Rachel Lovinger: Content Modeling Innovator – Episode 109

Content Strategy Insights

Rachel Lovinger Many content professionals were first introduced to the practice of content modeling by Rachel Lovinger's 2012 A List Apart article on the subject. Content modeling gives teams of authors, managers, designers, and programmers a shared understanding of a content ecosystem. Before they write a single sentence or line of code, teams align on a common language that keeps their work in sync. Content modeling accounts for everything from the authoring experience to metadata strategy to the end-user experience. It helps team visualize the content landscapes they are creating, and it serves as a conversation starter for any number of important stakeholder interactions. We talked about: her content strategy and content modeling work at Publicis Sapient the content-modeling lessons she learned working on the content and CMS for Entertainment Weekly at Time, Inc. her identification at one point as "a content manager of content management systems" her discovery when she interviewed for her first content strategy job that she was already doing everything in the job description her shift from content strategy to more of a focus on content modeling one of the big benefits of content modeling: its ability to help you visualize the landscape of the content you want to create the importance of accounting for the CMS authors' experience into your content model her work more than 20 years ago with a headless CMS her early work around organizing keywords and other metadata into controlled vocabularies her push for training and guidelines in many of her system implementations how a content model can help streamline documentation creation and author training how content models can serve as a conversation starter for important stakeholder interactions Rachel's bio Rachel Lovinger is a Group Director of Content Strategy at Publicis Sapient in New York City. With over 20 years' experience in online publishing, website development and content management, she's an internationally recognized thought leader in the discipline of Content Strategy. She regularly works on public-facing and enterprise projects, developing content models, metadata strategies, and overall content strategies for clients in a wide range of industries, including automotive, publishing, medical, financial services, travel, and entertainment. Rachel is dedicated to exploring a future in which information is well-structured and well-described, and connections are more easily discovered. Links mentioned in the interview Rachel's Twitter profile The Nimble Report, 2010 First Principle: Disambiguation, March 2012 Content Modelling: A Master Skill, April 2012 Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/num6SZwnRmM Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 109. To build a good system of any kind, like a modern content system, it's important to give everyone involved a clear picture of the system - before you start designing and engineering it. A content model gives authors, managers, designers, and programmers a shared visual understanding of a content ecosystem, before a single word or line of code is written. Rachel Lovinger was one of the first content professionals to develop and teach this important content practice. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 109 of the content strategy insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Rachel Lovinger. Rachel works now at Publicis Sapient, and welcome Rachel, tell the folks a little bit more about what you do there at Publicis Sapient and how you got into content modeling. Rachel: Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me and sure. So I'm a Group Director of Dontent Strategy at Publicis Sapient, and I've been there, I guess 16 years. Worked on a number of different projects. The company has gone through several name changes since I've been the...