Business
Margot Bloomstein After showing up in the content strategy world and generously sharing her expertise for more than 20 years, Margot Bloomstein has earned the trust of this community. Margot's new book, Trustworthy, shows you how to earn the trust of your customers and users. As reliance on experts fades and is replaced with crowd-sourced trust, the work of content strategists must evolve to account for these new dynamics. We talked about: the cynical era we live in and its implications for business our turn from trusted sources to distributed, democratized sources of expertise the corrosive effects of "marinating in a culture of gaslighting" how to help people learn to trust themselves again and to once again value good sources of information the three hallmarks of her approach to developing trustworthiness: voice - engaging users with content that sounds and feels familiar volume - understanding how much content is enough vulnerability - how to own up to stumbles and big mistakes and how to communicate in ways that build rapport examples of how "all businesses, regardless of their size or industry or budget, have the opportunity to engage in the work of rebuilding trust and gaining consumer confidence" the importance of undergirding trust-building work with a message architecture the shift over the past 20+ years in the understanding for the role of content on the web, from an experience that content creators thought they could control to the modern understanding that users bring a lot to content interactions her observation that content strategists are more empowered than we might think how content strategists can apply her insights to cultivate more trust in our work Margot's bio Margot Bloomstein is one of the most prominent voices in the content strategy industry. She is the author of Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap and Content Strategy at Work: Real-World Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project and the principal of Appropriate, Inc., a brand and content strategy consultancy based in Boston. As a speaker and strategic adviser, she has worked with marketing teams in a range of organizations over the past two decades. The creator of BrandSort, she developed the popular message architecture-driven approach to content strategy. Margot teaches in the content strategy graduate program at FH Joanneum University in Graz, Austria, and lectures around the world about brand-driven content strategy and designing for trust. Connect with Margot online Appropriate, Inc. Twitter Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBEzV4wmP6g Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 103. Nowadays, trust is hard to come by. With authoritative figures like Walter Cronkite fading into ancient history, experts are dismissed, and people are reluctant to accept information from unknown sources. These dynamics create a number of challenges for content strategists. Margot Bloomstein's new book, Trustworthy, shows how to create strategies that meet users on this challenging new terrain, how to get their attention, and how to earn their trust. Interview transcript Larry: Hey everyone, welcome to episode number 103 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really delighted today to have with us Margot Bloomstein. Margot is the principal at Appropriate Inc, a consulting agency, but you probably know her, if you've ever been to any content strategy conference or your content design, any design conference, you've probably seen her on the slate. She teaches workshops all the time, you might've seen her in one of those. But anyhow, welcome Margot, tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Margot: Thanks so much, I am thrilled to be here, thrilled to be talking with you,