Model Thinking
Whether you’re an executive who wants a content management system that enables business growth or a content professional looking to improve your content strategy and content modeling skills and grow your career, Model Thinking will help you learn, connect some dots, think differently, and get actionable tips.
Audits are overrated
Issue 24 Two weeks ago, your company had a big reorganization and you’re a content strategist joining a new team that you’ve never worked with before. You’re just itching to conduct a content audit of the pages on the company website that your team owns. Not a bad step, right? It’s a logical starting point, and you need visibility into what you’re working on. An audit is a great tool to do that. And, of course, an audit gives you some data points about the quality of your content experience,...
What others are getting right about AI and content systems
Issue 23 From other smart minds Last issue was the longest issue of Model Thinking yet. There was a lot there, and to be honest, I’m still recovering from pulling all that together. So I thought I’d do a round up of some valuable writing by others in related spaces. Rounding up some valuable writing. Cattle roundups are a spring thing, but content roundups can happen any time. The Coming Collapse of Corporate Knowledge: How AI Is Eating Its Own Brain Michael Iantosca writes about how human...
Content engineer: genius, myth, or marketing magic?
Issue 22 Fair warning: This is the longest newsletter issue I’ve published. Buckle up! TL;DR Content engineering started as structure, semantics, and systems to make content scalable and reusable. Marketers now sometimes use it to mean AI-powered content production. Both definitions are valid, but mixing them can cause confusion, mis-hires, and undervalued foundations. Traditional content engineering is still essential for scaling, personalization, and managing enterprise-level content. The...
Where content strategy, content design, and content engineering overlap
Issue 21 Imagine one day you stroll into your content strategy job at Acme SaaS Corp, ready to run some audits, lead a workshop, and pop into some weekly meetings, but first you join the company all-hands meeting and you hear about the company’s new “premium” offering that will bring additional functionality to higher-paying customers of your SaaS software product. With your most strategic hat on (is that a helmet? A fedora? Interesting side trail …), you immediately start thinking that...
Where content ops and content engineering overlap
Issue 20 No doubt you’ve had an experience working in something like Microsoft Word or Google Docs, and you’ve had no formal connection to the company style guide. Maybe you knew the content you created would be useful to an audience but you didn’t know how to—or who could—publish the content where the intended audience could use it. These scenarios are essentially content operations issues. More specifically, they are governance concerns. Often there is someone in the organization who cares...
6 content modeling mistakes I made (so you don’t have to) – Part 2
Issue 19 Structure Quick thoughts about how content lives in systems When content lives in a content management system (CMS) where there’s an underlying model that gives the content its structure. That structure—a content model—forms the core of creating meaningful content that can be applied in websites, apps, chatbots, and more. It allows the content to be created and managed at scale. Last issue, I introduced six mistakes I’ve made in modeling content. There’s not a lot of strong guidance...
6 content modeling mistakes I made (so you don’t have to) – Part 1
Issue 18 Structure Quick thoughts about how content lives in systems Whether or not we realize it, content has a shape and structure so that it can be applied as information and knowledge. Sometimes that structure is informal, set through headings and how the author organized their writing in a word processor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Other times, the content lives in a content management system (CMS) where there’s an underlying model that gives the content its structure. That...
Are we selling ourselves short as content strategists?
Issue 17 Recently, I’ve been part of several conversations that revolve around a concept that might sound nerdy to some, but to those of us who care deeply about the meaning of words, it's a fascinating discussion. It may seem like a trivial debate at first, but I think it’s one that holds more weight now as we navigate the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and how we position our work among colleagues. Let’s start with something simple: We talk about content management as a field. We use...
AI just raised the cost of outdated content
Issue 16 Strategy Quick thoughts about the importance of thinking strategically about content Inertia is hard to overcome. The world of content is a good place to observe this. The inertia of content is to keep creating, keep churning out more. Occasionally, a content strategist will come along and attempt to get rid of content that is outdated, incorrect, or somehow obsolete. Rarely does this get buy-in from the business; instead, it’s a side project done on Friday afternoons, and I suspect...
I built a tool to help you choose your CMS (and avoid blind spots)
Issue 15 Personal notes A couple quick updates This newsletter issue would normally have been sent last Friday, but I postponed it due to the American Independence Day holiday. No doubt you’ve seen the news coverage of the horrific flash flooding that occurred in Texas. It’s been an emotional weekend. My oldest son just finished working at a camp in another part of the state, and I can’t imagine if he had to go through something like this. The worst flooding, in Kerrville, was a...
Whether you’re an executive who wants a content management system that enables business growth or a content professional looking to improve your content strategy and content modeling skills and grow your career, Model Thinking will help you learn, connect some dots, think differently, and get actionable tips.