Episode 50: Corey Vilhauer, Blend Interactive - Demystifying content strategy

Kristina Halvorson:
This is the content strategy podcast and I’m your host, Kristina Halvorson. On each and every episode I interview someone I admire who’s doing meaningful work in content strategy and all its adjacent disciplines. If you care about making content more useful, usable and inclusive for all, welcome in, you have found your people.

Hello. Welcome back. It's me, Kristina. It's very cold here in Minnesota. I know that is surprising to those of you who live in the Midwest where it's cold everywhere, but it really snowed hard yesterday, eight, nine inches. And yeah, that's all I’ve got. When it snows like that, everything slows down and I just become the least productive person on the face of the planet, which is why it's really great to have the passion project that you look forward to because that gets you right back up on the horse. And good news, this is my passion project.

And with me today is someone that I'm very excited about. I was going to also call him my passion project, but that's very weird and it doesn't translate. So, I'm not even going to ask the producer to cut that out because I am laughing at myself.

Hey, let me welcome to the stage right now, Corey Vilhauer. And Corey, don't talk yet. I'm going to read out your bio. Corey is the director of strategy at Blend Interactive where he's responsible for leading the strategic design process with the focus on content strategy and information architecture.

Corey is the co-author of The Web Project Guide: From Spark To Launch And Beyond, an overview of the web process from ideation to post launch governance. He also writes at length about methodology, writing for accessibility, and shoestring content strategy at Eating Elephant, which is his blog, and writes about other things at CoreyVilhauer.com. He is a recovering advertising copywriter, a closeted fan of professional wrestling, which is now outed, and a playlist pack rat. Corey?

Corey Vilhauer:
Can I talk now?

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah, now you can talk.

Corey Vilhauer:
That's good, as your passion project.

Kristina Halvorson:
Welcome to my little passion project, his name is Corey.

Corey Vilhauer:
This is weird. It's got really weird all of a sudden.

Kristina Halvorson:
I know. I make it weird almost immediately every time. It's my personal brand. It's Kristina Halvorson making it weird since 2008. Where are you Corey? Where are you right now?

Corey Vilhauer:
Well, I'm in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, so we also got the same snow and cold that you have.

Kristina Halvorson:
Have I ever told you that Sioux Falls is one of my very favorite cities in the Midwest?

Corey Vilhauer:
You haven't said that. Why?

Kristina Halvorson:
I don't know and I discovered it when I came to speak at your conference many years ago.

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah, Sioux Falls is great. Sioux Falls is a perfect little mix between... we still have a bit of small-town Midwest in us, but we at least are big enough to have two Targets and four Walmarts.

Kristina Halvorson:
It's the perfect size, really.

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah, it really is.

Kristina Halvorson:
Then, you have outstanding art all throughout your downtown area. I remember this.

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah, we have great restaurants. We have a lot of great stuff. We have me, your personal passion project.

Kristina Halvorson:
Should I just start over? I'm not going to start over. Too good. This is really good content so far. Corey, let's be real.

Corey Vilhauer:
Okay.

Kristina Halvorson:
I kick off every podcast episode both by, A, complaining about the weather, but B, asking my guests if you could tell me a little bit about how you came to content strategy.

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah. So, as you read in the bio, I was an old marketing copywriter, and I hated it. I didn't hate it. I enjoyed getting paid to write, and what I really wanted to do was build websites and I didn't know how to build websites. So, when the ad agency would have a small website that would come in, I would always try to shove my way in and say, "Hold on, let me figure this out. I'm gonna... I'll write content for the website, I will organize the website," and then nobody would ever let me do that.

So, I asked on the internet one day, on Twitter, twitter.com back when twitter.com was still awesome and that's how you made all your connections, I reached out to Abby Jones who, I honestly don't even know what Abby does anymore. I think she's a big deal at Google, but at the time she was just somebody I knew through a site called 9rules.

And 9rules was essentially a blogging network that would select people based on the quality of their blog content. And I had a blog back then, and so I joined that and got to know Abby through there, and I said, "Hey, I want to write for websites,. What do I do?" And she said, "Well, that's called Content Strategy, and you should go do that." I realized now that is not a super accurate description of it at the time, but at the time that was the shorthand of what content strategy was just, "Oh, you're writing for websites."

Then, I looked into it some more. I bought your book. I remember writing a blog post that was called On Discovering Content Strategy, and I was just gushing over it. I had reached out to Deane Barker who at the time was the partner at Blend Interactive, and said, "Hey, I knew him through Sioux Falls, the Sioux Falls blogosphere." And I said, "Hey, help me get a job in the web," and he said, "Well, here, you should go apply for this job and then after a year we'll hire you at Blend."

Then, three months later maybe, he reached out and said, "Actually, let's just, we'll just hire you now." Then, I jumped into the web world. I started a content strategy practice before really understanding what content strategy was at all. I read a lot of books, I stole a lot of ideas, and that's pretty much it. Then, I've been hacking my way through it now for 13 years.

Kristina Halvorson:
So, I want to go back to the very beginning. When you said you hated your job as a marketing copywriter, why did you hate it?

Corey Vilhauer:
Well, I am an old Punk kid, and this is stupid to say because I work in a web shop which is not a Punk job, but it really went against... Marketing and advertising, really, it always felt gross to me. So, I wanted to get out of it and get more into... I was less about promotion and I wanted to get more into information structure and information itself. I was more of a library scientist, I think, at heart than a copywriter.

And I think that continues today. At Blend, we don't do a lot of copywriting. We do hardly any copywriting. We don't do a lot of the content side of content strategy. We do a lot more in terms of structure, and that's really what I like doing, organizing concepts and figuring out ways to build a content model that works.

But at the time I felt writing ads for hospital systems was not an ideal way for me to live. I appreciated the paycheck and I liked it better than all the other jobs I had at that point, but I was looking to do something a bit more, I don't know, meaningful, which is, I don't want to disparage ad people because they're all good people at heart, I think.

Kristina Halvorson:
Well-

Corey Vilhauer:
I don't know, maybe they aren't.

Kristina Halvorson:
... many of them. Any ad person listening to this podcast is a gem, really-

Corey Vilhauer:
Oh, they're all perfect. Yeah.

Kristina Halvorson:
That's right, they're all perfect in every way. I also started out, well like every content strategist I had 1 million jobs before I fell in love, just like you, with writing for websites and thinking about usability and information structure and so on. But the reason that I asked is that I do feel there are identifying shared values between the communication, the styles and the promotional work that we did and the people that we had to work with and the review process and all the different stakeholders.

Because there were so many important lessons I feel I took away from my early days as a marketing and an ad copywriter. So, you work with a lot of clients now. Talk a bit about your memories from that time in terms of the direction that you were receiving and the briefs that you were getting and how you learned how to navigate those relationships.

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah, I didn't learn any of those because it was largely a very top-heavy ad agency. There was a handful of people who had founded the company or had been there a really long time, and they were client-facing. And I was in meetings but I didn't get to talk to clients very much, which was, looking at the time I was, "Thank God," because I was scared, I was still like a kid.

I was scared to talk to clients about stuff. I didn't want anyone to say my stuff was bad. It would make me really sad if somebody was, "I don't like this." So, I didn't learn any of those skills that you need to be able to actually communicate to a client or even communicate to a team member. I just did my work and hoped it was good.

It took moving over to Blend after four years of copywriting to realize, "Hey. Now, you're gonna go need this part, go in there and talk to them about that," and learning how to better communicate to them what they needed and also what we needed as far as how do you critique this in a way that's helpful, how do you present this in a way that doesn't get too far into the weeds. I didn't learn any of that stuff at the ad agency, which was too bad.

I wish people would teach that. There should be a better focus of onboarding, like any new employee is getting them in front of clients and having them understand how to speak to them. But that's really nerve-wracking to an agency because you also want to put your best foot forward in all ways, and we're very afraid to let somebody fail in the name of the company.

Kristina Halvorson:
As we're talking, I'm just having this realization that when I stepped over to writing for websites, I was stepping over from basically doing advertising and catalog copywriting, and they wouldn't let me talk to the client, but when you're writing for a website, you have to talk to the client, and that's the whole core thing of why people become content strategists, I think, in the first place. They were just, "You can't just call me for the words. You need to bring me into the meetings because I have questions beyond just, is this tone supposed to be fast, fun and friendly?"

So, it's really interesting to me that that experience was so frustrating, so distasteful to you, and then you rolled into where you could really center communication words and information in a way that you were able to drive the conversation.

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah, we're all perfectionists and we're all control freaks. The only difference is that some are more introverted so that they speak up only when necessary, and some are more extroverted and they speak up all the time.

Kristina Halvorson:
Hey, you don't know me.

Corey Vilhauer:
I know you. I know you, Kristina.

Kristina Halvorson:
I know, I know.

Corey Vilhauer:
Maybe after all of this, you're actually my passion project.

Kristina Halvorson:
By the end of this conversation, I will be. That's right. Hey, Corey, tell me a bit about Blend Interactive.

Corey Vilhauer:
Blend Interactive is a web shop here in the Midwest. We do a lot of content managed focused websites. We really focus on complex content problems, by which we mean complicated integrations or how to build a complex content model or all the more technical side of content and web and design.

We're not doing a lot of ad sites, we're not doing a lot of marketing-focused splash pages or anything like that, but we are doing a lot of university and hospital and information-heavy websites. So, I think that's why I fit in really well there is, that stuff's very interesting to me and it always has been very interesting to me.

Kristina Halvorson:
And what is interesting to you about it? Is it the complex relationship between types of content and figuring out content models and taxonomies and so on, is it within the organizations and all the different humans that are creating and fighting over and fighting for the content? Talk to me a bit about why that is exciting to you.

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah, it's a bit of both. We talked about this before we hopped on, but I spent five days on a cruise last week, and there was a significant portion of each day where I looked at the cruise as a metaphor for a website, which is depressing to think about honestly that I was thinking about that on my cruise vacation.

But you look at the number for a website that has a ton of content connections, that has a ton of structure and a really complex model in a university site where you have multiple different departments all pushing content all in the same spot and you have to be able to connect it in a way and manage it in a way that still makes sense and is utterly unacceptable to the actual user.

So too is a cruise ship. There are, I don't know, all of these crazy systems that have been put together, and somehow they work, and nobody knows how except for the people who built them, but how they can manage the fact that, "Listen, you've gotta shut this door for your air conditioning to work," which makes sense otherwise it would create a vacuum in your room and then the door would slam too much.

Then, if you open this door over here, it actually leads to some piping system that goes three floors up. And it's all perfectly put together in a way that fits into the smallest space possible. So, that's the technical side of it. On top of that, you have to have a team of people who know how to manage each of these individual pieces. And that's as complex, watching the way that people interacted, the way they would essentially...

We stopped at an island one day and half the staff from the ship got off of the ship and went and worked the island. They all have special roles over there as well. Then, they would come back and they would take up their old spots, and the systems at play in both the technical side of the ship and the people side of the ship were absolutely fascinating to me. That's my long way of saying I think it's really interesting as far as websites go as well.

Kristina Halvorson:
I do need to say here for the record that when you told me that you went on a cruise for Thanksgiving, I immediately reacted with that if I had to name five people in the world who I didn't think would ever go on a cruise, that your name would be on that list.

Corey Vilhauer:
And I'm still on that list now. I have not moved off that list.

Kristina Halvorson:
I'll leave you on that list. You've fallen down a bit because you did in fact actually win a cruise, but that's okay, I'll save your spot. Yeah, I think that this interplay between technical systems and systems within the content itself and how we are working systems within our organizations, all of that comes to life in a website.

And that is, we've talked a lot recently about content design within applications and even within application of product ecosystems, but a website is the digital manifestation of your business for everyone to see. Megan Casey talks about it as, "Everybody's seeing your corporate underpants on display."

So, tell me a bit about then, when you are working with clients and they come to you and they're, "Our website, we have this super complex awful content problem. We actually have a million content problems." Do they often come to you with, "And we don't know where to start, and we have this specific project you want us to work on?"

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah. They come in two ways. One of them is that they come to us and they say, "Hey, where do we start?" And that's ultimately where The Web Project Guide came from, the book that Deane and I wrote. I mentioned Deane earlier. Deane was an old partner at Blend. He now works at a company called Optimizely. Deane Barker and I wrote a book called The Web Project Guide.

The Web Project Guide ultimately, it started as a PDF that we wrote to give to clients to say, "Here's kind of what the web project looks like. Here's sort the context of all these different things we're going to ask you to do so that when we say, 'Hey, let's do a discovery workshop, let's talk to all of your users, let's do stakeholder interviews, let's put together a content audit," here's why we're doing this and here's where this will be used later on."

So, we would give them essentially that high level overview and then begin using the discovery process to just ask thousands of questions about what do you need, what do you think you need, what do people around you think they need, what does your boss think that they need and how can we tell them they probably don't, and a bunch of stuff until you have a giant pile of ideas.

Then, you say, "Okay, well, we're going to decide, out of this giant pile of ideas, how many of these are actually viable, how many of these actually can be done with your existing workforce, and how much of this is just a sort of pie in the sky dreaming." The other option is that somebody comes in and they know exactly what they want.

And in that sense they don't really need any of my help, but we find out usually really quickly later on they needed a lot of my help, they just didn't want it. A lot of times it's a case of they've already done their own strategy work and they're doing their own strategy work through the lens of what they've already done before or they're doing a lot of their strategy work from the lens of this is what somebody who's in charge thinks they need.

So, even when a client comes in with a full plan and they just want us to design and implement a set of wire frames they're bringing us, we still shoehorn in a lot of those questions around, "Hey, why are you doing this? What are you missing?"

We'll position a discovery session as more of a kickoff and then we'll accidentally ask them all the questions and try to highlight the ideas that they have that aren't really viable. And they don't always go away. A lot of times, like with any project, you end up building something that may not end up being used, but for the most part we try to get all that information out at the very start.

Kristina Halvorson:
One of the things that I find can really derail those kinds of projects in particular very early on is missing the opportunity to create a real shared understanding about what you're talking about in the first place. How do you go about doing that, because the way that you're used to talking about something at Blend versus the way that your client is used to talking about something versus the way eight of their business partners that they are going to need to work with talk about something can really cause massive friction throughout a project life cycle. What do you do preventatively around that?

Corey Vilhauer:
It's hard to do with a project, like I said, the second kind of project, so I'm not going to go too deep into that. It's harder to do it with somebody who's coming in and just saying, "Can we build this stuff?" But if we are able to be present from the very beginning, from the ideation phase, from being able to say, "Let's get your ducks in a row to start and move from there," the idea of that shared understanding, that shared language, really comes from almost a respect for the idea that the client doesn't understand our industry as well as they think they do, and that's not their fault, that's our fault.

We as practitioners are very... we don't do a great job of explaining what we do to people who don't do what we do. And I say this because this is something we ran into when we wrote The Web Project Guide. And the reason we realized The Web Project Guide was a viable project, it's written for non web practitioners. It's written for people who can read it and pull a chapter out and understand, "Oh, this is what happens and this is why it happens. This is why we do a content inventory," rather than just giving them a blog post that says, "Here's how you do a content inventory."

Because in a lot of senses they're not doing them or they're just hiring somebody who can do it. They don't need to know all the details, they just need to know why it matters. And I think we really often get stuck in this idea of needing to show expertise by almost cloaking the details of what we do, of hiding behind the idea that we are the experts and that we are going to make everything right and they don't really need to worry about how that's going to work.

The projects that we've done that have worked the best are projects in which at the very beginning we have set a base level of just project management, like, "Hey, here's the language we're going to use. When we say this, this is what we mean. When we are doing meetings, we will try as hard as we can to do meetings in the way that you are used to."

Clients are ultimately strangers in our world. They come in, they're working with a web team, they're trying to build a project, they have a vague idea of what they want at the end, but all they know is that they're under a lot of stress and they're really putting a lot of trust in some agency to do the work they hope to do. And oftentimes, because of this, they're immediately skeptical because an agency or a web practitioner may not be essentially treating them with a level of, "Hey, here's how we're gonna do this."

They're not treating them with a level of, "We understand how this is hard and we're going to help you through these pieces." And I don't want to make it sound like we're babying clients. It's more in order to fully get buy-in. In order to fully build any kind of shared understanding, you have to really slow things down at the start and explain step by step, here is why these things matter and here's how they're going to happen."

Because ultimately, when it comes back to it, they're not strangers in our world. We are strangers in theirs. We're barging in to their existing organization and we're saying, "Here's how we're gonna do things." And it doesn't always work because they already have expectations of how things are going to be done. It's a lot easier for us, the five people working on the project, to change our ways and to help adapt to them than it is to ask their entire company to change to our ways.

Kristina Halvorson:
If you are doing that and trying to juggle that across various clients, what are some of the tools that you rely on to keep the process straight?

Corey Vilhauer:
A lot of meetings. Tools aren't meetings, or meetings aren't tools, but I guess they kind of are tools. And I don't mean a lot of meetings, but frequent short status meetings that help identify here's what this piece is doing and here's where it's going to go next. I think-

Kristina Halvorson:
Like a set cadence of meetings.

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah, yeah. Essentially, a weekly status call. Even if we don't have a status call, we're going to at least touch base for five minutes and say, "Here's what we're working on."

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah.

Corey Vilhauer:
The last thing we want to do is disappear behind the cloak and show up in that, and this is another thing that always drove me crazy about the ad world, we don't want to show up with this grand reveal. We don't want to pop up and say, "Here's your site map," and then they look at the site map and they say, "Ah, this is wrong in eight different ways and here's why."

Each of those eight different ways could have been handled differently if we would've just been running things by them, if we sent them a Google doc and say, "Hey, here's your site map." It's not a magic document, it's just a spreadsheet that's helping us organize things. Otherwise, tools, tools.

One of the things that we've started doing recently, and we've always said we were going to do it but it's just hard to fit it into your schedule, is to create, essentially, a shared glossary that says, "Here's what we mean when we mean this."

It ends up becoming a part of their ongoing project through... We use a tool called Redmine to organize tickets and things later on in development. We'll add that in. We'll make sure that we are clear in that when we say this we mean this and when they say something, they mean this.

So, you don't run into any issues, like I worked on a project once where the client kept asking for a use model. And I'm, "Cool, great. We're going to do a use model." Then, I would go and look up what a use model is, and I'd say, "I don't, I don't know what this is," because there is no definition for it.

Kristina Halvorson:
It's not a thing.

Corey Vilhauer:
A use model is not a thing. Then, I made up a thing that is a use model. And I don't even know what a use model is, but I know what we call a use model now, and I can give an example and say, "Okay, this is what a use model is." A use model is, essentially, just being a spreadsheet that takes user stories and translates them into a content model is how we use it.

Kristina Halvorson:
I want one of those.

Corey Vilhauer:
I'll send you one.

Kristina Halvorson:
You know, could put it on the internet and then I could link to it in the podcast notes.

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah, I should do that. I 'll do that.

Kristina Halvorson:
Are you allowed to do that? Okay.

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah, sure. I'll anonymize it.

Kristina Halvorson:
You could put it on CoreyVilhauer.com.

Corey Vilhauer:
Well, CoreyVilhauer.com is not a work blog. That's a personal feelings blog. I'll put it on eatingelephant.com, which is the work blog.

Kristina Halvorson:
You don't have personal feelings about use models?

Corey Vilhauer:
I do, but you don't want to hear them.

Kristina Halvorson:
No more passion project. You have been fired as my passion project.

Corey Vilhauer:
I failed, I failed.

Kristina Halvorson:
When did you start that Eating Elephant blog?

Corey Vilhauer:
Oh, forever ago. Deane told me... Deane was my boss once. Deane told me, "You need to start a blog and you should buy the URL so that if you ever leave you can keep it," and I said, "Great. Okay." So, I called it Eating Elephant for two reasons. Well, it's one big reason. I actually conflated the two stories, one of which was the story behind the sketch that you had on your A List Apart article way back in the day. The elephants, the people looking at the elephants, right?

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah. I'm not sure I actually knew that was the case. And that article, we'll link to that too, but that article was called The Discipline of Content Strategy. It's a bit of a big deal, I'm not going to lie to you.

Corey Vilhauer:
It's a pretty big deal.

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah, it's a pretty big deal. But there was a fantastic illustration of people looking at an elephant from many different parts of it. And what is that aphorism? It's, blind people looking at all the different parts of an elephant and trying to figure out what it is, I don't remember. Anyway. Okay, continue.

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah. So, when I first saw that, I immediately thought, "Well, this is actually that idiom of how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time?" That's not what it is. I created the blog and I looked at it later and I'm, "What the hell am I doing?

Kristina Halvorson:
So, you thought that illustration was people preparing to feast on an elephant?

Corey Vilhauer:
Yes, yes, yes. And I even look at it to this day and I'm, "Why? Why did I think they were all going to eat the elephant?"

Kristina Halvorson:
That's good stuff.

Corey Vilhauer:
So, that's where Eating Elephant comes from.

Kristina Halvorson:
I'm sure we've had this conversation, but that was literally probably 13 years ago.

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah. It worked out well because the domain was available too, so I was like-

Kristina Halvorson:
So, it's all right?

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah, yeah.

Kristina Halvorson:
Do you know why it was available?

Corey Vilhauer:
Because it's not a thing. Yeah, because it's not real. I made that up.

Kristina Halvorson:
That's right, that's right. Because it makes no sense whatsoever.

Corey Vilhauer:
It's not "how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time", it's something else too, I think. It's not
even an elephant in that saying. It doesn't matter.

Kristina Halvorson:
I think it is an elephant.

Corey Vilhauer:
Okay.

Kristina Halvorson:
I'm going to give it to you, Corey.

Corey Vilhauer:
Thanks.

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah, you're welcome. But that's how we met though, I know, was through that blog post, and-

Corey Vilhauer:
Okay. So, we've met before this, because I took that post, and that post actually was originally on my personal blog before I had a content strategy blog. I was still at the ad agency when I wrote on discovering content strategy. In fact-

Kristina Halvorson:
Now, see, it all comes back around.

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah. Deane told me later on, he's, "Oh, I read that," and I realized that's the reason... That's the point at which you were going to quit and come work at Blend. And I was, "Yeah, that's pretty obvious." I was ready to go into the web, and I posted that on Twitter. And I think, at the time back in the day when it was still viable, you had probably a search for content strategy Twitter-

Kristina Halvorson:
That's right, that's right.

Corey Vilhauer:
... and it popped up. And you tweeted it, and I didn't know who you were, and I was, "Who's this person?" And I went and looked and was, "Oh, that's the author of the book I just read. Cool."

Kristina Halvorson:
That's right. Again, personal brand is power, the personal brand.

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah.

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah. Well, all the way back around, Twitter's how we all found each other back in the day when you could search hashtag content strategy and actual meaningful things came up from the 16 people who were tweeting about it. I think that people who listen to this podcast really get sick of me being, "Back in the day."

But I refer back to it so often, not only because it seems like the day before yesterday, but also because it just really informs where things have landed as of today in terms of how there was a small group of us and we all knew that content was complicated and we all knew it was important and we all wanted it to serve the user.

And that set us apart from copywriters and marketing and folks who had been making the words for time eternal, and now just seeing today how we have all really started to dig into our different areas of specialization, website content strategy, content engineering, or managing the content models, and in relationships between different content types, et cetera, content design, content marketing.

It's just really exciting to me to see where we were and where we're going and how people like you are really leading the way into these other areas of specialization like website content strategy and information relationships on websites. It's pretty great.

Corey Vilhauer:
It is pretty great.

Kristina Halvorson:
You're going to talk about that at our Confab coming up next May.

Corey Vilhauer:
I'm going to talk about that. I'm going to talk about demystifying content strategy. This is a thing I've been poking on, and I noticed you were doing a really good job of leading me into questions that would get me to talk about it, which I appreciate. This idea of-

Kristina Halvorson:
I didn't. Listen, I didn't-

Corey Vilhauer:
Oh, you didn't? Amen. It just means you're a really good podcast host.

Kristina Halvorson:
That's exactly what that means.

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah. This idea of demystifying web design is really important to me because I work with a lot of people on every project, and they're afraid. It's not that they're afraid because they've hired a company and they want us to do the thing we want to do, but nobody wants to look stupid, and that includes a client talking to a practitioner. And I want to let them know, listen, literally everyone who does any of this work is still making it up as it goes along-

Kristina Halvorson:
Yep. Totally.

Corey Vilhauer:
... because it changes all the time. It's always changing. So, none of us are a 100% perfect at anything, and none of us should be... you should never be nervous to talk to a content strategist about content strategy because I promise you're not the first person who's asked them a question that you might think is dumb, because it's not dumb. This is a new process. You don't need to know this. We need to know this. Practitioners need to know this-

Kristina Halvorson:
Or we need to know that we don't know it and then go figure it out, which is the whole point.

Corey Vilhauer:
Exactly. Yes, exactly. But clients don't need to know all the stuff. That's what they hired us to do. So, it's our job to essentially demystify this idea that we're working within this black box, that there's just this hidden process in there. It's not. It's just, a giant chunk of what we do is helping people understand what's important and what's not important, what to focus on and what not to focus on.

So, I hope that the talk really touches on, here's what you need to focus on to be able to make it work better for clients you're working with or team members. Then, the book as well. I say book because I'm working on... I'm trying to get a book out there-

Kristina Halvorson:
You're going to.

Corey Vilhauer:
Yeah, we'll get.

Kristina Halvorson:
And we're putting that talk on the main stage at the Confab. As you know, it is the very last Confab happening next May, and I just feel this is going to be an extraordinary gift to some people on their way, to be able to give them that, that new lens on how they're thinking about their work and new language and ways in which to communicate with clients and team members about their work.

If you’re a fan of content strategy you may be familiar with Confab, which is the conference my company Brain Traffic produces. Well, after a stellar twelve year run, next spring will be our very last Confab. I know it is going to be our best event yet and we would love to have you join us. So visit confab events dot com, check out the program and all our incredible speakers, and if you decide to register you can use promo code PODCAST100 to save $100 off any in-person ticket. That is promo code PODCAST100 because you are hearing about it on a podcast. Hope to see you there.

Corey, before we go, I also just would like to acknowledge and give a shout-out that you are one of two human beings who have attended every single Confab since we debuted in 2011. So, I'm so grateful that you're going to be with us again this May, and on the main stage this time. So, I just want to thank you.

Corey Vilhauer:
I'm very excited about it. Yeah. Thank you.

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah.

Corey Vilhauer:
I have one question about that, one question.

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah.

Corey Vilhauer:
Is Eileen Webb, who I think is also going to be on the main stage, is she before or after me?

Kristina Halvorson:
Why do you ask?

Corey Vilhauer:
Because her talk makes people cry, and I don't want to go after that.

Kristina Halvorson:
You don't know. You don't know, you'll have to check the schedule. Her talk does make people cry. In fact, that is how Tenessa continues to refer to it over and over during programming. Well, Eileen's going to give the talk that makes people cry. Therefore, every time it's true, I'll let Eileen know that she got a shout-out for that reason on this episode. Corey, thank you so much for coming on the show today and chatting with me. You are, as always, a delight. And good luck with your book, and we'll see you in May.

Corey Vilhauer:
Thank you, Kristina.

Kristina Halvorson:
Thanks so much for joining me for this week’s episode of the Content Strategy Podcast. Our podcast is brought to you by Brain Traffic, a content strategy services and events company. It’s produced by Robert Mills with editing from Bare Value. Our transcripts are from REV.com. You can find all kinds of episodes at contentstrategy.com and you can learn more about Brain Traffic at braintraffic.com. See you soon.