Issue 32

When you don’t get to model content first

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As I read the thought leadership available online recently, it seems like there’s a move afoot that’s well inline with what I’ve been talking about for years. Content structure is gaining in importance. I see this, too, in conversations I have with more progressive organizations.

But then I hear from plenty of practitioners who aren’t in such progressive organizations. They want to help deliver value, and they probably see they could be doing so much more. I feel this deeply.

In a perfect world, content modeling happens before design. We define meaning and then design experiences around that meaning. Let’s call this proactive content modeling.

Few of us get the chance to work in a perfect world, and we’re often modeling content after interfaces exist. We try to bring content-focused semantic clarity to the work we do, but we often have to make concessions. That’s reactive content modeling.

Reactive isn’t inferior. It’s a constraint, a topic we tackled from a different angle in Issue 30.

I’ve been thinking about reactive content modeling as a fulfillment role. These content models fulfill the front-end designs.

Proactive content modeling is an enablement role. These content models enable the front-end design—and other experiences like voice assistants, chatbots, and large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence (AI).

When proactive content modeling happens, the structural work moves upstream. It’s viewed as a strategic value-add. When content architects can bring structure—even partial structure—into reactive environments, that’s also adding value.

Proactive content modeling changes the future, and reactive content modeling changes the present. Both matter, but one has more impact.

Josh Brentan, on LinkedIn​

Top of mind

If you’ve been reading Model Thinking for a while, you may remember that I launched a site called Choose Your CMS about 8 months ago. I had the hypothesis that there’s a lot of CMS vendors out there, people want help selecting the right one, the site would give them some free directional help, and I’d be able to convert some to clients and they’d pay for further help with the selection and implementation process.

Basically none of that happened.

Any time I talked about the site or shared it publicly, it got submissions and I made reports for all of them. But nobody booked the free 15-minute consultation and I never developed any leads from it.

I have several hypotheses about why that was. Regardless, it was a good learning experience.

Very soon, I’ll be launching something new based on what I learned. It’s still about CMS decision-making, but I’ve shifted the focus. The new offering will be part of Collins Content Consulting, and it will be priced to attract serious buyers rather than tire kickers.

Here’s the shift: I’m not helping people solve “which CMS should I choose?” Instead, I’m helping people determine “am I actually ready to choose a CMS at all?” This connects to today’s theme. Many teams rush into vendor selection without doing the foundational work that gives their implementation a chance to succeed. They don’t know what they don’t know. My new offering will help them figure out where they stand.

The first 5 subscribers to reply to this email will get a free CMS readiness assessment in exchange for giving me feedback on what I’ve built. If you’re interested, hit reply and let me know. I’ll share more details with everyone else when I launch in the next few weeks.

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