Latest / #ContentChat / 10/19/26 #ContentChat: The Unsexy Side of Content: Taxonomy, Data, and Reporting

Transcript

10/19/26 #ContentChat: The Unsexy Side of Content: Taxonomy, Data, and Reporting · #ContentChat

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Hello everybody, and welcome to Content Chat.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Erica Heald, and today my guest is Amy Rodriguez, who's someone who has spent a lot of time on LinkedIn talking about something near and dear to me, which is taxonomy.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that's literally how we became best buds online because we kept talking to each other on LinkedIn.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I finally said, let's talk about this on content chat because I feel like it's one of those, one of those areas that people don't think about until it's too late, until they have a huge mess on their hands and cannot get any good data.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: So before we dive into all of that, Amy, could you take a minute and introduce yourself and tell folks how you ended up being the person sparring with me about taxonomy on LinkedIn?
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm Amy Rodriguez.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: I am currently Senior Director of Intelligent Content Strategy at Infios, which is a B2B tech software company in the supply chain industry.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I've been in B2B tech marketing for a long enough time to know a lot about content, content strategy, content marketing.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I've dabbled in market research and brand and ops and performance analytics and all of the places that start to inform the taxonomy and the data and the performance and all of that.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I am by no means a taxonomy pro.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: There are people out there who, I mean, this is what they do, and they're very amazing at it.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: I just happen to have been on a couple taxonomy projects at multiple companies.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so I just came out with very strong opinions about how I should go.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we originally bonded over some pretty strong opinions.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then we joined a content channel.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: We were like, I respect your bookshelf game, and it just blossomed from there.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it's so funny because when you're a content strategist, you have to have good data to be making informed decisions.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like right now, we're in the middle of planning season and people are figuring out what the what they're gonna do next year.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but they're frequently they're using incomplete or bad data to make those decisions, which then means that they're just wishes and hopes and dreams.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Or just opinions.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, let's talk about, you know, to just ground this for the why people should care.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because I feel like everyone kind of skips over this or feels like it's not content's problem.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: But data standardization is actually content's problem.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because if it's not in place, if you don't have a standardized way of identifying things and talking about things that shared um vocabulary, you can end up with a huge mess.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's, I mean, you you end up with a huge mess in terms of understanding what you have, knowing what assets align to what topics or what solutions or what industries, all of that.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have a clear picture and forget trying to do an audit from that.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but more importantly, you don't have the information needed to know what's working for your audience, what they're consuming, where in the journey, in what channels, in what formats.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And if you don't know what's working for your audience, you can't improve or optimize or double down on what's working for your audience.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: So it's so tied in.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that metadata is the core of being able to get that kind of data-driven performance information and insights, but then to actually make decisions off of it.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's, I I love and also like bristled when you were like, it's the unsexy side of content.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, wait, order is very sexy.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: It is, but it's always stupid where people are like Exactly.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's not the thing that your CMO is gonna go wild about.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: They're not gonna be like, oh, that, you know, metadata project really, you know, moved the needle.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: But that's why I think it's also important that when you talk about these things, you talk about why you're doing it, what you're gonna get out of it, and how it's gonna enable you to advance revenue or you know, get it.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're not being organized with how you're interlinking things in the the vocabulary you're using, then AI isn't sure what you do, and then it's gonna make up what you do.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then you're not gonna turn up when people are looking for you because you've done a bad job of demonstrating your expertise, because part of expertise is how much validating data you have to support your claims.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if you're using eight different ways of referring to your product and four different ways of categorizing, you know, the same kinds of things, AI doesn't think you have any expertise.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: AI thinks you're a mess.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that you're very uh broad.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're looking for the like, what's that kernel that I can use to get everyone's attention and make them care, you can let them know that if they aren't paying attention to this, AI is not gonna know who you are and what you do, and that's gonna be a huge problem down the line.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: And bad data in, bad data out, and that's you know, whether you're using it yourself or whether you're using it to create a skill or whatever, an automation.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: You're, you know, it's all gonna be based on something that's faulty, and that's the last thing you want.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: So when you've had a more perfect state taxonomy that you've been able to influence versus having the IT team hand you something and say, here's our taxonomy, which I have been in that position, and that is horrible because then you have to do a lot of um, I don't want to say fighting or arguing, but you have to do a lot of persuading someone who doesn't report to you.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's a lot.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um but when you do have that, you know, that perfect state in play, you know, how does that impact your um your content operations?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, uh it it still comes back to it's the basis for data-driven decision making.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: It tells you, again, what's working, what's not, so you can decide what you need to create or where you have gaps or what you need to do more of.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it it really is figuring out the strategy and optimizing it, um, not only from a placement standpoint, but even from that generation standpoint, you know, up front.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna just say this.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you have an existing company that's had a website for let's say 10 or more years, you probably have inconsistent categorization and tagging.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Unless you've had somebody who really owns taxonomy from a content standpoint, you probably have a mess.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're in that situation, you know, what do you how can you even get started to figure out what you need to improve in and what the lay of the land is?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think the first thing is to understand the scope of of assets at the enterprise.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you can start with your dam, your digital asset management system.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: You can look at, you know, does my company only have marketing assets in there, or does my company use the dam for everything, including HR files and job, you know, recs and and you know, all the things because it starts to tell you where you're gonna have to collaborate versus what you can drive, or at least where the overlaps are.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then I think you have to get a sense of what's the scope of the metadata because there's a level of what you could do, and there's a level of what you should do.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: And and it's where the KISS rule like comes into play so much.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, you could go so far and so weedy and so detailed, and I might be a type A nerdy kind of person that would love that, but it's also there's a point when you're gonna get diminishing returns on that kind of effort.
• 8:12
  unknown: Yeah.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so even if you figure out, okay, we have, we're gonna, we're gonna start with the marketing assets, even, we're gonna just focus on the metadata that is important for us to organize those.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then honestly, there's a couple of people identification levels.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's IDing the groups that are gonna have to get input because even with marketing assets, there's there's different different ones, like campaign assets versus product and solution assets.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly, product marketing should have a pretty heavy weigh in on how we're categorizing or thinking about, say, just the content types of product and solution pieces.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, also, who are your approvers and and just knowing like I have to get this person, this person, this person across these different different disciplines to approve or at least to buy in.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I would say the most important thing and of your people identification is don't try to do a big cross-disciplinary group.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: That is um a mess in the making.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's very difficult.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, not only from some of those projects I do not recommend.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: Same.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and they're always with good intentions because there's so many people who need to weigh in and and and it just becomes really inefficient.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: But I I would say find the people who are willing to slog through the mud with you and and have it be two to four people because those are the people that are really gonna get in there with you, fight the battles that need to be fought, have a recommendation that then you're gonna you are gonna have to shop it around to all the different teams and get them to weigh in on the parts that make sense to them or that they really care about and um and get those approvers.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: But it's having that really down and dirty working team that's willing to just get into the mess.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and frankly, those are the people that I've got lifelong work colleagues who have become dear friends because of specifically these efforts, because we were in the mud together and we knew what it was.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and so then you know, the last thing would be just start with the easy stuff, you know, tackle language taxonomies up front.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Or, you know, if you're doing marketing, start with format, you know, it's one that most people aren't gonna disagree on.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you get the agreements up front and people kind of see what you're doing and they see that you're simplifying and making it pretty easy, um, that's the way to get a win up front and then and then move to content type where you're gonna have to have the battles because that's always gonna be a battle.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I agree with everything you said, and all I can add is it's it's important to make sure you understand your technology stack and what it can actually support from your um category development, from your taxonomy implementation.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because if if, for instance, you're using a 20-year-old association CMS that didn't have any places for metadata, then you're not going to be able to add some of that stuff unless you do manual on the page.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so you really, you know, you have to understand that and don't assume just because something isn't being done that it can't be.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like you may find out that you have somebody on your um on your IT team who is happy to give you co-pilot studio access so that you can update the brand kit with the taxonomy or that you can add that metadata into your um into your internet sites.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Don't assume that just because it's not being done now that it can't be done, but on the flip side, be realistic.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: So if it's something that's gonna require replatforming your website, probably is not gonna happen.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think some of the the longest, hardest conversations I've had about that sort of thing often is around something very minute.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like, do you have a parent-child hierarchical kind of relationship, or do you just have flat and and ultimately it's back to like see what your system can do, keep it really simple and and go forward.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and you started, you mentioned something that actually it sounds easy and simple, but it's not mean.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna have to we're gonna have to break this kind of into a few pieces.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: So when you said, you know, start with the format, that sounds really simple and easy.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: However, there when we started talking um online about this, there are people who feel the content type, format, and distribution channel are kind of all the same thing.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: They can be all in the same bucket.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: But let's let's just start start with format because I don't know about you, but I've been in the situation where I've been given really silly um goals that are not goals because they were production goals.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like do a blog post every week, publish an ebook every quarter.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I I know that ebook is a holiday for you.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: What's an ebook?
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a content format?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a content type?
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's not.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me more.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, as as we've said, there's I think we bonded over hills we would die on.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and ebook is one of them.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: So to me, and and you know, maybe others have a great way of doing this, but format, if I put my KISS hat on and I put my very basic knowledge hat on, it's it's essentially the the file type.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: And you can look at the extension and have that tell you.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's so basic.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a document, which includes PDFs, it's a video, it's an audio file, it's a spreadsheet, it's a slide deck.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there there's not a whole lot, but that's the way to keep it really, really simple.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: Gosh, there's no.ebook?
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: No, there's no ebook.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll tell you why.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: So if you imagine going to any competitor that you have, even not competitors, just go to any site and look up what their ebooks are.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: That they could be an actual web page because they're actually an electronic book.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: They could be what I would call a glorified PDF, which is often like it's a white paper, but prettier, or longer, or shorter, or with more pictures, or what it's horizontal instead of vertical.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: And to me, all of the I I say ebook is a design template, and that's it.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you'll still see it on a lot of sites externally, because that is kind of how we've come to consume things, which is also an interesting thing, that your metadata, your internal taxonomies don't have to necessarily match the user experience.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe that's a debate, but um but I think that where people get really kind of mixed up is in the content type, because they often think about that as it's what it is.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: And instead, they should be thinking about that as what is it for?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: What is the asset's primary purpose?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: So is it to explain something?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Is it to demonstrate a product or a solution?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: Is it to share research or a point of view?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then if that's the case, then it's an explainer, it's a demo, it's a POV, it's research, right?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: It it kind of follows that really easily.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and an ebook.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's not an ebook?
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's not an e-book.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like so because is your ebook giving your company point of view on top three things you should be doing in web space?
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: Or who knows exactly?
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: So imagine your audience coming to that thing.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: Can they clearly understand what they're getting out of it when they see ebook versus when they see POV?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I would argue one of those is right and one of those is not.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: But then there's some folks who are like, oh, but you know, just having video as a type is just too broad.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: We need subtypes because we have some videos, you know, that are like demos, and we have some videos that are explaining videos, and we have some videos that are something else.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I think so.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: So you could have take take demos, for example.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: Is it a, you know, you could all the way go all the way from, you know, we have use case-based demos, we have feature-based demos, we have full product tours, we could have overviews, and all of those might be versions of a demo that is in video format.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: The question is, are you gonna get enough out of how are you gonna look at performance data of all of those?
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: Do you even produce enough of those different ones to create a meaning and a need for the different data on them?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: If you do, awesome, great, yeah, compare them, see which one does better, because you might find your audience doesn't ever look at the feature ones, they just want use cases, and that tells you something insightful.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: But if you don't have that many, or you really don't have a need to break it down that to that degree, just start with demos, right?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's I think something else that people don't really realize with taxonomies is they're living and breathing things.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: You can add to them, you can change them, you can you can update them as you go along.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: They don't have to be what you decided today is is what it needs to be tomorrow.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: So there's some flexibility there too.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean that's also really important because as you change and grow over time, as you your your strategy changes, as you have inevitably new formats, new channels, all this stuff, you are going to have to update your taxonomy because it's exactly it's not gonna be the same.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: And if you try to just shoehorn things that are very different in, you're just going to mess mess up your data.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it I mean, it it can be so complicated, um, and you can make it infinitely complex and you could get the weediest of reporting.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I think it's are you gonna be able to actually make decisions off of that?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: If not, start start simpler.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's the key.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: For me, I've really found that you know, getting that taxonomy in place along with guidelines for actually how to use it is absolutely it's critical for website reporting in particular.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um because you can't really, you can't even uh answer any big questions if you have people going in and changing URLs uh or deleting content after it goes live or had friends and it differently.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Are you kidding?
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think the worst case scenario I ever saw, I was doing a content audit and was looking at Google Analytics data in one particular event had seven different entries into Google Analytics because of people messing with things.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that was terrible.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so bad.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Nope, the nightmares, the nightmares so bad because that meant that the you know, when you have to spend all of your time in a content audit um trying to figure out which data is misnamed and goes together in co collating numbers, yeah, that takes away from the time you have to actually get any real insights.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: It also makes people crappy.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and crappy people are not who you want to have giving you feedback on what you should be doing content-wise.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: You want people who can just go in and see things and make those connections really well.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Same thing goes for social content.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Almost every social scheduling tool allows you to add categories, to add tags, to categorize what the heck it is that you're trying to do with this piece of content.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: And you know how many times I've seen anybody do it consistently?
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: No time.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe occasionally they'll do it, but they'll leave it out too.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: So then every month you have to go in and you have to, you know, check against it and re-tag it.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because until people start to see how amazing it is to be able to see, hey, this kind of content on this channel is doing, you know, really well, and this kind isn't, and it coming from data, not from somebody eyeballing it and making an assertion.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that is transformative for reporting.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's huge.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: It takes away the emotion and the opinions out of any of those conversations and brings it down to the numbers and you can't argue with them.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: But I think there's a a point that you touched on that, you know, it it starts way before the performance.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: It starts with just being able to find the assets in the first place.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: And and think about your counterparts who I'm I'm sure so many of the audience here has heard that I can't find anything in the dam, I look it up this way, the search isn't that great, or that you know, whatever tool you have, it it's about the metadata tagging.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I've been in companies where um we've we've done a huge cleanup project because there was some format and type in place, but but they weren't the way I would think about them.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: Got those cleaned up, great.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: But even then they had um the ability to tag an asset, a single asset with multiple content types, which is really difficult when you're like, well, am is this a research paper or is this an explainer?
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: Because I can't like how do you do measure?
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but it goes back to.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Also, how do you find it?
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: So when your campaign person is going in saying, I need something that's meaty, either research or thought leadership, white paper, that kind of level, on this solution and this industry, if they don't have the right tags, you know, they can't find it.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: Versus surfacing something immediately and they can go on about their day.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it also helps the content marketers because they can quickly see an ecosystem around a particular industry, around a particular solution.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's critical because it helps us not just in the the after part of the job, I would say after you deployed the asset, it helps even like see what you've got on your plate in the first place.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then you do your audits and your gap analyses and all of that.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: So when we say this effort is so foundational, it it really is.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: And and I come back to the unsexy side of it.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's it is unsexy work, but ooh, it's unsexy work, but it gives you sexy results.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: How about that?
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, that's the way.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: I totally agree with that.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: Especially if you're gonna be spending all this time trying to optimize different pieces of content to truly speak to the you know, to the different people in the buying committee or to different industries.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: If you haven't tagged them correctly, they're not gonna get into the right campaign.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: They're not gonna be part of the right follow-up because no one's gonna know that they're there.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really the worst.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because then guess what?
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: Someone's gonna do that work again.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of repeated effort and wasted effort and all of it.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: And and and even when you start to think about, you know, on the opposite side, it's not just the content performance analytics that you're gonna get and the insights there, but when you start to overlay that data with like buying group insights and who are the influencers and what do they typically consume and lead progression data and what kind of assets tend to be the ones that like flip people over?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's when like you know, rainbows pop and unicorns jump around, and you you know, you've reached the holy grail of what we're all trying to achieve.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it's worth noting, it's really hard.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's really hard to get there.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: Really hard.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to have a lot of people.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, especially if marketing doesn't own it, because I mean, where have you been seeing taxonomy live?
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: I frequently see it's it's owned by whoever owns the website, which for some reason seems to frequently be the IT department, which they're not which is always rough.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, I've seen it, and and I think you're right.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: It really differs company by company who owns it.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so, like, you know, content ops, like or or even just operations, you know, enterprise operations, like not even marketing, right?
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: And and so it can go as far as that.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: And and that is because you have some taxonomy lists that cross over, you know, you want that industry list that you're applying to your content metadata to be the same industry list that's being applied in sales data and on the web and all of those things, because if they don't match, you can't start to integrate these things.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that's another holy grail is do you have all those tools with the same taxonomies that they then can start to talk to each other and integrate and share data across.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: So that is also a challenge.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: But a worthwhile one.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it impacts your style guide too, because your style guide is not gonna be accurate if you have a bunch of people using different vocabularies to talk about the same thing.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and if you don't have an accurate style guide, then you have no business ever using AI to create anything public-facing, you know, of any sort, because it's gonna have issues because it doesn't know how it should be talking about things.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: So it's gonna go with what everyone else is doing, which is how you're gonna end up with a category of ebooks.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: Worst case, like the horror music comes in.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: No, but you're gonna end up with something that is gonna inevitably push somebody's buttons because some of these things, the words that we use and the way that we talk about ourselves and the work that we do, there are people in your organization who feel really passionately about those things.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, every every organization I've ever worked for or with, we have a list of the kinds of, you know, this is the word we use in this use case, and don't ever use any other word.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: Or you've got to capitalize it this way, and if not, legal is gonna be all over you.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like those kinds of things, you can't have them be done willy-nilly.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to make sure that your taxonomy is accurate and that it reflects those things that are gonna be hot buttons.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's so important.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's where, depending on, you know, the scope of the assets that you're looking at and what your dam includes, there's some that the content team at like should absolutely be owning.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: There's some that you need to have a healthy respect for other disciplines and and what they do.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the examples I can think of is technical documentation.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: There is a very big difference between a configuration guide and a setup guide and a how-to and a tutorial.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: And they mean something very exactly, they mean something very specific.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: And in those cases, a lot of times it's like, you tell us what you think it should be.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like we'll we'll work and adjust to ensure that we're mapping things in the way that makes sense for the audiences that are consuming them in that case, too.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: So uh it's not that content is is dictating everything, it's kind of applying, you know, the knowledge for the disciplines where where we know it, where we have the expertise, and also respecting the disciplined knowledge from others too.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: And just I think a lot of times we just are the ones who are the first ones to pipe up and say, hey, yeah, it's a problem that nobody can find anything because we're calling, you know, we're calling every white paper five different things.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: So people can't find all of them, and then they think we don't have one, and then they go out and commission one, and then we have three white papers on the same topic in the same quarter from each department.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: What?
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: No, you're right.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: We're we're often the ones that are on the front lines of seeing the inefficiencies or hearing about it because a lot of times, you know, content owns the dam or something like that.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so um, so I think content can be a really amazing driver of this effort, um, and bringing the people together and and kind of working through and being like, all right, these are the ones we know.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like now let's work with you to figure out the ones that you need to have in there and all of that.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um it starts to give you also, frankly, an interesting scope beyond just content strategy.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the projects that I've worked on with taxonomy, God, how much did I learn about system and tool integration and so many things that frankly, if you're a content strategist, it's a notch in your belt of understanding that you wouldn't get with just pure, you know, strategy or content marketing and you know, distribution channels and things like that.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a you know, sexy, unsexy world, but it's also a good one to dive into and to have strong opinions about and to understand and be able to move forward.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's also a way for people to get that if you don't have a leadership role to get that sort of influence without, you know, management kind of perspective and and experience of how do you bring people along and get them to a point.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's a really, really good point.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, any kind of opportunity you have within an organization to do that kind of persuasion without having the authority, um, that's how you get promoted.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's, you know, or in this market, that's how you keep your job because you show that you're able to get things done by bringing people together.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that's so important, especially now that we're all we're bringing in so many um AI automations and workflows, which you know I touched on just a minute ago.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I'd love to hear from your perspective, you know, how you've seen um taxonomy be so important when it comes to bringing AI into the content organization.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: No, I think it um AI can can help here.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: And frankly, it's also something that, you know, I I love the point that honestly that you made in your book about there's humans reading data and there's machines reading data.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: And you gotta make sure in this case that the machines can read it and they're they're gonna read better when they're working off something clear and structured.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so whether using you're using AI to help you tag assets up front, or at least make I should say probably better to start with making recommendations for what the tags should be and training them and then having you know human oversight, great.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: And and then you can go into which team does the human oversight?
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, who owns the dam or who's responsible for putting it up there, you know, somewhere, somebody.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but as you train the model, it can help and you know certainly make that more efficient.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: But then I think it's also, you know, it starts to help you with personalization because you start to make the rules about all right, and X circumstance put Y kind of asset.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: And if again, if you don't have that clear metadata and those those tags, it's not gonna know what to do.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: So um I think it can be an absolute enabler in a lot of the processes and and sort of outcomes that you get when you have clear metadata.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: But as we've said, you know, if you don't have it in the first place, you're you're gonna create an even bigger mess than than you started with.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: And when I think about that, I just like again, we're in planning season.
• 31:40
  unknown: Yeah.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you're looking, if you go and you're pulling your reports and you haven't cleaned this up, how much time are you gonna waste?
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna be up until midnight working on spreadsheets when you should be perfecting your PowerPoint and practicing, you know, your pitch for needing more budget.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's instead, you're gonna be blurry-eyed working on a spreadsheet.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's what's working.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: I can't tell.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you're gonna have no idea.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna make it up because you're gonna just have opinions.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: And um, so yeah, people know when you're making it up.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: You may think that you do a really good job of BSing it, but you're gonna get caught.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: I've actually been in those meetings, and it's ugly when somebody gets caught just making it up because there's somebody who disagrees and is like, Oh, I'd love to see the data on that, and you go.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because it isn't any.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: And on the flip side, when someone's like, I'd love to see the data on that, and you say, Let me pull out my receipts.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: Here's why I'm right, then that also is an amazing feeling.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because then you've won that little, you know, that little check.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: Hold my beer, let me show you my numbers.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: But then it adds credence to everything you're talking about because people that's right, maybe, you know, maybe you don't necessarily have the receipts for everything, but when you're able to back up that um that assertion when somebody is not sure about it, it lends that same veneer of credibility to everything you're talking about, all of your recommendations.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas when you're just when you have a mess, and if you have to show someone else that mess, I'm sorry, being organized makes people think that you're competent and that what you're doing is going to work out.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: If it's just chaos and they're having to wade through your chaos to try to get the information they need, they don't have confidence in your ability to drive what you're doing.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're talking about owning content strategy, you have to have people's confidence.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's right.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because it is, I don't want to say it's a subjective area, but it's an area where everybody has opinions.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they forget that they are not the audience necessarily.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, that that data-driven decision making, that data backing is is critical.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think to your point, as a as a dear colleague used to say, you know, get your own poop in a group and then move on to somebody else's backyard.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: But get your stuff together first because it really makes a difference in how you're going about talking to other teams, presenting your strategies, like it's just backed, and that's a huge, huge component.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: So if somebody's listening to this and they know that they're that they have chaos, that they do not have clean data, that they're gonna be going into a meeting in a few weeks where they're gonna have to back up what they want to do for next year.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what's the first thing that they could do uh today, tomorrow, next week to start getting in a better place with this?
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because obviously taxonomy projects can be huge and take months.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: But what's something that most of us in content should be able to just do?
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think the first step, and it and it seems funny, but but just first agree that it's important.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: Agree that it's an effort worth doing, because if you don't have that, when it does get weedy, when you are in the muck, you're you're gonna have people give up on you, you're gonna lose effort, you're gonna lose momentum, and and that's where things can start to fail.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but if you have that core group of you know, three to five people who are willing to do this with you and you all agree that it's important and you commit to working through it, whether it takes three months or nine months or 15 months, then that's the first step.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: And then I think start to tackle what you can within your own purview.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: So we had that at a company I worked at where we could influence the content type and we could influence the content format, and we were able to do a massive cleanup based on that.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: We cannot influence the enterprise adopting a cross-company product taxonomy.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: We cannot influence the enterprise adopting a cross-company industry taxonomy, all of those things until the enterprise is like, yes, we're gonna put time and effort towards this.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: And and back to your point of it being unsexy, it's the thing that never gets resources, that never gets prioritized because there's always something bigger that's gonna, you know, take precedence.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but but get that little core group of people, work through it with them and and do what you can control and clean up, get your own boot in a group, and then you're able to at least start to you know report on your own data and and and assets and make some headway there.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're wondering from a real tactical standpoint, where to go look, go look at your website.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: Go into the CMS for your website and go and look and export all of the categories being used and then export all of the tags being used.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I want you to then look at them and flag everyone that is in some way, shape, or form either repetitive or a version of one another.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because, and this is pretty much how we got on the topic of ebooks in the first place.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: The thing that I've seen in every single uh website's category or tag, it's usually categories, which just makes me crazy.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: But they will have ebook, one word, all lowercase, ebook, capital E, lowercase book, e dash book, capital E dash book, capital E lowercase B book.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you may think, well, so what, Erica?
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, they're using different capitalization, who cares?
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the person who has to clean up your Google Analytics data cares because Google thinks those are five different things.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: And when you wrote a report on those, you gotta select every single one in the filter to make sure you see.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's maddening.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: So the moral of the story is if you're gonna have ebook, just write it one way.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: Stick with one version.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: But go looking for it in your taxonomy if you want to make the case for why it's a problem.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: Look for it in your taxonomy and then search for that word in your Google Analytics, and you will find how it's a mess.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: And how it means that you can't have a really good um view across all of your content.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: And when you can make that case in such a vivid, easy way, that to me is a really good way to get the buy-in.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, for sure.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: For sure.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean I was just gonna say, you can you can, I feel like, you know, we've sort of positioned this as, you know, it's hard and it takes a long time and it's weedy and it's detailed and and it requires a lot of collaboration.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: But you can get some real ROI out of spall wins with this, you know, even if you just get your format down, even if you just get some types, some basic types down, you can get some real wins out of it.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's a tough effort, but it is really worthwhile.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: And and you can make headway even before you get to the finish line, so to speak.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: One fact.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have any uh recommendations for people who feel like taxonomy is something they really don't know a lot about?
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: But like, are there some people or some um books or sites that you could recommend?
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there is somebody named Erica Hald who has a book called Content Foundations uh that I would recommend that is uh not influenced whatsoever.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I will say, absolutely, you know, God's honest truth, I was flipping through your book the other day and and looking through the brand section.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, I'm at a company, we have a style guide, we have a tone of voice, and and even then going back and looking, I was like, you know, I think we could do some things to make it better.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: So even when you're a seasoned content marketer, going back and looking at some lessons around content foundations can help get you there.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there's another person that I really like what he does.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: His name is Christopher Penn.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: He's done, um, he's got a newsletter on taxonomy.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think he's super, super smart.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it it can get really uh advanced.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: So because he's a huge AI nerd, but he can tell you how to aggregate and really like brute force get some of the stuff done.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: He is amazing.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: So and so some of his, like you said, he's really focused on AI right now.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: But even if you go back a year um and some of his newsletters and articles and and look at those, like that, there's some really, if you're starting, there's some really good foundational stuff too.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so he's those those would be the the first two I would say to start with.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean find the nerds in your company, you know.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: Find the people that find your nerds.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_01: Find your nerds, find your type A's.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because they're also going to be the people involved the next time the website's gonna be redone and you want them on your side.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: You want them to be your BFFs.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly right.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, Amy, where can folks find more of these insights from you and do things like talk M dashes and uh taxonomy and all these other kind of good things?
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, I'm I'm on LinkedIn, I'm happy to have conversations.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, connect with me, reach out to me.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like I I do nerd out about this stuff.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm on a content chat about taxonomy, right?
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: So whether it's that or anything else around content or or brand marketing, any of that, I'd I'd be happy to talk to anybody.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: So hit me up and and um yeah, let's connect.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: Love it.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you so much for being my guest today and diving in on this topic that, you know, not so sexy on the surface, but leads to really sexy results.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: There we go.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I want people to care about taxonomy.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: I do too.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: I do too, because it'll get it'll get people really far.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: So uh thank you for having me.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: This was a fun moment for me.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're I'm a fan.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: So getting to to talk to you and and even be here is is an honor.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, super fun.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_00: And thank you all for watching content chat, and we'll be back next week.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: Same time.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: Bye, everybody.