Podcast

Episode 21: Lou Rosenfeld, Rosenfeld Media - Industry Leadership in a Time of Change

June 6, 2019

Author, publisher, conference organizer, and all-around renaissance man Lou Rosenfeld talks shop about writing the first book on IA, watching the evolution of design practices, and how he’s helping to keep people at the forefront of their respective industries.

About this week's guest

Lou Rosenfeld is Rosenfeld Media’s founder and publisher. Like many user experience folk, Lou started somewhere (library science), made his way somewhere else (information architecture, then user experience), and has ended up in an entirely different place (publishing).

Lou spent most of his career in information architecture consulting, first as founder of Argus Associates and later as an independent consultant. He co-founded the Information Architecture Institute and the IA Summit. He helps curate the Enterprise Experience and DesignOps Summit conferences. And he does know something about publishing, having edited or co-authored five books, including the IA “bible,” Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond, and Search Analytics for Your Site.

For more, keep up with Lou at RosenfeldMedia.com or on Twitter at @louisrosenfeld.

Episode 21: Lou Rosenfeld, Rosenfeld Media - Industry Leadership in a Time of Change

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Episode transcript

Kristina: Hello again, welcome to The Content Strategy Podcast. I’m your host Kristina Halvorson. This podcast is brought to you by ContentStrategy.com and Brain Traffic, a content strategy consultancy. Find out more about Brain Traffic at BrainTraffic.com.

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Welcome back to another lovely episode of The Content Strategy Podcast. Here with me today is one of my favorite people and someone I am proud to call a mentor, whether or not he knows that that’s what I call him behind his back, and it is Lou Rosenfeld.

And Lou is the founder and publisher of Rosenfeld Media. He has edited or co-authored five books, including “the polar bear book”—or that’s what everybody calls it—Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond, and Search Analytics for Your Site.

Lou co-founded the Information Architecture Institute and the IA Summit. Now he helps curate the Enterprise Experience and DesignOps Summit conferences. Lou, welcome to the podcast.

Lou: Thanks, Kristina.

Kristina: You’re a busy man these days.

Lou: You should talk.

Kristina: Oh I know. But, five books, man. I’ve only written … I’ve only like, wrote one. I co-authored one. Everybody’s like, “When are you going to write another one?” I’m really tired.

Lou: When you get really smart about the creation of books, you realize it’s better to get somebody else to write them.

Kristina: Yes, exactly. And that’s, is that why you became a publisher?

Lou: Yeah.

Kristina: So you don’t have to write any more books?

Lou: Well, I think … It’s funny because one of my heroes is Tim O’Reilly. I’ll admit it up front. And when I started Rosenfeld Media, he said, “Oh, yeah, you’re like me.” I was really happy to hear that, “You’re like me.” Most publishers are frustrated authors. And, we want to do it the way our publishers, our own publishers didn’t do it.

And so that was kind of the genesis for me starting doing this, and yeah, I’d much rather have somebody else do the horrible work of sacrificing their family life and personal time, and ...

Kristina: Mental health …      

Lou: Mental health and all those things. I mean, it’s lonely, right? I mean, it’s like, of all the work we do in creating content and products, it’s the thing that places you in a position most far distant in time and space from your customer, your user, your reader. It’s just a lonely pursuit.

Kristina: Well, so let’s talk about your experience actually, in writing “Information Architecture,” because at first it was Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, right? Like that was the first title.

Lou: Because the web was pretty new then.

Kristina: Yeah, what year was the first edition? ‘99? Is that right?

Lou: ‘98.

Kristina:  ‘98.

Lou: Yeah.

Kristina: So and you co-authored that with Peter Morville, so that was less lonely that you had a co-author.  

Lou: Well, but even then co-authorship depends how you slice and dice it. I mean, it could be that you go off and you do your own thing, which we kind of did a lot of, or it could be, practically like, you’re sitting together all the time co-writing literally. We really did it more of the former.                    

Kristina: Yeah, that’s what Melissa Rach and I did to on the second edition for sure. What was that like, writing kind of that first big book on information architecture? I mean, it’s not … You know, a weird thing that I tell people all the time, because I similarly wrote kind of the first …

Lou: Bible?

Kristina: Yeah, well, codifying content strategy as a discipline, sort of that sits adjacent to user experience. And I have to remind people all the time: I did not invent content strategy, was not me, already was a thing. Just put it in the book. What was that like for you? To release this book and just be like, “Let’s see what happens. Hope this sticks.”    

Lou: I was saying here, I mean like we didn’t invent it. And there were people who were writing about, maybe a slightly different flavor of it for a while. Others as well, by the way, like John Zachman, who came at information architecture from a completely different perspective. People don’t know about Zachman, but I think he actually invented the term.

But, when we were writing about this, Peter and I, well, I’ll speak for myself because Peter, I think was a lot calmer and mentally more healthy than I was at the time. I had a huge chip on my shoulder, because I saw the web exploding, and I saw all this mess of content that was going to just, it was pretty obvious right away, that it was going to be a disorganized mess and that nobody would be able to find anything. And I knew that library science and information science, which is where I’d come from, were areas that had something to offer, but were absolutely terrible at presenting those skills to the world, that’s something that the world could take advantage of.        

And so that was kind of, what we were trying to do, is make a point to the world that librarians and their ilk had something to offer in this new era of the information revolution. And it’s kind of like, it’s funny, because we had like, another chip on our shoulders, the other shoulder had a chip, like to the librarians, like, “Hey, there’s this whole world out there that needs us and stop just thinking about libraries as the only context for this kind of work to happen. If you do, you won’t have a job in 20 years.”

And sadly, that’s been pretty much the case for a lot of librarians, because they didn’t see the benefit of what they could do, if they could sort of deal with the uncertainty and occasional discomfort of transferring those skills to new context.        

And I’ve got to think, in content strategy, same thing, I mean, we’ve talked a little bit, you and I, about my wife, today’s her first day on the job as a UX strategist. What’s her background? Journalism. A lot of people in that field have fortunately found their way to content strategy and areas like UX writing. But a lot of people haven’t, because they haven’t been comfortable shifting gears around context.      

Kristina: Yeah, what’s interesting is that a lot of times, this just happened at our conference, Confab, that happened in April. And it happens every year. A lot of times people show up and they’re like, “I’m doing content strategy. I’ve been doing content strategy for years, and I never knew that it was a thing, that it had a name.”

That level of realization is, just continues to blow my mind and it’s constant. It’s everywhere. We have people showing up in the Facebook content strategy group all the time, just like, “Oh my gosh, what I do is a thing.” So, I don’t know necessarily if it’s that people are having trouble transferring skills so much, as they are struggling with kind of codifying what it is that they’re doing so that they can talk to it, talk to their employers or to potential employers about the value of that skill set and what it can bring to the table, not only in UX design, but also just in editorial planning, within marketing or with, structuring and building out content models within what we call content engineering. It’s kind of, it’s an ongoing evolution. I’ll tell you what.

Let me ask you a question. When I first started stomping my feet, and I often say that my early career was fueled by rage and self-righteousness, when I first started stomping my feet, going, “What about the content? What about the content?” Something that sort of blew my mind is that here, you and Peter had laid this foundation out for the industry around the importance of information and making it findable, organizing in a way that was intuitive for people to browse. Then Jesse James Garrett came out with The Elements of User Experience and his sort of, watershed model that helped people see, okay, here is ... Of course, he kept saying, “This isn’t a waterfall process.” But everybody built it into the design of waterfall process.                    

But, one of the things that was in there, is that he put content requirements in the, not content requirements. Something about content in there. But it was really late in the game. And it was more like structuring the content or organizing content without having anything to do with the substance of the content itself, or how, whether, whether or not, we are considering how that content was going to meet our users’ needs. Where did that fall through the cracks?    

Lou: Well, I think like early on, and we were certainly guilty of this as well with the IA writing that Peter and I did. We were so focused on containers, because the container was like the new exciting thing. And we were early on, all in a position of taking existing content and forcing it into this new container of HTML primarily. And so we were really kind of trying to wrap our minds around what these new containers could do, and how they could work and just, let’s just get some content in them and learn from them. Not think too much about the content itself.          

So I still remember so well, one of the big projects that my consulting firm that Peter and I ran, Argus Associates, took on in the late ‘90s was this huge intranet for AT&T, one of their, for their call centers, for their residential call centers. And basically it was a horrible thing where they had just literally taken their printed documentation that the agents would use when they’re on the phone with customers, and they threw it into or dumped it into a giant HTML meat grinder and out came this horrible stuff that was like verbatim from the paper version of their documentation.

And, that was what we were all dealing with back then. And I think, when Jesse did his diagram, I think that was around that time. Now, I can tell you that when were worked on the second edition of the polar bear book, which was about four years later, came out in 2002, I was certainly struggling with content modeling at that point, because it became clear that we had to look at things like XML and other schemas that were really kind of getting at a more of a kind of micro level of content structure, where the lines start to blur between structure and semantics.      

And we were all talking about micro formats in those days. And I can tell you that that book, that second edition, ended up being twice as long as the first edition partly for this reason that we were trying to start to scratch the surface of where content worked in the sort of spectrum of how you, whether its structure or semantics. And I think we threw out 150 pages of crap that I wrote around the subject. And it was just a struggle to try to make sense out of it.

So I wish I could have found you back then, and picked your brain, and started to really get at this issue of where content itself, at the offering level, fits. And thank god that you introduced me to Sara Wachter-Boettcher, because she did a wonderful job with Content Everywhere and getting at this issue. And that’s a book that we were happy to publish at Rosenfeld Media.                  

Kristina: She is a smarty-pants. And then she went on … So here’s something that’s been interesting. I think I get, I just taught a new version of my Introduction to Content Strategy, and I spend about 10 minutes talking about the history of content strategy. I think people are like, “Oh, yeah, the good old days.” I’m just like, “No no, you have to understand where things came from and how we have been building upon these foundational questions, because those questions don’t go away. Like, they’re still the same questions that we’re asking, which is, what is it that we’re trying to say? Who are we trying to say it to? How do we define that within content requirements? How are we going to organize it and so on?” And I just think it’s important that people have that context.                  

What I was going to say about Sara is that, it’s been interesting to watch her career evolve from, sort of generalized content strategy to really focusing on content structure, and now she’s going in a completely different direction, with ethics in content and software and app design. And now, in fact, I think is really invested in her podcast, Strong Feelings. But it’s been really interesting for me to watch folks who, did kind of start digging into and leading different parts or areas of focus of content strategy and other UX disciplines, and how their interests have evolved over time.

And I think that, beginning to be more aware of the larger community, the needs of the larger community, the direction that our industries are taking, the ethics of the decisions that we’re making day to day. I see that happening. I’ve watched that happen with Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer with their work with An Event Apart. Jared Spool has taken that on, moving from his early career in usability, and now runs an entire school, center for UX designers.

And now you have really, your interests and passions have evolved. I mean, you were early in building community for with, the IA Institute in the IA Summit. But now here you are not only publishing, but also running these two conferences that I think are so forward looking, not only in how you are experimenting with format which we can talk about later. But really where you are focusing sort of in highlighting concerns and opportunities at the enterprise level.

Can you talk to me a little bit about, so the two conferences, you have Enterprise Experience and you have DesignOps. Can you talk to me about ...

Lou: I’ll start a dirty rumor right here, we’re working on a third conference right now.

Kristina: What is it?

Lou: Might have something to do with research. And then again, it might not.

Kristina: Can I put the word research in front of ops? Can I do that?

Lou: No.                  

Kristina: Okay, well, what these are the three important things that we’ll complement each other, regardless. So tell me, was it, you started Enterprise Experience before DesignOps, is that right?

Lou: Yeah, this will be the fifth one, about four weeks from today.

Kristina: Gosh, five already. Great. Well, by the time this posts, June 3rd will be in the past. So that’s the magic of podcasting.

Lou: Yeah, Einstein is rolling over in his grave, but okay.                  

Kristina: Good work. So talk to me about where these two conferences came from. Like, why did you decide now is the time for these events?    

Lou: Well, it’s funny because for the first one, Enterprise Experience, which we used to call Enterprise UX before this year, I had actually been talking with my very small team at the time, and they were like, this is like five years ago, “Why don’t we get into conferences?” “Ah, we’ve reached peak UX conference. There’s too many as it is.” And then like, a month later, Dave Malouf, and Casey Ties and Harry Max, were all at Rackspace at the time, contacted me and said, “We think there should be a conference on UX in the enterprise setting and if you program it we’ll host it. What do you think?” And, like, I thought about it for about five seconds, and I said, “Oh, yeah.”

Kristina: That sounds familiar.

Lou: That was the genesis there. And I think, for me personally, the attraction is two things. I like getting people together. I just I don’t pretend to be the deepest expert in any of the fields I’m involved in by any stretch. But I do like the idea of getting different people together to collaborate and have a good time. And what better way to do that than in a conference.

And the other thing is that, a conference, like a book, is a really interesting information product. And I used to like kind of find myself spending time around other information architects with my tail between my legs, like “I’m not worthy, I don’t really do this anymore, I don’t really know what’s going on, I feel guilty, I don’t really do IA anymore.” And then like, it’s stupid, because really, there are a lot of people who sort of like, updated the context that IA was practiced in, and are really talking a lot about that.      

But it took me a while to catch on that conferences, like books, are just a form of, or a great setting for IA. You know, working on the format and doing the user research to develop the programs. It’s just fascinating. And we get to try new things like, pretty much every year. And for example, I’m using, we’ve been using Donna Lichaw’s The User’s Journey book that we published as a guide for designing the narrative arc of the experience that people have at our conferences. And we get to try these things out in real time, with real people in the room, and get immediate feedback. So it’s just so much fun.      

I also like the fact that, we’re just kind of practicing what we preach. There are a lot of UX conferences out there. And some of them are fantastic, but in many cases, I think it’s because they caught lightning in a bottle. I mean, it’s hard to sustain that year by year by year. And you might luck into it sometimes, but you might not. And I think if you do the planning and the research and think of it as a product and not just an information product, you’re going to have a lot better chance of succeeding with the product itself.                  

Kristina: So, tell me a little bit, what information do you talk about at Enterprise Experience? What does Enterprise Experience, what does that mean?        

Lou: So, for us it means, the practice of UX in or for enterprises, which are large organizations that are to scale, and so distributed that one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing, or if it does, it doesn’t care or absolutely despises that other hand and wants to totally destroy it. There’s this horrible political environment in large enterprises that’s aggravated by scale and distribution.

And if you’re trying to do any type of UX work in that setting, you can be the world’s best craftsperson, the best designer, the best user researcher, but you will fail, if you don’t understand politics, the culture, how these organizations work, how they make decisions, how their businesses are a different type than let’s say, a startup, and what kind of soft skills you need to succeed in that environment.    

So that’s really what we’re talking about. There’s this huge migration of talent in UX to the enterprise, and a lot of those folks have just been ill prepared to navigate those environments. Now, when we first started doing Enterprise Experience five years ago, we were mostly designing it for a use case of leaders and managers of new UX groups that were trying to get established safely, and not have to look over their shoulders as they, a new CEO, or new leader came in and decided to hack back the carefully designed design organization.

Now this year, because UX seems to have matured quite a bit in the settings, where we have two new use cases. One is for those leaders and managers to really help up skill or up level the skills of their teams to succeed in the enterprise environment, by giving them training on how to do business modeling, and soft skills and things like that.        

The other use case, is to help them collaborate with their peers in other parts of the enterprise. That could be product, could be engineering, HR, business development, you name it. And how you collaborate with those people is pretty important because they all have a share in the outcome when it comes to delivering great experiences at the enterprise level. And so, we’ve designed these, what we think are really innovative, interactive sessions and you’re actually going to be part of one Kristina. And they’re all about collaboration.

Kristina: What? No I’m just kidding.  

Lou: They are all about collaboration and getting people to role play on stage, represent different functions, whether within a product team or within the C level folks at an organization as they work together. But to kind of work through what their problems are on stage, and how to identify them, and how to get past them. And those kinds of problems are things we’re all familiar with, things like we use different vocabularies, we work at different cadences, we have different models of seeing the world, and different types of goals for our work, and a lot of other differences. But we also have a lot in common, and if we can model some of those good outcomes on stage, we’re hoping that our attendees can take some really useful skills back to work with them.              

Kristina: It sounds to me like this kind of a conference format, would be useful for folks in management leadership positions across kind of any practice.    

Lou: Well, we want the conference to be in the long run, like our goal in a few years is to have 50% of our attendees to not be members of the UX tribe. Because ultimately, maybe this is a thing you want to get into a little bit, UX is, like a lot of things including content strategy, becoming democratized. It is not the provenance of UX people, it’s owned by everyone, pretty much these days, in a business setting. And if you are a product manager, or an engineer, or any number of these people, you care about the experience, whether you realize it or not.        

And you don’t have to be UX person, but you have to care about UX. And you often do. Those are the kinds of people we’re trying to bring to the conference. And we’ve actually completely changed our curation models to include people from those functional areas on our team. And it’s really exciting to work with different people who all care about experience.              

Kristina: It is, I have said, over the years in so many different articles and conference talks and interviews, so many times, you can swap out the phrase “user experience” for “content strategy.” And you can’t, like it’s all the same stuff. It’s, I think that content strategy as a discipline, as a practice, as a function within whether it’s small companies, or agencies, or the enterprise, is still fairly immature, but it is evolving at lightning speed. That has been a challenge, albeit a really fun and exciting one, but that has been a challenge at Confab to keep up with, sort of those topics, and desired trainings for the folks who are growing within organizations.                

I think that what we saw this year, that we haven’t seen before, I mean, in my workshop that I taught, Introduction to Content Strategy, I had somebody come up to me in the middle of the day and say, “I kind of feel like I’m hiding in plain sight. I’m an executive at a Fortune 500 company.”

Lou: Wow.                

Kristina: Yeah, well, she was there, because she had figured out that content is a business asset, and that she needed to somehow establish and evolve a practice and needed to kind of figure out what marching orders to give her team. So I, it’s exciting to me to see that you are, that you’ve formalized an offering for those folks. And, yeah. I mean, I would love to get content strategists and people who are managing content strategists within UX teams or otherwise to come in and sit in and hear what you all are talking about. And of course, my brain is also like, “And we have to formalize an offering like this for content strategists, because this is going to be important in five years.”

Who’s coming? Who will be there?

Lou: In terms of the attendees in general?

Kristina: Yeah, not necessarily companies, but like, what are the roles of the folks who are coming?

Lou: Well, we get a lot of people who are UX leaders and managers of teams and functions, we get a lot of practitioners who are pretty senior as well. I’d say, probably at this point 80 to 90% are folks that have UX or design or research somewhere in their job title. And when, usually when we do the analysis of those job titles, it’s something like 50 to 60% have pretty senior titles. It’s not a senior design ops, but still pretty senior. And the rest are people that are product people. There’s a smattering of executives, smattering of developers, and that’s the troop that we really want to, we want to grow and make this feel like a home for them. And that’s one reason we changed the conference name from Enterprise UX to Enterprise Experience.

Kristina: Now who comes to DesignOps, what is, because that’s another content operations, it’s a sort of up and coming, I won’t call it a bright shiny thing as much as I’ll call it a necessary awakening within organizations. Tell me who comes to DesignOps and what the focus is there.          

Lou: Well, so we did our second one last November. The third one will be in Brooklyn, here in Brooklyn, October 23rd to 25th. And, in fact, we just opened our CFP, the people ...

Kristina: That’s the call for proposals.

Lou: Thank you. I was just thinking I should explain that. The people come to DesignOps are the people in, again, primarily large organizations who are there to try to take all the talent that’s being amassed on these teams, and basically amplify what that talent can do, by giving them tools and processes that enable them to do great work.

So instead of doing the same thing over and over again, why not put some of that work into a design pattern library, or a research operation, or could be content related as well. And we’re starting to see more of that, but start putting a lot of effort into developing products and services for designers of all stripes to use, so that they can be freed up to do the really hard work that you can’t manage through a pattern library or something along those lines.

And so, we’re seeing, we just did some research actually, and we’re saying something like, half the people who are interested in this area are like in year one, are just starting out in terms of building design programs or design operations, research operations inside their organizations. And the rest are a split kind of evenly between having been in it for like one to two years or more than two years. And very senior people, we got 700 for the second conference, we couldn’t believe it. And we’re anticipating even more this year.

So it’s a shiny thing, but it’s also a recognition that this field is maturing. So we’ve like, been yammering about design thinking for years and years and years, we finally get these organizations to invest in recruiting and building these teams, then it’s like, “Oh, shit. We have to actually make sure the teams can do the work or we’re going to suddenly lose these people to better-run teams, and better-run organizations.”

So the sort of the prototype of the, or archetype of the audience member, is someone who is titled or has an equivalent title of a COO of a design organization.                

Kristina: That is interesting to me too, because I have, in some of the conversations, I’ve had people say, “Oh, we are going to need to see a chief content operation or officer at some point because of the need for enterprise-wide content functions and interdependencies and integrations and different kinds of skill sets and so on.”

I just, as I’m sitting here, I’m just so struck by how I see content strategy as a field, rushing in the exact same direction as I think you have articulated, where design and UX are today at the enterprise level, and I think, that we’re finding at agencies and higher ed and non-profit and so on will be a probably a little less well-funded and well-staffed. So still scrambling a little bit.

But it’s just, it’s so exciting and so fascinating to me, and I think it’s such an important opportunity for content strategists who are in more senior positions right now, or who are striving to gain more seniority, more purview into what’s going on outside of their own teams, to pay attention to, and learn from some of the thinking, and shared education that’s going on at conferences like yours. I don’t, there aren’t really other conferences like yours, are there?    

Lou: I mean, there’s some conferences that are focused on people who are in leadership and management roles and UX, maybe a little less specifically about the enterprise setting.                    

Kristina: And what is unique to the challenges that folks are facing in the enterprise setting, would you say it’s just a matter of scale? Or what do you think is unique about that?            

Lou: I mean, I think it’s scale. I think it’s distribution. I think it’s the unevenness that those two things create in sense that in an organization, single organization, you have people or groups that are so far along and so advanced, that you’re almost embarrassed to work with them, let’s say if you’re a consultant. And then, others down the hall there, like, sort of in the primitive era. It’s just like the, I think any organization that you cannot … really that you cannot picture of in a way that makes any sense. It’s like so confounding to try to actually build something in that setting.        

So we have one cluster of talks a Enterprise Experience called the “product journey.” The product journey, it’s like, “What? The product journey?” But like think about it, think about where in an enterprise the idea for a product comes from, and how that could be a very different group of people than the ones who basically say, “Yeah, we approve of that.” Who can be very different than the ones who say, “Yeah, we’re going to fund that.” Very different from the ones who have to design it, and different from the ones who have to build and implement it, and different from the ones who have to maintain it, or support it. And then different certainly than the ones who end up using it, may not even be part of the enterprise, it may be customers.        

So, this is a really distributed journey that a single product can take, and what the hell? How do you deal with that? We’re trying to address that, at the conference, by having case studies that are co-presented by at least two people from different functions. That’s our initial stab at trying to address that issue, but it’s a really hard problem.                

Kristina: It is and again, for the eightieth time, I’m sitting here going, just replace product with content. It’s the exact same thing.    

Lou: I’m going to say we should, like I don’t think content strategy is different than UX. I think this is all the same thing. Some of us may work more with structure. Some of us may work more with content or semantics. Some of us may work more with, systems, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t like that we have a something of a perceived boundary here, that we’re dancing on. And I think you and I should do something about it, Kristina. I think, if nothing else, we should have a conversation about why there’s not more UX people at your conference and more content strategy people at my conference. Something like that.    

Kristina: Well I will tell you, no I know, but I’ll tell you that I, at Confab, had people who were not directly in the field of content design, content strategy, whatever, raise their hands. It was a solid third of the folks who were there.

Lou: That’s great.      

Kristina: Yeah. Well, I think that, for better or worse, I think content people have been banging on tables going on, “UX, let me in! You need me there, the experiences fueled by content.” And I think that just now, or in recent years, UX folks have been like, “Oh, yeah, I do care about the content. I haven’t known what to do about it. Nobody will give me resources, nobody will pay attention to the fact that I have asked to have writers in the room early on.” So, I do think that content folks and UX folks are, want to work hand in hand, off in to the sunset, want to work hand in hand in a lot of these projects and a lot of these undertakings.                

I think that when we’re talking about it at the enterprise level, it’s really leadership that needs to understand the connection between those two disciplines. And so, yeah, let’s do something about it. Let’s do it.      

Lou: All right. We’ve just gone public. I don’t think it’s going to be very easy to edit this out, so if we change our minds later, forget it. We got to do something.

Kristina: Well listen, this conversation is a good first step at any rate.

Lou: Absolutely.            

Kristina: Well, we’re about out of time. So thank you so much for taking the time to chat. I’m so fired up about the work that you’re doing, really looking forward to attending and being a part of Enterprise Experience.

And for those of you who are like, “Why have we been talking about conferences the whole time?” I just wanted to share, that I think that conferences like these, are so key to, I’ll use the word again, codifying and advancing our disciplines and helping to surface challenges, to put frameworks around, how to discuss those challenges, and to share success stories around what, how people have navigated and solved them and are continuing to move forward.        

So whether or not you’re able to participate as an attendee, follow the hashtag. What is the hashtag going to be? Actually I just looked at the release date. What day is the conference again?

Lou: Oh, June 3rd to 5th.

Kristina: Yeah, we’re going to release this podcast on the 4th. So I will … yeah, good job, us.

Lou: #EX19.                

Kristina: #EX19. Okay, great. Follow along, and yeah. I’m just so excited for the work that you’re doing and for these conversations, and I’ll see you in just a few weeks.

Lou: Yeah, Kristina, I’m really looking forward to it. And thank you for your mentorship.

Kristina: High fives, Lou.

Lou: All right, take care. Thanks again.

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Kristina: You’ve been listening to The Content Strategy Podcast. I’m your host, Kristina Halvorson. This podcast is brought to you by ContentStrategy.com and Brain Traffic, a content strategy consultancy. Find out more about Brain Traffic at, of course, BrainTraffic.com. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.

About the podcast

The Content Strategy Podcast is a show for people who care about content. Join host Kristina Halvorson and guests for a show dedicated to the practice (and occasional art form) of content strategy. Listen in as they discuss hot topics in digital content and share their expert insight on making content work. Brought to you by Brain Traffic, the world’s leading content strategy agency.

Follow @BrainTraffic and @halvorson on Twitter for new episode releases.