Tent Talks by Chicago Camps

Session Overview

In this Tent Talks session, Meghan Casey delves into her journey from her early career to establishing Do Better Content Consulting, emphasizing the importance of content strategy and modeling. She shares insights on how content modeling enhances content consistency and efficiency, and discusses common challenges and effective collaborative strategies for implementation.

Content Strategy Journey:

• Meghan's career began in roles such as Communications Manager, Website Editor, and Marketing Manager.
• She often asked strategic questions about audience, goals, and key messages, leading her to content strategy.
• Joined Brain Traffic in 2008, transitioning from web writer to content strategist.
• Authored "The Content Strategy Toolkit," which boosted her career and reputation.
• Founded Do Better Content Consulting six years ago, working with clients to solve various content-related problems.

Explaining Content Modeling:

• Content model bridges the front-end experience and back-end content management systems.
• Helps determine what content to display and how it relates together.
• Important for resource efficiency, consistent information delivery, and confidence in content creation.
• Examples include creating multiple versions of a CEO's bio for different contexts while maintaining a centralized source of truth.

Enhancing Audience and Team Experience:

• Ensures consistent, accurate, and relevant content, preventing conflicting information.
• Example: A medical facility had differing post-surgery instructions on their website and physical handouts.
• Helps place content where it is most relevant and useful for users, like serving up specific parts of a product page in various contexts.

Challenges in Implementing Content Modeling:

• Enormity of the task and lack of time or leadership support.
• Solution: Start with small pilots to demonstrate efficiency and benefits.
• Changing content creation mindset to think in structured chunks rather than linear pages.
• Disconnect between content creation and visual/UX design needs.

Collaborative Strategies for Content Modeling:

• Workshops and collaborative sessions with diverse teams (product owners, marketers, developers, designers, content creators).
• Mapping out all necessary information about a product across its lifecycle.
• Using tools like Airtable to prototype content structures and having iterative discussions with developers.
• Important to involve legal, innovation, and product development teams for future-proofing content models.

Notable Quotes

• "Content is a key part of solving all manner of problems from business issues to people and process problems."
• "The content model helps figure out what to display and how it all relates together."
• "It's crucial to provide consistent, accurate, and relevant content to prevent conflicting information."
• "AI reminds me of the early 2000s when everyone wanted an app. It's important to ask what problems AI can solve for you, rather than just jumping on the trend."
• "Helping people think about content in a more chunked-out way can start the process of effective content modeling."
• "Collaborative working sessions and conversations are key to successful content modeling and ensuring everyone is on the same page."

Reference Materials

• "The Content Strategy Toolkit" by Meghan Casey
• "Content Strategy for the Web" by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach

About Tent Talks

Chicago Camps hosts irregularly scheduled Tent Talks with people from all across the User Experience Design community, and beyond. Who really likes limits, anyway--If it's a cool idea, we'd love to hear about it and share it!

What is a Tent Talk? That's a great question, we'd love to tell you.

Tent Talks are short-form in nature, generally lasting from 10-20 minutes (ish) in a recorded format--we like to think of them as "S'mores-sized content" because that's pretty on-brand. Tent Talks can be a presentation on a topic, a live Q&A session about the work we do, or the work around the work we do, or really just about anything--we don't want to limit ourselves, or you.

You should send along an idea or topic of your own so we can learn from you, as well! You don't have to be a published author or a professional speaker on a circuit to be good at your job, so please, put yourself forward, and let's have some fun, talk, and share your experience with others!