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Transcript

8/31/26 #ContentChat: Measuring Your Content Operations Maturity · #ContentChat

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Hi everyone, and welcome to Content Chat.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Erica Heald, founder of Erica Heild Marketing Consulting and author of Content Foundations: Scale Your Content with AI Without Losing Your Voice.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: All right, today we're going to talk about something that's very near and dear to my heart.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it's something that really follows off what we've been talking about over the past three months, where we've really been talking about all of the individual components you need to have in place in order to build a strong content foundation.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we talked about brand voice, style guides, personas, taxonomy, content planning, review and approval processes, quality, AI, documentation, building out your content team, all of those things that are really important.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: But the one thing we didn't necessarily talk about so much is actually something I get a question about pretty much every time I talk about content governance and building those strong foundations for your content operations.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that question that I get is well, where should I start?
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I get it.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you gotta start somewhere.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: You can't possibly tackle all the things at once, right?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe you know that your style guide is outdated and it hasn't been updated, you know, since you joined the organization several years ago, or that you don't have an editorial calendar, that you have multiple teams with their own spreadsheets or uh, you know, dashboards.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps your content intake process includes people sending Slack messages, text messages, or paper airplanes to whatever marketer they happen to know to request what they need.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say maybe you have personas that exist, but nobody can remember where they're stored, let alone what differentiates any of them from each other.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, I'm pretty sure that just about everyone out there is having their leadership team asking, Hey, so what exactly are you doing with our investment in AI?
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: How are you doing more with the uh tools that we've given you?
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: When you look at that, it can be so overwhelming.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: You can feel like, oh my gosh, I need to fix everything and I don't have time, I don't have the resources.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the deal, you absolutely do not have to fix everything at once.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: You just need to understand first where your content operations are today, what's really creating friction, and what improvements that you can reasonably accomplish are going to give you the strongest foundation for whatever you need to do next.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what we're going to be talking about today: how to evaluate your content operations maturity level.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to walk you through a couple of resources that I've created to help you do exactly that.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: These are all non-gated resources, things that you'll be able to grab a hold of on the ContentFoundationsbook.com website.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: You scroll down to the bottom, and there's uh those resources that we're gonna be talking about.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Starting with number one, before we actually talk about the first resource on the page, which is an assessment, I want to talk about what I mean when I say content operations maturity.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because when we hear the word maturity, it can sound like there is one ideal end state, like there's one thing you need to do first, and then second, then third.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not it.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: You don't just get started with the first thing and just do, do, do, and then go, okay, now my operations are perfect.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that's just not how it works, unfortunately.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because every day our organization changes, our market changes, our customers change, technology changes, business priorities change, especially when it comes to what marketing should be focused on, right?
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say you've acquired new companies or you launch a new product, you enter a new market, or you leave a market, you hire new people, people leave.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: All of these things change every single day.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: How organizations create, review, distribute, and manage content.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: So that means that content operations maturity isn't a destination, it's really just recognizing what your current ability is to consistently create the right content in the right way with the people and systems you have.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's how well you're able to do that versus it being a hundred-point scale where you get 100 and then you can go, whew, we are done with operations.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, it is not that simple.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason I say this is I frequently see organizations trying to implement processes that are more complicated or more sophisticated than they actually need at this given point.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: So you don't get extra points because your content governance has 12 approval stages, and you're not gonna be creating better content because you have a quorum of 10 people who all say it's great.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I think those kinds of things are actually evidence that you have a problem.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, you know, if you have a two-person marketing team, you're gonna have a very different need when it comes to technology workflows and documentation than what a global organization that's producing content across multiple business units, several dozen languages, and a bunch of different business regions.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: That is gonna require a completely different level of maturity with different types of processes, guidelines, and documentation and a completely different tool set.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the thing is, is what really matters in regardless of which kind of organization you are, it's whether your content foundation supports the work that you're charged with doing, that you're able to do the things that you need to do to create the content that your customers need.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: It starts with when are the people on your team able to find the information they need to do their jobs?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Do they know who owns what when it comes to your content operations?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Are they aware of what good content looks like for your organization?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Or are they guessing if the content that they or their contractors, freelancers, or agencies have created is good enough?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: If you onboard new people, are you able to bring them into the process without everything falling apart?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: And really critically at this point, can you give an AI tool enough context, guardrails, and documentation to produce something useful that's on brand for you without requiring a human being to completely redo the output?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I gotta tell you, the answer to that last one is no for so many organizations.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: It is no for most people, because that's frankly not how people have been approaching using AI.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: They've been approaching it from the, hey, I gotta create a good prompt that I do a really good job of telling the AI what it is I want it to do for me.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: But we focus so much on that that we haven't focused on providing that context that the AI needs to understand what makes you different and your audience different and the value that you bring different.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: But your answer to all of these questions together is what's going to tell us a lot more about your content operations maturity than how many tools you've purchased or how many pages are in your brand guidelines.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, where should you realistically get started?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you need to start by assessing what you actually have in place.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that's honestly why I created the Content Foundations assessment in the first place.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was to give people a relatively quick way to take stock of which of those content foundations they have that are actually in place and working well.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to be able to find that on content foundationsbook.com.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's 10 short, multiple choice questions.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end, you will get a score because I want to bucket you in to help you get a sense of where your content foundation is today.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: But the score, in and of itself, isn't the most useful part.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: What's useful, in my opinion, is noticing which questions make you hesitate.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because those moments of hesitation, they tell you something really important.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: If I ask you, do you have documented brand guidelines?
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And your answer is, well, sort of.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's useful.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm asking you whether everyone involved in content creation knows where to find your current documentation, and you think, well, I know where it is, that's also useful.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: But I didn't ask if you knew where it was.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: I asked whether everyone who needs to know knows where it is.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that, and thinking through these answers in that way.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the difference between having a content asset in place, having a tool in your toolbox, and having an operational foundation that helps everyone do their best work.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where I think the content governance checklist, which is also on the book's website, can be especially helpful.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: It goes um, goes a little bit deeper, goes uh in a little different direction than the quiz to let you work through the different pieces of your content foundation and identify what's working, what's missing, and what may need attention.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: So you can actually use these tools together.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I recommend as you work through it that you resist the temptation to immediately start fixing things.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's so, so tempting to just jump in and say, Oh, what's the low-hanging fruit?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: What could I do today?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Could I update our brand voice?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Can I have that quick win?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: No, do not jump in and start doing because first you need to diagnose the problem.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: What is holding you back?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: What are some patterns?
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: Where are you consistently answering yes?
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Where are you consistently answering no?
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: And where are you saying, yeah, technically we have these things in place?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because I gotta tell you, technically is great because it's one of my favorite warning signs uh when it comes to doing um discovery or having doing a content audit and talking through it with the owner of the content inventory.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because technically, it's like when you say technically, we've got a style guide, technically, there's an intake form.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: What that says is that these things aren't working very well, they aren't necessarily usable.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Something that was created four years ago that no one references isn't helping your content operations.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a really comprehensive 75-page style guide that takes out all the most important parts from the AP style guide that you use and has everybody's most pet peeves sitting in there, that 75-page style guide in a PDF somewhere on SharePoint isn't necessarily helping your team make decisions when they're drafting a blog post.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, it's probably overwhelming.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have an intake form, yet everyone bypasses it by messaging the content leader or whoever they know is the owner of that channel, then you don't have an intake process.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: So don't just ask yourself as you're going through this process, do we have this?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Ask, does this actually support how we work?
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: So then once you've taken stock of which of these resources you have that are usable, that's when you also need to understand what's actually holding you back when it comes to doing the work that you need to get done.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because not every missing piece has the same impact.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, let's say that you go through the assessment and checklist and discover that you have gaps in five areas.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you don't have a well-documented brand voice, your personas need updating, your taxonomy is inconsistent, your review process is cumbersome, and your aggregation of editorial calendars is not giving anyone a clear view of everything being created across the organization.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's a lot, and it can feel like, oh gosh, that's five separate problems I need to tackle.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: But sometimes these gaps are actually just symptoms of one or two larger issues.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, maybe your content team is spending a lot of time revising drafts from internal subject matter experts.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: You could look at that and say, we need a better review process.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe, but probably not, because let's look at what's actually happening there.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Why are the drafts that are coming in requiring so much revision?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: Are the subject matter experts unclear about the audience they're supposed to be talking to?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Or do they not understand the expected format that you need to have that posted?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Are they writing in their own personal voice versus the brand voice that you need to have the content to reflect?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um and did they receive a vague request that said, hey, can you write 800 words about this topic instead of getting a creative brief that outlined all of these expectations?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because if that's what's happening, adding another review stage or more people into that process is not going to solve your problem.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: You may need to improve upon your content brief or create better templates or more usable brand voice guidelines, or all three.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why I always want to understand where the friction shows up in the workflow.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes the way to get to this is by looking at, if you have any kind of a project management tool, looking at where content is getting stuck, what stage of your process things are lingering in?
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Where are people waiting for extra amounts of time that are breaking your timeline?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Where are people confused and needing to hop on a quick call or slacking or just simply stopping work because they don't know what's expected for them?
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Where's work being redone by you, by the folks publishing content, by the designers?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Where are people creating their own workarounds because the official process doesn't work for them?
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, sure, in some cases it's gonna be because somebody just has issues with authority and with following someone else's process, but frequently that's not the case.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's because the process is not working for them.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so you do need to find out why that is.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: And last but not least, if there's one person who has to swoop in and fix everything every time you are publishing this kind of content or working in with this subject matter expert or working on this channel, that is something else that you need to take stock of and ask yourself why.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because frequently an organization's content operations might look on paper like they're a lot more mature than they are, but it's really that there's just that one experienced person, that content leader, who's holding everything together because they know what the CEO likes and what their hot button issues are.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: They remember which terminology that product marketing and legal both agreed upon.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: They know where the latest messaging document lives.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: They remember why you stopped using a certain phrase three years ago.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: They know who needs to approve a customer quote and whether or not there's any chance that you're gonna get it approved in time to put it into that ebook that you want to be publishing.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: They know which subject matter experts actually gonna respond by the deadline and who's gonna need to get a 30-minute meeting put on the calendar just to get them to look at whatever it is.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because they know all these things, the content gets out the door.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not a mature system.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's institutional knowledge living inside someone's head.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: And let me assure you, it is not living there rent-free.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: It is costing so much.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because if that person goes on vacation, changes roles, leaves the company, or anything out of the norm happens, suddenly everybody realizes how much of the process was undocumented.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're evaluating your content operations maturity, don't just ask whether the work gets done, ask what does it take for the work to get done?
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's when we're gonna be able to identify your bottleneck.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's really what probably the most important part of this exercise.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because, you know, we all have huge to-do lists, you don't need to be adding more unnecessarily to a list of everything that you could possibly improve, because we could all improve pretty much on all of the different levels of content foundations.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Every organization, even if they're pretty mature, nothing works perfectly.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: But you're not trying for perfect, you're trying to identify what's keeping you from operating effectively right now, today.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: So it's the foundational element or small group of elements that's limiting everything else you're trying to do.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, frequently, I find that in so many organizations, it's brand voice.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because every piece of content ends up being rewritten by every single person who does a review because no one agrees on what the organization should sound like and what is your voice.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: So when that happens, you know, you add AI to the process and hire freelancers and an agency, and you create templates, but none of it matters.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: None of that actually helps you get anything done.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because if no one can explain to all of them, and especially to the AI, what sounds like us, you're just gonna be creating an enormous amount of editing rework for your content leader.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: For a lot of organizations, another big bottleneck is intake, those requests, how requests come to the or the group, how they're prioritized, the information, getting all the information they need to even decide if something can or should be done.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Too often content teams spend so much time responding to random content requests that they can't execute against those strategic priorities that have been on the editorial calendar for the entire quarter or longer.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, in that situation, if you're creating, you know, spending the time to create a sophisticated taxonomy isn't gonna be your best first priority.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: You have to get control over what is coming into the team.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: For other organizations, you know, the biggest bottleneck might be ownership, where you know, you have so many people who contribute to content, but nobody knows who has the authority to make the final decision.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: So reviews last forever.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: People give conflicting feedback, and you have you try to get consensus, and so you spend cycle after cycle of trying to get somebody to back down from their opinion.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that's you know, exhausting.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, in those kind of situations, it's not that you need another tool, it's that you need to get that buy-in for people agreeing on what the roles are of each person in your content review process and who owns the decision making, who owns the channel, who owns the kinds of content that you're creating.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: So, as you can see, there isn't ever one thing that is the biggest issue that's gonna actually be that lowest hanging fruit across all content operations.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: For every organization, it's gonna be something that's gonna take that reflection, where you really have to think about how you're answering the assessment and what the real world experiences are of working on content across your team.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: So a few things you can ask yourself are you know, what are we trying to accomplish that our current content operations make unnecessarily difficult?
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: That gives you the context for everything that you've put into your maturity assessment.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're not improving your content operations just so you can say that you have more mature content operations.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: You're not gonna print out your score and hand it to your boss and say, give me a raise.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: I got I got a 100% on the content operations.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: We're doing everything perfectly.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the whole point here.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: You're doing this because the business needs your content team to do something that it can't currently do reliably or efficiently.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now I gotta give a big warning, a big halt, which is don't confuse.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: The size of your technology stack or the amount of time that you've spent tailoring that technology stack, don't confuse that with content maturity.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: It comes up a lot.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: People feel like, oh, we just need to get a really good content operations platform that has really solid built-in governance that we can, you know, define all those workflows.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's gonna be, you know, once we get the budget for that and get that implemented, that's gonna solve our problems.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: But the technology, buying that technology, is not gonna automatically make your content operations more mature.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna give you a bunch more work, but it's not gonna solve it by itself, the same way that implementing AI isn't gonna solve that problem either.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can have a really sophisticated content management system or project management platform, a dam, whatever those things are as part of your marketing stack, and still have a really immature content operations foundation because technology can automate a process, but it can't make a bad process good and it can't enforce a process across your organization.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: It can't define a process that works for you guys, for your team.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the big reasons that I've spent so much time across the last few months as I've walked everyone through Content Foundations talking about documentation.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I know people are tired of hearing about documentation, they're tired of putting stuff in writing.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: But come on, you know it, you know this to be true.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: If your team can't agree on your brand voice, giving everyone access to an AI writing tool is just gonna cause more of a mess.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: You're just gonna create inconsistent content that much faster.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: And you're not gonna then get that return on the investment that everyone was promised by bringing in the new technology.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, if you have taxonomy that consists of whatever somebody feels like tagging something as, with everybody being able to go in there and add categories and tags and use them willy-nilly, well, then you're not going to have an organizational structure everyone understands.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: If your approval process involves six people who don't agree, giving different feedback, and the poor person creating the content revising the content again and again and again and sending it back out, putting that workflow into a shiny new platform doesn't eliminate the problem in the process, which is truly about roles and responsibilities.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's just going to clog your email inbox with more and better notifications about the fact that your process is stalled.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know about you, but I've absolutely never been somebody who wants to get more notifications about how something is late and not happening.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: Ugh, right?
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: But that's why AI readiness is part of content operations maturity.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: Before you ask what we can automate, what can AI take off of our plate?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: You really have to say, you have to, you really have to understand if the process is ready to be automated.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got to be able to answer yes to is it documented?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: Is it repeatable?
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: Do people agree on what good looks like for the output from doing this process?
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: Do we know what requires human judgment versus what are we comfortable handing off to AI?
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: And do you have any idea what information an AI tool would need to perform the task successfully?
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you're just relying upon it to use whatever it was trained broadly in its model to do, and from boiling the ocean of all sorts of good, bad, and indifferent content, you're absolutely not going to be creating something that reflects who your company is and the brand that you're trying to put forward.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: So if you answered no to any of those questions, that's useful because you've just identified foundational work that needs to happen before you try to scale by introducing new technology.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: All right, so let's say you've completed the assessment, you've gone through the checklist, you've identified the places where your team experiences the most friction.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: And now you probably have a list, maybe even a pretty long list.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: So what do you do with it?
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think your best results are gonna come from evaluating each potential improvement against three elements.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's gonna be your the impact, the effort, and the dependency.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: So for impact, that's asking yourself if we improve this, what changes?
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Is it gonna reduce rework?
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: Is it gonna speed up approvals?
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: Will it help people create better first graph drafts?
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: Does it make it easier to onboard freelancers agencies and new hires?
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: Does it reduce risk?
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: Does it help us use AI more effectively?
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: What is it going to mean to our content operations, to our content team, if we improve upon this?
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: Next, you need to look at what the effort is going to be that's required to address the issue.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: How difficult is it to address?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: Updating like a one-page content brief that's just a document file might take you an afternoon where you just really look at it and say, what's the information that's missing, or that we're not getting quite the what we need in response?
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: That could be an easy project to do.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: Creating a global taxonomy across multiple business units, on the other hand, very different undertaking.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not saying you're gonna want to avoid the harder work, but as you are looking at your list and prioritizing, you do need to understand what you're committing to and how much time and other resources it's going to take.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then that last one is one that it's always tempting to skip over or that we can forget.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: But those dependencies, what needs to happen before something else can work?
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say, for example, your boss might be saying that we that you need to create an AI prompt library.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's a very common thing that people are thinking that they need to have because they want everyone to be using the same prompts.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: But if you don't have documented brand voice guidelines, really usable personas in standardized content templates, you do not have the ingredients for the context that you need to give AI in order to create very useful prompts.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: Those prompts are going to create completely different outputs for every single person who uses them because it's going to be looking into their individual use of the tool versus having that shared understanding of who your brand is and what good looks like.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: So in that situation, your prompt library isn't actually your first project, your foundational documentation is.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, you might want to overhaul your editorial calendar.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: But if nobody agrees on what qualifies as a content initiative, who owns approving the requests, or what information needs to be captured before you can give something the green light, you gotta answer those questions first.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why I don't recommend taking a maturity, the maturity assessment and turning every no, every place that you had to give yourself a low score on.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Don't turn all of those into an action item.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, you want to use those gaps to create a sequence to put things that prioritize what is going to actually help you because it actually really does need that attention right now.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: What's going to become possible once we fix this thing and what can wait?
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: And there are a lot of things that can wait.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's the good news.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to be doing all of this at once, okay?
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: So finally, there's something else I want you to think about as you're doing this work.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: Your organization probably doesn't have a single content operations maturity level.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: Different parts of your content operations may be at very different stages.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: Your brand team might have excellent documentation and governance.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: Your demand generation team probably has a strong planning process, right?
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe your product marketing team has really detailed messaging documentation.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: And your thought leadership program is held together with email threads, Slack messages, and good intentions.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's pretty normal.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, just because all those processes are in place in those individual teams doesn't mean that those processes are working across your whole organization either.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: But that's okay.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's totally normal.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: But it means that when you're evaluating your maturity, you want to avoid averaging everything together and deciding we're pretty good.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: You need to actually think through where there are significant gaps with various teams that are impacting the way the whole organization comes together with content.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you try to lump it together and you say, well, in general, you know, we have this one group that's really good about at documentation, and this other group doesn't do any of it.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess we're okay, right?
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: We're pretty good.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: But the thing is, is if you just decide to go with the oh, it's it's fine, things are pretty fine.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that actually hides the areas that are causing significant friction for your team.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, have you seen those kinds of situations where you have one team has a content intake process that works really well, but it's only for this one team.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: And nobody knows where that intake form is.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, been there.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, there might be a team that has a really good handle on what the taxonomy is for the way that they're naming their files and the way that they're referring to things within their content, but they haven't documented that process and shared it.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: They haven't documented that taxonomy and shared it with the rest of the organization or gotten agreement and buy-in that that's how you want to be using those words.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not consistent across the whole organization.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's just started there.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what's great is that's a starting point and an opportunity.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes, you know, improving your content operations isn't going to be about inventing something completely from scratch, starting something new.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it means you find something that's already working somewhere in your organization and helping it scale, making it be usable across your entire content operation.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually one of my favorite things to uncover when I'm doing this kind of work with a client.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: When somebody says, Oh, well, we don't have a very good process for that.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then someone else says, Well, actually, our team does.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: That is fantastic.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I always say with my grabby hands, gimme, let's look at it.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: What works about it?
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: What could we standardize?
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: What needs to be different for your team?
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, can we put this, you know, on the marketing SharePoint as a variable intake form that depending upon what it is the end product is, that it gives them different questions and it automatically routes this to the right team and gets it in their Monday board.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: Things like that are so much easier than starting from that blank sheet of paper and trying to get everyone aligned.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: So just know that maturity is not about imposing identical processes everywhere, starting from scratch.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's about creating enough shared structure so that people don't have to reinvent the way that content gets made every time they start a project.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna give you some homework, a practical exercise to do this week after you've listened to uh the Sizion of Content Chat.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to go to contentfoundationsbook.com and take the content maturity assessment.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's just 10 questions, so this isn't a huge commitment, and you don't need to worry about whether or not you get a good score, okay?
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, I want you to pay attention to the questions where you hesitate and then download the content governance checklist and spend a few minutes looking at the individual components of your content foundation.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: And as you work through it, you'll be wanting to create three buckets.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: One that's for working, the parts of your content operations that are documented, understood, being used by everybody, and actually helping your team.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: In the middle, I want you to have that needs attention.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: And these are things you technically have, but they're outdated, they're not used consistently, they're hard for people to find, or they're causing friction.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, the big bucket of things that are absolutely missing, foundational elements you don't have yet.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: Then you're gonna want to look at those last two categories and ask which of these gaps is creating the biggest obstacle to what our team needs to accomplish by the end of the year?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: Not which one of these sounds most impressive, or which tool has our leadership team been asking about.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: All right, and not, you know, I know it's tempting, but just because you went to a conference that was really exciting and gave you lots of great ideas, that's not how you're gonna decide either.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: You need to focus on what's actually preventing your team from doing its work more consistently, efficiently, and effectively, and that's where you're going to start.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: So if there's one thing that you take away from today's conversation, I'd like it to be this.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: Your content operations maturity isn't about having everything done.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's about having the right foundations for what your organization needs to do next.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: Those foundations will change, they're gonna evolve over time.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why assessing your content operations isn't something you're gonna do once and forget about it.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's not, you're not gonna say we had this great content foundations project and we completed it, and now we never have to think about any of that again.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, that's not gonna ever happen, all right?
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's not gonna be a set it and forget it.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: You do need to come back to it, especially after any kind of major organizational change.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: So if your team grows significantly, you introduce or sunset new channels, you expand into new markets, implement some new technology, or are finally getting integrate AI more deeply into your content workflows.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: In each of those scenarios, you're going to want to take a step back and assess whether that foundational element that supports this change, whether that thing that worked for you really well in the past, is it still gonna work in this new scenario?
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: Or is it gonna need some augmentation?
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: So we just remember that the goal is not to reach some permanent state of content operations perfection, because that's not something that happens for any of us, all right?
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: Your goal is to recognize when your current foundation is starting to constrain you and strengthen it before those cracks become bigger problems.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: If you haven't already uh picked up a copy of Content Foundations, the book walks you through each of the foundational areas in significant detail and has practical frameworks you can use to strengthen the areas your assessment identifies.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: Also, when you get your response from the assessment quiz that's online, it will give you some free tools that I've created that you can use as well.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Alright.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, your goal for this for this week: take uh the assessment, look for the friction, and figure out what's actually holding your content team back.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: And just choose one foundational improvement to focus on next.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to fix everything, you just need to fix whatever that thing is that's keeping you from moving forward.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, thank you so much for joining me for today's content chat.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be taking next week's holiday Monday off, and we'll see you again the following Monday.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: Take care.