Kupo and Bulleit enjoying the view on one of our walks in Sea Ranch last weekend. My partner and I trekked to the Coast this past weekend with our bulldogs, taking a long weekend road trip to celebrate my birthday. I wanted to listen to and see the ocean, and have a hot tub available for soaking whenever I wanted. We found a great vacation rental in Sea Ranch that ticked all the boxes. When we arrived and started unpacking, I noticed a few things that made this vacation rental a lot different...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
If I were giving today’s #ContentChat talk in person, I wonder if I’d be met by picketers holding signs reading, “Boycott all writers who use AI!” Everywhere I’ve gone online over the past two weeks, I’ve seen increased hostility toward AI use, like the Threads post from someone outing another writer for using AI. As it turns out, though, they were using it to create ads to sell their books—not to write the books themselves. Yet, this was somehow still grounds for ruining all the authors’...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
It's probably an anomaly that it's taken nearly 10 years of volunteering with shelter animals to have one of them happily poop on me. But that just happened. She was a Frenchie with coloring very similar to my own Kupo's. I'd been giving her all the scritches and scratchies. She'd been having an amazing time. Then, all of a sudden, she hopped up onto her bed, moving as far away from me as was possible in her kennel. I misinterpreted it, at first, as her being overstimulated and done with our...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Summer is meant to include BBQ, leisurely strolls, and making a dent in the to-read pile stacked on my desk. Instead, I've spent the past two weeks battling some sort of viral ick—but at least I've gotten to do some reading! This year, however, Summer is ALSO something else really special to me. It's the 10-year anniversary of my taking on hosting #ContentChat and going out on my own as a full-time content strategy consultant and fractional content leader! For those who weren't around here 10...
3 months ago • 3 min read
What do e-book, Ebook, and E-Book all have in common? They're three variations on the name of one content type, and they're wreaking havoc on your taxonomy. I know, I know! Most content teams don't spend much time thinking about taxonomy. We're focused on integrating into marketing campaigns, content creation, distribution, performance, and proving business impact. Taxonomy often feels like something for website managers, CMS administrators, or information architects to worry about. Until...
3 months ago • 3 min read
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...
4 months ago • 2 min read
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...
4 months ago • 2 min read
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...
5 months ago • 2 min read
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"...
5 months ago • 3 min read