The Song Remains The Same.
The technologies may change but the challenges don’t.
Earlier this week my friend Kit Brown-Hoekstra - comgenesis.com - posted an interesting observation.
I’m going through a box of old papers and finding conference notes and handouts from the 1990s and early 2000s. Fascinating how much of the discussion revolves around the same topics we are dealing with today. Just substitute AI for some of the earlier tech…
This resonated with me as after our recent move I’m going through a similar exercise as I set up my new office. I’ve been throwing out a lot of old conference papers, but as I write this sitting on the corner of my desk is a bound set of papers from a conference I presented at back in 1997. Why hang on to that particular set of papers?
While the conference’s main subject was the old CALS (Computer Aided Logistics Support) initiative, many of the papers are still surprisingly relevant if, to Kit’s point, you just switch out the acronym of the day.
The same themes associated with introduction of new technologies are apparently timeless.
That was reinforced for me recently after reading The Book in the Age of the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree which discusses the invention of the printing press and its impact on the way that information was created, collected, and distributed. Again many of the themes we have discussed at conferences and online over the last few decades around the move to digital were the exact same issues people were worried about in the 1440s - nearly 600 years ago.
Concerns that this new technology would:
Deskill content creators
Cost people their jobs
Devalue the content
Undermine the influence of those who controlled the content
Lead to unregulated copying of content.
I am currently working with one of my clients to help them modernize the way that they create their content as well as select their first real content management solution, and these exact same issues have been raised.
We all suffer to a degree from recency bias and during my 30+ years in the content business I’ve noticed that there is a tendency for each generation to think that they are the first to have these challenges, especially in the early adoption of a new potentially disruptive technology, like AI.
The truth is that while technologies come and go, people are a constant, and that the greatest challenge is always the change management addressing people’s concerns about how those technologies will impact them.
Alan
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Talking About Storytelling
Upcoming Webinars and Conferences
October 22nd - Content Wrangler Webinar - Customer Focused Storytelling for Product Information - Register HERE
October 24th - Content Matters Podcast - Developing Persona-based Content - The Good, Bad, and the Ugly!
October 27th-30th - Conference - LavaCon Content Strategy Conference - Portland OR.
Weekly Thought
Take a holistic, strategic view in regard to your content. Look not only at what your content was created for but also at where else you can use it to answer customers’ questions.
Customer Focused Storytelling Workshops
THE CONTENT POOL is pleased to announce that we are now offering our popular Customer Focused Storytelling Workshops
We are now taking bookings for the rest of 2024 and Q1/2025, and we wanted to make sure that as a newsletter reader you got an early opportunity to lock-in a date.
“Weaving storytelling into the mix makes the content more compelling, accessible, and effective!”
Learn how to deliver content-driven experiences that your customers relate to on our two-day Customer Outcome Focused Storytelling workshop.
In this workshop, we will:
Examine content from the customer’s perspective.
Plan how to adapt content delivery to meet the needs of a rapidly changing marketplace
Examine why every business transaction is a story
Outline the 10 Rules of Storytelling as applied to Customer Experience
Apply proven storytelling techniques to your content.
Identify potential opportunities for incorporating storytelling techniques
into the production of your customer-facing content assets.Facilitate an interactive feedback session on your existing customer-facing content.
If you would like more details, or you like to discuss reserving a date for yourself and your team to benefit from a Customer Focused Storytelling Workshop, just email us at ajp@4jsgroup.com to reserve your date.
In The Bookstore
If you enjoy the contents of this newsletter and would like more, we have three books always available from XML Press.
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Till next time - have fun paddling in The Content Pool.
Alan J. Porter
The Content Pool™ is a division of the 4Js Group LLC