In episode 86 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bill Swallow continue their discussion about the steps to structure, how to move from unstructured content to structure, and what each level of maturity looks like.
“Step five is when you’re  thinking even your structure is structured. You’re really thinking about how to take this to the highest possible level, how to get the most out of your automation, and how to make sure that the way you’re delivering your content is maximum efficiency.”
– Gretyl Kinsey

Related links: 

* Steps to structured content (podcast, part 1)
* The challenge of digital transformation

Twitter handles:

* @gretylkinsey
* @billswallow

Transcript:
GK:                   Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about the steps to structure, how to move from unstructured content to structure and what each level of maturity looks like. This is part two of a two-part podcast. Hello, and welcome. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.
BS:                   And I’m Bill Swallow.
GK:                   And today we’re continuing our discussion about the steps to structure. So we previously covered steps one and two, which are unstructured phase, and step three, which is getting to structure. There’s step four, which is customized or specialized structure. So could you tell us a little bit about what that means compared to just sort of the baseline structure?
BS:                   Sure. So once you have everything in your structured format, chances are you’re going to start finding little bits of differences or dissonance between the type of content that you’re producing and what the structure will allow you to use. You may say, “Well, we have this very specific type of paragraph, or this very specific block of content that doesn’t really fit into the structure in its own native form.” We want to be able to handle it, and we want to call it something unique. We want to be able to structure it uniquely as well, yet still use it within the framework of everything else we’re doing. So this act of specialization or customization is kind of the next step because now you’re looking at the structure and saying, “This is great, but we can do more with this.” So you’re fine tuning and tailoring things a bit more so that you can label your content more appropriate to your needs and be able to handle that content specifically for the types of uses for that content.
GK:                   Yeah. Absolutely. And I think this is an area where we start to really see a lot more work on the kind of metadata and taxonomy side of things because that’s when you start thinking, “Okay. Now that everything actually is structured, now we can think about how this content needs to be organized, how it needs to be sorted and filtered, how both our authors and our customers need to be able to search for the particular information that they need within this content set, how we might need to do something like personalized delivery.” So once you kind of have that foundation laid down with just the basics of structure, that’s where you really kind of start to think about: Okay, how do we want to customize our metadata? And how do we want to build out some sort of a taxonomy that we can support with metadata so that the content is not just tag...