Business
Erin Golden Erin Golden and her colleagues have created a model that shows the evolution of the practice of content strategy. Drawing on the Kardashev scale – an astrophysics method for measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement – they rank content strategy practice along a 1-to-5 range. K1 represents the first stage, when content strategists were mostly concerned with putting words on webpages instead of in paper documents. K5 represents the science-fiction-ey AI future of the practice. This reflection on the advancement of the discipline has led Erin to bolster her own professional toolkit, adding to her content skills new practices like UX research. Erin and I talked about: her background in the government, nonprofit, and higher education world as a information architects, user experience designer, content management specialist, and copywriter her current interest in the intersection of content strategy with user and audience research and how to incorporate data of all types into her work how she and a colleague apply the Kardashev scale as a model for evolution of content strategy practice maturity the five stages along the Kardashev scale: K1: copywriting, moving words from paper to the web K2: content strategy emerges as an alternative to inserting content into designed boxes K3: content ecosystem approach, SEO and content marketing K4: product experience, structured content, moving away from page-based models, arrival of content design K5: the AI era, implications for the future how different organizations and business units can be at different points along the K scale at any one point in time her propensity to push new content practices and tools how her "content first" approach is validated by the maxim, "form follows function" how the current era might actually be better described as "research first" the crucial role of research and content strategy in the early phases of product design the evolution of editorial decision making in the digital era to better focus on user needs and to manage content across its lifecycle the occasional lack of clarity around who is leading the dance between content strategists and SEO practitioners her observation the the convergence of disciplines allied with content strategy - information architecture, SEO, UX design - points to the benefits of being a generalist her belief that structured and atomic content are key to the future of content production and delivery Erin's Bio Erin Golden is a senior content strategist and experience designer at Publicis Sapient where she helps lead the experience design capability for the company while partnering with clients to advance their digital strategies. Based in Washington, D.C., Erin has worked in content and digital strategy for more than a decade with experience in government, nonprofit, and higher education. She has held a range of titles including copywriter, content management specialist, information architect, and user experience designer. She is passionate about audience and user research and enjoys working with teams to integrate research and measurement into their process. Follow Erin on Social Media Twitter Video Here’s the video version of our conversation https://youtu.be/y8r8IV8VId4 Podcast Intro Transcript The discipline of content strategy has been around for about 20 years now. It's evolved a lot over that time span. From its humble beginnings as a practice devoted to translating print content into web pages, content strategy has grown into a sophisticated multi-disciplinary business practice. Nowadays content strategists contribute to digital products that we could not have imagined 20 years ago. Erin Golden and her colleagues at Publicis Sapient have come up with an innovative model to illustrate this evolution. Interview Transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 78 of the Content Strategy ...