used to define and document content models within diverse teams and how can organizations ensure everyone is on the same page?

[00:12:53] Meghan Casey: I teach a workshop on content modeling that really the whole purpose of it is to help people have conversations about content. So I think collaborative working sessions, different groups, people all together can be really helpful. So for example, if you have, let’s take product as an example, again, have a product owner, a product marketer, a development person, a designer, a content person, everybody trying to, Map out when we have a product, what are the different bit of information about that product that need to be communicated to someone somewhere, somehow throughout the entire life cycle of it, not just from specs and their support and all of those kinds of things, and have people work together to document all of those little pieces.

And then start to say, okay, we’ve documented all of these pieces, which of these are ones that are used in multiple contexts, which of these are only used on a product page, but you’ll never see it again, and help to start thinking about, like, how that content fits together with other content and how it might relate to something else that’s related and it’s really just all of those conversations that happen that I think are really important.

And then for me, I like to, when I’m working on content modeling or structuring content for a website, for instance, I like to take a stab in Airtable or something at what I think the structure is like, what are the fields, what kinds of fields are they? What kinds of taxonomies are they?

And have a meeting with the developer and then they’re like, that doesn’t make any sense because we have to use that same content type for this thing so we can’t call the field that and you just start to have all of these different conversations that help solidify what it is that you need to do.

I used to be terrified of content modeling until I worked with some really smart developers who it was like, Oh, this isn’t so hard. We just have to like compromise sometimes. And understand each other and like what we’re trying to achieve. Oftentimes the developers trying to be like few component types of components as possible.

And sometimes I’m like, I want everyone to be unique so we can have a very specific component for very specific things. And they’re like, absolutely not. We can’t, we don’t have to go for that. But then we can figure out the places where you do need unique, like those FAQs that we talked about for the higher ed place.

A lot of conversations, a lot of trying to break stuff. Like, okay, got this sort of figured out. Let’s try to break it. See where it doesn’t work and what we might need to do differently. So break it before you launch it whenever possible.

I would recommend adding legal process for sure. I think that’s always super important. And then also add people in innovation or product, new product development, or the people who are thinking ahead, because then you can make sure you’re at least aware of things that might come down the road that might challenge the validity of your model over time and try to plan for those things.