Jeffrey MacIntyre: Orchestrating Personalized Content Experiences – Episode 189

Content Strategy Insights

Jeffrey MacIntyre Scalable content personalization systems create huge value for businesses. Like most valuable endeavors, they're really hard to do well. Jeffrey MacIntyre orchestrates the activities - terminology and taxonomy work, metadata strategy, information architecture, and more - that help businesses build content operations that deliver the customer-focused experiences that consumers expect. We talked about: two trends he sees that are driving content strategy for customer experience: product thinking and the need for better IA in large enterprises the opportunity that better IA affords to build a competitive moat around your business how structured, semantically meaningful content and enriched metadata enable better personalization his take on the "personalization gap" his prediction that something like the Hippocratic oath will emerge in the near future to address ethical issues around AI the importance of a cross-functionally and collaboratively generated controlled vocabulary his advocacy for up-skilling content design professionals with better taxonomy and metadata skills how "cowboy taxonomy" work fits in his practice his assertion that the best way to advance collaboration is a robust test and learn program how information structure provides a backstop for AI a shout-out to Marcia Bates for her insights about "berry picking" how good metadata can prevent the accumulation of "experience debt" the benefits of Leidy Klotz's notion of "subtraction" Jeffrey's bio A personalization optimist and information retrieval obsessive, Jeffrey MacIntyre is an independent consultant focused on "shovel-ready" solutions to personalized, automated, and simplified customer experiences. He writes Bucket List, a newsletter of tales from the trenches of his consultancy, Bucket Studio. He speaks widely on the IA for AI — the role of information science in shaping connected experiences — and runs Bucket Brigade, the only community for those who design such experiences. Connect with Jeffrey online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/krcZnNgnJFI Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 189. Crafting the personalized content experiences that consumers expect nowadays is not an easy job. To assemble those made-to-order interactions, you need to first align your internal teams on the terminology you use and organize it around a clear metadata strategy, and then you need to structure and categorize your content so that you can create engaging experiences at scale. Jeffrey MacIntyre specializes in orchestrating content operations like these. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 189 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Jeffrey MacIntyre. Jeffrey is an independent personalization consultant. He's well known in the industry as "the personalization optimist." He's the principal and founder at a studio, Bucket Studio, which is his agency. He also runs the Bucket Brigade community, which we might talk about a little bit in here. He's also a founding member of the Consortium for Personalization Professionals. So you're catching the theme of personalization here, but tell the folks a little bit more about what's going on these days, Jeffrey. Jeffrey: Yeah, absolutely, and thanks, Larry, for having me on - a big fan of the pod. So what's happening is we've got two interesting developments in my mind. We have the ascendancy and design circles of product thinking, so a lot of people wanting to really skillfully design and deliver really discreet user flows within a customer journey and do growth hacking along it and really measure and understand success, sense, and respond. That's trend one. And then trend two, particularly in the enterprise, but not alone, we have very large sprawling sites that are ripe...