Cruce Saunders
Welcome to Toward the Smarter World. This is your host, Cruce Saunders, and I'm pleased to be joined by a friend in the industry, Lisa Traeger. Lisa is an expert in Omnichannel digital strategy and the effective use of content assets. Most recently, she had a role at
Verizon involving creating customer centric experiences in marketing and acquisition strategy and as an independent consultant. She's led digital enterprise initiatives on the agency and client sides in telecom, healthcare, Pharma, financial services, consumer goods and government sectors. If that's not enough, in her spare time, she's interested in the intersection between
content strategy and the art world. Welcome, Lisa.
Lisa Trager
Hey, Cruce. Thank you so much. So happy to be here.
Cruce Saunders
Lisa, so glad you could join us today. You've had a lot of experience in a lot of places within the industry, and I'm really curious, as you've seen content evolve over time. What has drawn you into the content world? What is it that keeps you interested and keeps you motivated in this busy and ever-changing space?
Lisa Trager
Absolutely. I think the one thing in my career that is a continuum is storytelling. When I started, I was initially in television production, where I worked at the networks and at Channel 13 WNET. During that time, I also did a master's in media studies. And so, although my career was very much on video and television, I got downsized in the industry in the early 90s. And at that time, my husband was a very early adopter to the Internet and working in that sector. And I'm talking about like the early 90s. So, when I got downsized, he said, "oh, stop crying about television. The future is the Internet." Which was very true. So, I pivoted my career. I found that I had a lot of transferable skills, and back in the day I was able to do a certificate program at
NJIT, that was everything you had to know about working in the World Wide Web, as we called it, in a six-week course. This included HTML and graphics and Firewalls, and you name it, the entire Kit and Caboodle was there. So my first job in the industry was really as an information architect.
And to me, that's what started laying the groundwork for an appreciation for structure and for dynamic content. Soon after, I was interviewing at
Publicis, and this was around 2006. And the hiring manager turned to me and she said, you're really a content strategist. I said, I am. And that really kick started my career in this field. I really leaned into what that meant. And at that time, we were all kind of inventing it, but it definitely was the path that was right for me.
Cruce Saunders
The storytelling as a theme, it's really a very primal, human baseline, really. All these companies and organizations you've worked with, at some level, they're telling stories and artists are telling stories. There's a need to connect stories now through so many different channels, and that really kind of introduces the need for our storytelling approaches to evolve. And I'm curious, kind of what you're seeing as the evolution of storytelling has evolved in the enterprise. What are you seeing that has been changing in the methodology of delivering corporate stories out to consumers?
Lisa Trager
I think that more and more corporations are getting it mainly because, as you mentioned, all the different channels. It's not just a one-way delivery as it was, let's say, in the 70s or 80s. It's two ways. So,. So, they need to have a presence on everything from Instagram to Facebook, to having their own stories and their own branded websites that relate to their consumers in terms of what they're interested in and what is their priority. We saw over the last two years with Black Lives Matter, the importance of social justice, the importance of all sorts of things that corporations, they never really had to own before. But over the last few years, these things have become front and center to consumers and their allegiance to what brands they will support is very much tied to what they stand for.
Cruce Saunders
And that evolution in the stories has been evolving. That bidirectional nature. And then also the way that stories get collated and created and edited and moved through an enterprise has evolved as well. I'm curious what changes you've seen in the content practices, governance around content and the systems that support and deliver content.
Lisa Trager
Well, I'll tell you, I most recently worked in the marketing Department of Verizon. And although the marketing was much more all about offers that we provide our customers in both FIOS, and the fixed wireless asset area 5G home, I think at its heart it's about thinking of how to create content in a reusable, repeatable way. . And it just started to become something that was just so big to support that I often say sometimes change comes not because they want it, but because there's no other option. And I think that at Verizon and many companies, things started to hit that pressure point where things had to change because there was no other option. So, as a result, we start seeing companies moving into using content management system more, into creating various areas of the company to support consistency, having a
content strategy department that ensures consistent nomenclature is used. Now, I was a very big advocate of that, and in my role, I very much socialized and tried to make new areas understand the importance of consistency. And it can start in such a simple way of just, okay, let's all call it offers rather than some areas call it promos, some calls it promotions, some call it perks, some call it gifts. Well, what's the right word? So, in fact the
content strategy group at Verizon, they took this on. But then it became a whole exercise in getting all these various groups to adopt that word. So, it starts very simply. And I think that sometimes we overthink "what does enabling structured content or content reuse, what does it entail?" And in my mind, in my experience, the technology of supporting that is important. But I think it starts with the mindset, it starts with people understanding the benefits and in very small ways pushing the needle in that direction.
Cruce Saunders
Benefits are tough to quantify sometimes. What methods have you seen that work for those conversations helping folks to understand the quantified benefits of working with content that's more structured or even really that just has some really good
content strategy and terminology management around it?
Lisa Trager
Sure, you know this might sound a little simple, but by creating a copy deck for the projects that I worked on made a world of difference. This one copy deck became the source of truth. Would it have been better to be able to put this into a content management system and structure it with a header and an intro and various
elements? Of course, but being able to do that in a Google document so that various areas, regardless of whether was sales that were promoting the offer or the redemption process that was enabling the customer to redeem the offer or even the systems that the customer reps go to, so they could use the same nomenclature, they could use the same descriptions. That's something that I'm actually very proud of, that I was able to in this one small manner, start getting ... we could all use the same nomenclature, calls to action imagery for one given offer across various lines of business. And it sounds really fundamental, but it really did lower the level of effort. When you think about all the different groups involved. Before, you had multiple people coming up with a tagline, multiple people coming up with what image to use. And sometimes these things were contradictory.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah, The other thing, of course, is
content structure. And we've talked in the past about initiatives of different kinds in this area. And one of the projects we talked about really can be summed up with an organization that had a whole lot of unstructured content and needed to be able to get it out in a consistent way across multiple channels. So those are the patterns we work with day in and day out, in our structure and semantics practices today. But
Lisa Trager
Yeah. If I may, I was actually brought into Verizon originally to solve their content problem in the area of support content. At the time, there were over 60,000 pages of what's known as KB or knowledge-based content. One of the first things that I was able to do which made it a difference, was helping the wider team understand the importance of topic-specific content. So that rather than an FAQ document being a Wikipedia of everything on, let's say a battery problem on your phone, let's limit it to very specific thing. And that started to gain a little ground, shortening these FAQs, making them much more detailed on that given topic started making a difference to all sorts of things, including search engine optimization. Having structured content is an integral element of SEO. Right? So, once we start implementing these things and using consistent nomenclature, using the right headers, H tags in this, all of this kind of approach starts to lift all ships. Now, at the time, the organization for a lot of reasons wasn't ready to take a leap into the content management system and
DITA and all of these nice things that we talked about. But these were incremental steps that led to the point where today, guess what, KB content actually is using
DITA today. It was taken on by another organization within the company. But I'm happy to say that introducing these ideas early on, over five years ago, I believe made a difference. Now here's where things can go astray although knowledge-based content is in
DITA, the other part of their support content, which is more, less technical support content, shall we say, is not in
DITA, and there's been great pushback against it. Why? I think that one of the things that organizations have to think about is again, socialization, communication. Why is there pushback? Where are the difficulties having training to maybe address and simplify some of the pushback that comes with change? And
Cruce Saunders
Yeah. . Right. That there's promos to get out right away. There's a new website release that needs to come out or we're replacing the CMS. We see so many organizations driven around the individual quarter-by-quarter initiatives, as opposed to the larger picture of being able to get content to work together across systems and platforms and interface levels. It all tends to be narrow, ship the content, ship the new system kind of thinking. And I'm curious, have you seen anything that gives you hope that it's possible to build systemic, long-term practices into organizations that are dealing with quarter-by-quarter budgets and deadlines and busy docket of commitments?
Lisa Trager
Yeah. I think one of the big challenges, especially with large enterprises, is meeting stockholder needs for showing more revenue. And investing in something like content management and structured systems is a long game which a lot of companies are not willing to invest in. And when they are, oftentimes it's different silos that are behind it. So even though everyone may be moving in the direction of using
AEM as a content management system, then we run into some issues where, oh, well, this org is using one instance and another org is using another instance. So, guess what? They don't talk to each other. And as a result, even though they're moving in the right direction because there's a lack of coordination from a higher 10,000-foot level, it's not integrating. So the benefits of being able to create once and publish everywhere, across various channels and systems is lost. You also have very much a territorial approach where you could have certain teams kind of own this aspect of production, and as a result, there can often be some rigidity that prevents the actual benefit from blossoming. So one example is the idea of templates. One thing that I've witnessed is . They're not seeing the bigger picture of what various areas are going to need in terms of character count, in terms of imagery. So they say, okay, we're going to create a system through AEM where we can reuse content, but everybody has to use the same template, and it only affords 45 characters. And no, you can't have a call to action because it's too big and it doesn't fit on our tile, that kind of thing. So as a result, you have a situation where not all fit into the same shoe. So these kinds of things sometimes stand in the way of the longer objective. The objective is there. They get the idea of content reuse, but the rigidity is making it really difficult to apply.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah, rigidity. You know, on this topic,
content structure is tough in the enterprise because there's such an inherent distrust of structure. I mean, creators want to have a blank canvas, and I understand it. Right? You want to be able to tell the story the way you want to tell it. And so here comes along a content strategist saying something about multichannel omnichannel
content structure, and it just sounds to me like I'm going to be putting in a bunch of boxes, and it's hard for creativity to happen in a box. So how do you confront that issue in the enterprise? Any guidance on that.
Lisa Trager
I think that at the heart of the matter is the need for communication and due diligence at the start of the project to make sure that you have input by all of the stakeholders that will be part of the process of creating structure. In the end result, we really need to have these systems. As I mentioned before, I don't think there's really any other choice with the amount of content that companies are creating. However, along with that, we have to have a new mindset and we have to start thinking outside of Silos. What do I mean? You also have the situation where many people actually are doing the role of a content strategist, but that's not their job title. So when you start telling them how to do their job, there can be tremendous pushback because they've been doing this for over ten years. So who are you to come and tell me, oh, now you have to break up the content this way or that way to make it work?
I think that socialization and being able to explain to people from a 10,000-foot level how it's going to work can make a difference. And in a Siloed environment where you're only looking at your small, narrow piece, oftentimes that gets lost. Let me give you an example. We were very close to launching a project that enabled structured content, that enabled the use of AEM, and a reuse strategy. But it all fell apart when it came to data entry. Can you imagine? We had everything, a very complicated process worked out, except for the one political piece of who would do the actual data entry. Now you might scratch your head, as I did, and say, well, how could that be? But it's because people, they have very, very narrowly defined roles often. And if you're asking them to do something outside of what their role is, then you're going to get into very big political, territorial conversations. And that's something that we have to all be aware of.
Cruce Saunders
We've seen that data entry problem be addressed by hiring big offshore teams. I mean, in some enterprises, there are literally hundreds of people in offshore copy paste farms, and they usually call themselves something like
content operations or publishing support or whatever. But it's essentially a data entry function, especially in large AEM environments where there is no connection between the authoring and the actual versioned content assets that are in the engagement systems.
Lisa Trager
Yeah, maybe that's a good thing. Sometimes it's much closer to home and it's onshore and very rigid that you can only input the data for ABC, not XYZ, and that requires BP level approval and intervention. So, it's complicated. It really is. I think that everybody has good intentions. And I think that also there is a push pull and how much work people want to take on. So that's what kind of makes it a little bit more complicated, in that we're all, to a certain extent content strategist in our roles. The idea of creating content, at least in my experience, not only at Verizon, but in Pharma companies, in agencies, it can be a very siloed environment. And pushing against that can lead to a lot of pushback.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah, sure. The change we've seen in organizations that has been most effective is cross-functional content teams that don't tax the individual silo's core budgets too much, where they can basically be like assistance or helps to getting content published. And so they end up being welcomed by the departments. But it's rare to find the sponsorship for that. It has to go upstream. So we're always having to sell higher and higher into the organization, working with our champions inside of enterprises to open those cross-functional conversations.
Lisa Trager
Yeah, that's an interesting thing. I mean, I've tried it both from the bottom up approach and the top down approach, and I'm convinced at this point to make real change, you really need to get a sponsor from as high up in the organization as you can.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah. I mean, we like the two world strategy where there's a director, senior director, or several kind of syndicated working together to make change because they see the systemic issues needing to be addressed. And then they have some really strong C-level connection that's basically providing air cover for the whole thing. Yeah.
Lisa Trager
Yeah. And my advice would be figure out technically how it's going to work. Figure out the how and the when and the who should come after. Keep the politics out of it. Start with the "how is it going to work", what systems are impacted, what needs to change, where are the gaps, what is your time frame? And once you figure out that and have a really tight flow diagram and technical documentation, I think the "who will do it" will be much easier to answer.
Cruce Saunders
Oh, it's true. And that we've seen these big change initiatives get sponsored where we built them, these large scale kind of change management programs built around integrated content teams and standards across structure and semantics, and the content orchestration model to help empower
content services organization that's cross functional. So those are in place at a number of enterprises and rolling forward, which is great. It's just we've seen them get subsumed in a few places by big IT projects that suck all the oxygen out of the room, for example. Okay, we're going to roll out a new headless system. And so now everybody's energy is focused on headless and somehow all of the content structural standards, as obvious as it they are to connect with the headless system. It's possible for them to get left behind in the rush to lift and shift the content. And so for the change management folks, it's a real Sisyphean battle. Sometimes, like you roll the rock up the hill and then it comes back down. We really want to see more of these initiatives get longer term commitments for true cross functional integration. I think we're going to get there, but it is definitely an uphill battle, and I wish I had better news in 2022 about it. But that's just the reality of what we've been encountering for the last couple of years. I'm curious about your thoughts on the likelihood of that dynamic shifting or what might help it.
Lisa Trager
I think it goes back to what we were talking about before, with the prioritization being on revenue and how the C-suite can report to stockholders. It's really hard to make systemic change, and it's really hard to do things that take long term to reach the finish line. So as a result, of course, they're using offshore teams. Of course, they're using approaches that are not ideal because the emphasis, at least in my experience, has been on the shinier objects that are going to realize real an upward trend in the revenue side. I don't know if there's any way around that.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah. I mean, that begs us to get really specific about the top line impact of customer experience initiatives and really make it less about content. I mean, the longer I'm in the content industry, the less I think content is the actual object of what we're doing. The tendency for content to be downplayed comes from the very real objection that customer experience and campaigns, which include outcomes, and customer support, and all of those kinds of dynamics, are much more important than the content, which is funny because all of those things depend on content.
Lisa Trager
I was going to say all those things rely upon it.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah. Everything relies upon the bedrock foundation of content, but people aren't. It's kind of like they want to talk about the house, not the foundation.
Lisa Trager
Yeah. And look, I think that we've made real success over the years I've been in this business. At least people are starting to get the need for using a content management system. Hooray. Whether or not they're planning on that content management system, connecting their reps with their sales channel, with their website, and this, and that. Well, that's a whole other question. And I think one of the problems is that, remember back in the day there used to be a role, and it was called a webmaster? I mean, it seems so arcane, right.
Cruce Saunders
Of course. Yeah.
Lisa Trager
But it was the webmaster that really had the 10,000-foot
view that was their job. To look at things like holistically, who does that today?
Cruce Saunders
That's hysterical. I haven't thought about it in those terms. But you're absolutely right. I mean, in some organizations there's a chief digital officer, some organizations there's chief customer experience officer. Everybody, though, seems to think of the website really as its own dynamic and they're focusing on some sort of business outcome, not the holistic big picture that content experience moves across.
Lisa Trager
And if anything, if I were to leave anyone with a bit of advice and here I am, I'm somewhat of a rebel, I must admit. Even if your role is very narrow, take a step back. And even for your own self, take a look at what the customer experience is end-to-end. Even if you're only little piece of it. Have an intention and reach out to your colleagues to say, well, wait a minute, how does it look when they're coming into the sales flow? How does it look once they're actually in the website and they're having to get something serviced? How does it look from a customer rep perspective? Because it's They can introduce a world of confusion and questions if we don't look at it from the perspective of the customer.
Cruce Saunders
Yes. So really, I think starting and ending with customer experience as the object of what we're doing, I think will help then tying that to top line revenue helps. Organizing teams in an empowering way so that we're not handcuffing creators, that we're empowering creators and giving organizations a real feel for the interconnection between how the work that they're doing in an individual Department or campaign effort or individual silo really reverberates and can be reused and impacted and leveraged across the enterprise so that they are empowered to think of their work in a way that shows them the impact.
Lisa Trager
That, more holistically, they're a bead in a necklace that will break without them, but yet they are part of a whole. That's something that again, I really pride myself that I just made sure that I had eyes on the end-to-end experience. I also think that managers and directors, they should actually try to go in and try to do tasks themselves, and see where or how it may break. If you go into an app and it says, hey, you have a message and then you click on it and there's nothing there, there's something broken, right? But it happens all the time and it happens in all sorts of apps, in all sorts of brands. We need to start trying these things out, not just looking at our little piece, but again, standing back and trying out how to do this from a customer experience.
Cruce Saunders
Awesome. That's a great place to wrap our conversation. Obviously, there's a lot more we could talk about across your varied and interesting career inside of enterprise content. Thanks for sharing some of your insights and wisdom with our audience today, Lisa. I appreciate it.
Lisa Trager
Always a pleasure. Thank you.
Cruce Saunders
All right, thanks, everybody, for listening in to Towards a Smarter World and keep making steps in your enterprise towards coherent content sets, towards structural standards. Introduce the concept of semantics tags, at least shared vocabulary around words and how we use them, and start building a
content orchestration model. Start getting real intentional about how content moves, and little by little we're going to get the enterprise world of content and the larger world a little smarter, one day at a time. Thanks, everybody. Have a good afternoon.