# Timothy Truxell > Enterprise content strategy leader Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### About Me URL: https://www.truxell.net/about/ Last updated: 2026-07-11T14:40:53.000Z ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2026/02/tim--14-1.jpg) ## Enterprise Content Strategy Leader 25+ years building scalable content operations for Fortune 500 companies helping them transform how they approach content [My CV](https://www.truxell.net/timothy-truxell-cv/) I've been working in content strategy since 1998, when the discipline was just beginning to emerge at various agencies independently. I'm one of the original content strategists (from USWeb/CKS). Before that, I was a technical writer and a poet—someone who thought deeply about language, meaning, and the space between what's said and what's understood. These may seem incongruent, but both areas contribute to how I approach content strategy today. Making the complex simple and finding just the right was to express it and make it sing. That background has shaped everything I've done since. Content strategy, at its best, isn't just about organizing information or filling templates. It's about understanding how language works, how people make sense of things, and how to build systems that enable both clarity and connection. Over 25 years, I've worked at every level of content complexity. At UPS, I managed global content operations across 119 countries and 23 languages—building governance frameworks that had to work across cultures, systems, and stakeholder groups with competing priorities. That work taught me how to think at enterprise scale: how to create structures that are rigorous enough to maintain consistency but flexible enough to adapt to local needs. I've also spent significant time leading content practices at agencies like Rightpoint and Publicis Sapient, working with Fortune 500 clients across healthcare, automotive, healthcare, technology, travel, and consumer brands. In those roles, I built teams, developed methodologies, and embedded strategic thinking into organizations that needed to transform how they approached content. The work ranged from digital transformations and CMS implementations to content modeling, taxonomy design, and governance framework development—always focused on making content scalable, maintainable, and effective. In 2020, I founded Rubicon CX to deliver enterprise content strategy in a more focused, boutique model. I've worked with clients including Dell Technologies, Genesis, Kennesaw State University, and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital—helping them solve complex content challenges, build sustainable governance models, and create digital experiences that actually serve their audiences. The work spans all three pillars of content strategy: experience (what users need), delivery (how systems enable it), and governance (how organizations sustain it). My approach is iterative and collaborative. I ask questions. I listen. I adjust. I don't come in with a predetermined playbook—I come in to understand the specific challenges an organization faces and design solutions that fit. The poet in me shows up in the precision: knowing what to include, what to leave out, and how to make complex ideas clear. The strategist in me shows up in the systems thinking: understanding how content flows through organizations, where bottlenecks emerge, and how to build frameworks that enable teams to do their best work. The technical writer in me still strives to know how complex things are and state them simply (hat tip to Hemingway). I'm currently seeking senior content leadership roles—VP of Content Strategy, Chief Content Officer, or Director-level positions—where I can apply this experience to help organizations transform how they approach content. I'm drawn to complex challenges: enterprise-scale operations, digital transformations, governance frameworks that need to work across business units and geographies. I bring 25 years of experience building and scaling content systems, a track record of leading teams and practices, and the ability to move between strategic vision and hands-on execution. If you're looking for fractional or contract content strategy support, you can learn more about my consultancy at [Rubicon CX](https://rubicon.cx/). [OpenWater Wisdom Profile](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kxnHmufXGnjz5rp4qt0ueArks6TyUKOa/view?usp=sharing) ## Where I've been Over my career, I've been lucky enough to work for some of the biggest and most interesting brands in the world (some apply to multiple categories): For the visual folks: ![Grid of brand logos.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/08/Clients-1.png) The inevitable brand wall. For the word people: #### Automotive & transportation - Acura - Genesis - John Deere - Mercedes Benz #### Digital workspace - Benjamin Moore - Coca-Cola - Exelon - Motiva #### Consumer goods & services - ADT - Benjamin Moore - Coca-Cola - Craftsman - John Deere - Michelin - Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits - UPS - Whole Foods Market #### Education - Kennesaw State University - MD Anderson Cancer Center - St Jude Research Hospital #### Financial services - BB&T (Truist) - J.P. Morgan-Chase - Mastercard - Protective Insurance - VALIC #### Healthcare & life sciences - Boehringer Ingelheim - Boston Scientific - Cigna - Georgia Department of Public Health - MD Anderson Cancer Center - St Jude Research Hospital #### Hospitality & travel - Carnival - Holland America - Hyatt - IHG - Cherokee Nation Entertainment - NASCAR - Seabourn Cruises - Universal Orlando #### Retail & e-commerce - Academy Sports & Outdoors - Dell Technologies - Genuine Parts Corporation (NAPA Auto Parts) - The Home Depot - Neiman Marcus - Princess Auto - Target #### Technology - ADT - Adobe - Big Commerce - Brighthive - Cerence - Dell Technologies - Google - Mastercard - UPS ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/04/IMG_0378.jpeg) HQ [Contact me to discuss your content needs](mailto:tim@truxell.net) ### ### Services URL: https://www.truxell.net/services/ Last updated: 2025-08-15T19:12:48.000Z ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/06/IMG_3425-3-1.jpeg) ## Services A breakdown of the services I provide by area: content experience, content delivery, and content governance. ## Leading with human intelligence and feeling We’ve been told a lot about AI and how it can replace many tasks that actual humans do day today. They we’re right about AI and they were wrong. I recognize that AI can perform many rote tasks, which I can then review in a fraction of the time (and cost) to do it wholesale. It can help summarizing large amounts of data for example. But I will never use AI to create new material to pass off as human content. This includes my own presentations, web content, and the like. As a poet, I take the ethical concerns around copyright **very** seriously. I will disclose exactly when and where AI has been used in all my work. That is my promise. Proudly human. ## Services overview My services break into three categories, each of which is further detailed below, and they map to the following closed-loop strategy process: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/04/Content_Process-3-1.png) ## Content experience ### From branding to brief **It starts with understanding where you are…** I inventory and audit your current content to identify opportunities for improvement. We assess content qualitatively against best practices and quantitatively through analytics and SEO performance, pinpointing specific enhancements for your future experience.. ****Content is the beating heart of any experience** Content design briefs cover user interactions, brand voice and tone, and messaging hierarchies. Our actionable recommendations are based on observations, research findings, and technical feasibility, prioritized by business value and complexity for your roadmap. **Specific work products or deliverables:** - Brand personality - Voice and tone - Content audits - Content strategy briefs - Page-level content strategies - Content priority diagrams - UX Writing - Content marketing strategy and writing - Copywriting ### Designing for the experience on the back-end **The best content needs to be managed…** Great content requires efficient back-end systems like a CMS or DAM to remain timely and relevant. I will collaborate with your business users and tech team to ensure system designs meet content requirements and create content models that optimize the author experience. I'll work with your business users and the technology team to ensure that any system design meets the content requirements for the overall experience. We create content models to inform system design to ensure that the content author experience is optimized and easy to use for business users. ****The mechanisms to bring your content to the experience** I have experience with all major content management systems including AEM, Contentful, Opentext, SharePoint, Sitecore, Tridion SDL, and WordPress. Our tagging strategies, taxonomies, and metadata specifications ensure content is properly categorized to drive personalization, improve search, and boost SEO. **Specific work products or deliverables:** - CMS and DAM capabilities evaluation - Content models - Taxonomy design - Metadata definition and tagging specifications - Tagging strategy - Accessibility enablement - SEO support ### Maintaining the experience **Keeping it all tied together…** Governance is essential to maintain content integrity. I can help determine the optimal governance model for maintaining and optimizing your content performance across all editorial processes—online and off. ****The right roles, processes, protocols, and tools to manage content** I can define players, responsibilities (using a RACI), and appropriate staffing models to ensure timely content maintenance, audits, and optimization without straining business resources. **Specific work products or deliverables:** - Governance model definition and specifications - Team structure optimization - Maintenance workflows - Process improvement [Contact Me to Discuss ](mailto:tim@truxell.net) ### Work URL: https://www.truxell.net/work/ Last updated: 2026-04-14T14:10:10.000Z ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/06/IMG_3467-2-1.jpeg) ## Work Here are some case studies that showcase my work for Clients and a link to more detailed deliverables. [View list of detailed deliverables](https://www.truxell.net/portfolio/) ## Case Studies ### Pollsition – Fractional Chief Content Officer I am serving as the fractional Chief Content Officer for this app. The app is designed for U.S. citizens to more deeply involve themselves in our democracy by making their views on the issues known, the can choose to share their participation socially and with their representatives. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/09/IMG_0708-1.jpeg) In the initial phases, I not only provided a scalable content strategy using publicly available sources organized in a citizen focused structure, but also established a voice and tone to align with the overall forward-looking brand. Tactically, Inprovided a messaging framework to align with the brand and strategy, along with key messages for pre and post launch in the app stores. Finally, I provided UX writing oversight and support for the app. --- ### Genesis.com– AEM Content model for relaunch and migration of Genesis.com I was tasked with completing the content model for the relaunch of Genesis.com on the latest version of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/04/Genesis-1.png) How the content model played out on the pages I designed the content architecture for Genesis.com's relaunch on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), balancing business goals with user needs over eight months. The design included: - 6 reusable widgets that could be incorporated into core components - 3 content fragments that could be called throughout the site - 4 experience fragments for commonly used content blocks - 9 page templates to ensure the design integrity of the experience - 29 content components for presentation on those templates I also created authoring guides for each template type, contributed to page-level content strategies, and led a team of content authors to ensure on-time launch in August 2023. --- ### Not Unmindful: A complete campaign digital strategy **A call for change at Washington & Lee** This suite of experiences represents a comprehensive content and experience strategy that uses all the tools that I bring to bear from both a user-facing experience, as well as back-end considerations. It was created as a pro-bono project for a group of like-minded alumni from my *alma mater*. I designed a story-driven approach to advocate for change at Washington & Lee University. I approached this to this not only as a problem to be solved, but also as a stakeholder as an alumnus. In our current time, we believe that any association with the confederacy will act as a millstone around our University’s neck. Formed in early June 2020, a group of alumni began advocating for change at the University to increase diversity, inclusion, and equity–starting with the name of the school and the confederate baggage it entails. It included the following: - A new brand that fit the group's goal while resonating with the history of the school - A standalone website creating a new brand, while using reminiscent elements of the University's brand - Integrated social channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) - Strategic content taxonomy for alumni stories - WordPress content modeling and technical implementation ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/04/NU-copy.png) Digital footprint for Not Unmindful On Twitter and Instagram, we were constantly active, tagging the university’s feeds and keeping the pressure on—all while driving traffic to the main site. **The Results** While the university retained the name, they implemented structural changes to increase diversity and reduce associations with Lee, including renaming Lee Chapel to University Chapel. Through it all, our digital strategy served as an information hub and platform to organize alumni action. --- ### NAPA Online: content discovery and strategy **Consolidating GPC's flagship digital property** For Genuine Parts Company, I conducted a complete discovery project to improve NAPA Online's content strategy. The process included: - Full inventory and audit of digital properties - 20+ stakeholder interviews and store walks - Competitive analysis of auto parts space and best-in-class experiences ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/05/GPC-1.png) The resulting content strategy addressed ecosystem consolidation, content quality improvements, maintenance processes, and identified new content needs to modernize the digital experience for all audiences. ### Kennesaw State University: comprehensive content strategy **Matching a growing university's content experience to it's evolution as a premier school** For the better part of 2020, I created a comprehensive, end-to-end content strategy for KSU's digital presence. - Complete inventory and content audit - Stakeholder research (approximately 40 interviews) - Voice and tone guidelines within editorial standards - Page-level content strategies for all templates - Key audience messaging frameworks - Foundational taxonomy and metadata strategy - Streamlined governance model with roles and workflows ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/04/ksu-copy.png) Content strategy artifacts for KSU --- ### Cerence: product launch content strategy **Voice and tone, copywriting and UX writing** I supported Cerence, the AI vehicle solutions leader, with content strategy including voice/tone development and page-level strategies. We implemented a repeatable product-launch content process for press releases, web content, and white papers. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/04/Cerence.png) Site copy and white paper for new product This resulted in successful launches with new content representing approximately 75% of Cerence.com's product section, covering: 1. Core technologies 2. Cloud services 3. Voice and beyond 4. Mobility platforms 5. Platform developers --- ### NASCAR: end-to-end content strategy **Creating a new fan-engagement experience** NASCAR had spent many years outsourcing it’s main digital presences to third-parties, foregoing any syndication and advertising opportunities and ceding editorial control of it’s wealth of existing content to that third party. NASCAR sought to reclaim control of their digital presence. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/04/Home_Off_Season-0001.jpg) A new experience for NASCAR.com **Content experience** - Comprehensive audit informing UX and visual design - Voice and tone development for NASCAR's digital brand - Editorial guidelines for content creation and maintenance **Content delivery** - Content model guiding AEM development - Taxonomy and tagging strategy for personalized content - Metadata tagging strategy and specification **Content governance** - Governance model with recurring content audits - Centralized model with staffing plan for non-race content - Comprehensive editorial workflows and processes to support site content and quickly updating race-news content --- [View detailed examples ](https://www.truxell.net/portfolio/) [Schedule a conversation](https://calendly.com/ttruxell-rubiconcx/30min) ### Contact Me URL: https://www.truxell.net/contact-me/ Last updated: 2026-02-12T18:49:01.000Z ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/08/AdobeStock_303701178_color-cropped-1.jpeg) ## Let's have a conversation I'd love to hear from you. I'm currently pursuing senior content roles—VP of Content Strategy, Chief Content Officer, or Director-level positions. If you're hiring for one of these roles, or if you'd just like to discuss content strategy, ## Contact me a variety of ways: [Direct email](mailto:tim@truxell.net) [Schedule a consultation](https://calendly.com/ttruxell-rubiconcx/30min) [Find me on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/timtruxell/) I'm based in Atlanta, but I'm accustomed to working with teams across time zones from IST to PST. If you're looking for fractional/contract content strategy support, visit [Rubicon CX](https://rubicon.cx/). ### My portfolio URL: https://www.truxell.net/portfolio/ Last updated: 2026-02-12T22:09:17.000Z ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/09/2014-06-26-14.53.52-2-1.jpeg) ## Examples The breadth and depth of work I have brought to bear for my clients. ## See example deliverables for clients in many industries. Below you will find examples of the work I've produced for my clients. Some of it is necessarily sanitized to preserve client confidentiality, but the gist should still be apparent. More are available to be presented (but not shared) on request. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/09/Picture1.png) ## Content experience deliverables ## ### Content is the beating heart of the user experience. I can inventory and audit the current state of your content to identify opportunities that will lead to actionable recommendations and, if required, a voice and tone for your digital experience to reflect your brand’s personality and purpose. The deliverables provided below span the range from content audits and assessments through content strategy briefs and content strategy playbooks. [01 – NASCAR Content Assessment01-NASCAR-Content-Assessment-2.pdf5 MBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/01-NASCAR-Content-Assessment-2.pdf "Download") [02 – NASCAR Content Recommendations02-NASCAR-Alignment-Content-Recommendations.pdf5 MBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/02-NASCAR-Alignment-Content-Recommendations.pdf "Download") [03 – NASCAR Editorial Guide with Voice & Tone03-NASCAR-Editorial-Guide-with-Voice-Tone.pdf555 KBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/03-NASCAR-Editorial-Guide-with-Voice-Tone.pdf "Download") [04 – Tech Example Content Strategy Playbook04-Tech-Example-Content-Strategy-Playbook.pdf2 MBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/04-Tech-Example-Content-Strategy-Playbook.pdf "Download") [05 – Spirits Distributor Content Strategy Brief05-Spirits-Distributor-Example-Phase1-ContentS.pdf10 MBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/05-Spirits-Distributor-Example-Phase1-ContentS.pdf "Download") [06 – Credit Card Content Strategy Recommendations06-Credit-Card-Content-Strategy-Recommendation.pdf3 MBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/06-Credit-Card-Content-Strategy-Recommendation.pdf "Download") [07 – E-Commerce Content Audit07-E-Commerce-Example-ContentAudit.pdf11 MBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/07-E-Commerce-Example-ContentAudit.pdf "Download") [08 – ResearchHospital Content Strategy Playbook08\_ResearchHospital\_\_CS\_PlaybookL.pdf35 MBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/08%5FResearchHospital%5F%5FCS%5FPlaybookL.pdf "Download") ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/09/Screenshot-2025-09-19-at-2.40.44---PM.png) ## Content delivery deliverables ### All content needs to be managed No experience will succeed unless it can be easily delivered. To this end we create create content models to inform system design to ensure that the content author experience is easy to use. We also create taxonomies and metadata specifications to drive personalization and improve site search (as well as providing SEO lift). The deliverables provided below span the range from content models, content strategy playbooks with component level guidance, and taxonomies and metadata specifications. [01 – Healthcare Content Strategy Playbook and Specifications01-Healthcare-Example-CS-Playbook.pdf15 MBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/01-Healthcare-Example-CS-Playbook.pdf "Download") [02 – NASCAR AEM Content Model02-NASCAR-Content-Model.pdf1 MBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/02-NASCAR-Content-Model.pdf "Download") [03 – Hotel Company Taxonomy & Metadata Specifications03-Hotel-Example-Taxonomy-Metadata-Spec.pdf8 MBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/03-Hotel-Example-Taxonomy-Metadata-Spec.pdf "Download") [04 – Hotel Company Detailed DAM Metadata Specification04-Hotel-Example-DAM-Metadata-Specification.xlsx56 KBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/04-Hotel-Example-DAM-Metadata-Specification.xlsx "Download") [05 – Hotel Company Enterprise Taxonomy05-Hotel-Example-Enterprise-Taxonomy.xlsx252 KBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/05-Hotel-Example-Enterprise-Taxonomy.xlsx "Download") ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2025/09/Screenshot-2025-09-19-at-2.43.36---PM.png) ## Content governance deliverables ### The processes and roles required to keep things up to date Without governance the other pillars that provide for a great experience fall apart. Working with you, we can determine the best content governance model for maintaining and optimizing the performance of your content, including all online and offline editorial processes. This also includes detailing the roles required. The deliverables provided below include a full governance model recommendations including roles and responsibilities and process, and editorial workflows, that include detailed authoring and review steps. [01 – University Content Governance01-Education-Example-Content-Governance.pdf1 MBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/01-Education-Example-Content-Governance.pdf "Download") [02 – NASCAR Workflows02-NASCAR-Workflows.pdf907 KBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/02-NASCAR-Workflows.pdf "Download") [03 – Technology Company Tools, Process, and Roles03-APEX\_Tools-Process\_Final\_Readout\_v5.0.pdf2 MBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/03-APEX%5FTools-Process%5FFinal%5FReadout%5Fv5.0.pdf "Download") ## Copywriting, UX writing & content marketing ### Bringing it to life for your users Once all the other pieces are in place to ensure the continual, smart delivery of content, that content has still be to created—either through editing existing content, as determined during a content audit or assessment or by creating brand new content based on the gap analysis from earlier phases. This includes such things as continually maintaining a blog to keep content fresh, meeting an editorial calendar for product launches, and generally keeping content current, relevant, and on brand as part of the overall maintenance process. And then, once the content has been created, using social platforms to activate the content and amplify its reach. The examples provided provided below span the of content creation activities, including page copy and downloadable assets. ### **Dell Technologies** From 2021 to 2022, I supported Dell Technologies with various types of UX and copywriting support. First, I helped populate the UX copy for the Dell Design System 2.0 ([Dell Design System 2.0](https://www.delldesignsystem.com/)). Specifically, I wrote the copy for the following components: Breadcrumb, Divider, Footnote, Modal, Overlay, Select, Tabs, and Text Area. This included working with designers to understand the features of each component and foundation to document them for using in designing and creating Dell’s digital properties. During this time, IX also wrote vision copy for roadshows to help sell digital concepts internally, including a fleet management application and a next generation (NextGen) customer facing experience to help users keep their computing experience optimized. The copydecks for each are included below (unfortunately without visuals because of client non-disclosure agreement): [01 – NextGen Roadshow copydeckNextGen\_Roadshow\_copy\_v2.pdf48 KBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/NextGen%5FRoadshow%5Fcopy%5Fv2.pdf "Download") [02 – SAC Fleet copydeskSAC-Fleet.pdf87 KBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/SAC-Fleet.pdf "Download") ### [**Cerence**](https://cerence.com/) For the better part of 2020, IX supported Cerence, the leader in providing AI solutions within your vehicles. First, we helped with a repeatable product-launch content creation process. This resulted in a number of successful product launches supported by content on the web, both as page copy and downloadable PDFs. We focused on the product section and created content to support approximately 75% of the content that is currently live at Cerence.com, including the copy and fact sheets (below) in the following product areas: [ Core Technologies](https://cerence.com/cerence-products/core-technologies) [Cloud Services](https://cerence.com/cerence-products/cloud-services) [Voice & Beyond](https://cerence.com/cerence-products/beyond-voice) [Mobility Platforms](https://cerence.com/cerence-products/mobility-platforms) [Platform Developers](https://cerence.com/cerence-products/platform-developers) The downloadable PDF fact sheets can be found below. [01 – Cerence Automotive Platform01-Cerence-Automotive-Platform\_v2.pdf1 MBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/01-Cerence-Automotive-Platform%5Fv2.pdf "Download") [02 – Cerence Car-Life Fact Sheet02-Cerence-Car-Life-Fact-Sheet-1.pdf622 KBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/02-Cerence-Car-Life-Fact-Sheet-1.pdf "Download") [03 – Cerence Cognitive-Arbitration Fact Sheet03-Cerence-Cognitive-Arbitration-Fact-Sheet-1.pdf1 MBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/03-Cerence-Cognitive-Arbitration-Fact-Sheet-1.pdf "Download") [04 – Cerence Conversational-AI Fact Sheet04-Cerence-Conversational-AI-Fact-Sheet-1.pdf752 KBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/04-Cerence-Conversational-AI-Fact-Sheet-1.pdf "Download") [05 – Cerence Extend Fact Sheet05-Cerence-Extend-Fact-Sheet-2.pdf842 KBdownload-circle](https://www.truxell.net/content/files/2025/09/05-Cerence-Extend-Fact-Sheet-2.pdf "Download") ### Home URL: https://www.truxell.net/home/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T13:36:21.000Z ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2026/02/IMG_6532-1.jpeg) ## Enterprise content strategy leader 25+ years building scalable content operations and governance frameworks for Fortune 500 companies Hello. I'm a content strategy leader with 25+ years experience. In that time, I've built scalable content operations for some of the world's biggest brands. I've managed global content across 119 countries in 23 languages and led content practices at agencies including Rightpoint and Publicis Sapient. I founded Rubicon CX to continue to deliver enterprise content strategy for clients. Some client highlights include Dell Technologies, Cigna, Genesis, and NASCAR. I'm currently seeking senior content leadership roles where I can apply this experience to help organizations transform their approach to content—streamlining operations and delivering exceptional digital experiences. ### Tags URL: https://www.truxell.net/tags/ Last updated: 2026-03-03T21:39:30.000Z _No content available._ ### Timothy Truxell CV URL: https://www.truxell.net/timothy-truxell-cv/ Last updated: 2026-07-11T14:46:40.000Z ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fe/67/fe67797f-40f4-46c9-9ff1-c565cbdec0fe/content/images/2026/07/Hero_AdobeStock_272551958-scaled-2.jpeg) ## Timothy C. Truxell Content & Experience Strategy Leader [DOWNLOAD PDF](https://drive.google.com/file/d/122VS%5FcYxAWh%5FxbDU41RlKO9Qou3dUqsi/view?usp=sharing) Content and experience strategy executive with 25+ years leading enterprise content practices for global brands. Builds and directs content governance, editorial, and operations functions from the ground up—and stays hands-on through execution. Background spans content strategy, information architecture, editorial leadership, content governance at global scale, and the AI-readiness of enterprise content systems. Available for Director, VP, and C-suite (fractional CCO) engagements, and through Rubicon CX, an independent consultancy founded in 2020. ## Core Expertise - Content Strategy & Governance - Narrative Systems & Storytelling - Editorial Leadership - Information Architecture - Content Operations at Global Scale - Messaging & Enterprise CX Frameworks - AI-Ready Content Operations - Taxonomy & Metadata Strategy - Content Globalization & Localization - Platform Migration & Transformation - CMS & DAM Platform Strategy - Executive Communications & Thought Leadership - Cross-Functional Stakeholder Alignment - Practice & Team Building / Player-Coach Leadership ## Selected Client Engagements - **UPS** – Managing editor across 23 languages and 119 countries. Led governance for localization. - **Dell Technologies** – Content governance structure and staffing plan. Editor for design system UX writing - **Mastercard** – Messaging frameworks, enterprise content strategy - **J.P. Morgan Asset Management** – Content strategy and governance for global blueprint - **Boehringer Ingelheim** – Metadata strategy and implementation for complex product suite - **Cigna** – Enterprise content strategy and managing editor for HCP and member portals - **MD Anderson Cancer Center** – Content strategy, taxonomy, and governance for healthcare content - **St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital** – Content strategy playbook and model for healthcare content - **IHG** – Enterprise taxonomy, DAM metadata specification and governance - **Carnival ABG** – Content strategy and platform transformation across multi-brand portfolio (Carnival, Holland America, Costa, Seabourn) - **Genesis** – Content strategy and modeling for platform transformation - **Michelin** – Content experience strategy for multi-brand platform transformation (BF Goodrich, Michelin). DAM modeling, taxonomy, and metadata specifications - **Genuine Parts Company** – Content discovery and strategy roadmap for NAPA Online - **NASCAR** – Platform transformation in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). Content strategy and governance - **Coca-Cola** – Content model and governance for the GDMP global CMS platform amd Design Machine taxonomy - **Target** – Content strategy, modeling, and taxonomy for platform transition - **Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits** – Content strategy, taxonomy, and content roadmap incorporating syndicated content - **ADT** – Content experience strategy to increase conversion informed by research and analytics ## Professional Experience ### Principal and Executive Director: Rubicon CX, Atlanta GA. 2020 – Present Independent content and experience strategy consultancy serving enterprise clients on content strategy. governance, editorial strategy, narrative systems, and AI-readiness of content infrastructure for marketing operations. Engagements span strategy, hands-on execution, and fractional leadership roles. ### National Practice Lead, Senior Group Director, Content: Rightpoint. 2019 – 2020 Led the national content strategy, content design, UX writing, and copywriting practice, guiding enterprise content strategy and messaging across large-scale digital transformation initiatives. ### Senior Group Director, Content Strategy: Sapient to Publicis Sapient, Atlanta, GA. 2006 – 2019 Led the national content strategy, content design, UX writing, and copywriting practice, guiding enterprise content strategy and messaging across large-scale digital transformation initiatives. ### Senior Content Strategist (Lead): Genex, Atlanta, GA, 2004 – 2006 Led the national content strategy, content design, UX writing, and copywriting practice, guiding enterprise content strategy and messaging across large-scale digital transformation initiatives. ### Lead Content Strategist and Managing Editor: UPS, Atlanta, GA, 2002 – 2004 Led the national content strategy, content design, UX writing, and copywriting practice, guiding enterprise content strategy and messaging across large-scale digital transformation initiatives. ### Senior Writer and Content Strategist: MATRIX Resources, Atlanta, GA. 2001 ### Lead Content Strategist and Editorial Director: Xceed, Atlanta, GA. 2000 ### Content Strategist \[OG\]: USWeb/CKS, Atlanta, GA. 1988 –1999 ## Education **Bachelors of Arts – English (with Honors)** *Washington & Lee University* Lexington, VA **Masters of Arts – English Literature** *The College of William & Mary* Williamsburg, VA My background in medieval studies and poetry is foundational to a professional approach to narrative structure and systems thinking. ## Skills & Tools ### Skills - Accessibility - Agile design & development - AI-enabled content - CMS design - CMS selection - CMS strategy - Content design - Content governance - Content maintenance - Content marketing - Content strategy - Copywriting - Cross-functional collaboration - DAM design - DAM strategy - Experience strategy - Editorial calendars - Editorial direction - Editorial processes - Editorial workflows - Integrated marketing - Metadata specification - Metadate & tagging strategy - Messaging strategy - Narrative platforms - Product strategy - SEO/AEO/GEO - Stakeholder research & alignment - Taxonomy design - Taxonomy development - Taxonomy strategy - User journeys - User research - User testing - UX design - UX writing ### Tools - Adobe Creative Suite - Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) - Airtable - ChatGPT - Claude.ai - Content Stack - Contentful - Drupal - Figma/Figjam - Gemini - Ghost - Keynote - Lovable - Mediabin - Microsoft Office - Miro - Mural - OpenText - Screaming Frog - SEM Rush - Site Bulb - SiteCore - WordPress ## Selected Clients - Academy Sports & Outdoors - ADT - Adobe - AIG - Alamo - Alethia - BB&T (now Truist) - Benjamin Moore - BF Goodrich - Boehringer Ingelheim - Boston Scientific - Brighthive - Carnival - Carter’s - Cigna - Cerence - Coca-Cola - Craftsman - Dell Technologies - Genesis - Genuine Parts Company - Google - The Home Depot - IHG - John Deere - J.P. Morgan-Chase - Kennesaw State University - Mastercard - MD Anderson Cancer Center - Michelin - NASCAR - Neiman Marcus - Protective - Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits - St Jude Research Hospital - Target - Truist - Universal Orlando Resort - UPS - Victorinox - Whole Foods Market ## Posts ### Brands must be present enough to be received URL: https://www.truxell.net/brands-must-be-present-enough-to-be-received/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T15:24:23.000Z Last week, I made a claim that I left it hanging. I wrote about [negative capability](https://www.truxell.net/keats-negative-capability-and-the-work-that-disappears/)—Keats's name for the discipline of getting the self out of the way so the made thing can belong to whoever receives it. In it, I said that this doesn't quite work for brands. A brand needs presence. It can't disappear the way a poet can. I want to come back to that, because it's the more interesting problem, and because I don't think it's quite right. I described how "To Autumn" disappears completely. There is no "I" or "we" in it—no speaker, no arguing self. It is just a season rendered so fully that the poet vanishes into it. A brand can't do that. It needs to be recognized wherever you encounter it—a voice that sounds like itself whether it's writing a headline or an error message. Self-erasure isn't an option. That Keatsian discipline seems to break here. Presence is the one thing a brand can't afford to give up. It doesn't break. It changes form. And I know it changes form because I've spent a long time building the thing that holds it. ## **The tool** I build voice scales. It's one of the first things I make for a brand, before any tactical recommendations. It's usually the thing that outlasts everything else I deliver. A voice scale is simple to describe. You name the brand's personality and the voice it should have. Then, on either side of it, you name two voices it could tip into and shouldn't. The quality sits in the middle, between them. You do this for each attribute of the brand personality. The result is not a list of adjectives but a set of positions, each one defined as much by what it declines as by what it is. The clearest way to show it is with three voices everyone already knows. Think about warmth—the open, optimistic register a lot of consumer brands reach for. On its own, "warm" is nearly useless as instruction; everyone nods at the word and no two writers execute it the same way. So you place it. On one side, warmth tips into Starbucks: earnest, meaningful, deeply invested in how you feel about a cup of coffee. It's a voice that takes its own craft seriously enough to tip into taking itself too serious. On the other, it tips into Mountain Dew: fun, loud, aggressive, and alive. A voice that has so much energy that it shouts to be heard. The held middle is Coca-Cola. It's warm without the earnestness, fun without the strain, optimistic in a way that never seems to be reaching for it. You'd know that voice in a single line with the name stripped off. It's been the same for more than a century. Now "warm" means something. Not because I defined the word, but because I drew its edges — and a writer can feel, sentence by sentence, which edge they're drifting toward. ## **The ditches have to be real** Here is the part almost everyone gets wrong. I pulled ditches for VDOT five summers running, so I use the word with some authority—ditches are cut to grade, and they fail in two directions. Voice is usually positioned as this and not that. And the not this is usually something that no one would want to be. What I see, again and again, is a strawman ditch. "Warm, not cold." "Fun, not boring." "Confident, not arrogant." It looks like the same move. It is not the same move. No one was ever going to pick cold. No one was choosing boring. The ditch isn't a voice you might drift into; it's a vice nobody would choose, dressed up as a boundary so the scale looks like it's making a distinction. It isn't. It rules out nothing anyone was tempted to do. It tells the writer nothing, because the writer wasn't standing anywhere near it. A voice scale does something different. The two voices on either side—the ditches—have to be *good ones, viable ones*. They have to be voices the brand could plausibly, credibly become. Starbucks is a coherent, excellent voice; a serious consumer brand could live there and many would be glad to. Mountain Dew is a coherent, excellent voice too; a serious brand could live there just as credibly. That is exactly why positioning yourself between them is a real decision. You are declining two real options, each with its own logic and personality. The boundary is informative because it's drawn against something you might actually have chosen. A real ditch is a temptation. It's the good voice next door — the one with its own gravity, the one you'd slide into on a Tuesday without noticing. Naming *that* as the boundary is what does the work, because now the writer knows which pull to resist. "Warm, not Starbucks-earnest" is useful precisely because the Starbucks voice is good, and drifting there is a real risk. "Warm, not cold" is useless precisely because cold was never on the table. So the quality of a voice scale lives entirely in the quality of its ditches. A scale is only as good as the viable voices it turns down. And a scale built on strawmen is worse than no scale at all. It pantomimes rigor while delivering none, and it leaves everyone who uses it convinced they have guidance when what they have is decoration. ## **The method travels** Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Mountain Dew make the scale legible because you already carry all three voices in your head. But the method isn't tied to famous brands. I've built voice scales for a national sports property, for a business-software platform, and for a healthcare organization (among others). The audiences have almost nothing in common. Those brands would never be mistaken for one another. The attributes changed every time. What didn't change was the shape: name the quality, name the two good voices on either side, hold the middle. The scale for a sports brand and the scale for a hospital look nothing alike on the page, and they were built the exact same way. That's how I know it isn't a trick that happens to suit one brand's problem. It's a discipline. The method is indifferent to the industry; what it measures is the same everywhere: how to be recognizably yourself without hardening into one caricature or dissolving into another. ## **Why hold, instead of assert** There's a simpler-sounding version of "a brand needs presence," and it's wrong in a way worth saying aloud. The simple version says: assert more. Turn the voice up. Say more, claim more, be more emphatically *there*. "Hi look at me." That's the mistake the ditches are built to prevent. Both Starbucks and Mountain Dew work—neither is quiet, neither is weak. The failure was never a lack of volume. The failure lies in losing the held shape in one direction or the other. Coke doesn't win the middle by being the most emphatic voice in the room; it wins by being unmistakably itself, at ease, for so long that the shape became the brand. A brand that responds to "you need presence" by turning everything up doesn't become more itself. Presence isn't a volume knob. It's a position held between two ways of falling out of yourself. It's an equalizer instead. Turn some things down and turn others up. And the reason to hold rather than assert is the same reason the poem gets out of the way. A brand that asserts everything and tries to resolve every question leaves nothing for the reader to complete is a brand doing all the meaning-making itself. It's the corporate form of what Keats called the "irritable reaching"—the voice that cannot leave anything open, that must be seen to have arrived, that insists on being the one who's right. The strawman ditch is itself a version of this: a brand refusing a real tension in favor of a fake one it can obviously win. "Not cold, not boring" is the brand insisting on its own virtue against opponents it invented. Sitting between two *good* voices is the harder thing. Staying inside of it is a real choice, declining a real alternative, without a villain to point at. Content that resolves everything is content you receive and forget, because it was never yours to finish. ## **The hardest hold is two things at once** The scale I've described balances a single quality between two ditches. The harder ones balance two whole registers that don't want to coexist. The healthcare work is the clearest case. That brand had to be authoritative—rigorous, exact, the kind of voice you trust with a consequential decision. At the same time it had to be deeply human. It had to be warm enough to speak to people at a hard moment in their lives. Those pull against each other. Turn up the rigor and you get a voice that's correct and cold. Turn up the warmth and you get a voice that's kind and untrustworthy. Neither alone is usable. The whole task was to hold both—to be exact and human in the same sentence, without either one collapsing the other. That's the brand version of the discipline the Nightingale ode finally arrives at: not the total vanishing of "To Autumn," but a self present enough to hold a shape and open enough to let the meaning be received. Structure that carries meaning without fixing it. A voice formed enough to be recognized anywhere, and open enough to become the reader's own. ## **Where presence is actually measured** So, we're back to where I started, and back to what where things could be taken wrong. I said a brand can't disappear because it needs presence. But I measured presence at the wrong end. Presence isn't how much you put into the voice. It's how much lands as the reader's own. An over-present brand that asserts everything, resolves everything, fills every space often registers as noise. It's received and immediately discarded, because it left the reader nothing to bring. A restrained brand, the one that held its shape and stopped, can be far more present in the only place presence is real. It's real to the person on the other end, who found room in it for themselves. Less, received in the right way, is more present than more, received as noise. In "Ode to a Nightingale," the bird's song survives because it was never pinned to a single meaning. It became Ruth's homesickness and the casements' wonder at once, holding both without being only either. The song did that because the bird put no self into it. A brand can't go quite that far; it has to keep its shape. But the principle holds. Coke has kept one shape more than a century and still lets a billion people share a Coke and a smile. Build the voice strong enough to be recognized and open enough to be received, and it will mean something the reader brings rather than something you imposed. The voice scale is how I do that on purpose. Two good ditches, a held middle, a shape strong enough to travel and quiet enough to let someone in. Not the absence of presence. Presence disciplined into a form that can be received. That's the whole question, in the end. Not how present the brand is. Whether the reader can find themselves in it. Cross posted from [rubicon.cx](https://rubicon.cx/brands-must-be-present-enough-to-be-received/). If you want to explore your brand's voice, [schedule a free consultation](https://calendly.com/ttruxell-rubiconcx/30min). ### Keats, negative capability, and the work that disappears URL: https://www.truxell.net/keats-negative-capability-and-the-work-that-disappears/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T15:24:33.000Z ## **No pride of authorship** In my [first real job](http://www.integratedscience.com), I was a technical editor and sometimes writer for environmental remediation reports, site assessments and the like. The documentation nobody reads unless it's in their backyard. The firm hired me to make the reports accessible to the public. I was a bit intimidated by the scientists and the engineers who knew all this. I was young enough to think my sentences were mine after interrogating them. The president of the company set me straight early, and he did it without meaning to teach me anything. He was talking about the work, the way you talk about weather, giving me my instructions. He said: "We have no pride of authorship here." He meant it unambiguously. He meant the client's name goes on it, not the geologist's, not mine, not our firm's. He meant no one signs the work or defends a specific sentence because they wrote it. He meant no one mistakes the satisfaction of writing well with the point of the task. The work belonged to the people who paid for it and to the people who would read it and never think about who wrote it. That was the job. Disappear into it. I have carried that sentence for thirty years. I have carried it through every client I have ever written or worked for: industry to industry, program to program for companies whose products I mostly would not have picked off a shelf. I wrote in their language, not mine. Sometimes, I helped define that. I learned the cadences we defaulted to and worked toward them. When the work was good, no one knew I had been there. When the work was very good, *users* did not know I had been there. And, clients came to believe they had always sounded this way, that the voice had been theirs all along. [Content strategists disappear.](https://rubicon.cx/the-content-strategist-as-maker/) That is the strange alchemy of the thing. The better you do it, the less of you remains in it. Success is measured by absence. You are trying to leave no trace—and the trace you are trying hardest to erase is the one that would say "I made this." It took me a long time to understand that this is not modesty. Modesty is a posture; you can put it on. This is something harder and more total. It is the deliberate emptying of the self out of the work so that the work can belong to someone else entirely. The maker does not stand beside the made thing, pointing. The maker gets out of the way. This is what no one tells you when you are twenty-five and proud. Getting out of the way is not the sacrifice you make to do the work. It *is* the work. The discipline is not something you practice so that you can then go make something. The disappearing is the making. *Poiesis*. ## Negative capability > Brown & Dilke walked with me & back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean **Negative Capability**, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. > —[John Keats to his brothers George and Tom, 1817](https://keatslettersproject.com/correspondence/to-george-and-tom-keats-21-27-dec-1817/) John Keats wrote that to his brothers George and Tom in December of 1817\. He was twenty-two, walking home from a farce. No poem. No essay. Just a description of a walk home from the Christmas pantomime with two friends. Then an idea struck him mid-conversation, which he half-caught a few days later in a letter that survives only because someone copied it out after Keats was dead. Before the odes. Before the epitaph. It mirrors the most durable thing anyone has said to me about how good work gets made. It arrived in that offhand line from my first boss, who was not setting out to teach me anything. The phrase is prone to misinterpretation. "Negative capability" sounds like weakness or inability. Skimmed, Keats seems to praise not-knowing, as though confusion were a virtue. It is nothing of the kind. The word "irritable" carries the inherent caveat. Keats is not against fact, reason, or knowledge; he read for long hours at a time, and he reached for truth his whole too-short life. What he is against is the irritable reaching—the ego's need to resolve or pin the work down, and then put a name at the end. The reaching that cannot leave a question open, because an open question is a place where the self does not get to be *always* right. He gives that failure a face. In the same breath he sets Coleridge against Shakespeare. Coleridge, he writes, "would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge." There is the irritable reaching. To Keats, Coleridge stands at the edge of a mystery and cannot leave it half-known. He reaches in to resolve it, to explain it, to have it—and in the grasping, the fine isolated thing slips past him. He loses it by clutching. The mind that must know, must close, must be seen to have arrived, is the mind that cannot make the thing that lasts. It is too busy being present to disappear. Walter Jackson Bate states the positive version in his [1963 biography.](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674478251) Negative capability needs "an imaginative openness of mind and heightened receptivity to reality in its full and diverse concreteness. This, however, involves negating one's own ego."\* There it is. It isn't modesty, nor is it humility as a manner. The negating of the ego—the deliberate setting-aside of the self's demand to be present and credited for the making. The same emptying that my boss meant when he said we had no pride of authorship. The poet, the critic, and the boss: three men who never met, describing one discipline. And Keats gives the discipline its master. Shakespeare, who possessed it "so enormously." The greatest maker in the language is the one who disappears most completely, who is nowhere in the plays, who takes no side, who becomes Iago as fully as Cordelia and judges neither, who empties himself so wholly into what he makes that four centuries of readers cannot find the man inside the work. We know very little about him. That is not a gap in the record. That is the achievement. ## Own, and disappear The odes do the work here: [Ode to a Nightingale](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44479/ode-to-a-nightingale), [To Autumn](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44484/to-autumn).\*\* I have academic history with these. So, what can they teach us in the current moment? How does it connect to content strategy? Read "To Autumn." Find the poet in it. Try. It's the epitome of negative capability. Keats made choices yes, but they disappear in the service of the whole. It's "a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep." Not Keats. All meaning is fluid based on what the audience brings to it. Everyone observes and receives meaning differently. This, however, doesn't necessarily work for brands, where they need a bit of presence. Autumn disappears too completely for a brand. The question is whether a maker can disappear and still remain. With that in mind, let's look at "Ode to a Nightingale." In "Ode to a Nightingale," the poet sits at the center. It opens on his self and never quite loses that: "My heart aches."He is present throughout—aching, listening, and longing. But, it's what he longs for is key: he longs with his whole being to stop being himself. He wants to follow the bird's song out of the world. To "fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget / What thou among the leaves hast never known, / the weariness, the fever, and the fret". Take the verbs in order: fade, dissolve, forget. It isn't rest but self-erasure in three steps. To fade is to grow faint but remain. To dissolve is to lose one's edges. To "quite forget" is to completely lose even the memory of having been a self. But here, the poem takes a strange turn. As the self goes dark, the world does not. It floods in. The speaker, faded into the shadow, says he "cannot see what flowers are at my feet," but then the poem fills with the world that he can no longer see flooding in: the grass, the thicket, the fruit-tree, violets, the coming musk-rose, and, last, "the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves". Extinguish the seeing self and the world arrives in full, concrete, murmurous detail. This is what negating the ego is *for*. Not blankness. Reception. The self that stops insisting on being the one who sees is the self that finally receives the thing in all its diverse concreteness. The haunt of flies is the reward, not the cost. It shades toward death, and Keats will not pretend otherwise—a few lines on he is "half in love with easeful Death... ready to cease upon the midnight with no pain." The longing to disappear completely is close kin to the longing not to exist. To negate the self entirely is to die. But short of that total vanishing, the disappearing does something else: it opens the world. And it makes something that lasts. In the seventh stanza the song turns deathless: "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!" Not immortal because the bird outlives other birds. Immortal because its *song* has outlived every ear that ever caught it. Keats asks what that deathless song actually is, and his answer is the thing that has stayed with me for thirty years. It is not that the song means one great fixed thing. It is that it has meant something different to everyone who ever heard it: > Perhaps the self-same song that found a path > Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, > She stood in tears amid the alien corn; > The same that oft-times hath > Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam > Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.\_ The self-same song. It found a path through the sad heart of Ruth, sick for a home that is not this field, standing in tears amid corn that is not hers. It sang her own homesickness back to her. But the same song charmed magic casements open on perilous seas. One song, different meanings: Ruth's grief, the casements' wonder, the emperor's triumph and the clown's jests. They all heard the same source, but none of them exhausted it or claimed it. The song is deathless because it was never pinned to a single, absolute meaning. A song fixed to one meaning would have died with the first listener. The song survives because every ear receives it differently. It is open enough, empty enough of its own insistence, to become Ruth's grief and the casements' wonder at once, without contradiction, without ever being only one of them. The bird put no self into the song. That is why the song can hold everyone's. And then the bell—on the very last word of that vision. "Forlorn." The word ends the stanza in faery lands, and opens the next as its own undoing: "Forlorn! the very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self." The naming breaks the spell and returns him to himself—a man in a garden again, awake, alone. He could not hold the disappearance. No one can, entirely. The fading was only ever the wish; the self comes back. But the song remains. The bird flies, the fancy flees—"Fled is that music: Do I wake or sleep?" Yet the music that fled is what we still have, two centuries on. It means something different to everyone who finds it. The maker was tolled back to his sole self. The made thing stayed open, and lasted. This is the version a brand can use. Not Autumn's total vanishing—the poet gone so wholly there is no one there at all. It is Nightingale's harder discipline: a self that remains, present enough to hold a shape, disappeared enough to let the meaning be received. The negative capability that matters is not the absence of structure. It is ambiguity held within structure—a song formed enough to travel, open enough to become the listener's own. The bird keeps its song. Ruth keeps her grief. Neither cancels the other, because the song was made to hold both. That is the discipline, and it is not a paradox to admire. It is the work. Build the structure that carries the meaning without fixing it. Hold the shape; let go of the meaning. Own, and disappear. ## The work now I only knew the poetry in a very different context when my boss first told me this in 1990-something. I was twenty-five, a little intimidated, and proud of the sentences I wrote and reworked. He was not teaching me negative capability. He had probably not read any Keats past high school. He was telling me how the work got done in a consulting context, the way you'd tell someone where the coffee was. But he described the same discipline Keats found walking home from a pantomime, the one Shakespeare had so enormously, the one the bird has in the garden. Get the self out of the way. Build the thing well enough that it can hold what other people bring to it. Then let it go, and let it be theirs. Thirty years on, that is still the work. It doesn't disappear because the self doesn't matter—it does; the maker has to be present enough to build the structure, hold the shape, make the choices Keats made with the furrow. Disappearing because the made thing has somewhere to go that the maker was never invited: the client's voice, the reader's need, the field that isn't yours where someone stands sick for home and hears, in what you made, their own grief sung back to them. The song belongs to Ruth. It belongs to everyone. It always did. We have no pride of authorship here. \*Bate, Walter Jackson. *John Keats*. Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1963, p. 249. \*\*Also, [Ode on a Grecian Urn.](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn) I encourage you to read them all because they are just awesome despite or beyond anything I have to say. Among the finest poems written in English. Cross posted from [rubicon.cx](https://rubicon.cx/). If you want to discuss this further,[schedule a free consultation](https://calendly.com/ttruxell-rubiconcx/30min). ### The leadership gap URL: https://www.truxell.net/the-leadership-gap/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T15:28:20.000Z I've been naming this gap for about a year now—in decks, in posts, in conversations with other content practitioners who recognize it immediately because they've lived it. I haven't had the opportunity to share it with executives in a room, but I've seen the evidence in content audits for my entire career. You can see it in the answer to a simple question—who owns this? When the answer turns out to be everyone, or no one, or a list of names from across the organization. The responsibility is present, but thin and scattered in different silos. That's how it looked before I had a name for it. And for most of this time, I've used the phrase without detailing the underlying argument. Among people who do this work, it lands fast and everyone nods. But when people hear "leadership gap," they hear a staffing shortfall. A seat that needs filling. Hire the right person, close the gap, move on. That diagnosis is wrong, and it makes organizations pay for the same failure year after year. And yet they think they're solving it. The gap isn't a missing person. It's the authority that never came with the responsibility. Drop a new hire into that and you've just replicated the problem, not closed it. ## The work gets done Here is what actually happens inside most organizations. Content work happens everywhere. Writers write. Designers design. Someone owns the taxonomy, someone else owns the CMS, a third person owns the style guide, and a dozen specialists each own a fragment of a thing that only means anything *when* assembled. The work gets done. That's the part people miss when they diagnose these programs—the failure usually isn't execution. The individual pieces are often good. What's missing is the position where the pieces cohere. Above all that competent, fragmented labor, where someone should make decisions that turn a dozen fragments into a system, there is no one. The org chart has a box for every content function except the one that governs them. Governance, architecture, voice as a system—the platform functions I keep returning to—none of them belong to anyone with the authority to hold them together. They get owned in pieces, by people who have responsibility for their piece but no authority or view of the entire platform. That's the gap. Not a missing writer. Missing authority. ## It looks like understaffing And the reason it persists is that it disguises itself as a resourcing problem. The symptoms read like understaffing. Things fall through the cracks, quality drifts, and the same problems recur, so the organization acts intuitively and adds people. More writers. Another specialist. A bigger team. But you cannot close a gap that exists at the top by adding people at the bottom. More competent fragments do not assemble themselves into a coherent whole. They just make a larger pile of fragments, and now there are more of them to drift out of alignment. I've watched this happen from the inside more than once. An organization that has invested seriously in content by adding real talent, tools, and budget, but it still produces work that reads like it came from six companies wearing the same logo. Every time, the diagnosis from within is the same: we need more capacity. And every time, the actual problem is sitting above all the pieces, in an office no one built. ## An empty room and its cost Because that's the thing about this position—it isn't just unoccupied. Most organizations have never drawn it on the chart at all. There's a place for the people who make content and a place for the people who make decisions about the business. Between them, no one has the authority to own content as a system. The place where content decisions should get made is a room that was never added to the building. What does it cost to leave that room empty? First, it costs coherence. Without someone seeing the whole, every part optimizes for itself, and the organization speaks in a dozen voices that agree to use the same font. It also costs real money. That cost is hard to see. It hides inside redundant work, reactive fixes, and rework. Each becomes necessary only because no one governed the content the first time. And the cost compounds. Content accrues value when it's built as infrastructure, not when it's produced as output. That value is the kind the organization never sees, because it never had anyone to build toward it. And it costs the thing that's hardest to name, which is meaning. A content program without a governing authority can produce endlessly and still not add up to anything. It can be busy for years. It can hit every metric on the dashboard and still leave the organization unable to say, coherently, who it is and what it means. That's not an execution failure. You can't fix it from below, and no amount of output closes it. The missing authority is expensive because it's invisible. Nothing shows up as a line item. The work gets done, the team stays busy, the fragments keep arriving, but the whole thing fails to cohere, year after year. Everyone works hard, but no one is positioned to see why it isn't working. That's the leadership gap. It was never about headcount. It's all the responsibility, and no one with the authority to act on it. Cross posted from [rubicon.cx](https://rubicon.cx/). If you want to learn more, [schedule a free consultation](https://calendly.com/ttruxell-rubiconcx/30min). ### Narrative and meaning URL: https://www.truxell.net/narrative-and-meaning/ Last updated: 2026-08-12T13:17:03.000Z ## **Stewardship of organizational meaning** In what now seems a long-forgotten past, Sapient and Razorfish existed separately. Similar, yes, but different propositions. Both had once competed against USWeb/CKS, back when that was still a name that mattered. When Publicis put them together, we all wondered: what does this mean? What's our story? I had colleagues on all sides I'd go to war for. The cultures aligned. The history did not. Organizations do not communicate through content alone. Meaning is received before it's made—and it's rarely received the same way twice. It arrives as culture, as cause, as the accumulated identity of the people who built something. But, it lands differently for everyone who encounters it: employees, customers, partners, the market. Narrative is what organizations do with what's been received unevenly. It does not resolve it into one fixed account. Instead, it loosely reconciles it by holding different receptions together well enough to function as one story, without pretending they were ever identical. Narrative does this reconciling through an accumulation of decisions: what an organization says, how it says it, how it organizes information, what it preserves, what it changes, what it lets go. This is how meaning evolves—not toward one settled version, but toward a story *wide/capacious* enough to hold what everyone actually received. That work is never finished. Content is what's left once that work ends. Everything else is implementation. That work gives rise to the systems organizations rely on. Content is one expression of that system. Technology is one mechanism for enabling it. Governance is a way to nurture it. AI is simply its newest participant. The larger challenge isn't producing more content. It's reconciling meaning that was never received the same way twice, without flattening it into something false. Narratives let organizations act on meaning however it's received, holding integrity across people, platforms, and time. Meaning evolves for its audiences, even as narratives hold. It's stewardship of meaning. ## **Narrative architecture** Narrative architecture is the intentional design of the structures that hold that work of reconciliation together—so it survives beyond any one entity. It encompasses storytelling, editorial practice, information architecture, semantic systems, governance, content platforms, and AI-enabled operations. Each contributes to a larger narrative ecosystem rather than being an isolated discipline. Viewed this way, taxonomy isn't simply classification. It's the shared vocabulary through which organizations understand themselves and communicate. Metadata gives meaning the context it needs to persist. Editorial standards aren't merely style guides. They preserve voice, intent, and identity—the meaning an organization received, still legible. Editorial standards aren't merely style guides. They keep voice, intent, and identity legible, despite the different perceptions of meaning. Governance isn't control. It's stewardship. AI isn't replacing authors. It's becoming another participant in the creation and interpretation of organizational meaning. ## **The real question** All of that is architecture. And whether or not an organization has that in place, most still ask the wrong questions: > How do we create more content? How do we manage content better? The real question organizations should ask is this: > How do we reconcile meaning that was never received the same way twice, while maintaining narrative integrity? This is one of the questions I created Rubicon CX to address. Cross posted from [rubicon.cx](https://rubicon.cx/). If you want to learn more about narrative, meanings, and the platform to support it, [schedule a free consultation](https://calendly.com/ttruxell-rubiconcx/30min). ### Content is a platform URL: https://www.truxell.net/content-is-a-platform/ Last updated: 2026-08-12T12:59:30.000Z Over the last several weeks, I argued for something most organizations still get backwards: content isn't the thing you produce for a campaign. It's the platform everything else runs on. The pieces built on each other—model, voice, governance, experience—and by the end they weren't really five separate points. They were one. Here's the whole argument gathered. [**Content is a platform, not a campaign**](https://www.truxell.net/content-is-a-platform-not-a-campaign/)**.** Most organizations budget content as an expense line. Wrong model — content is the foundation other things run on. [**Voice is a system, not a style guide**](https://www.truxell.net/voice-is-a-system-not-a-style-guide/)**.** A style guide documents intent. Governance is what makes voice real across channels, vendors, and time. [**A content model is the architecture**](https://rubicon.cx/a-content-model-is-architecture/)**.** Let the CMS define your content model by default, and you don't have a platform. You have a repository with ambitions. [**The governance problem isn't new**](https://www.truxell.net/the-operating-model-problem-isnt-new/)**.** CMSWire framed this as an AI-era discovery. Rockley and Cooper were making the same argument in 2003\. AI didn't create the gap. It just made ignoring it expensive. [**The experience is the platform's only job**](https://www.truxell.net/the-experience-is-the-platforms-only-job/)**.** None of the above means anything if it doesn't produce something a person actually feels. Get the invisible 90% right, and the visible 10% finally has something to stand on. Cross posted from [rubicon.cx](https://rubicon.cx/). Want to learn more and decide if this is the right path for your organization, [schedule a free consultation](https://calendly.com/ttruxell-rubiconcx/30min). ### AEO and GEO aren't a tactics problem. They're a platform problem. URL: https://www.truxell.net/aeo-and-geo-arent-a-tactics-problem-theyre-a-platform-problem/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T15:24:59.000Z Everyone has wanted to talk about SEO for years, even though it wasn't the actual thing they needed to solve. Now the conversation has shifted to AEO and GEO. Same ideas, but anyone selling you a quick fix to any of it is selling you snake oil. They say the same things, again: - Add Q&A formatting - Add FAQs (the bane of actual informative content) - Apply schema markup (without underlying taxonomy) - Claim your entity in the knowledge graph. Do these things and get cited by AI. Absolute bollocks. Every one of those tactics is downstream of a decision nobody's making. ## The structure behind it all The thing is, structured data improves how often AI systems cite a page. The margin is measurable and huge. And it may get expensive if you ignore it. But schema markup doesn't create structure. It reports it. You can't tag an entity that was never defined consistently in the first place. You can't mark up a Q&A pattern in content that was never organized around the questions buyers actually ask. The tag is downstream of a decision that was never made. That decision is the content model, which most organizations still let their CMS make by default. And then they double down on it and publish whatever miscellaneous content that has accumulated rather than deciding what the model should be. Without a model, you don't have a platform, you have a repository with ambitions—a problem [I've written about before](https://www.truxell.net/tag/content-platform/). AEO and GEO didn't create the problem. They just made it visible, expensive, and impossible to ignore any longer. ## And SEO? This really isn't new. It's ground well trod. Google and other search engines have prioritized structured and organized content for over a decade*.* Organizations that took SEO seriously (past keyword stuffing, which sadly never died) built something else in the process. They built consistent taxonomies, clean information architectures, and internal linking structures that reflected how concepts were related. They chased ranking, but they built a foundation along the way—even if by accident. The content got easier to find, maintain, and trust. That's the whole story of SEO for most of the last decade: chase the signal and maybe get to the substance. AI retrieval made the accident the point. Ranking well used to be a reasonable proxy for getting cited by an AI answer. No more—a shrinking share of AI citations now come from what ranks on page one. Showing up in search and getting chosen by an AI system have become two separate problems. Most brands are optimizing for the wrong one out of institutional inertia. This isn't a new lesson. It's the same one, with the shortcut finally closed. Content entity clarity (i.e, being recognized by an AI system as a coherent, consistent, well-defined thing rather than a scattered pile of pages using your name five different ways) is a governance function. It's the same discipline [I've posted about.](https://www.truxell.net/the-operating-model-problem-isnt-new/) Now, it has a new enforcement mechanism. The organizations that succeed right now aren't the ones who read a listicle. They have a voice system, an information model, and an editorial process—and had it before anyone was talking about AI. Even if that's not what they initially set out to build. The honest version of this advice isn't "add schema." If you don't already have a governed content model and taxonomy, schema markup is decoration on a building with no foundation. It'll read fine to a person skimming the page, if they find it. But, it will not read as coherent to a system trying to determine whether you're a real, trustworthy entity worth citing. Coherence was the thing you never built on purpose. ## Everything old is new again None of this is new. It's the same argument the whole platform series has been making, with a new judge. A style guide couldn't make voice real. A CMS couldn't make a content model exist by default. And a schema tag can't make structure out of content that was never structured to begin with. AI retrieval didn't create the gap between organizations that treat content as infrastructure and organizations that treat it as output. Now it's sending the bills. Cross posted from [rubicon.cx](https://rubicon.cx/). Want to learn more and decide if this is the right path for your organization, [schedule a free consultation](https://calendly.com/ttruxell-rubiconcx/30min). ### The experience is the platform's only job URL: https://www.truxell.net/the-experience-is-the-platforms-only-job/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T15:25:12.000Z I've written four posts about this. A [platform instead of a campaign](https://www.truxell.net/content-is-a-platform-not-a-campaign/). A [voice system](https://www.truxell.net/voice-is-a-system-not-a-style-guide/) instead of a style guide. A [content model](https://www.truxell.net/a-content-model-is-architecture/) instead of a CMS default. An [operating model](https://www.truxell.net/the-operating-model-problem-isnt-new/) instead of a governance rulebook everyone quietly ignores. None of it means anything if it doesn't produce something a person can actually feel. ## **The 90% was never the goal** This whole series has argued that most organizations only manage the 10% of content they can see—the copy, the images, and the video. The 90% underneath it—the taxonomy, the metadata, the governance, the model—is what actually determines whether any of it works. That argument is still correct but incomplete on its own, because the 90% isn't the goal. It's the foundation. Nobody visits a website to admire its taxonomy. Nobody visits a product detail page and thinks fondly of the content model that made it coherent. The invisible layer exists entirely to produce something in the visible layer: an experience that holds together, makes sense, and gets someone where they were trying to go. Get the invisible layer right and nobody notices it. That's not a failure of the platform. That's the platform working exactly as intended. ## **Where the two layers meet** I've worked with an enterprise whose taxonomy nobody could search and whose CMS nobody owned. Content existed. It just couldn't be found, and no one could say who was responsible for what happened to it after it was published. The fix wasn't more content. It was governance: clear ownership, a metadata structure built around how people actually looked for things, and workflows that made maintenance someone's job instead of everyone's afterthought. Search performance improved, as expected. What mattered more was upstream of that. The content stopped degrading the moment it was published because someone was actually watching it. The visible experience got better because the invisible platform underneath it finally existed. There's the rub—the platform isn't a separate initiative from the experience. It's the reason the experience is capable of holding up post-launch and over time. ## **Content strategy's actual job** This is why content strategy sits where it does—between the business and the consumer, translating what the organization needs to say into what a person can actually use. Not a downstream execution function. Not a governance committee. The place where architecture and audience meet. The time when the pace of change gets absorbed instead of passed straight through to whoever's using the thing. Every question a content strategist answers eventually runs through the same filter. What does this person need, at this moment, given everything happening around them? Does the platform underneath actually support giving them that, or does it just support publishing something that looks like it? ## **The bow on top** Content is the platform, not the campaign sitting on top of it. Voice is a system, not a document describing one. The model is the architecture, not whatever the CMS happened to default to. The operating model is the actual governance structure, whether or not anyone wrote it down. But the experience—the thing a person actually inhabits and remembers—is the only reason any of the rest of it is worth building. Get the invisible 90% right, and the visible 10% finally has something to stand on. Cross posted from [rubicon.cx](https://rubicon.cx/). Want to learn more and decide if this is the right path for your organization, [schedule a free consultation](https://calendly.com/ttruxell-rubiconcx/30min). ### The operating model problem isn't new URL: https://www.truxell.net/the-operating-model-problem-isnt-new/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T15:25:23.000Z [CMSwire recently ran an article telling CMOs their AI problem isn't really an AI problem](https://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/dear-cmos-your-problem-isnt-your-ai-its-your-operating-model/). It said it's an operating model problem: organizations govern technology investments function by function, while the systems those investments create inevitably interconnect. Customers experience the combined result. Nobody's accountable for the combination. It's a good article. It's also not a new argument. ## **We've read this before** Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper made a version of this case in [*Managing Enterprise Content*](https://managingenterprisecontent.com/). Then, the systems in question were content management platforms rather than AI models. They made a structural diagnosis. Organizations build technology investments in silos. So, accountability stays tied to function. The resulting chaos—duplication, inconsistency, inexplicable and unfindable content—isn't a technology failure. It's a governance failure disguised as a technology one. Kevin Nichols made the same case with more architectural precision in [*Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide*](https://store.xmlpress.com/product/enterprise-content-strategy/) (*full disclosure: I reviewed the book before its publication*). All of this occurred years and years before anyone was framing this as an AI-era discovery. Content operations, governance processes, and the systems that wrap around both were already described as foundational concerns. Not emerging ones. Foundational. [Scriptorium's maturity model,](https://www.scriptorium.com/2020/07/enterprise-content-strategy-maturity-model/) built on Rahel Bailie's work from 2011, has been telling clients the same thing for over a decade. > Most enterprise content operations sit at the lowest maturity level, fractured across marketing, technical communications, support, and training, each with its own terminology, its own tools, and no shared owner. Organizational hierarchy not only influences content governance, but in most companies, it *is* the default governance model. ## **The gap isn't information. It's authority** None of this is obscure. The people writing about enterprise content governance in 2003, 2011, and 2015 weren't wrong. And they weren't early. They were right but largely ignored—because the argument stayed where arguments about content usually stay: adjacent to the org chart, not embedded in it. That's the actual gap. It's not a knowledge gap but an authority gap. The people who understood the operating model problem were rarely the people with the authority to fix it. They wrote about the interconnection. Someone else owned the individual systems. The distance between diagnosis and authority is where the problem has lived for twenty years. haven't just read about this. I spent that time building content practices inside organizations that had exactly this problem—watching a taxonomy decision nobody owned become a CMS migration nobody wanted, watching governance get treated as a rulebook to consult instead of a structure to build. The literature was right. Unfortunately, it wasn't sitting in the room where the decisions got made. ## **AI didn't create the problem. It exposed it** Here's what's actually changed. AI doesn't create the interconnection problem. It did make the cost of ignoring it visible faster, and at a scale that's harder to paper over. A content taxonomy no one owns was survivable when the consequence was inconsistent search results. It's a different problem when that same ungoverned structure is feeding a model that's deciding what a customer sees, in what order, and why. These decisions now have to be explained after the fact, sometimes to a regulator. That's no longer hypothetical. Governments are starting to write it directly into law, because "we govern each tool separately" doesn't survive contact with systems that touch real people's lives at scale. The [EU AI Act's deployer obligations](https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/26/) are the clearest example to date. The Act doesn't treat AI tools as isolated products each with self-contained risk. It splits obligations between the organization that builds a system and the organization that deploys it. Organizations can't discharge their own accountability just by pointing at the vendor. They have to understand how the system behaves inside their own data and decision flows: what's feeding it, who it affects, where the outputs go next. That's the same argument we've been making about content platforms for twenty years. The technology has changed. The failures have not. If you don't understand how your own systems connect, you don't actually control what they do. Eventually, someone with real authority is going to ask you to prove that you do. ## **The fix is not new** Architecture comes before tooling. Ownership comes before rollout. Build the model around how systems actually connect—not how the org chart says they should. That's not an AI governance insight. It's a content governance insight that AI has made impossible to keep ignoring. The operating model was always the problem. The technology just got expensive enough to make everyone finally look at it. Cross posted from [rubicon.cx](https://rubicon.cx). Want to learn more and decide if this is the right path for your organization, [schedule a free consultation](https://calendly.com/ttruxell-rubiconcx/30min). ### The content strategist as maker URL: https://www.truxell.net/the-content-strategist-as-maker/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T15:25:41.000Z Wordsworth defined poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility. Felt deeply, written down. The Greeks had a different word for it: *poiesis*—making. The poet made something that didn't exist before. The feeling was the material, not the product. This held true through medieval and renaissance poetry as well. Chaucer, the Gawain poet, Dante, Spenser, and the unknown makers of the *Chanson de Roland* and the *El Poema de Mio Cid*. They were makers all. Oh. That guy Shakespeare too. This is where content strategy begins. ## **Missing the forest for the trees** Content Strategy is known to speak the language of analysis, governance, audit, alignment. All of this is true. Businesses understand this language. But, none of it is the thing. What a content strategist actually does is make. Make sense of a system. Make language that functions. Make the invisible architecture visible enough to be worked on (and then invisible to the ultimate audience). The analysis is a foundation, not the purpose. ## **An inventory is not an audit** The inventory is an understanding of culture and language in practice. It comes first. It is not the work but is the text you need before you can read it. Move through it and you're not counting pages. You're learning the language as the organization actually speaks it. The cadence it defaults to. The constructions that recur when *no one's watching*. The gap between the brand voice and the published sentences. That gap is almost always where the real work lives. Most content audits stop at the first question—what exists. The second question—what is this actually doing, and does it match what anyone intended—is harder, and rarer, and where the real diagnosis happens. The close reading reveals language the organization doesn't know it's saying. ## **Close reading and the content strategist** Close reading is how you learn what you're working with. A literary critic moves through a poem foot by foot, line by line—not to reduce it to extractable meaning, but to hear what it's doing beneath what it claims to be doing. The meter and the actual stress pattern are often different things. The poem says one thing. The syntax does another. Diction. A content audit done right works the same way. Key page by key page. Story point by story point. First, understand the lay of the land, the culture, and what is being said and to whom. And then ask, is this what the business and the audience need? Where they overlap is the sweet spot. The load-bearing line. The one that does the work everything else is reaching for. The point in the poem that etches itself in your memory. ## **The finding that changes the engagement** When the answer to the question, "what is this actually doing?" is unclear, you haven't found a content problem. You've found a strategy problem that content has been faithfully executing without anyone noticing. The content is doing exactly what it was built to do. What it was built to do is wrong. That finding requires a reader's ear, not just an analyst's eye. The spreadsheet can't hear stress. The person who has only ever inventoried, not audited, content, can't either. ## **Brand, explicated** Everything comes back to brand. A brand that can't locate its own story arrived at that place for a reason. Something real was felt once—in a room, in a deck, in a moment of genuine conviction and buy in. Then it became a framework. Then guidelines. Then content. Each iteration was a step further from the original. And it became rarely used. Each one was just further explication on an explication. By the time the audience sees it's a fourth-generation prose account of an experience no one in the organization can point to anymore. This isn't a writing problem. It's a leadership problem. It's not treating content as a platform, but as a relic. The framework isn't wrong. The guidelines aren't wrong. Each step made sense to the people who took it at the time. But no one was in the room with both the authority to stop the drift and the literacy to hear it happening. Content publication continued, sometimes at scale, and the story kept flattening. Because the process was followed correctly, no one could name what was lost in the translation. What gets lost in each iteration isn't a word or a phrase. It's the foundation of the narrative—the first claim, the tension that made the story worth following. Explication smooths tension. That's what it does. A close reading of the resulting content finds prose that moves without friction and arrives nowhere. The organization mistakes the smoothness for quality. It isn't. It's the absence of the original. ## **A poem that disappears** This is a different failure mode, though it grows from the same root. A brand loses its story through iteration. Each handoff moves it further from the original; drift accumulates in the absence of governance. This happens with content that no one trusts to work on its own. Every hedge is a footnote. Every qualifier un-makes the claim beside it. At some point the poem disappears under its own annotation. The legal caveat that follows the bold claim. The parenthetical that pre-empts the objection no real reader would have raised. The keyword that fractures the sentence. The heading rewritten for SEO rather than sense. The closing paragraph that summarizes the three paragraphs before it because someone, somewhere, decided the reader couldn't be trusted to have followed along. Each addition is a small act of distrust. The audience deserves better. Content that over-explains itself un-makes itself. The poem that needs to explain what it means has already failed. The explanation signals that the original didn't do its work. The fix is never the footnote. The fix is the poem. Content under institutional pressure accumulates annotation the way ships accumulate barnacles. Slowly, below the waterline, until the drag is everywhere and the source is nowhere visible. The voice guidelines that started as liberation become the cage. The approved messaging that captured something real becomes the thing that prevents anything real from being said. The strategist as close reader hears this too. The over-explained sentence, the claim that doesn't trust itself, the paragraph that apologizes for existing. These aren't style problems. They're symptoms of a system that has stopped believing its own content can do the work. ## **The work of making** A content strategist works back toward the original aim. Not to recover some lost authenticity, but to find the foundation. To find the claim that holds weight and the language that does what it says it does. Then, build from there. That's *poiesis*. That's the work. That's what it means to make a narrative that holds. --- Want to learn more and decide if this is the right path for your organization, [schedule a free consultation](https://calendly.com/ttruxell-rubiconcx/30min). ### We gave everything a new name and called it progress URL: https://www.truxell.net/we-gave-everything-a-new-name-and-called-it-progress/ Last updated: 2026-06-24T13:21:06.000Z If you have tried recently to hire someone to lead your organization's content work, you already know the problem. The job descriptions blur. The titles multiply. The candidates arrive speaking different dialects of what sounds like the same language. Content strategist. Content designer. UX writer. UX content strategist. Content marketer. Each tribe comes with a distinct LinkedIn following and a distinct conference circuit. Each also has strong opinions about where the others fall short. We all value clarity, communication, structure, and meaning. But, we've made ourselves nearly impossible to understand from the outside. This is not semantic nitpicking or a taxonomical debate. Title confusion can create real organizational dysfunction. It leads to misaligned hires, poor budgeting, and structures that reflect turf wars rather than business needs. Senior leaders default to whoever speaks loudest or whoever showed up first, rather than whoever sees the problem most clearly. And I can't say I blame them. The confusion isn't an inconvenience. It can be expensive. ## **Where it started** The content field wasn't always this complicated. For its early history it had two poles and a reasonable amount of space between them. One side was copywriting—a traditional craft with real lineage. It came from the ad agencies, the direct mail houses, and the brand voice specialists. They understood that words do work and that doing that work well requires genuine skill. The other side was built in response to a new medium—the web. Content development became a catch-all for people producing written material that wasn't advertising. Documentation, web content, technical communication, and the like. The titles were functional rather than aspirational. You wrote things, or you wrote things for ads. When organizations started taking the internet seriously, the problem got more complicated. ## **The discipline that was already there** What gets called the origin of content strategy is usually told as a story about a seminal book and a conference. That version of history is tidy and not particularly accurate. Not that it makes the book and the conference less important. The discipline already existed. And it had its name. Enterprise practitioners worked through hard organizational problems well before it had a public brand. It happened at various places independently as early as 1998 (even though the actual work was being done in pieces before then). Information architects, technical writers, and content strategists at early digital agencies were doing the work then: auditing content at scale and modeling information architecture across complex digital properties. The problems they were solving were genuine and difficult. The approach they developed was real. And it still applies. By the time content strategy had a recognizable conference circuit and a canonical book, it already had at least a decade of practice behind it. Popularization and origination are different things. Conflating them flattens the discipline's actual roots and obscures where it came from and why it matters. Content strategy didn't emerge from a community of practitioners looking for an identity. It emerged from organizations with serious content problems that needed solving at scale. That distinction matters because it points toward what content strategy actually is: an organizational capability, not a job title or a methodology or a personal brand. ## **Proliferation cascades into confusion** Once content strategy had a name and a community, the splintering began in earnest. Content marketing arrived first, staking out the channel and funnel territory—publishing, distribution, audience building, lead generation. When the buyer was a traditional CMO, the language had to follow. It borrowed content strategy's audience-first posture and attached it to marketing department metrics. Content design emerged from the product and UX world, claiming the interface layer—the content that lives inside products, that guides users through flows, that makes software legible. Different lineage, different methods, genuinely different problems. It was a reasonable differentiation, if an aggressive one. And some of the agencies that helped build content strategy pivoted here. I know, because I disagreed at the time. Not everything is a product. UX writing carved out microcopy as its own domain—the button labels, the error messages, the onboarding flows. It is also a useful specialization, serving the overall experience, In practice, it became another flag. Then came the compounds: UX content strategy, UX content design, product content strategy. Attempts to reconcile the above that mostly succeeded in adding more titles to the fog without resolving any of the underlying overlap. Each new designation claimed differentiation. None resolved the fundamental question of where one practice ends and another begins. The org chart absorbed all of it and hoped for the best. So we have been shooting ourselves in the foot again and again and again. It's all content, which at the end of the day is anything that carries meaning. And we wonder why we are the first against the wall in a re-org or downturn. ## **And copywriting now?** Traditional copywriting held its ground through most of this—TV, print, brand, direct response all still have their place. It had enough craft tradition and enough distance from the digital content world to maintain a distinct identity. But digital copywriting is a different matter. A digital copywriter is doing serious work in audience modeling, mapping customer journeys, and making decisions about messaging hierarchy. That is content strategy. The label is different. The work is not. Which raises a question worth sitting with: how many of these distinctions are methodological and how many are territorial? How many of these titles describe different kinds of work, and how many describe the same work claimed by different communities with different origin stories and different conference affiliations? The honest answer is: some of both. But the territorial share is larger than the field likes to admit. ## **Who benefited from the confusion** The title proliferation wasn't only intellectual drift. It had organizational incentives behind it. Marketing departments watched through the 2000s and 2010s as content sprawled across their organizations—from IT into product, customer experience and communications. Content was everywhere, and ownership of it was contested. Content marketing was, among other things, a territorial claim. It said: this part is ours. It lives in our budget, reports to our CMO, and gets measured by our metrics. The titles that followed were partly the same move made by different organizational actors. Each practice that named itself was also staking a claim to a budget line and a reporting structure. The title proliferation reflected every department that wanted to own content, but without any organizational framework, it became a collection of competing fiefdoms. The cost of that fragmentation rarely gets named directly. he confusion didn't come from one direction. Vendors, consultants, and practitioners all told different stories. Meanwhile, organizations fought internally over who owned content. Confusion fueled more confusion. ## **What coherence would look like** The different titles are not going away. That ship has sailed. Too many practitioners have too much career investment in their particular label for consolidation to be realistic. But titles are not the real problem. The real problem is the absence of a shared theory of what content does inside an organization. A shared understanding would apply across channels, functions, and job titles without turf disputes. One that gives the C-level a stable answer to the question: what is content actually for and what has to be true for it to do that work reliably. That theory exists. It just doesn't fit neatly on this or that conference lanyard. It comes from treating content as an organizational capability—something that has to be architected, governed, and connected to the systems and decisions it's meant to support. Treating it like a platform, not a production line. The field gave everything a new name and called it progress. The organizations that actually move forward will be the ones that stop asking what to call it and start asking what it needs to do. Cross posted from [rubicon.cx](https://rubicon.cx). ### Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! A Field Guide to content practitioners URL: https://www.truxell.net/lions-and-tigers-and-bears-oh-my-a-field-guide-to-content-practitioners/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T15:25:52.000Z #### *For executives who keep getting lost in the forest* Every forest has an ecology. Predators and foragers. Specialists and generalists. Animals that hunt and animals that range. Understanding which does what and why they behave the way they do isn’t about memorizing taxonomy but watching long enough to recognize the patterns. I promise this isn’t about taxonomy, mostly. The content field is no different. What follows is a field guide to content based on the notes that I’ve collected over time. Offered without malice. ## Lions: Content Design Apex predator within a defined biome. The content design practitioner is methodical, coordinated, and very good at what it does inside its range—the interface layer, the product experience, the content that makes software legible and interactions coherent. Works in structured packs. Has developed sophisticated methods for operating within product development cycles. The lion is not wrong about its domain. The interface layer is real and the work there is genuinely difficult. What the lion occasionally overstates is the size of its biome. Product content is not all content. The methods that work inside a design system do not automatically scale to enterprise content operations, brand governance, or the structural decisions that sit upstream of any individual product. Encountered most frequently in: product organizations, design systems teams, UX-forward technology companies. *Caution*: Lions are territorial about methodology. Expect friction at the borders. ## Tigers: Content Marketing Unmistakable in motion. Fast, territorial, built for the hunt. The content marketing practitioner arrives with metrics, a funnel, and a strong opinion about publishing cadence. They are optimized for pursuit and capture (traffic, leads, conversions) and they are genuinely good at it within their range. The tiger is a specialist. It knows its territory and works it hard. What it does not do is range. The ecosystem beyond the funnel—the governance questions, the structural decisions, the content that lives inside products and experiences rather than in front of them—is not its natural habitat. It may tell you otherwise. Watch the behavior, not the claim. Encountered most frequently in: marketing departments, demand generation functions, agencies with retainer models. *Caution:* The tiger tends to define the entire forest as its territory. This is a confidence display, not a map. ## An aside about foxes: UX Writing Quick, adaptive, and perpetually underestimated. The UX writing practitioner moves through spaces the larger animals can’t reach. It works in the shadows (the invisible connective tissue of digital experience)—microcopy, error states, onboarding flows. Does some of its best work in the margins. The fox does not hold territory. It moves through everyone else’s. This is simultaneously its greatest strength and the reason it keeps getting absorbed, redefined, or claimed by adjacent practices. Content designers say UX writing belongs to them. Content strategists say it’s a subset of voice governance. Product managers sometimes wonder if they need a UX writer at all or whether a template will do. The fox knows things the larger animals don’t. It has been everywhere. It has read every error message, navigated every flow, felt every moment where the words failed the experience. That accumulated knowledge is worth more than its job title suggests. Encountered most frequently in: product teams, design organizations, anywhere the interface meets the human. *Caution:* Undervalue the fox at your own risk. It notices everything. ## Bears: Content Strategy Ranges widely. Has been in this forest longer than any of the others. It is an omnivore that feeds across the whole ecosystem, moves between the governance questions and the structural decisions and the voice work and the operational realities without needing to specialize to survive. The content strategy practitioner is not optimized for the hunt. It is optimized for the terrain. It knows where the water is, where the territory changes, where the other animals’ ranges overlap and conflict. It has seen enough seasons to recognize patterns the newer arrivals are still calling unprecedented. The bear does not move fast. It does not need to. What it does— auditing at scale, modeling information architecture, governing content across complex organizational systems, connecting content decisions to business outcomes—takes time, patience, and a tolerance for problems that don’t resolve cleanly. These are not qualities the content economy learned to reward. The metrics dashboards were not built for them. This is why the bear keeps getting mistaken for something smaller than it is. Encountered most frequently in: enterprise organizations with serious content problems, senior leadership roles where the structural questions have finally become impossible to ignore. *Caution:* Do not confuse patience for passivity. The bear has been watching longer than you have been asking. They abide. ## And the forest? The animals are real. The territories are real. The friction at the borders is real, expensive, and largely unnecessary. What the forest lacks is not more specialists. It has those. What it lacks is a shared understanding of the ecosystem—who ranges where, who does what, and why the whole thing works better when the animals stop mistaking territorial claims for maps. Organizations that figure that out stop asking what to call the work and start asking what the work needs to do. That is a different question. It is the right question. The forest is waiting for someone to ask it. Want to explore what the bear knows? [Schedule a free consultation](https://calendly.com/ttruxell-rubiconcx/30min). [Cross posted from rubicon.cx.](https://rubicon.cx/lions-and-tigers-and-bears-oh-my-a-field-guide-to-content-practitioners/) ### A content model is architecture URL: https://www.truxell.net/a-content-model-is-architecture/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T15:26:08.000Z If content is a platform as I’ve argued, a content model is architecture and the blueprint. This is not only a metaphor but also a structural parallel. You wouldn’t build a software platform without an architecture document. You wouldn’t scale a technology organization without a clear understanding of how the systems relate to each other, what each component is responsible for, and what the rules of engagement are between them. Yet most organizations build content platforms without anything of this sort. They have content. They have a CMS. They have a strategy document somewhere. What they don’t have is a model. That’s the gap. And it’s a significant one. ## What a content model actually is Not a spreadsheet of content types, though it may use one. Not a CMS configuration, though it will eventually inform one. A content model is a formal description of your content’s structure, attributes, relationships, and governance rules. It defines what content exists in your organization, how it relates to other content, how it behaves across channels, systems, and contexts, how it’s authored, and how it’s described. A content model will answer the questions that your content operation probably answers on and *ad hoc*basis now. What is a destination page, exactly? How is it different from a landing page? What attributes does a product description carry, and which of those attributes are required versus optional? When a piece of content is published in three markets and four languages, what stays consistent and what changes? Who needs to review each piece of content? Who owns each content type, and what does ownership mean in practice? These aren’t editorial questions. They’re architectural ones. And without a model, every team answers them differently each time,. These different answers compound into structural content debt. ## The CMS trap Most organizations let the CMS define the content model. This is where they go wrong. Of course it happens gradually. They select the platform. Implementation begins. The team makes decisions about content types, templates, components, and metadata fields. The implementation team often makes these decisions with little or not input from a content strategy. Rather, they are driven by what the CMS makes easy rather than what the content strategy requires. Easy, of course, requires fewer resources (people and expenditure). By the time anyone thinks to ask whether the model is right, the architecture already exists and changing it becomes even more expensive. The model should drive the technology decisions. Not the other way around: a platform agnositc content model desinged independently. I t should be grounded in the content strategy, governance requirements, and operational realities of the organization. Then it gives you the specifications your technology implementation should meet. Without it, you’re letting the tool make architectural decisions. And tools, left to their own logic, will optimize for their own constraints rather than yours. ## The platform connection This is where the distinction between a content platform and a content repository comes into focus. A repository stores content. It has a CMS, a folder structure, maybe some tags. Content goes in. Content comes out. Nobody is quite sure what’s in there or whether any of it is current, but only that it exists. A platform serves content— intelligently, consistently, at scale. It knows what content it has, how that content is described, how it relates to everything else, and how to surface the right content in the right context for the right audience in the right context. The difference between the two isn’t the technology. It’s the architecture. And the architecture is the content model. Organizations that treat content as a platform investment understand this. The content model is not a phase one deliverable that gets handed off to the development team and forgotten. It’s a living document. It’s structural decisiosn that governs how scontent is authored, managed, published, and retired across the entire ecosystem. It’s the reason your CMS behaves like a platform instead of an expensive file cabinet. ## Where it gets hard Content modeling is straightforward in the abstract. It gets complex when content has to work across brands, markets, localization requirements, and channel contexts. For example, what does a shared content architecture for three cruise lines look like. Each has a distinct brand identity, different primary audiences, different geographic markets, and different localization requirements, all on a single platform. Every content type in the model has to account for brand variation without fragmenting the architecture. Every attribute has to be flexible enough to accommodate market-specific content while remaining consistent enough to enable shared infrastructure. The taxonomy has to support personalization across all three brands without collapsing into a lowest-common-denominator structure that serves none of them well. That’s not a CMS problem. That’s an architecture problem. And the only way through it is a content model rigorous enough to hold the complexity without breaking under it. The same challenge appears, at different scales, in any organization managing content across multiple brands, multiple markets, or multiple channels. The content model is what makes the platform coherent. Without it, every brand, market, and channel team builds their own workaround. And then platform fragments from the inside. ## Governance always needs addressing A content model without governance is a blueprint nobody builds to. This is the through-line across the content platform conversation. Voice is a system, not a style guide because a style guide without operational infrastructure produces no behavioral change. Content is a platform, not a campaign because campaign thinking produces no compounding value. And a content model is architecture, not documentation because documentation without governance produces no structural consistency. The model defines the structure. Governance is what makes the structure real. Who owns each content type? Who has the authority to change the model when the strategy evolves? What’s the process for deprecating content types that no longer serve the architecture? What happens when a new channel or market requires the model to expand? These are not theoretical questions. They are the questions that determine whether your content platform holds together at scale or slowly fragments under the weight of ungoverned decisions. ## How do you diagnose it? If your organization has a CMS and a content strategy but no formal content model, you have a repository with ambitions. The platform is implied but not built. The architecture exists as tribal knowledge distributed across whoever has been around long enough to know how things work. And it degrades every time one of those people leaves. The content model is how you make the architecture explicit, transferable, and governable. It’s how you turn content into infrastructure that compounds rather than accumulates. The blueprint comes before the build. Always. If you think you need content model help, feel free to [schedule a free consultation](https://calendly.com/ttruxell-rubiconcx/30min). ### What a fractional content leader actually does (and what they don't) URL: https://www.truxell.net/what-a-fractional-content-leader-actually-does-and-what-they-dont/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T15:26:58.000Z There’s no standard title for the person who owns content at the executive level. Some organizations call it Chief Content Officer. Others say VP of Content, Head of Content, or Editorial Director. Some don’t have a title yet because they haven’t had the role. If you’re reading this, you probably know the gap exists. A fractional model is one way to fill it to help you figure out the next steps. Here’s what it actually looks like. So let’s clear it up. ## What a fractional content leader doesn’t do A fractional leader doesn’t write your content. They are not content producers. So no blog posts, video scripts, or draft executive communications. If that’s what you need, hire a writer. They don’t manage your CMS. They’re not in your publishing queue, scheduling posts, or troubleshooting your taxonomy inside a platform. If that’s what you need, hire a content manager. They don’t run your social calendar. They’re not scheduling tweets or optimizing posting times. If that’s what you need, hire a mid-level content strategist or social strategist. On he other hand, they don’t deliver a report and disappear. The fractional model is not a consulting engagement that produces a deck and a set of recommendations you may or may not act on. If that’s what you need, hire a consultant. What a fractional leader doesn’t do is, in every case, may point at something else you actually need—and may already have, or should have, on your team. A fractional leader is not a replacement for those functions. They’re the person who makes those functions coherent. ## What a fractional content leader will do They own the content strategy—not advise on it or contribute to it. Own it—with the organizational authority to make decisions, set standards, and hold the line when those standards are tested. That’s a meaningful distinction. Advisors recommend. Leaders decide. They build the infrastructure. Governance frameworks. Voice and editorial standards. Content models. Workflow architecture. Taxonomy direction. The systems that make your content operation function at scale and produce quality rather than just volume. This is the work that doesn’t show up in a campaign report or initial web analytics but determines whether your content actually works. They align content to business outcomes. A fractional content leader sits at the intersection of content, brand, marketing, product, and sometimes sales and customer success. Their job is to make sure content is doing real work across the organization—not just filling an editorial calendar or supporting a single channel. They ensure that [content acts as a platform](https://rubicon.cx/content-is-a-platform-not-a-campaign/). They can build and develop your internal team. Part of the role is building the capacity that eventually makes itself unnecessary at the fractional level. That means developing content leaders, establishing processes that outlast the engagement, and creating the organizational muscle to sustain what gets built. Built in obsolescence. They help you make the case internally. Budget conversations. Headcount justifications. Explaining to a CFO why content governance is an infrastructure investment and not a line item to cut. A fractional content leader has had those conversations before and knows how to frame them. ## When you actually need one Not every organization does. Here are the signs that suggest you might. ### 1\. Your content operation has outgrown its leadership. ou have a team producing content—maybe a large one, but no one with the strategic authority or organizational scope to set the direction for the whole system. Content decisions get made by whoever has the loudest voice in the room or whoever owns the budget that quarter. ### 2\. You know something is broken but can’t diagnose it. The content exists. The investment is real. But the results don’t reflect the spend, the brand doesn’t sound like itself across channels, or you’re constantly rebuilding from scratch instead of building on what you have. That’s a systems problem, and systems problems require systems thinking. ### 3\. You’re not ready to hire a full-time content executive. Maybe the organization isn’t at the scale yet. Maybe you’re not sure what the role should look like. Maybe you’ve been burned by a hire that didn’t work out and want to get the function right before you commit. The fractional model gives you senior leadership without the permanence or the risk of getting the hire wrong. ### 4\. You’re at an important juncture. Your organization is undergoing a big change. It could be a rebrand, a merger, new market, or a product launch. All of these may require content infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet. These are moments when content strategy becomes suddenly urgent and the cost of getting it wrong is very visible. A fractional leader can move quickly because they’ve navigated these moments before. ## What comes next The fractional model is a phase, not a permanent state. Done well, it builds something. It can provide a functioning content operation, a developed internal team and an organizational understanding of what content leadership actually looks like. At some point, that clarity makes the full-time hire obvious: what the role should be, what it should own, what kind of leader it requires. The fractional content leader, if they’re doing their job, is working toward that transition from the first week. Not because the engagement has to end, but because building internal capacity is part of what good content leadership does. If you’re not sure whether your organization is at that inflection point, that’s usually a sign worth paying attention to. Want to learn more and decide if this is the right path for your organization, [schedule a free consultation](https://calendly.com/ttruxell-rubiconcx/30min). ### Content is a platform, not a campaign URL: https://www.truxell.net/content-is-a-platform-not-a-campaign/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T15:26:22.000Z There is a budget line in most marketing plans called "content." It sits near social media and paid search. It gets evaluated quarterly. When times are tight, it gets cut. That's the misclassification. And it's costing you more than you think. Content isn't a marketing tactic. It's organizational infrastructure. More precisely, it's a platform—the foundational layer on which an alarming number of business functions actually run. So, Content Marketing is a tool in a wider toolbox. Marketing campaigns are built on it. So is sales enablement. Customer onboarding. Product UX. Internal alignment. Investor communications. The content platform is load-bearing whether your organization treats it that way or not. The question isn't whether you have one. It's whether it was architected or just accumulated. Most organizations accumulate. Every post without strategy is just adding to the noise. Throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks isn't a sustainable strategy. ## **Platform thinking versus campaign thinking** Here's the practical difference. Campaign thinking treats content as a deliverable. You produce it, you distribute it, you measure it, you move on (maybe you eventually sunset it). The budget is an expense. The content is consumed. Next quarter, you start again. Nothing compounds. Nothing connects. The work disappears into the archive or just sits out there and the organization starts from zero. Platform thinking treats content as an asset. Assets are architected. They require investment decisions, not just production budgets. They have structural dependencies—taxonomy, governance, voice standards, content modeling—that make every individual piece more valuable because it connects to everything else. And like any asset, content appreciates or depreciates depending on how it's maintained. ## **Depreciation** This rarely makes it into most content strategy conversations, but it should. A neglected content platform loses value continuously and quietly. Like your car. Outdated pages erode trust. Redundant assets create confusion. Inconsistent voice signals that nobody is in charge. Ungoverned proliferation of content produced by every team, in every format, on every schedule that isn't answerable to an editorial standard invisibly accumulates debt the same way technical infrastructure does. Until it doesn't. This is the content debt many others have described. The moment it becomes visible is never convenient. A rebrand that requires auditing thousands of untracked assets. A compliance review that surfaces years of contradictory claims. A customer experience that doesn't hold together because five different teams own five different pieces of it and none of them talk. At that point, the cost of the infrastructure you didn't build becomes very easy to calculate. ## **What a content platform investment actually looks like** First, you have to fund architecture alongside production. Taxonomy. Governance frameworks. Voice and editorial standards. Content modeling that makes assets findable, reusable, and maintainable at scale. I know these aren't glamorous things. They don't produce a campaign you can put in a deck. They don't have the wow factor visually. However, they are what separates a content operation that compounds from one that meanders from one campaign to the next. It means maintenance budgets, not just creation budgets. The ratio matters. An organization that spends heavily on content production and nothing on content governance is one that is actively generating debt. The content exists. It just isn't working. It means editorial leadership with real organizational authority. Not a content team that reports three levels down from the CMO and gets looped in after the strategy is set. Platform infrastructure requires someone whose job is to think about the whole system, not just the next deliverable. ## **Diagnosing it** If you're a decision maker, here's a useful place to start: pull up your content budget and look at the ratio of production spend to infrastructure spend. From creation to governance. From output to architecture. If you don't have a maintenance or infrastructure line, that's your answer. You wouldn't run your technology organization that way. You wouldn't accept a software platform with no maintenance budget, no architectural oversight, and no one accountable for the integrity of the whole. The fact that content feels different—more creative, more fluid, harder to systematize—is exactly why it keeps getting misclassified. Content is a platform. Build it like one. ### Voice is a system, not a style guide URL: https://www.truxell.net/voice-is-a-system-not-a-style-guide/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T15:26:37.000Z Somewhere on a shared drive in your organization, there is a brand voice guide. It has a cover page. It defines three to five adjectives—words like “confident,” “authentic,” or “human.” It includes some examples of dos and don'ts and maybe a section on tone for social versus email. Someone worked hard on it. A designer made it look good. Leadership signed off. And then, nobody reads it. Or, to be more precise, people may read it once, during onboarding. Then, they go and write what they were going to write anyway. Your agency partners have never seen it. And if they have, they want to redo it. The subject matter experts who produce half your thought leadership content don’t know it exists. And when you hire a new content marketer or manager, you send them the link and hope for the best. **This is not a content problem. It’s an infrastructure problem. And confusing the two is why most brand voice work fails.** Before we get into the nuts and bolts, we need to set the stakes. ## What consistent voice is actually worth This is where the conversation usually loses the room, so let’s be direct about the stakes. Inconsistent voice is not just an aesthetic problem. It’s a trust problem. When your content sounds different depending on the channel, the author, or whether it was written in-house or by an agency, you don't sound real. You’re signaling—whether you intend to or not—that there’s no one in charge. That signal reaches your customers, your partners, and your own employees. Consistent voice, on the other hand, compounds. Every piece of content that sounds unmistakably like you reinforces the brand. It builds the kind of recognition that doesn’t require a logo to do the work. It creates the sense—earned, not manufactured — that there is a coherent intelligence behind what you publish. See Patagonia. See Yeti. See Britannica. See Pitchfork. That is not something a style guide delivers. That is something a system builds, over time, through structure and accountability and the quiet, persistent work of editorial governance. **The style guide is where you start. The system is how you get there.** So let's talk about that. ## The style guide illusion There’s a reason brand voice projects feel like they’re done when the document is done. Documentation is visible. You can point to it, share it, put it in a deck. It signals completion in a way that is satisfying to everyone involved. It has a thud factor. But a style guide is not a system. It’s a reference artifact. At best, it’s a starting point—it captures intent. It does not create behavior. Behavior requires structure. It requires process. It required clearly defined responsibilities. It requires the unglamorous organizational work that can't be easily captured in a deliverable. But it is the only thing that actually moves the needle on consistency. ## What a voice system actually contains A voice system is the full operational infrastructure that makes brand voice real across channels, teams, vendors, and time. The style guide is one layer. Here’s what the rest of the system looks like: - **Standards documentation.** Yes, you still need the guide. But it should be built for actual use—structured so writers can find what they need in 30 seconds. They shouldn't have to wade through pages and pages looking for what they need. - **Onboarding integration.** Voice standards need to be part of how every writer, content manager, and relevant vendor gets introduced to your organization. It cannot be an afterthought, such as just providing a link in a welcome email. It needs active orientation. - **Writer enablement.** Training, examples, annotated models of what good looks like. People don’t apply voice guidance they don’t understand. The system has to teach, not just document. - **Editorial review process.** Content that touches your brand should have a defined editorial gate. Who reviews for voice? At what stage? What happens when something is off? If the answer is “it depends” or “nobody, really,” you don’t have a system. - **Quality checkpoints.** Periodic audits, content scoring, or even informal spot-checks can tell you whether the system is working. Without feedback loops, drift is invisible until it’s a crisis. - **Governance ownership.** Someone, with authority and accountability, owns the voice. And they have the power to enforce it. ## The operationalization gap The distance between “we defined our voice” and “our content actually sounds like us” is sometimes as wide as the Pacific. This is where most programs fail. Let's call it the operationalization gap. The gap exists because defining voice is a creative and strategic exercise, while operationalizing it is an organizational one. They require different skills, different stakeholders, and different timelines. Organizations that are good at the first often skip the second entirely, because it’s slower and harder to show in a quarterly review. I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly across large, sophisticated content operations: a beautifully conceived voice framework, built by talented people, that produces exactly zero behavioral change because nobody built the infrastructure to carry it forward. The work dies in the document. Closing the gap requires treating voice not as a brand project with a launch date, but as an ongoing editorial function with ownership, maintenance, and accountability. Moving from the guiding principles to practice. ## Voice governance is editorial leadership Is your voice system functioning? Just answer this question: who owns it? Not who built the style guide. Not who wrote the style guide. Not who designed it. Who, right now, is accountable for whether your content sounds like your brand? Who gets called when a vendor submits copy that completely misses the mark? Who updates the standards when the brand evolves? Who has the authority to say “this isn’t right” and make it stick?In organizations that have solved this problem, the answer is usually an editorial leader with real **authority**—someone who understands both the strategic intent of the voice and the operational realities of content production at scale. (And yes, they've internalized and adapted the Style Guide.) The title varies: Editor-in-Chief, Head of Content, VP of Content Strategy, Chief Content Officer. What matters is that the role exists, has scope, and has the authority to enforce standards rather than just suggest them. For organizations that aren’t ready to hire that leader full-time, a fractional model can provide the same governance function—someone who builds the system, trains the team, and holds the line on standards while the organization develops internal capacity. And, when the time is right, helps you hire the right brand steward (or as an esteemed technical colleague or mine called it: The Brand Cop.) Want to know more and start figuring out how to make voice and tone a living brand asset, [schedule a consultation](https://calendly.com/ttruxell-rubiconcx/30min). ### The history of content strategy and me URL: https://www.truxell.net/the-history-of-content-strategy-and-me/ Last updated: 2026-04-02T19:25:29.000Z ## One of the OGs First things first. I’ve been a content strategist for as long as the term existed (and a little before to be honest). So, I know whereof I speak. I started my post-college life in academia and teaching. When that didn’t take, I got a job as a technical writer/editor. This was for an environmental engineering firm in Atlanta, GA. Then the web happened. I was the one that was always in the office. So, I ended up doing a lot of marketing and leading Internet strategy. Doing nascent content strategy, as it were, but before there was a term for it. But the web had changed my career trajectory. In 1998, I joined USWeb/CKS as a content developer and technical writer. My first gig was technical writing at BellSouth onsite. I finished that by the end of the year, and upon rejoining the rest of the gang in the studio. It didn’t take long to realize that the term content developer didn’t begin to encompass all we were doing. My supervisor at the time, [Robert Manning](https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberttmanning/), and I had long discussions about this. I think he was the one that landed on the term content strategy to formalize it for USWeb/CKS. He even wrote an article about it on the [ClickZ](https://www.clickz.com/) network (link rot, sadly). When I left USWeb/CKS and worked with other content folks, I realized than many agencies had made that leap on their own (IBM, Sapient, Razorfish, Agency.com, and the like). At the time, we focused on the front-end experience for users: ## Copywriting What it says on the tin. Writing long-form and short-from copy for web pages. This includes what is now become UX writing. At the time, we were mostly coming from a writing and editing background. Library science would come later. ## Content inventories The workhorse deliverable for any content project. To enhance any experience, you must first understand what the entire scope of what exists in the content ecosystem. ## Content audits and analysis This is where the strategy enters the picture. Assessing what can be improved in the content based on the results of the content assessment. Even then, we were scoring content based on set criteria. At the time, it was mostly looking at existing content and assessing if for its suitability for the digital medium (i.e., is it scannable, does it use the inverted pyramid, and the like). ## Content briefs or recommendations These are still foundational. A content brief provides directional, high-level recommendations for content on the site to meet not only the stated business goals, but also user needs. These recommendations focus not only on site copy, but inform other types of content as well (i.e. video, audio, imagery, and social content). ## Content matrices The content matrix is and was a detailed map for the future state of the content experience. It documented annotations for the content on each module or page in the wireframe/design. It’s a page-by-page map of the future-state content. It maps each page to a template and identifies which content will be required to build the page. This deliverable has evolved along with the systems required to manage content, getting more detailed and representing content at the component level. ## Editorial style guides This activity/deliverable defines the content style and usage needs for future content across all audiences and channels. It also defines key quality attributes for all content to be produced, supporting the rollout of the appropriate branding and execution for all digital content. ## And what was next? stay tuned for voice and tone, the advent of content management, and such. ### Is generative AI the answer for content? URL: https://www.truxell.net/is-generative-ai-the-answer-for-content/ Last updated: 2026-03-13T19:25:51.000Z ## Or, in which, less is sometimes more. For years, I’ve been advising clients to create more content. Now with AI, it’s easy. But should that be the route? Then, I was working with clients to create real, human authored content on a schedule. The best I could do then is to get them post something new once a month or week. The schedule and keeping to it was key from as user-centered perspective. Now, they can post articles and other things multiple times a day, flooding the zone with their content. But is it truly theirs? It’s just throwing shit (a lot of it). against the wall to see what sticks. None with that human spark or insight. This was never what I advised for my clients. These days, less content does truly mean more, if done correctly. Now you can do more with car less volume to make an impact. AI can generate a lot, but it can’t generate actual insight or a spark that drives the next step.and when you have the spark, it, well, sparkles. I’m not advising that you ditch AI LLM models as generative tools. Instead, use them to spark ideas. Maybe, do this instead: Create three drafts on different but related subjects. put them side by side and look. Look for that spark. Look for the odd comparison. Look for insight that isn’t apparent. ## Always be human, even if your research assistant is Claude.ai And then write or create something that truly connects to other humans as a human. People will recognize that. It’s not rocket science or brain surgery to them, but they’ll never think of rocket surgery for example. Mixed metaphors aren’t its bag. ### The power of taxonomy URL: https://www.truxell.net/the-power-of-taxonomy/ Last updated: 2026-03-13T19:26:04.000Z A recent article at CMS Wire highlights and reinforces what I've been telling my clients for years: [taxonomy act as the backbone the modern user experience](https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/why-a-strong-taxonomy-is-the-backbone-of-exceptional-customer-experience/). In today's digital landscape, customers expect to find what they need quickly and effortlessly. Behind every smooth, intuitive user experience lies a powerful but often invisible force: **taxonomy**. This structured system of content organization isn't just about keeping things tidy—it's the foundation that makes or breaks modern digital experiences. ## What makes taxonomy essential for digital success Think of taxonomy as the DNA of your digital platform. Just as Carl Linnaeus revolutionized biology with his classification system in 1735, digital taxonomy creates order from content chaos. It allows users to navigate and search your content seamlessly. The impact is immediate and measurable: - Customers find what they need faster, reducing friction in their journey - Search engines better understand and rank your content - Personalization engines deliver more relevant recommendations - Analytics reveal clear patterns in user behavior and content gaps ## Six characteristics of an effective taxonomy Building taxonomy that truly serves customers requires strategic thinking across six key areas: 1. **User-centric language**: Use the words your audience actually searches for, not internal jargon. Your keyword data and search analytics should drive terminology choices. 2. **Logical structure**: Create hierarchies that make intuitive sense. A customer looking for boots shouldn't find them categorized under jewelry. 3. **Audience-alignment:** Match your taxonomy's depth to user needs. A specialized B2B platform may need hundreds of terms, while a focused blog might thrive with just ten thoughtful tags. 4. **Foundational flexibility**: Design for change. When new topics emerge (think COVID-19 in 2020), your system should adapt quickly. 5. **Omni-channel consistency:** Apply the same taxonomic structure across all digital touchpoints—website, mobile app, support portal, and community platforms. 6. **Governance and training**:Ensure content teams understand how to tag consistently and specifically, avoiding both over-tagging and under-tagging. ## Where taxonomy creates business value The returns on taxonomic investment show up across every customer touchpoint: **Enhanced Content Discovery** drives deeper engagement as users easily find related articles and resources, increasing session depth and time on site. **Personalization at Scale** becomes possible when AI systems can understand content relationships and user preferences through clear categorization. **SEO Performance** improves dramatically with clean hierarchies, structured URLs, and topic-based content hubs that search engines can easily interpret and rank. **Search Experience** transforms from frustrating to delightful when faceted filters and synonym recognition help users refine results effectively. **Content Intelligence** emerges from analytics that reveal which topics resonate most and where content gaps exist. ## AI Amplifies Taxonomy's Power Far from replacing the need for structured taxonomy, AI actually makes it more critical. Machine learning algorithms and natural language processing tools can suggest tags and automate much of the categorization process, but they need a solid taxonomic foundation to work effectively. AI-powered personalization engines rely on clear content relationships to deliver relevant recommendations. Search algorithms use taxonomic structure to understand context and intent. Even chatbots depend on organized information architectures to provide accurate responses. ## The Bottom Line In an era of information overload, taxonomy isn't just helpful—it's essential. It's the invisible infrastructure that enables customers to find what they need, when they need it. You know, the old saw of content strategy. It can create a frictionless experience that builds loyalty and drives business results. Organizations that invest in thoughtful taxonomy management don't just organize their content better; they create competitive advantages through superior customer experiences, improved SEO performance, and data-driven insights that fuel growth. The question isn't whether you need taxonomy—it's whether yours is powerful enough to support your digital ambitions. ### The great AI copyright heist URL: https://www.truxell.net/the-great-ai-copyright-heist/ Last updated: 2026-03-13T19:26:18.000Z [The AI Now Institute has released Artificial Power: 2025 Landscape Report.](https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/research/ai-now-2025-landscape-report#h-overview) I've summarized and provided my take on [the executive summary of this large study](https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/research/executive-summary-artificial-power). Follow the links to learn more of course. But for now, this is my marker. AI has limited ethical uses, but are the costs worth those? I'm still struggling with that balance to be honest. AI copyright issues, however, aren't so thorny. But I promise This will always be true. What I publish. I write. The AI revolution isn't just reshaping technology—it's the largest intellectual property theft in human history, disguised as innovation. A new report from AI Now exposes how tech giants have systematically pillaged creators' work to build AI systems that now threaten to replace the very people whose labor made them possible. People like me. ## Building on a stolen foundation Every AI system powering today's "revolution" was trained on copyrighted material scraped without permission from authors, artists, journalists, programmers, and countless other creators. These companies didn't ask—they simply took. Books, articles, code repositories, poems, artwork, music, and films were vacuumed up en masse to train models that now compete directly with their creators' livelihoods. OpenAI, despite its name, refuses to disclose its training data. Google's models were fed on copyrighted books through its library digitization project. Meta trained on billions of social media posts containing user-generated content. Meta even seeded and reaped porn videos according to new reports. The entire AI industry is built on what would be considered theft in any other context, laundered through claims of "fair use" and "transformative purpose." This, of course, is absolute bullshit. You bet if I took stuff directly from their marketing materials and replaced OpenAI with OpenAssholes and published it under the transformative purpose bit, their lawyers would bankrupt me. ## The displacement economy The cruel irony is inescapable; creators' own work is being used to build the machines meant to replace them. Journalists' articles train AI systems that publishers now use to generate content more cheaply. Authors' novels and poems feed chatbots that aspiring writers are told to use instead of developing their craft. Artists' portfolios train image generators that clients increasingly prefer over commissioning original work. This isn't creative destruction—it's extractive parasitism. The AI industry has found a way to monetize human creativity without compensating creators, while simultaneously devaluing the skills and expertise that took lifetimes to develop. They've turned our collective cultural heritage into training data for profit-maximizing algorithms. The rich take and take and profit, while those who build are left holding the fucking empty bag. ## But, the productivity right? Tech companies frame AI as boosting "productivity," but whose productivity are we talking about? When Microsoft's Copilot helps software engineers write code faster, it's not making programmers more productive—it's making them replaceable. The value goes to Microsoft and employers who can extract more output for the same wages, while developers see their specialized knowledge commoditized, downgraded, and disrespected. This applies equally to writers and artists in other contexts. And by all accounts the code is crap even though it sort of works. Gone is the elegance. The same pattern repeats across industries. AI doesn't enhance human creativity; it standardizes and mechanizes it, surgically removing the creative spark and transplanting rote machine learning. Big problems are not solved in any context without that moment of creative intuition that AI is incapable of. The "productivity" gains flow upward to shareholders. And this was always the point. The actual writers and artists face downward pressure on wages and working conditions. The pressure is real. I'm seeing hourly rates that are 25% of what I could command even last year. Which would be all well and good if the end product were good. But it's not. It's exactly what you'd expect from Eliza the chatbot with a larger vocabulary and phrases learned from people who can actually write, lacking the connections and context. ## The haves and have nots It always comes back to class it seems. The AI industry's approach to copyright reveals its true nature. It's a wealth extraction mechanism designed by and for the already powerful. When individual creators sue for copyright infringement, they face armies of lawyers and claims that training AI models constitutes fair use. Meanwhile, these same companies zealously protect their own intellectual property, using patents and trade secrets to maintain their advantages. See above. The message is clear—your creative work belongs to everyone (meaning everyone with means like tech giants), but their algorithms belong only to them. They've created a system where human knowledge and creativity are treated as free raw materials while machine outputs are considered proprietary products worthy of protection. *(Ed: Note: I use the em dash on purpose as a human, despite all the hair pulling and clothes rending on LinkedIn.)* ## **Laundering human labor** The worst part? AI systems obscure their dependence on human labor and creativity. When ChatGPT generates text or DALL-E creates an image, the output appears to emerge from the machine itself. The thousands of writers, artists, and other creators whose work enabled these capabilities become invisible, their contributions unacknowledged and, more crucially, uncompensated. This erasure isn't accidental—it's necessary for their business models. If users understood that AI outputs are sophisticated recombinations of existing human work, the mystique would disappear. The technology would be revealed as an elaborate mash-up scheme, capturing value from creators who can't afford to sue while selling their transformed labor back to the market. ## By whom exactly Traditional media may have had its flaws, but its flaws were human and noted as such with errata. It always maintained concepts of attribution, credit, and compensation. AI systems obliterate these norms entirely. When an AI model generates content based on training data that included your work, you'll never know. There's no citation, no royalty, no acknowledgment that your labor contributed to the output. This represents a fundamental shift from an economy based on creating and sharing ideas to one based on hoarding and recombining them without consent. We're moving toward a world where the concept of intellectual ownership becomes meaningless for individual creators while remaining absolute for platform owners. My own work on content strategy has been ripped off in such a way. Parts of some its descriptions match mine verbatim, despite the years between their generation (this may have change to pick on one of my colleagues by now as I've been keeping a lower profile socially). ## Other costs to society The environmental cost of training and running AI models represents another form of theft—from future generations. These systems require massive energy consumption and water usage, contributing to climate change while providing dubious benefits to society. The companies profiting from AI externalize these environmental costs while claiming their technology will somehow solve the climate crisis they're actively worsening. So much for technology saving the future. It's as it always was. All about the profits as long as possible. Roll on the bed of cash until you die and to hell with everyone else. ## The regulatory capture As evidence of AI's harmful impacts mounts, the industry has deployed sophisticated regulatory strategies. They fund academic research, hire former government officials, and shape policy discussions to focus on hypothetical future risks rather than present harms. Meanwhile, copyright holders struggling to protect their work face an uphill battle against well-funded lobbying efforts. The "AI arms race" with China provides convenient cover for avoiding accountability. Any attempt to enforce copyright law or require consent for training data is framed as hampering American competitiveness, even as these same companies freely exploit the work of American creators. ## Can we regain what is lost? The current trajectory threatens to destroy the economic foundation for human creativity. Why invest years learning to write, code, or create art if AI can produce "good enough" alternatives instantly? We're witnessing the devaluation of human skill and the commoditization of culture itself. Independent media, already struggling against platform monopolization, faces an existential threat from AI-generated content. Publishers can replace expensive human journalists with cheap algorithmic substitutes trained on their own archives. The feedback loop is devastating: human-created content trains AI systems that then compete with and ultimately replace their creators. We must treat AI for what it is: an intellectual property laundering scheme that must be subject to the same laws governing any other use of copyrighted material. This means: **Enforcing Existing Copyright Law**: No amount of "transformation" should exempt AI training from requiring permission to use copyrighted works. Clearly define what "fair use" is in today's environment. **Mandatory Licensing and Compensation**: AI companies should pay for the content they use, just like any other media company licensing copyrighted material. **Transparency Requirements**: Companies must disclose their training data so creators can identify unauthorized use of their work. **Creator Rights**: Individuals should have the right to opt out of AI training and remove their work from datasets. **Economic Justice**: Revenue sharing mechanisms should ensure creators benefit from AI systems trained on their work. The AI industry wants us to believe this transformation is inevitable, that resistance is futile. But there's nothing natural or inevitable about a system that concentrates wealth by stealing from creators. We have laws protecting intellectual property for good reason—it's time to enforce them against the biggest violators in history. The future of human creativity hangs in the balance. We can either accept a world where our cultural output becomes free training data for corporate algorithms, or we can fight for an economy that values and compensates human creativity. The choice is ours, but only if we act now. ### All the brands URL: https://www.truxell.net/all-the-brands-2/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T15:27:14.000Z Some of the brands I've worked with over the many years. These span over 25 years of work, both on the agency and client side. **7** agencies **5** names for one of those agencies (Sape folks know) **3** client side positions **1** Open for work sign, with "Gone Fishin'" on the back ### Lots of tech URL: https://www.truxell.net/all-the-brands/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T15:27:25.000Z So many content management systems. So many ways to think about content. One real driving principle—content lives separate from the design from a tech perspective. From headless to WYSIWYG back to headless (and now headless and naked!) ### Where else can you find me? URL: https://www.truxell.net/coming-soon/ Last updated: 2026-03-13T19:28:08.000Z Ok, so I'm launching this site to represent me as a contract resource or a fractional solution to your content problems. Call this an AB test. What works better? Do I lead with a corporate and agency approach? I have [rubicon.cx](https://rubicon.cx) for that. Personally, I experiment with things and natter on about music a lot at [flannelenigma.com](https://flannelenigma.com) (The real personal me. All the back end of the mullet so to speak.) And the social stuff. I'm really trying to limit my placement on the whole Meta suite, so I use Flickr instead of Insta. WhatsApp? What's that? Messenger, sadly, is a necessary evil still. That said, I do live other places online: check out my [Linktree](https://linktr.ee/flannelenigma). ### ChatGPT, or how I learned to stop worrying and not hate AI URL: https://www.truxell.net/chatgpt-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-not-hate-ai/ Last updated: 2026-04-29T14:36:57.000Z [ChatGPT](https://chat.openai.com/chat) has been in the news a lot lately. The glut news has kicked off a fresh round of hand wringing by content professionals. How do ChatGPT and content play together? Of course, we all worry about the potential ramifications, but I'm not sure the news is all bad. I've spent a lot of time over the last week or so playing with the tool. I'll detail some of my explorations in another post. I've also had many conversations about it with other professionals. I've gathered my thoughts here and drawn some preliminary conclusions. We all like to bring our best work for our clients. However, I've learned over the years that not all clients appreciate that effort. Creating content that meets what our criteria for successful content requires effort: 1. Content that is frequently updated 2. Content that embodies the brand voice 3. Content that clearly differentiates them from their competitors 4. Content that has a clear purpose and next step Too many clients will content themselves with content that merely checks the first box. Call it quantity versus quality. When they only see the bottom line, ChatGPT will always be a consideration for them. Short term, this will have them seeing only the savings now. Yes, they can cut expensive content professionals from their budget. But at what long-term cost? Cutting content expenses will inevitable affect how their potential customers perceive their brand. Saving money now could only lead to greater crisis expenses in the longer term. As a friend said on LinkedIn, ChatGPT "might feed 'penny-wise, pound-foolish' thinking," and I agree wholeheartedly. My own experience will the tool bears this out. I've able to churn out a lot quality, crap content. Of course, this will meet content creation quotas and ave a lot money for companies that don't mind sacrificing quality for quantity. That's not to say that we can dismiss ChatGPT out of hand. For clients that do care about quality, it could provide a rough first draft of content. This could take some of the initial legwork a content creator usually requires. They could then take the content, edit it, infuse it with the appropriate voice and tone, and embellish it to meet the content's purpose. So, even on the quality side, it may save some time and money up front. By automating one step, it could still enable more quanity, slightly lower costs without sacrificing quality. This could play out in a couple of ways: 1. We can use the rough first draft and build on it as a human? 2. Or we can make more refined queries of the AI to train it with more data? As my friend said in our conversation, "A wise man once told me, 'As good as you are, you can’t compete with free.'" To which I replied, "another wise man also said 'there ain't no free lunch.'" As content professionals, we should look at ChatGPT not as our replacement, but as a tool to add to our toolbox. (Much as tools like Screaming Frog and Site Bulb replaced manual inventories.) Image credit: By Cryteria - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Cross-posted at [flannelenigma.com](https://flannelenigma.com/2022/12/chatgpt-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-not-hate-ai/). ### Incredible infographic URL: https://www.truxell.net/incredible-infographic/ Last updated: 2026-04-29T14:37:16.000Z We love to give credit where credit is due. COVID-19 is complex, especially when the variants are considered, and there is a lot of contradictory information (much of it absolutely false) floating around social media. This is why [this infographic posted to Facebeook by the Baltimore City Health Department](https://www.facebook.com/BaltimoreHealth/photos/pcb.10159244388310642/10159244385470642) is so refreshing in simplifying the message through the noise. Well done folks! ### Truly immersive content has arrived URL: https://www.truxell.net/immersive-content-strategy-becomes-more-real/ Last updated: 2026-04-29T14:38:39.000Z ## We must find new ways to think about it This is something we've been thinking about a lot here at Rubicon CX, especially as we emerge from the pandemic lock down and begin processing the new ways of engaging with content on our own terms that came along with it for better or worse. Not everything was successful, but users began to look to experience new ways of interacting with content, in some ways paralleling our thinking around the future of content in physical spaces and on the go (mobility). With the quarantine, users began to look to bring those richer, immersive experiences home is all sorts of ways—from the obvious (Zoom Calls) to the not so obvious (content with playlists and voice over build around visual and editorial content. In fact, I was lucky enough to have a client last year where some of these began to intersect: voice, natural language, rich online content, automobiles, and navigation. But more on this to come... For now, the always impressive A List Apart, [begins to echo our thoughts](https://alistapart.com/article/immersive-content-strategy/): We’re transitioning to a new world of remote work and digital content. We’re also experimenting with unprecedented content channels that, not too long ago, elicited chuckles at the watercooler, like voice interfaces, digital signage, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Many factors are responsible. Perhaps it’s because we yearn for immersive spaces that temporarily resurrect the Before Times, or maybe it’s due to the boredom and tedium of our now-cemented stuck-at-home routines. But aural user experiences slinging [voice content](https://alistapart.com/article/usability-testing-for-voice-content/), and immersive user experiences unlocking new forms of interacting with formerly web-bound content, are no longer figments of science fiction. They’re fast becoming a reality in the here and now. Preston So, from the article Of course, he talks about the usual suspects: extended reality, augmented reality, and virtual reality. But what gets really interesting is how we think about content to feed such experiences. Every device, channel, and and **context** required a different way of thinking about how the user is interacting with content, more now than ever. I even hesitated to use the word "channel" in the previous sentence, because what we've witness is the deliberate blurring of lines between "channels" that are identified as devices or locations, or, in fact, tearing down those walls altogether. This calls not only for what has been variously called before nimble or choreographed content into something even more independent, if the author's words: "Agnostic Content." We not usually ones for all the content buzz words du jour (see above, sorry RL), but this one makes a hell of a lot of sense to us. This is going to be further explored in a fortcoming book by the article's author, and I'm really looking forward to reading it. Or,a as he puts it: Today, content also has to be ready for contextless situations—not only in truncated form when we struggle to make out tiny text on our smartwatches or scroll through new television series on Roku but also in places it’s never ended up before. As the twenty-first century continues apace, our clients and our teams are beginning to come to terms with the fact that the way copy is consumed in just a few decades will bear no resemblance whatsoever to the prosaic browsers and even smartphones of today. Preston So from the article Where this will get really intesting (which we will need think about and explore further) are the implications of this on personalization. Really, read the whole damn thing. The article even gets into some of the nuts and bolts of how we as content and experience strategists need to retool the tools in our toolbox to account for this, wirh particular guidance on the always starting point, the content audit. While I could pick some nits on some of the details, I think the main thrust is dead on. ### My city burned last night URL: https://www.truxell.net/my-city-burned-last-night/ Last updated: 2026-04-29T14:39:12.000Z I'm not sure how to really approach this. I'm angry. I'm sad. I'm outraged. I'm depressed. I'm using this image way too much these days, but the alternative is a black block. My friend Helen from University pulled together a list of resources that we should all keep in our back pocket. This has nothing to do with Content Strategy or Experience. It has to do with humanity. I didn't know where else to put this, so just bear with me and all of us. Be safe. Be well. And care for your fellow humans. #### Share this ### Content in a Plague Year URL: https://www.truxell.net/content-in-a-plague-year/ Last updated: 2025-09-28T21:06:03.000Z As the entire planet struggles to come to terms with its new reality in the phase of the novel COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve begun to reflect a bit on the ramifications for what it is that we do. It would be very easy right now to pat ourselves on the backs and say something like “your content is now more important, blah, blah, blah”. But that’s not what I’ve been thinking about. Instead, I’ve been thinking about the communications and messaging I’ve received as I’m bound in my home office, still working but isolated from most contact in the physical realm. I’ve received emails from every company I’ve ever done business with it seems, and if not emails, many of the sites that I frequent has a banner or some over messaging related to the pandemic. And I’m asking myself, “is all of this really necessary?” Of course, there is a scale here. Do I need to know what steps my bank or other businesses that I still physically visit are taken to address them pandemic? Absolutely yes. This includes store hours, strict enforcement of social distancing, and the use of PPE (personal protective equipment, sorry my wife is nurse). This is crucial communication, and I need these messages reinforced at every touch point. The next part of the spectrum includes those businesses or services which occur largely online. I’m thinking of basic e-commerce (Amazon, Lowe’s, Bombas, et. al) and meal delivery services (DoorDash, Uber Eats, GrubHub, and the like), since they involve an actual human packing your goods and bringing it to you. They are just as vulnerable as anyone else. And the steps they take have material impact on me. And then there are those businesses that I interact with exclusively online that don’t require any human contact. I’m thinking specifically here of those entities whose only product is their content. Of course, I’m happy to know what Vox or the Washington Post or WSBTV are doing to protect their employees, but is it really critical to me? Does it impact how I go about my daily quarantined life? Only insofar as those that are being proactive and good to their employees are more likely to receive my support and business in the future. I guess the point I’m trying to get at here is that all communications and content are not created equal, and over-proliferation of these messages tends to drown out the really important ones. There’s a lesson to learned here in a post-COVID world too. Think about the hierarchy of communications and messaging. Not all pieces of content are created equal and have equal importance to those viewing them. So, at the end of the day, while the message is timely, doesn’t mean it’s always relevant. *\[Update: Just got an email from Delta about retaining my status for an extra year. This impacts me materially (perhaps), even though it doesn't involve an actual person and social distancing. Call this the exception that proves there rule above. It is still *relevant* though.\]*\\ \*I can never pass up the opportunity for a literary allusion. And they said I wouldn’t use my English degrees. #### Share this ### The end of personalization? URL: https://www.truxell.net/the-end-of-personalization/ Last updated: 2026-04-29T14:39:33.000Z At least that what the headline of [this report](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-12-02-gartner-predicts-80--of-marketers-will-abandon-person) from Gartner implies. Ignore the headline folks, only a few companies are even equipped to deal with the level of personalization that they are talking about, and that requires deep data and lots of smart systems running on the back-end. Only a couple of companies come to mind that even currently attempt to personalize content at this level (I'm looking at you Amazon). What does this mean for most companies? there is still a lot that can be done from a content and experience perspective to provide more meaningful information for our users. Super-detailed one-to-one personalization is sometimes self defeating given the investment required. That doesn't mean that you can't segment you customers in very meaningful ways to crate smaller groups that have shared preferences, likes, dislikes, etc. Crafting experiences around such groupings can still yield meaningful, personalized experiences, even if it isn't an experience crafted just for one. ### Where is the brand in SharePoint Modern? URL: https://www.truxell.net/where-is-the-brand-in-sharepoint-modern/ Last updated: 2026-04-29T14:38:20.000Z CMS Report recently posted an article titled, "[Have We Lost a Bit of Heart and Soul in the Shift to SharePoint Modern?"](https://www.cmswire.com/digital-workplace/have-we-lost-a-bit-of-heart-and-soul-in-the-shift-to-sharepoint-modern/) I have to say that I agree with a lot of the point the article makes. I spent a fair amount of time on SharePoint Modern projects in the last year of so, and you know what, I often found myself asking this same question. In the quest for easy implementation and out-of-the-box functionality, a lot is often left by the wayside. Look, I get it. Companies have to deal with limited budgets, and intranets or digital workspaces are generally low on their list of priorities, even though they tend to recognized their importance as a productivity tool. So, this leads to maximizing what they can get for the least amount of money. Hence, implementing SharePoint Modern off the shelf as much as possible. Don't get me wrong, SharePoint is a powerful tool, but to make it truly your own, customization will always be required, and this doesn't mean the functions and features implemented. Where is the branding element. As I've said many time, internal audiences are also audiences that are important for a brand to thrive, and any experience must speak to them in this way, embodying the brand just as much as the public experiences do. So loosen up the purse strings, just a little most of the time, to make sure that the digital workspace embodies the brand just as much as any public experience. #### Share this ### Brand and experience URL: https://www.truxell.net/brand-and-experience/ Last updated: 2026-04-29T14:36:31.000Z \[Note: moved from earlier content blog, Contented\] https://vimeo.com/7493030 ### Wal-Mart has a blog URL: https://www.truxell.net/583-2/ Last updated: 2026-04-29T14:38:04.000Z Believe it or not, I come not to bury Wal-Mart, but to praise it. Quietly launched late last year, Wal-Mart's [Check Out](https://www.blogger.com/#) blog provides a good example to all would-be corporate blogs. Most corporate blogs seem to be either mere extensions of the company's PR department--every post sounds like a press release--or bland soulless entities that would have its readers believe that the blog is actually penned by the CEO or other ranking executive (you can just smell the vetting in those too). Unlike the vast majority of white-bread company blogs, however, the authors for the Wal-Mart blog actually have their own voices and personalities (as well as pictures that make them even more immediate). Even more surprisingly given the passions that Wal-Mart can stir among some segments of the population, from the posts I've been seeing over the last couple of weeks, the bloggers and company itself takes a pretty liberal stance on commenting. There's no evidence of censoring negative comments or stifling debate withing the comments. Take note companies. This is how it should be done. Blogs require real voices to even past the lowest muster test for authenticity, and real conversation and community is another must in this medium. Does the Check Out blog pass these tests? Check. So far, I've found some of the posts to be very interesting. This will bear following for a while. If anything changes, I'll be the first to jump all over. Of course, [Wal-Mart has been burned once already](https://www.blogger.com/#) by this whole blogging thing. So it's nice to see them do it right this time around. \[Note: moved from earlier content blog, Contented\] ### Brand Obama URL: https://www.truxell.net/brand-obama/ Last updated: 2025-09-28T21:06:05.000Z A [Newsweek blog has an interesting post](https://www.blogger.com/#) describing how Obama's branding efforts are more thorough and complete than any campaign thus far, and certainly more so than his rival. It explores something I've been thinking about as well. Obama's "brand" looks way more Apple or Target than Hillary's or McCain's (Dell and Wal-Mart/Army circa 2003). Also, his "O" logo scales much better online than Hillary's. From a copy perspective, Obama definitely has a tagline, whereas Hillary doesn't that I can find. "Ready from day one" just doesn't cut the mustard. While "Change I can believe in" isn't great (is that a preposition I see at the end of that sentence?), at least it's an attempt. What does this mean. Not a heck of a lot, but I still think it's interesting. Could something like this influence those of us that work in such matters? Perhaps, but we were probably pre-disposed to support him anyway. Of course these brief thoughts prompt me to start a content comparison of the major candidates websites. I'll try to get to that perhaps this weekend. \[Note: moved from earlier content blog, Contented\] ### Don't "Click Here" URL: https://www.truxell.net/dont-click-here/ Last updated: 2026-04-29T14:39:54.000Z One of the things that it seems that I always have to tell my clients is avoiding using "Click Here" as a link. Surf around the web a few times, and you'll see this phrase countless times in countless environments in countless treatments. Other than being imperative, what does this tell the person reading the page? Nothing. It's merely an exhortation, an instruction without inducement. If you wrote "Jump off a bridge," would you expect anyone to follow the instruction without further information? That's really all "click here" is. Think about the most frequent use of this phrase is. Banner ads, pop-up windows. Do you really want to equate your links with an exhortation to shoot a duck on a banner ad? Instead of taking this easy way out, your links and calls to action should give the end user some indication of what they will find once they select a particular link. I'm not saying it should always match the title of the page it leads to. I'd never be so dogmatic. In any event though, it should give a bit of a preview as to what a user will find on the other side. \[Note: moved from earlier content blog, Contented\] ### This is my career on drugs URL: https://www.truxell.net/this-is-my-career-on-drugs/ Last updated: 2026-04-29T14:37:48.000Z Here is the full text of a legitimate business e-mail I just sent in response to a request for helping out with a couple of hours of content work for a project I'm not assigned to: > I'm pretty busy helping out with Don't Ask, or I Don't Know (I can't keep them straight), but I may have some time at the end of the week. I'll try and catch up with you on IM tomorrow to try and figure something out. Any questions? \[Note: moved from earlier content blog, Contented\] ### What I am going on about here anyways? URL: https://www.truxell.net/what-i-am-going-on-about-here-anyways/ Last updated: 2026-04-29T14:36:11.000Z After many, many years of writing for the web and dealing with content strategy for various and sundry clients, I've found that I repeat myself a lot from engagement to engagement. So much so, I thought I'd start writing about writing for the web and about content strategy in general since I've seen so few resources of this type to point these things out. I don't expect that I'll be repeating myself any less, but at least I'll be able to document a lot of things, spark a few discussions, and generally get things off my chest (the pessimistic view) or provide some insight into how best to deal with the written word and such on the web (the optimistic view). \[Note: moved from earlier content blog, Contented\]