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Transcript

6/8/26 #ContentChat: Taming the Chaos with Taxonomy · #ContentChat

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Content Chat.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Eric Ahield, and today we're continuing our content foundation series when we're talking about chapter four, which is teeming the chaos with taxonomy.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I know, I know, taxonomy isn't usually a topic that gets content marketers or any marketers, frankly, really excited.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Most people would rather be talking about AI, thought leadership, content strategy, social media, literally anything else.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the thing: taxonomy is one of the foundational systems that makes all of those things work better for you.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't have that shared language and a consistent way that you organize your information, your content, your assets, your content becomes so much harder to find.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why today's conversation will be focusing on why taxonomy matters for content marketers and how it supports scalable content operations.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, if you'd like to go deeper, chapter four, in addition to everything we're going to talk about over the next few minutes, it also includes an example of how to organize a taxonomy.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: So an actual example of what a marketing taxonomy looks like, and for some framework for incorporating taxonomy management into your ongoing content hygiene efforts.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Alright?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Let's dig in.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for those of you who are saying, what exactly is taxonomy?
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, taxonomy is the science of classification.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: It gives us a consistent way to organize and categorize information so that people can find, understand, use, and manage that content more effectively.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Every organization already has a taxonomy, whether it's documented or not, because you're already naming files, you're already putting headlines and titles on things.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: So you already have a way that you are describing things.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: So the question really is if that taxonomy is intentional, consistent, or and useful.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: And spoiler, frequently it is none of those things at all.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: It is something that has just sort of happened.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's accumulated over time.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: But when taxonomy isn't documented, teams too often create their own versions of the truth.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Different departments use different terminology.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's how you get that E-book, small E capital B book, and four other variations of ebook being used to describe the exact same file, depending upon who is doing the describing, which then also leads to all sorts of problems.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: When similar content gets categorized in those different ways, it's almost impossible for any of the tools that you use for doing your measurement, for doing suggested related content, none of those tools are going to have a comprehensive picture of what you already have in place because you're describing it in a variety of different ways.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: But when you do have that documented taxonomy, that creates the structure that ensures that you are all using the same language to describe the same things.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that creates structure that helps you move from having that content chaos to having content clarity.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Overall, I would say that most organizations don't even realize that they have a taxonomy problem until a few of these really frequent symptoms start appearing, such as realizing there's multiple names for the same product, service, or initiative.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: And not just internally, those names are leaking out externally.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen that a ton, especially when you're in a fast-moving startup that is trying to create a whole new category.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: You can have a bunch of people doing a lot of naming creation on their own.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, you'll see duplicate content being created because nobody can find the existing assets that were already created for that same purpose.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: You have inconsistent tagging and categorization, again, having those ebooks, ebooks, and more ebooks in different ways, but also with white papers and reports all being used for different reasons by different people for the same and differing content.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that leads also to that difficulty locating content when it's needed, horrible reporting challenges caused by inconsistent classifications, because guess what?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Every time you use a different spelling, even just different capitalization for your tagging for a content, tools like Google Analytics create a whole new entry for that one piece that's tagged that way.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it won't then be rolled up into all of the rest of them, which means you're going to be making decisions based on inconsistent, incomplete reporting.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, at first these issues can seem like isolated problems.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like maybe you'll just see one of them kind of popping up.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: But they're all symptoms of the same underlying challenge, which is not having that shared organizational language and structure.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Which gets makes me to my next point, which is a lot of people think that taxonomy is just simply a one-and-done kind of tagging exercise, that, you know, really it's fine to let whatever department owns the website own the taxonomy, and we'll all just use whatever it is that they decide to use as the way that we are describing things.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem is that your taxonomy isn't just something that lives on your website, it's actually a governance tool.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's a hugely important content governance tool.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: It helps establish that consistency across your content creators, teams, channels, and technologies so that you have that shared understanding of how information should be categorized and described.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you can't be scaling your content operations without having it in place.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I consider taxonomy be one of the foundational building blocks of content governance and talk about it at the very start of my book, Content Foundations.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you don't get anything else done, um, you know, the top four things that we've gone over over these past few weeks on content chat, you know, taxonomy is that fourth major building block that you've got to have in place, even if you do nothing else, if you want to be able to bring your content strategy to life.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: When you do have that common language that you're using in the form of a taxonomy, it becomes easier to know what content you should be creating, to manage it, measure it, distribute, and maintain that content.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Taxonomy isn't just about creating more rules, it's not about creating naming conventions for your files, although that's certainly something that taxonomy plays into.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's about reducing friction.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: I definitely feel that this conversation that we're having now about taxonomy is so critical because of how much um AI adoption is happening throughout organizations and your AI tools.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: People kind of think that, you know, AI just automagically understands your business, and that you can just give it your website URL or upload, you know, a few uh sentences, and that it will understand your voice, your tone, your personas, your um style guide, and that it'll understand what your taxonomy is and be able to apply it to everything that it does.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not true.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: AI needs context that you provide.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to train it.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: And taxonomy provides really helpful context because it documents your organizational language, your product terminology, your audience definitions, the content categories that you use to describe and differentiate between the content that you're creating and the relationships between the concepts that you discuss across all of your channels and across all of your different pieces of content.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Many organizations discover their biggest taxonomy weaknesses only after they've implemented AI, which is not ideal.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: The reason for that though is that the technology pretty quickly reveals inconsistencies that humans have been quietly working around for years.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: When different teams use different terminology or classify content differently, especially across your website, which I've seen so frequently that to be the case, that each section is owned by a specific department who's updating that content and they're not using that same language across the entire organization.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: And when that happens, AI tools don't have a reliable way to determine which version of the truth is correct.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: So the stronger your taxonomy, the stronger the foundation you're providing for both the humans that create content in your organization and for the AI tools that you want to be using.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the last things I'm gonna leave you with today is that the biggest taxonomy mistake isn't creating a bad taxonomy.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's about creating one and not maintaining it.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Businesses evolve, your products evolve, your audiences evolve, content evolves.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Your taxonomy needs to evolve as well whenever any of these things change.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where content hygiene becomes critical.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: A healthy taxonomy is not going to be a one-time project.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's not something you can assign to someone on your team to, oh, just document that taxonomy and get it up there in our digital asset management tools and on the website, and then we never have to think about it again.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, that's just not the case.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: You're absolutely going to have to be going in there and seeing are pieces of content being created that none of your defined taxonomy adequately uh differentiates between.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Are there categories in your taxonomy that are never being used?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or are there are there terms that are being used for such a broad uh grouping of content that people are not able to find what they need?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Over time, after you've documented your taxonomy, you 100% are going to want to be making revisions to it to reflect how people are using your content and what your current content realities are actually focused on.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why chapter four in the book doesn't just discuss taxonomy structure, it also explores how taxonomy management can be part of your, can become part of your regular content hygiene process, helping to ensure that your organizational language stays aligned with your business and your content ecosystem over time.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: So your goal, remember, is not perfection when we're talking about any of these foundational content foundations.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: The goal is just getting started, is doing the work.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: So for this, your taxonomy goal is to maintain a taxonomy that remains useful, relevant, and usable.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: So if you take nothing else out of this uh mini rant that I've shared with you today, this overview of chapter four in content foundations on taxonomy, taxonomy isn't about the tags, categories, or metadata, even though that's obviously what the what is, right?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: But what the value is in taxonomy, and the reason you should be focusing on it as one of your core four content foundations is taxonomy is about creating a shared language that helps people and technology work more effectively together.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: A good taxonomy that's been documented and shared and adopted across your organization makes your content easier to find, easier to reuse, easier to personalize, easier to measure, and critically easier for AI to understand and to apply.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of those invisible systems that nobody notices when it's working well, but everybody feels when it's broken.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why taxonomy deserves its place alongside brand voice, style guides, templates, and workflows as a foundational element of scalable content operations.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: So thanks for joining us today for content chat.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have any questions about taxonomy, leave them in the comments and join us next time as we go forth into the second section of content foundations.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Bye everyone.