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The #ContentChat Bulletin

Erika Heald is the host of the weekly #ContentChat LinkedIn Live video podcast for content marketers, held Mondays at noon Pacific. As a B2B marketing consultant, she helps organizations define and execute content marketing strategies that drive business and professional growth. As a creator, and gluten-free blogger helping people discover gut-friendly farm-to-table food. She frequently speaks at B2B marketing industry events on employee brand advocacy, content strategy, customer experience, AI readiness, and social media topics. You can find her on her blogs erikaheald.com and erikasglutenfreekitchen.com.

Featured Post

The #ContentChat Bulletin: Your Style Guide Already Exists (It’s Just Undocumented)

Most organizations already have a style guide—it just isn’t documented. Instead, it lives: in Slack messages inside tracked changes buried in old slide decks scattered across Google Docs comments and in the heads of the person everyone depends on to “make it sound right” And while those tiny decisions may not feel strategic in the moment, they add up fast. Every: “Would we say it this way?” Every: “Do we capitalize this?” Every: “Can you make this sound more on-brand?” …creates friction. And...

When I worked in-house as a content marketing leader, I never had enough time to deliver everything to the quality I strived to deliver. Whether it was last-minute requests or late content drafts from contributors, it often felt like the best I could hope for was to just get through the day. When that's your daily reality, it can feel like a luxury to take the time to document your content strategy—let alone the processes and tools needed to bring it to life. But here's the thing—until you do...

Contrary to all the ads clogging our social feeds, most content teams don't struggle with creating content. They struggle with scaling their content operations. To get a clearer picture of why, I asked a simple question in two recent Meetup conversations and then shared the results of my content scalability assessment. The question: Which foundational content elements do you actually have in place today? What Most Teams Are Doing The good news is, as with the respondents to the assessment...

There's a pesky question that keeps coming up in my in-person workshops and webinars: "What if Copilot is the only AI tool our team is allowed to use?" While I usually reply quickly with my condolences, I also acknowledge that for a lot of enterprise and regulated teams, that's the reality. IT has approved Microsoft Copilot, and everything else is off-limits. And while it's tempting to see that as a limitation, it's more than that. It's actually a signal. Your organization isn't saying "no"...

Can you guess what these three intro pitches all have in common: 1) Our AI-powered traffic solution delivers engaged visitors to your site, costing significantly less than traditional paid ads. 2) Are you tired of "generic AI" spitting out robotic, soulless text that readers instantly reject? 3) You've poured months of hard work and your entire soul into your manuscript, but the reality is harsh: your book is effectively "invisible" in the vast ocean of Amazon. All three were sent to me via...

A few years ago, I built what I still think was one of the best editorial calendars I’ve ever created. I even use its format as a template. But the way I position it has completely changed. It was for a client with a growing content program and a lot of ambition. We mapped out the next three months of content in detail: blog posts tied to strategic themes, supporting social content, newsletter features, and even a few assets designed to support an upcoming product launch. Everything connected...

Everyone wants AI to repurpose their content magically. Turn a webinar into a blog post. A blog post into LinkedIn posts. A case study into sales enablement. And when it doesn’t work cleanly, we blame the prompts or the tool. But if your AI-generated repurposing feels messy, inconsistent, or exhausting to supervise, the issue usually isn’t the technology. It’s the infrastructure behind it. Repurposing isn’t just a productivity tactic. It’s a content maturity diagnostic. When derivative...

I've always been a "don't let the carrots touch the mashed potatoes on the plate" kind of person. In the early days of social media, it meant having a handful of different Twitter accounts, each focused on different facets of my interests. It took years before I friended work colleagues on Facebook. I've been keeping up that vigilance here, too, for months. But this Monday, I am beyond tired. So, I am going to share something with you that I shared on my personal accounts late last week....

I launched my book, Content Foundations, two weeks ago, and have gotten to catch up with so many of my favorite people to talk content strategy and governance. What was interesting (and not so surprising) is how many folks confided that they couldn't imagine being able to find the time to write a book. But here's the thing: those same people are always creating—podcasts, presentations, blog posts, books. But too often, we treat each piece of content like a one-time special edition of one...

Does this sound familiar? "We're creating more content than ever with the help of AI… but it doesn't get any easier." More channels. More contributors. More AI-assisted drafts. More pressure to publish faster. AI was supposed to lift us out of our never ending list of low-value to-dos. And yet, here we are struggling with more friction, more rework, and more "this doesn't sound like us" conversations. That's not a creativity problem. It's not a tools problem. And it's definitely not an AI...