From civic activism to the European Council 🙌 Amazing story of consistently showing up for the people.

It’s always wine o’clock somewhere when you need it. Hang in there 🙌

Take that away, and you’re asking uncomfortable things like ‘is the way we’ve always done things actually ok?’ or ‘is this making us money?’. That’s why you get the friction and resistance. If the leadership is willing to try new things, you’ve got a chance. If they won’t, it’s a losing battle.

How do you measure performance for a knowledge base? What do you track? What’s success for a content designer working on a product? (Actually, I think those people have it easier, but maybe that’s just me) volume is easy to count.

…either by controlling where they go love geographically or do time-series analysis, can you prove you brought in revenue? If not, you end up comparing 50 ads with 3 reports. Which sounds better(and took less effort to do?) and this is just marketing.

An example (and ongoing debate): it’s easy to justify budgets for paid campaigns on social, because tracking (supposedly) gives you the ability to prove your ROI. But do 3 good researched content pieces that give you brand exposure, but if you can’t control their visibility with statistical models..

I think the reality is somewhere between scenario 2 and 3. Also, you might have hit the nail on its head with ‘tying performance metrics with volume of content published’. I think the actual problem is the maturity of orgs in terms of how they track metrics / what brings them revenue.

But to also switch back to the org’s perspective (I was both no. 2 and 3), there’s usually a lot of anxiety and resistance. That content publishing does something for the org, internally (making managers feel in the spotlight) or externally (mkt results). U need alternatives before taking it away

3) The CS doesn’t have either authority or organisational awareness, so all their recommendations hit a brick wall and they find no partners to work with. That’s usually a recipe for burnout, and a miserable place to be in.

2) The CS doesn’t have authority, but they have organisational awareness and change management skills (I’m calling that the ability to make people buy into new processes even when they’re uncomfortable). So they find pilot projects and ways to show data insights to get the org to do less content

This is one of those questions you can only answer with ‘It depends’. There’s a couple of scenarios how this can play out.

1) The CS has the authority and the change management skills to create the roadmap towards the new world they’re aiming for, and the rest of the org will follow

I think they will have retired and gone into arts and crafts. Or on a beach. Or you know… some place like that.

When organisations don’t have proper content governance put in place, different teams will go off doing their own thing, trying to solve their own problems. They’ll get rewarded for bringing results, and no one gets brownie points for paying attention to the bigger picture. 🥲

Please add me as well! So grateful you're putting this together and also to see this place take off. I missed the nice internet.

The top 150 science communicators on here; sadly, no men qualified for the list. Maybe next time.

go.bsky.app/JKv3BWU