Episode 66: Jeff Eaton - The importance of observability in assessing content

Kristina Halvorson:
Because if I don't hit record before we actually start recording, what happens is you bust out with a word. Like, what did you just say?

Jeff Eaton:
Epistemological?

Kristina Halvorson:

You made that up?

Jeff Eaton:

No, no, no, no. Someone else made it up.

Kristina Halvorson:

Okay, that's fair. But I can't... Can you spell it?

Jeff Eaton:

There's an E and there's a...

Kristina Halvorson:

You are a content expert. 

Hello once again, friends and neighbors, it's Kristina, and today I have with me a human being that every single time I have a conversation with him, I say, "Stop talking. We need to put this on the podcast," because everyone should hear whatever it is that you are saying because it's very smart and important. Let me tell you a little bit about him.

This is Jeff Eaton. Jeff is a partner at Autogram, a boutique strategy consultancy that helps organizations make their design and communication systems more effective. And who doesn't want that? Whether he is fixing problems with CMS architecture or editorial workflow, his solutions sit in the overlap between design, communications and technology. Jeff, I'm telling you, every single person listening to this podcast right now is already on the edge of their seat. Like, go on. Hello Jeff.

Jeff Eaton:

That's the wonderful thing about our community, the topics that would cause a crowd to disperse at a cocktail party make everyone come together and go, oh yeah, let's talk.

Kristina Halvorson:

That's so true. It is so true. My people, the content nerds. I love you very much.

Jeff Eaton:

Exactly.

Kristina Halvorson:

Exactly. So Jeff, you and I have known each other for a very, very long time. I oftentimes will start my podcast with that, we've known each other for a long time and I will say I count myself of among the very, very lucky content strategists who have kind of grown up in this industry with some of the smartest humans on the planet. And I tell you that all the time as well. Let's kick off with you telling our listening audience a little bit about your journey through the ages to where you are now in content and content strategy.

Jeff Eaton:

I know we've joked before about how it's never a short story for anybody in our industry. I actually started working in a design agency and doing a lot of freelance writing and journalism and increasingly getting involved in producing the marketing and support materials for organizations where they needed a lot of copywriting. They also needed design work and stuff like that. But we also then, because at the time it was this new fancy stuff, we started building websites for companies that we worked with, and through that I ended up getting a lot of very early experience in, Hey, I run the web server, I write the copy. Oh, we need a product catalog. Well, I guess learn how to set up the database. A lot of that stuff was do it yourself or at least very close to it in those days. So I sort of learned all the angles at the time in order to do stuff at that scale.

And this was mid-nineties, so the web wasn't totally new, but as a core part of everyone's communications and marketing efforts, that was kind of emergent at the time. Over the years following that, I ended up getting deeper and deeper into the tech side of things, working on building out sort of proto little CMSs for clients so they could update things or eventually working with companies that weren't even doing web publishing but just needed the technical backend work. And I started working on that.

But I ended up coming full circle and getting back to web content just because of a number of projects that I was working on that needed that CMS piece again, probably around the 2004, 2005. I ended up becoming really closely involved in the Drupal community and ended up being hired by a company called Lullabot, which I was with for many years after that. And you've probably heard of them, Kristina, you've spoken with them and everything.

They're in the Drupal world, they work a lot on big content projects. And that was an amazing time because for me it felt like sort of coming back full circle where I was deep into technical projects for clients that needed rich content that was really core to their business. Communicating with either media companies or educational institutions or tech companies that needed to market their products or support their products. And spent a lot of great time there and ended up building out the content strategy practice at Lullabot because over time it became clear that the problems we were encountering as Drupal matured and we added capabilities to it, and the community worked on it, the problems that the clients were encountering were about their content and about their organization and about how they tackled that stuff and whether they really understood how their different types of content were working together and stuff like that.

Those were reflected in the technical side of the project. But it wasn't just, oh, we need a new feature, we need better templates. It was really where the complexity came up. So that sort of brought me back to a greater focus on the content again, and it felt a little like coming home. And I spent years sort of building that practice out at Lullabot and recently with Karen McGrane and Ethan Marcotte, I ended up leaving Lullabot and we ended up founding Autogram because the three of us were finding certain kinds of emergent problems with all of the clients that we were looking at where different parts of their work, the design teams and the content teams and the IT teams individually were doing great work and following best practices and all that, but things just weren't coming together for those organizations as well. We started comparing notes and thinking about what's going on? What's this problem we keep seeing across all these companies? And focusing on that intersection in particular at Autogram, that's how we got together.

Kristina Halvorson:

So where you landed the kinds of problems and challenges and opportunities that you all are tackling, I mean, first of all, let's just say the two folks that you work with are real luminaries in the web and UX industry. I mean, you hang out with a guy that invented responsive design, I mean whatever.

And then Karen McGrane, I learned a lot of what I know about content strategy from Karen a really long time ago. So you are working with two of the people I admire most in this field and the idea that your clients get to sit down with you with these huge problems within an organization, like how do we connect design and content so that not only are things working technically and efficiently, but also we can consider things like, I don't know, meaning and intent.

I mean that's really exciting. So I wonder in these levels of conversations, I wonder if you could just kind of share for a few minutes what are you seeing these days? What are the primary questions that folks are asking? What are the challenges that they're facing and where are the key opportunities that you're seeing? So if you can just talk for the rest of the episode about those topics, that would be great. I'm going to go get some coffee. You go ahead.

Jeff Eaton:

Oh my goodness. So what are we seeing? I mean, naturally, I don't want to make too sweeping of pronouncements about here's what's happening in the world because the kinds of problems we decided we want to tackle obviously shape the kinds of clients that we end up working with. So we spend most of our time chewing on this particular type of stuff, but even though we decided we wanted to focus on it, it has been startling how consistent some of the challenges that we're starting to see are. I'll say first what the themes are and then some of the specific areas that we see that are popping up.

Thematically, what we're seeing with clients is lots of pressure and an accelerating pressure on content production and the ripple effects that always come from that in terms of management and effectively utilizing the stuff that's been produced. There's so much competition for attention at this point, and the natural response to that is almost always to try to produce more and just turn the dial so that you stay visible in this world where everyone from an influencer who's trying to get a footprint on TikTok to your direct competitors in your industry, to spam farms who are using AI to automate stuff and just try to hoover up clicks. Everyone is trying to get out there in front of people and content and communication and messaging is so critical to make a connection, it's really hard to not feel like you're sinking beneath the waves. And that pressure is a big part of what most of the organizations and teams we're talking to face.

Some of them feel like they're sort of up to their eyeballs in the water and trying to get above it. Others feel like, okay, we're doing all right, but this pressure is always there. Figuring out ways to make that easier and to mitigate that either by strategically narrowing down what they're trying to produce and to more intelligently target what they're making and how they're getting it to people. That's one way. Another way is to build systems that are actually more effective at leveraging what they have produced and what they do produce so that the content they make is working harder for the time and the money that they invest in producing it.

So that pressure is one of the things that we see. The other is, I guess I'd call it a crisis of observability. That scale problem of how much more is being made and how many places it's going is one part of it. But so many organizations have no ability to actually examine what they have and what they have created and to know whether it's working or not. You've got Screaming Frog and you can check at the SEO is going, okay, and you've got grammar tools and site accessibility checkers you can run and you've got your analytics team if you're lucky, or just a copy of Google Analytics that you've got running or whatever if you want to try to look at the numbers.

And then even what do we have inside the content that we've created? How has it shaped? What assets are we using? Video clips or pull quotes that we've got that we ought to be repurposing in other ways like that. Sometimes you've got a CMS that's capable of pulling those things out and helping you with them, but oftentimes that stuff is just locked in interviews or articles or case studies that just aren't built to make that stuff surfaceable in a way that allows you to reuse it or even find it quickly when you need to go back and figure out, hey, can we use what we've got? Or do we need to hire a writer and get permission from a client again or something like that.

There's all those individual tools to do that stuff, but there aren't really good ways that most organizations have to look at the big picture and to say like, okay, our content, is it healthy? What's the quality of it? Are there places where it's just not up to the standards that we want? And then effectiveness, is it doing what we expect it to do out in the world? We have traffic numbers and maybe if you're a commerce company or a SaaS company that has a very well-engineered conversion pipeline and you can tie things to that. You can say, well, is our content directly contributing to the new user signup or the conversion that we want?

But bringing that full picture together and being able to assess it as like, what have we got? How is it doing? Where are the problems and where are those problems maybe connected to each other or what's doing really well in ways that we didn't expect? That just doesn't exist at so many organizations because some of it's a tools problem, some of it's a strategic problem with knowing what it is would need to be measured to answer those questions. But yeah, sorting those questions out and helping organizations move the needle with that kind of stuff, that's a lot of what we do and that's where we see the problems. Those are some significant pain points at a thematic level I'd say.

Kristina Halvorson:

So these are huge challenges, and I'm losing my voice because I'm crying, no, that's not true. These are huge challenges that anyone at, I mean, I was going to say an enterprise organization, but let's face it just about any organization that has what I'll call big content, a lot of content faces, and what I have seen with our clients is that oftentimes it's very, very difficult to know where to begin.

Because to your point, there's information over here about content performance and analytics, even though they don't understand what the content is trying to actually do or serve in the first place. There's information over here about inconsistent messaging and how that needs to get fixed. There's information over here about four different kinds of user personas that have been created throughout the organization. I mean, there are so many moving pieces. So I have two questions related to that. The first is, where does a company start? And the second is, what are the roles that you would recommend? I mean, let's say that there's a core team or a steering committee or whatever you want to call it, what are the key roles that need to exist once things have sort of been identified and kicked off?

Jeff Eaton:

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. But which bite is first? That's the big question. Increasingly we've started to talk about that idea of observability for the content as the real key because no matter what systems issues you start to solve, if you don't know what it is that you have and where the problems are, what you're going to focus on in terms of the problem solving is always going to be a matter of luck.

Are you fortunate enough to have noticed a problem or felt the pain from a problem that happens to be widespread, or is this just what you happened to bump into today? Without that sort of observability question at least being addressed, you have no way of knowing whether it's widespread or isolated to a particular team or whatever. And if you're working inside of the context of one particular team, sometimes those things can be useful to tackle.

But at the organizational level, if you're saying, Hey, we want to move the needle at a large scale, you're not going to solve the problems in one fell swoop. You're going to have to figure out how to prioritize and tackle them one by one. But the observability piece in figuring out how you can measure, we tend to break it down into quality, health and effectiveness of what you're creating, measuring those three things effectively, that's what you use to make a decision about what to focus on first. Otherwise you're flying blind.

And that's the biggest challenge that we have found where organizations have gotten programs started and they're focusing on fixing the CMS or re-platforming or we're going to be doing thought leadership or we're not going to be doing thought leadership because we did that last year and it turns out it didn't help at all or whatever. Those kinds of things can produce results, but again, you're flying blind if you don't have the bigger picture of how these different pieces are working together and how successful things are in different areas.

Kristina Halvorson:

And so that rolls me into the next question which is, you just used the words decide and discover and prioritize and that's people and that's empowerment. So talk to me about the different roles that are required there and typically what you see is the required level of sponsorship for a project like that, or not just a project, but a movement, a longer term initiative.

Jeff Eaton:

I do want to call out, by the way, Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti an amazing technical writer and UX writer from Spain who works for Splunk. I think is one of their leads with technical documentation. I can't remember what his exact role is, but he actually wrote an amazing blog post on docs observability, like measuring documentation effectiveness I think earlier this month.

And he's actually the one who put the word observability in my ear with that post because that's something that for literally two years at Autogram, we've been writing and talking about it, but having this open conversation about what's the right word for this thing? It's not analytics, it's not this, and we've really sort of clicked with the word observability to describe that. Because it captures a lot and it helps take that question out of, we need to do an audit or we need to improve the analytics, or we need to get... It's the big picture and huge hat tip to him for his writing and thinking on that question of how we frame what we need to be doing.

Kristina Halvorson:
We will be sure to include a link to that post in show notes on contentstrategy.com because it is a post blew my mind and I got back to Jeff and said, I just don't know why tech writers and web content strategists and content marketers and content designers aren't, we talk about the big tent, but why are we all not reading what he is writing, thinking, oh, tech docs don't apply to me because they do.

Jeff Eaton:

Oh, they do.

Kristina Halvorson:

Oh boy.

Jeff Eaton:

So anyway, sorry, what you were saying is I think what you asked was who needs to be in the room? Who needs to have the authority and ability to drive those things?

Obviously depends on the organization, the size of the organization. If you're in a small team that some people are going to be wearing multiple hats and at a large team it's sometimes going to be spread over multiple roles, I would probably say that some of the most critical roles that we have found are obviously someone who actually owns the messaging and communication strategy for the organization. And this may be getting a little fussy. I don't like coining new terms for things because that feels very precious, but I say that rather than saying content strategy because content strategy has become such a big tent that that can include an engineer who really cares about content, who's primarily concerned about CMS architecture or it could include someone from the content marketing team who's focusing on the big picture of how they organize the cycles of their comms and stuff like that and managing the editorial calendar.

There's such a huge spread in what could be someone's focus if you say, "Hey, we need somebody to handle the content strategy." And that is something that we often see in organizations where there will be someone who may have the title of lead for content strategy or something like that, but there's a really strong emphasis on one particular aspect of that and other ones may not be getting as much focus. It's understandable, but that can sometimes be a factor. What I would probably say is that there needs to be somebody who's clearly and unambiguously able to make calls and answer questions about the messaging and communications priorities. What perspective are we speaking from? Are we a trusted leader in our industry? Are we a fresh upstart with a new perspective? Are we... So it's that brand and voice kind of stuff.

Another one is what are the core messages we're communicating? Who's our key audience and in the short term, what kinds of things do we need to emphasize? What kinds of ideas do we need to get across effectively and how do we need to do that? That kind of strategic stuff. Somebody needs to be able to answer those questions and they need to either have an interest in or an ability to dialogue with the rest of the team about some of the nitty-gritty questions about how that gets realized. Like, oh, we're going to be doing that by rolling out targeted micro sites that work like X and Y and Z, or in order to accomplish that, we are going to be investing time in reworking our past two years of case studies that we produced and modularizing them so that we can construct really compelling audience targeted landing pages that feel conversational and have quotes and have, here's ROI impact and let's talk about how we can help you and what's your problem? We can speak to it.

But that's pulled from our past case studies where the work of making structured content isn't just a philosophical issue that we want to do content better, but it directly serves this messaging need that we've got that we're doing this to accomplish something. There has to be somebody at that strategic message purpose level who can answer those questions and is able to dive down and get into the weeds at least to some level with the team who's making the how we're going to accomplish that decisions just to make sure that everyone is on the same page and on the same table.

On the flip side, there has to be someone at that nitty-gritty level, whether it's working with the CMS or coordinating the individual campaigns that are going on that is able to think about that from an asset perspective like we're making assets for the organization. This content that we're putting out there isn't just an artifact of a campaign that we're hurling out into the world. It's an asset we've invested time and resources in creating and we want to be able to figure out how to make it work effectively for us in the future.

That stuff, somebody who's thinking about the structural asset management stuff, somebody who's thinking about that messaging, the messaging priorities and what purpose this serves for us, why are we doing it? When this goes out into the world, what do we think is going to change? What do we think the impact is? What's its intention?

And then the third leg I would probably say is if you're in an organization where there's any kind of design system work or there's a strong emphasis on starting to build out that kind of consistency in visual design and presentation, making sure that they're part of that circle and that their work isn't treated as sort of this thing that we draw on once we need to click stuff together, we'll use their modules or we'll use their components. Making sure that they are aware of these kinds of purpose messaging, asset reuse, broader intention questions because they're going through the same conversations on the design side.

They're asking those same questions about design components and how things are assembled together. And on the visual side, how they work together and what's the intention, what is this visual presentation tool we've created? What is it good for and what are the right times to use it? They're asking a lot of those questions. They're answering them with the systems they create, but one of the things that we so often find is that if those sort of three legs of the table are there but not working together effectively and not on the same page or don't at least have some way to coordinate with each other, things fall apart.

Because the design systems team is answering those questions but in a different way from a different angle. And then when the content team that may be coming up with great tooling to support all that production and publishing work, the lines don't match up when they try to put them together and there's awkward fits, things aren't as flexible or useful or easy to roll out quickly as everyone thought they would be. And if it isn't being managed from a perspective of that strategic outcomes messaging and outcomes level, if there's not somebody there who's keeping that together, even if the technical content and the design systems teams are able to come to a point of understanding, there isn't necessarily a good way to look at whether it's working long-term and how those pieces can be improved. Getting them on the same page and making sure that there's that common set of underlying beliefs about how we tackle this stuff and how we make decisions when we're together. And then when we're off with our respective sub-teams, it really falls apart.

So I'd probably say someone who's responsible for and can own the design system, someone who can own the content production and the technical tooling that supports that work, and then someone who owns the messaging and the ways of determining whether it's actually effective once it goes out into the world. Those three roles, they don't necessarily correspond to any useful titles that I can call out, but those really feel like three key pillars. 

Kristina Halvorson:
So the first thing I wanted to say is you made the very good point, and this comes up on the podcast a lot about content strategists can mean 80,000 things within an organization and a lot of the roles that you've described, marketing, content in design, content engineering, content on website. I mean, there's a million different things, and one of the things that we really talk to organizations about at our consultancy Brain Traffic is getting on the same page about what kind of content strategy we're talking about in each of those different areas of the business and then naming it and calling it the thing, calling it a content marketing strategist, calling it a website content strategist. Content engineer is one of my favorite terms to introduce into clients.

The best that we have been able to do to date to describe the thing that ties it all together, whether we're talking about editorial workflows or the same principles, all the things that you are describing in terms of how are we sure that everybody is kind of singing from the same songbook is enterprise content strategy. That phrase carries a lot of weight when we talk about the CMS or content engineering. It's the best that we've been able to come up with. Content ops is not quite it, but that's what we roll with anyway.

My question is what we see happen a lot is that we do this very long-term situation analysis because there's so many people to talk to, so many conversations to have and to facilitate and deliverables and initiatives keep getting unearthed. We can go on and on and then finally at some point we're like, okay, here's what we see. Here's the synthesis of that information, here's our analysis, and then we move on to strategic recommendations. In terms of moving from strategy towards implementation, nine times out of 10, the best that organizations can do because of leadership hesitation or money or timing with other initiatives is a pilot project. How do you see organizations begin to take those steps towards change?

Jeff Eaton:

I mean, in terms of where they first focus with those early pilot projects?

Kristina Halvorson:

I guess what I'm asking is it a pilot project?

Jeff Eaton:

That's what it has to be. Even my background, even back when I was at Lullabot and we were doing enormous content migrations to actually do a re-platforming where you can say, well, the job's not done until all the content is on the new platform, so it's just a job that is X big, you still have to start with small pieces of it because that lets you figure out is what we're doing working? Is the approach we're taking is the angle we're looking at this from, is it accurate? When we try to do it with this one campaign or this one particular type of content that we have that we feel is underperforming and we want to move the needle on it, is what we're doing playing out the way we believe it will? Is it working? That has to happen at a smaller scale and you can build on that and gain the confidence to start applying it at a broader scale.

It also allows you to get numbers. If you're actually looking carefully at what happens when you do one of those pilot projects, it can give you actual results with measurable outcomes that you can use to build institutional support and justify like, well, here's what we believe the ROI is going to be as we start rolling this out at a larger scale because that's what we saw happen with this pilot program.

I think the hardest part, those of us who spend a lot of time thinking real hard about this stuff and trying to figure out what's a better way, how could we do this better? The initial impulse, I think, is to sell the betterness of it to convince leadership that this better way of approaching a particular problem we've got is what we ought to do because we've demonstrated from first principles that it's better. And that can be convincing when it's us in a room talking shop about how we do stuff, but from an institution that needs to figure out where it's going to invest resources and actually carrying this stuff through, starting small, measuring outcomes, using that opportunity to course correct when there's aspects of it that don't play out the way that we think it's going to or whatever. That's the process by which things actually happen at scale.

And there's a client we just worked with just a little bit earlier at the end of last year, beginning of this year is when we wrapped up where they're consolidating platforms. They're going to be moving and shifting some content that had been managed in a fairly chaotic way over the years and their theory was that the performance of this content was going to improve dramatically if they reorganized it, culled some of it, moved it to a new platform where a lot more of the work has been going on to improve things. But there's an investment in doing all of that work, and every organization has to make judgment calls about whether or not it's worth it or not. So one of the things that we worked with them on as we planned out how this would play out was what's the first 10 pieces?

What's the first hundred pieces of this content that we know we can do with a very low impact? We can do on a tight budget right away? Get that out there and start gathering information on whether this tiny slice of what we're looking at performs in the way that we're predicting it will. And as that information accumulates, you can roll that back in and say, okay, we dipped a toe in the water and the water seems nice, and we're going to go further and further with this, and we've got a phased plan. But we've got a story about not just why we think this works philosophically, but we've got the early data that matches with what we predicted. And that makes a huge difference inside of the organizations that are large enough that doing the big shift is a significant institutional commitment in resources and people's time. Does that help?

Kristina Halvorson:

In fact, if I just cut the rest of the episode and just had those last five minutes, I think that we'd be good. I think that a word that you used in there that is so important is story as well, is how you are telling the story as you go throughout the process. The story of what's happening now, the story of what could be not just from a, this is better, but here are predictions and here are the outcomes that we think would be beneficial beyond just this is a better way to do it.

And so having that ability to be able to identify what is the meaningful data going to be? How does it map back to our business objectives or pain points that leadership's been struggling with? And then how are we going to tell that story of either our success or we are halfway there, here's what we'd like to do next, because I think that we can take it all the way. So I think that that's so important and that's so powerful, and I'm glad that you mentioned that.

Jeff Eaton:

Coming back to just the, where does content strategy fit into this? I think I need to track it down again, who wrote about this first, but I think one of the most interesting descriptions of strategy that I've read in a long time is that it's a theory of change. It's not just, here's what we're going to do, here's the goals and metrics we're shooting for stuff like that. It's not just that. It's like at its heart, a strategy is a theory about what's going to be different if we do X and why do we think that's going to be different? What's our theory about how doing A will lead to B?

And that's helped me when those fuzzy boundaries between, well, is this a strategy or is this the execution plan or is this higher level institutional decisions that are outside of our domain or whatever? And I think what you described is being able to tell that story about what we're going to be doing and why, a lot of it boils down to that. And the observability, the measurement, the performance that we look to to prove it out is basically, did that story, did it play out the way we expected? Is that a true story?

Kristina Halvorson:

I love that very much. I think that a lot of times when I talk about strategy it's we're at point A, we've identified what the situation is, we've identified where it is that we want to go, at least the next milestone on our longer journey, what is the path that we're going to take to get there? And I think that adding that dimension of, and what do we believe will be different after we reach point B, is really, really wise. And I've always loved talking to you about strategy, so maybe that'll be our next conversation the next time I have you on the podcast because I'm positive it will happen at some point.

Jeff Eaton:

Well I'm looking forward to it.

Kristina Halvorson:

Terrific. Well, today we are out of time, but I wonder if you could share with folks where they can find you online.

Jeff Eaton:

Well, the stuff that we do at Autogram, you can go to autogram.is that's where Karen and Ethan and I sporadically post things, but also we're all over the internet as well on places like Mastodon and increasingly LinkedIn, the new Twitter.

And then personally, I have a website at eaton.fyi that I'm in the process of, as always, rebuilding it to include a past archive of a lot of talks and writing I've done over the past probably 15 years or so on some of these topics. Because it's been trouble, the loss of Twitter, I realized there's so many threads and comments and then presentations that I only really linked or talked about there, that with it sort of weirding out, I want to sort of pull that stuff together so that it's a more useful archive. That's ultimately what that's going to be.

Kristina Halvorson:

That's really exciting. Thank you for salvaging your wisdom from Twitter. All right, well, thanks so much for taking the time to join us today. I appreciate you and I will see you around the interwebs. Yeah, take care.

Jeff Eaton:

Have a wonderful day.

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.