Content debt is real, and getting real-er in the age of AI

Published 22 days ago • 5 min read

Issue 9

Note: Some months ago, Deane Barker shared some principles of content management, and beginning with Issue 6, I started sharing pieces of what Barker wrote along with a few thoughts of my own. Today, we’ll look at the structural and strategic implications of a single principle.

Content can accumulate debt over time

Content can accumulate deferred work which will be required to re-use the content in other contexts. Experience, skill, and planning can limit or slow this debt accumulation.

– Deane Barker

Structure

Quick thoughts about how content lives in systems

Earlier this week, I was talking with someone who had worked in engineering at a very well-known tech company, and they were sharing how their content was single-use content with multiple copies for use in different scenarios.

Maybe it’s a natural process, where people have to make that mistake before they understand why it’s a mistake.

But just in case you haven’t made the mistake of creating multiple single-use copies of a piece of content to fulfill different use cases, let me try to save you the trouble.

Here’s a scenario:

You work for Acme Corporation, which has sold a product called Wonder Widget for the last 15 years. You just found out that the marketing team is changing the product name to Grand Gizmo, and everything on the website from marketing pages, to blogs, to help and support articles needs to use the new name.

You’re responsible only for some help articles that need updates. In fact, there’s one article you wrote last week for which you made 5 copies of for different Wonder Widget variants on the market. Each of those variants was copied multiple times, because each variant needs that content on the website, on Wonder Widget itself, on Amazon Alexa voice assistants, and on Google Assistant.

You bury your head in your hands, realizing that you have 20 instances of that one article to change—and that’s just in English! (BTW, I’m old school. That’s a human that used that em dash.)

Deferred work has come due, much of which could have been avoided if experience, skill, and planning had been employed up front when the content management system was chosen and when content models were crafted.

Thoughtful content architecture can help future-proof your content and reduce the content debt your organization would otherwise create.

Strategy

Quick thoughts about the importance of thinking strategically about content

Regardless of whether your content structure minimizes content debt or not, content debt is a fact of life. When you’re thinking through strategic issues like quality standards, governance, measurement, and even staffing, you need to leave space for content debt.

If you fail to account for content debt, you run a number of risks, such as the following:

Employee burnout
Lower rankings on search engines
Increased support contacts
Legal and regulatory risks
Becoming the punchline on social media and forums
Decreased customer trust

For years, many organizations have struggled with content debt. Now, in the day when so many businesses are starting to use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to create content, the content debt problem will be magnified.

Make sure you have the people, processes, and procedures in place to eliminate content debt on a regular basis.

“Any content you create or commission is content you have to maintain. …If people didn’t have time to produce the content in the first place, chances are they’re not going to return to it later.”

Content Strategy at Work: Real-world Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project by Margot Bloomstein

Scuttlebutt

News from the UX design, content strategy, and content management communities

Last week I took part in a Kinetic Council workshop, and I’m keen to tell you about this emerging initiative.

Industry leaders across content management, semantics, and data disciplines are forming the council to establish the authoritative professional association for these inter-related disciplines.

The Kinetic Council aims to unite and empower through networking opportunities, world-class education, certification programs, and industry advocacy. The “kinetic” name reflects a focus on the dynamic, non-static elements that form the foundation of modern human-AI interactions.

Strategic initiatives include developing professional certifications, building university partnerships, and creating a robust membership community. The Council is particularly focused on establishing professional identity and career pathways for practitioners in these disciplines that currently lack formal support in academia.

What makes this effort particularly timely is its emphasis on cross-disciplinary collaboration within the knowledge trades that will shape how human content and data interact with AI systems.

Learn more at Kinetic Council

Top of mind

Things that are bouncing around in my head as I synthesize a range of ideas

A few things to call out this week:

Interesting insight

I got far more (positive) feedback from you on my last brief issue of Model Thinking than I’ve gotten on other issues. There’s something there that I want to build on.

One person mentioned the brevity as a positive, and everyone mentioned the personal anecdote.

As a result:

I’m tracking wordcount by issue.
For this issue, I’ve cut out some regular sections for brevity’s sake. (This issue is slightly below the average wordcount per issue, and I’m going to try to lower the average over time.)
I’m putting more personal updates in this section.

Curious to know what you think, so feel free to reply to this email and share your thoughts!

Amazon affiliate update

Since starting Model Thinking, I’ve shared Amazon affiliate links to books I mention.

A few months ago, I failed to meet the volume that Amazon wants from its affiliates, even though I did earn a little through that first effort with the affiliate program. (Thank you to whoever you are!)

When Amazon shut off my first affiliate program, I set up another, which—if I read the dashboard correctly—has led to no sales.

I’ve come to realize I probably need an exponentially larger subscriber base to make the affiliate program worthwhile. I’ll keep using it until Amazon shuts it down too, and then I’ll move on from that experiment until I 10x my subscribers (or something).

In the meantime, I’ve moved the Amazon affiliate notice from the bottom of the newsletter template into the bottom of the body because I discovered that the web archive doesn’t include the notice that I’m supposed to use.

CMS report (subscriber freebie)

After a period where I didn’t add data to my CMS industry report gift for subscribers, I’ve found that I have more time to work on that, so I’ve now populated data for all CMSes with names from A to F as well as adding a few new vendors to the list.

If you’d like to see something that isn’t in the spreadsheet, let me know by responding to this email.

If you’re not a subscriber, sign up today to get your gift!

John Collins

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