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Transcript

8/24/26 #ContentChat What’s Next for Content Foundations? · #ContentChat

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Good afternoon and welcome to Content Chat.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Erica Heald.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Today we are doing a little special edition that is an addendum to our 12-week content foundations series.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because I wanted to share some of the things that I've learned since I published the book in talking about the book and doing presentations, working people working with them as they work their way through the book.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because I have certainly learned a ton that will be used to influence the eventual second edition of the book.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: So the first thing that I learned is people are using the book in one of two ways.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: There are people who are reading it from cover to cover, and then there are people who are kind of skipping around based upon what their level of content operations maturity is.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: So folks who have taken the assessment, which if you have not taken the assessment, you can go to contentfoundationsbook.com.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the very first link at the bottom where we have the book resources is to are you laying the right foundation for content success assessment?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a 10 question assessment that will give you a score, give you a rating to show how mature your content operations are and what your areas of development should be.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if you take that first, it can help you decide perhaps which chapter you might want to start with.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: So that was the first thing that I'd anticipated, but it was definitely nice to see that that is how people were deciding to do things.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Secondly, everybody kept asking me for a content governance checklist.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: So they really people really wanted to have something in writing that they could use to try to determine what's working, what's missing, and where the book would be able to help them the most.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: So again, the people who didn't necessarily want to take the assessment, even though it just takes a couple minutes, it's all multiple choice, it's easy peasy.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: But there are folks who really want to do a self-scoring checklist, just you know, themselves and their favorite pen or pencil, and just do it from scratch by hand.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: So okay, I created a content governance checklist, which you'll also find on the site.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Another thing that I found is once folks read the book and saw um saw that there was something in there that really spoke to them and the challenges their teams had, I've had a few people go ahead and purchase a number of books so that way they could share with their entire content team.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And for those folks, I have book club guides.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: So both guides for professional organizations like meetups, um, like the content strategy meetups or content marketing meetups in Portland and Seattle.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, for folks like that, put together a book club guide and also a version that you can use if you are in-house or at an agency and wanting to share the book and have conversations with your team.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I put that up on the website as well in response to what I was hearing from people.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then last but not least, from the site, um, I actually put together a content governance starter template, which was a read-along template that could be used when you're reading the book to kind of write down your responses to the content that you were consuming and to the different frameworks and methodologies.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that way, after you processed everything that you were learning about, that you could see what you would want to come back to and have an easy place to do that.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, with all of that, I actually think when we have the version two, something I'm gonna do for people who pre-order is I'm going to create a workbook that has a section for each chapter and has any of the elements that you would work through based upon the book that'll actually have workbook pages to give you a place to jot notes and do some of the exercises yourself because I think that would actually be really helpful.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: So those are just some things to think about, and I'm definitely going to add in a manual self-assessment into the book itself for the next version, so that way people don't have to go to the website in order to get the PDF printable, but they can just have it right there in the book in that moment when they're going through.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: So those were a few things that are specific to using the book.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when it comes to applying what I'm talking about in the book in the actual workplace settings, one of the most interesting things I found is, and this wasn't a surprise, but basically, anyone whose organization is large enough to have a dedicated IT person or an dedicated IT department, they are an enterprise that's using the Microsoft infrastructure.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: This is almost 100% the case.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: And in all of these situations, they of course have copilot.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's where the the tricky part comes in.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: So copilot is fantastic in that it integrates with the rest of your Microsoft ecosystem.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: So if you have um your templates, your guidelines, your data all on your intranet, on your SharePoint sites, the good news is it's very discoverable by Copilot.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: So Copilot can be using those things, um, using those resources in conjunction with the outputs that it gives everyone.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: However, and this is the hard part, not every organization is getting the copilot um studio license that allows multiple people to go in and actually customize elements of Copilot to reflect your branding.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the reason that's important is your IT team and what they're going to be looking to set up from a settings standpoint is going to be focused on security.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas you, as a content leader, as a marketer, you're going to be thinking about making sure things feel on brand and that people are using the latest PowerPoint template.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not something that's necessarily happening in the organizations that I'm seeing.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it's literally because Copilot hasn't been told that this is the specific style guide for content or that this is the specific writing guide for how you need to approach things.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: So as a result, it's using every single thing it finds on the internet doesn't know which things are the most recent, what's canon, and so you end up with some confusion and with um all sorts of uh slides and slide decks that are distinctly not on brand, unfortunately.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing that becomes a little bit more of a struggle is frequently Copilot is not integrated with anything outside of the Microsoft ecosystem.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the reason this matters is pretty much every single organization, the marketing team is using technology for sending emails, for hosting their website, for doing all sorts of marketing work, and that technology is not Microsoft technology.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: So if the co-pilot instance is not talking to the tools that marketers are using to do their everyday jobs, it's also not talking to the other AI tools that marketers are increasingly using.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because I found that individual teams frequently will have their preferences around using um various paid commercial AI tools that aren't talking to anyone else's tools and that aren't part of that ecosystem.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: So the challenge that that gives you is you have however many people across the organization creating content.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: They're creating, they're writing emails, they're writing scripts to be used with customers, they're creating website content, they're doing whatever part of their job involves content and communications, and they're doing that in a vacuum with help from AI tools that are being trained based upon their individual usage.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, what that led me to create for my marketing profs uh workshop is something I'm calling the AI instruction system template.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: And this is not just another prompt, it is literally a fill-in-the-blanks MadLib style template that helps walk people through the context that they need to give in order to ensure that the AI tools understand who your brand is and who they're speaking to and how that should sound.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: And specifically, what's a little bit differently, done a little bit differently, is I show where you should be linking to documents such as your style guide, your brand voice chart, all of those other foundational content elements that you need to have in place in order to have that brand consistency and to scale your content operations.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: This walks through all of that for you.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it starts with the core identity and goal for the content.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: So letting you point to the correct persona, describing or pointing to the tone and style guideline, defining the primary goal, and explaining what it is exactly, the level of expertise that you need the AI tool to be using in order to complete the task that you're requesting.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Then, and only then after that is all in place, you move into the task execution and workflow, which gives the AI an understanding of the step-by-step process, the input requirements.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, what kind of information the AI tool needs to solicit from the user before it starts doing its work, or what it needs to validate its received and its uploads from the user before it starts doing its work, the step-by-step process in great detail, and then the length or scope of what the output needs to be.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: So specifying what a good output looks like from a scope of of scope of work and from a length of content standpoint.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: The third section is constraints and formatting, and this is really, really important, and it's something that most regular prompting doesn't include, and that is the things that you don't want it to do.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: So forbidden actions.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't want it to be using emojis, you need to put that here.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't want it to use very casual language or to make up statistics or whatever the thing is that's really important to you, you give that into the forbidden action sections, you put that in there so that way you're telling it explicitly do not do these things.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And on the flip side, you're gonna tell it what you have to include in the response.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: So for example, if you're creating a um, if you're taking a transcript from a call with a customer and you're trying to turn that into a case study draft, you would be telling it, hey, the mandatory element, you know, it needs to include three direct quotes from the customer.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you might also want to include something that you ask it to do at the end of a report saying, like, hey, you must always include a risk assessment summary in the response.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally, your output format, that's where you tell it, do you want a bullet list?
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: Are you looking for a PowerPoint slide or a PDF?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Do you want to have markdown table?
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: What is the thing you need it to produce at the end?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you don't tell it what it's going to produce, might not be what you actually need.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: It might give you text when you needed an image, or it might give you an image when you need a worksheet.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: You need to be very explicit when you're explaining to it what kind of a format you need in order to ensure you get what you want.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: So these are all things that when you have for each use case one instructions uh template that is filled out with the things that should never change, such as the references pointing to your brand voice chart, pointing to your writing guidelines, pointing to all of those foundational elements that help bring your content strategy to life, those things will never change.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And by having a template in place that everyone is requested that you have everyone use, regardless of which AI tools they're using, then you're at least giving that grounding point, that starting point of some that similar starting point of context for everyone's use of AI.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it's still not as good as if you had one tool only that everyone was using that had all of the governance baked into it, but it is still a heck of a lot better starting place than everyone starting from whatever their collected several years worth of prompting is telling the AI that good looks like or is what they expect.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: So the only thing I'm not getting into today is everyone says to me, Erica, what is the best content governance uh platform or system?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the thing I've looked at or used every single one of the top um content operations tools, and I haven't found that any of them actually allow you to incorporate all of the content governance elements that you would want to have in place.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: They don't incorporate all of those into their system.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: Frequently, they're either focused on being a publishing platform, so they do a really good job of allowing you to publish to the web or to send emails or things like that, or they're really good at helping you manage one you know, individual team workflow.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I haven't found one yet that end-to-end gives you a really good way to make sure that you're putting in those governance milestones and triggers in a way that it helps you do that overall.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm hoping to uh do a future deep dive or two on some of the platforms that people really love.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: So if you have a specific uh platform that you love and you're a content practitioner and you want to be my guest on content chat, drop me a line, all right?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because I would absolutely love to have some folks share their real-world approaches to content governance and their technology stacks.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: So stay tuned for that.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: But that's it for this week.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you found this series to be helpful, and we're gonna be back and in our regular, regularly scheduled uh content chat conversations starting next week.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't wait to hear from all of you about your content operations platforms of choice.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, take care.