 All right. Well, hello everybody. Welcome back to another let's discuss with Parsons TKO I am your always fun and chipper and drink too much coffee hosts Tony Cappuccini and the CEO and co-founder of Parsons TKO and Today for our topic of let's discuss taxonomy. I'm joined by two of my colleagues Nate Parsons and Stefan Bergkrieger who you may have seen in another episode or two But I'll let them just introduce themselves the cases your first time joining us Maybe Nate you go first. All right. I'm with as Tony has mentioned I'm a Nate Parsons chief strategy officer of Parsons TKO and also co-founder And I'm Stefan Bergkrieger chief analytics officer at Parsons TKO and I lead the data strategy team Where we spend quite a lot of time talking about taxonomy actually It's become sort of a daily Daily conversation for us as taxonomy touches a lot of parts of how organizations understand their content and their performance So very much looking forward to this one So, you know our let's discuss conversations are Informal but informed Topics of things that we like to discuss as a company. We were having these types of conversations internally And literally today's was from a ginormous slack thread that started two days ago between Stefan and Nate That was on the topic of taxonomy It comes up a lot in conversations here So to kick it off. I mean, I think The word taxonomy. I mean, I've been in the game for 20 some years now I remember at a certain organization I was working at in 2007 or 2008. I had It was like a seven foot tall sheet of paper with all the possible words And we had all we actually had a library staff at the time so when they were getting in on it And I would take this to the executive all these different vice presidents offices But you need to decide on these words You know, that's but that's one basic probably understanding taxonomy and but it's just to note that I I think the word Potentially has lots of different meetings for different folks Which probably obscures or hinders what we really mean by it from the technical sense Of how I can help an organization. So I hope that's maybe a good leading question for For one of you to dive in with Yeah, that's is the word too big. I don't know. Can we define it? Yeah, it's interesting You know, I think You know the way that for a lot of folks that they got they first encounter taxonomy and where it's kind of Been historically a part of the digital landscape is that it's been something that happened on websites where You know content items would have these Tags these like words at the bottom of the post or the story or whatever that would be The summary of the three important or five important kind of things that the story was about and they were sort of these almost summarizations of longer form content and You know Because of that and because of the way that a lot of people thought about them They're often applied after the fact people would write a story and then they would think Ah, what is the story about and they would select the content items that they thought it was from This list and that would become the taxonomy that was applied and over the course of time People sort of waffled between two kinds of polls one where they wanted to be very exhaustive And they would have these really big taxonomies like those pages and pages of things where it was like Oh, well northern ireland is different from southern ireland, which is different from western ireland But this is also about wintertime in ireland and those would all get different tags on the story, you know And then there was the other school thought which was like no It's going to be highly managed and you can't make up any other tags And it's just going to be this thing So if you had a story about ireland and you didn't have an ireland tag you're like, well, it's about the uk That's close enough bam going to put the uk tag on this thing and then off you go right and like those are Kind of the ways that most taxonomy got applied and because of that, you know sort of Usage, you know the way that it often was used by users once it had been applied is they would click on those tags to see more stories About that particular topic and what they would see is then a big list of content that all shared that tag, right? And so that was kind of taxonomy is a system, right? And as you can imagine, it's all pretty unintentional It's pretty divorced from you know organizational strategy And it doesn't have a lot to do with helping the user understand what your opinions are, right? Because they don't discover the taxonomy in full they discovered in these little atomic pieces, right? They find one tag and that's all they know about your taxonomy. They don't really get to see your understanding of the You know descriptive world the way your taxonomy is organized Yeah, I mean I'll I'll jump in there. I'm getting climbing back on board. I have to say given my Irish family members some of the things you said about Tagging Ireland in different ways or hard to recover from but But I will say that I think that's exactly right And I think that heritage of taxonomy in the web world has been a really tough thing for people to overcome And this stems from a conversation I just had yesterday where That use of taxonomy as a way to browse your content Is actually not that engaging a user experience for users And so I think a lot of people have this heritage. This is the one way they've ever seen taxonomy used on a website That's the most forward-facing way that it's used on a website And then people who watch the analytics say oh well people don't even really use that So why should I care and so it gets really neglected in a lot of ways? But I think that misses out on this whole world of opportunity Of ways in which taxonomy can be leveraged both through taking those features those sort of traditional features of taxonomy on a website And making them better actually spending some time on user experience Figuring out how you can use it to You know syndicate content. Well, I think yeah, we could we could go on and list a whole bunch of ways In which which taxonomy can be used UX wise, but then I think beyond that There's taxonomy in its role for reporting and measurement being able to actually explore what People do with your content based on how you think of your content. There's taxonomy for You know strategic alignment. There's taxonomy for integrating your systems And so I think there's just so many different ways to to slice and dice your content And and reach into you know the the different use cases of those taxonomies I don't know Nate. I mean of all those things. I mean which ones which ones I guess Have you seen the most potential for organizations to do something new and revolutionary? Yeah, I think the the the first one is just switching around where in the strategic process taxonomy emerges or occurs, you know, which is to say like You know every organization I've ever encountered has an a theory of education or a theory of change about how the world is and how it could be better and how they can influence it and that's often represented in An ephemeral and kind of conversational way within those organizations and it's rarely captured in any kind of visual document or any kind of strategy document and You know Ironically there are millions of things that look just like taxonomies that people don't call taxonomies to help come up with their strategies Like two popular ones are mind maps which people do to kind of brainstorm and find all the things that are connected And concept maps which are how are these two concepts related? Which one is important in the hierarchy and how should you learn things like oh this one before this one before this one? That's sort of order of operation of things And you know those documents are really taxonomies, you know, they're just not considered as such And they're rarely formalized as such they're used as initial tools And then they are graduate to other things that don't even look like those and they're kind of left behind And then they sort of sometimes reemerge in some kind of, you know, frankenstein format eventually back through the taxonomy system to get supplied But the most revolutionary thing is just to start and continue using a visual taxonomy document, you know, and I think that That does a couple of amazing things in the organizations to do it one They have serious conversations about the kind of Content and the kind of outreach they're going to conduct because they, you know Need to be able to put content into each of the taxonomy buckets that they're creating, you know They also create consensus around what are the The correlations of topics like these three atomic things roll up to this bigger thing and that's important And we want to talk about the bigger thing And it's really easy for experts especially to miss the middle right They start with their mission and they get right down into the details But then that flow of like hey this major concept is supported by all these minor concepts We're working on and we chose these minor concepts because they help advance this major concept Is often sort of undersold or implied but not actually spoken to So it helps with that and you know, I think there's much, you know Sort of dramatically from a systems level when you start and use that taxonomy It doesn't just exist on the web it exists on You know content records in the crm and exists and how email and outreach is conducted It exists and how reports are quantified it reports how funding is allocated it reports in terms of strategy Oh, we're going to do this this year and you know in two more years We're going to stop working on this part of the tree We're going to add this part of the tree and it becomes a management function So I think you know ironically this the most amazing part of it is just starting with it and sticking with it But it's it's like, you know done by you know a hundredth of the organizations we run into So as you guys are talking i'm i'm sitting here and i'm thinking We drive really hard into digital transformation, right every organizations needing to do this now You like it or not it is here and you've got to start maneuvering And taxonomy today in that essence in my head it becomes this underpinning, right? Like it actually becomes an essential element Where when I think of it was funny because you're you're talking about tagging and all the different tags and All I could think of was web 2.0 now you can like Do the content yourself so it was web 2.0 to blame but you know there was this moment of oh I get taxonomy It's not this crazy thing that librarians talk about all the time. It's this other piece of information I could put out for findability Because when the web was still a little newer, right? Oh, I want to really make sure that because everyone believed at least I did I think in like 2002 that if I added these tags Somehow some search engine Maybe google call it would grab it and everybody would find my stuff So I guess two things, right? I mean does it really help with findability? Where where does the google machine play into things like this and then thinking about taxonomy? I think you've said it before and maybe step into taxonomy as a strategy, right? Because that that really underpins and strengthens The componentry of a digital transformation thoughts I mean, I'll I'll speak from the why is it? I mean, why is it useful in the in the technical side and the technical systems? I mean, I think one of the biggest things. I mean if you want the exciting answer Uh, personalization personalization and marketing automation. They all completely depend on consistent and comprehensive and well managed well curated taxonomies You know, Nate was talking about how taxonomy is Can be and should be Reflected across all of your systems all of your systems have to play a role in creating a cohesive user experience for your audiences and unless you can figure out here's The topics that I cover on the website here are the topics that people are interested in Here are the topics that we're emailing people about Unless you can connect the dots between those you can't create that cohesive experience every every Time you talk to a person it's from scratch and they're just a new person In the way you're writing for them. And so taxonomy can be the connective tissue between all these different systems And so I think you know, this is even setting SEO aside. How do you SEOs about how do you find Help people find you but once people have found you how do you build a relationship with them? And and that's where taxonomy is crucially important for you to be able to learn about your audiences and their interests In a structured way that Your systems can then also use to make decisions about outreach So I think I think that's you know that alone. I think it makes the case for for taxonomy Yeah, just to to plan that a little bit, you know, one of the the coming evolutions in technology is the movement from systems that filter content Dictionaries down to what you're looking for like google tries to filter the whole web down into like the 10 or 20 Things that things you might be interested in to a systems that try and understand your intent And then try and match things that fit your intent better And you know, everyone has sort of experienced this with either syria or lexa or google assistant or one of those systems where you're like Tell me the weather in denver, right? And it tries to figure out that you want to know the weather report in denver colorado Because you're in the united states and it's implying all these things and it's trying to figure out your intention And then give you data that fits your intention And you know taxonomies are an important stepping stone to that because do you think about it? From just a pure content perspective when you apply a taxonomy term to a piece of content You're declaring an active intent. You're saying I tried to make this content about this term You know for better or for worse for more accuracy or less accuracy That's what you're declaring and I think that there's also going to be an evolution What is in the taxonomy as well? You know taxonomies historically have been sort of almost You know library or research library focused in the sense of like, oh, we'll have a region's taxonomy And it'll have all the places and we'll have you know Concepts taxonomy will have all the concepts in it or something like that But you know, of course, those don't really include intent, right? Like are you trying to learn about this thing? Are you trying to keep up with this thing? Are you an expert in this? Are you a student in this? And I think that the next evolution in terms of how we're taxonomy is going to go is going to start to pull in some of those intent factors into taxonomy because I think it is it's part of the learning, right? Like if you have a model for how somebody Should learn about a concept, you know, you take them from first hearing about it to a journey Through it and then eventually, you know, some level of understanding or expertise in it And I think you know, that's similar to how You know a lot of nonprofits try and think about engaging their audiences, right? Like we want to take somebody from first hearing about the nonprofit Becoming a strong, you know booster of the nonprofit or having a lot of affinity for the mission, you know And I think all of that sort of speaks to their being intention sort of latent in these like sort of systems and in these content And you know taxonomy is I think will continue to evolve to include intent as part of the the strategy captured with them So I have several thoughts now from that Uh, and I don't I have us throw them all out and then you all decide how you want to to take them from there. I mean On the intent piece You know, interesting. So what if I was at my what if my organization had a great taxonomy? But now I want to evolve it or adapt it or tweak it Can I do that without losing All of the great connections, you know, it's definitely to your point for this data reporting I was able to do and the journeys I was able to how do I evolve it. What does that Do and you know, we also talked about mapping it between systems If it feels at least in my experience It always seems to stem from a communications website perspective And then there's always the debate with whoever the program or department is that might own some knowledge area It's rarely ever on my experience out from the crm experience That goes back into the other places. So that's a whole bunch of like where my head went And you know how my brain goes like an amoeba, so I'll let you all attack what I threw out there However, you'd like to if you've got thoughts on it Yeah, I'll dive in real quick just that um, one of the things that the we try and bring to You know, one of the perspectives we bring to our client engagements, which I do think is pretty unique to to ptko is this concept of Portfolio management and what I mean by that is that we try and describe both the effort it takes to do something The value business value produced by doing that thing and the time period in which you're going to both commit to doing something And reevaluate doing something and potentially, you know replace or modify or evolve something at the end of that And you know, I think content libraries. That's a key one, right? Like people are always like, oh, you know How do we revisit old content or how do we deal with still content? The same thing applies to taxonomies, right? Like where the taxonomy exists really in a period of time You know, we kind of see it as this like permanent like obelisk that's been planted into the sand But the reality is it's like a crop that we plant every year and sometimes we need to change the mix, right? We might need, you know, more soybeans this year or more corn this year And that's the same thing with like how we actually Create things that are measured by the taxonomy, right? Like we may have more content in one area We may have a new sort of strain or new evolution of things that we want to add to it We may want to like let some things like fallow for a little while And we may decide that something we're never going to do again And you know, I think that the key for evolution there is just that it's planned and intentional You know, I think that what really happens in a lot of organizations is that they say we want to start doing x And so why stops because there's not enough time or ability to do it Not because there's an intentional plan to sunset it And I think that's where most of the business value is lost and much of the user dissatisfaction occurs, you know Instead of saying, hey, we know you're trying to do x and we're focused on y now And here's where you can still find what we did on x and it's still relevant But it's sunset a lot of organizations kind of play the shell game of like, oh, where are we creating content? We won't tell you and you won't know you'll just have to discover it, you know And you won't find the places that are stale and we're not covering because we're not going to tell you that either And I think that's a real trouble, right? Like it makes them it makes them feel like they're covering more ground But really what they're doing is obscuring their best and newest work And I think that's part of the the evolution piece, right? Like it needs to be intentional and not just a matter of capacity And Tony, I want to go back to your question and build on Nate's word intentionality And I think that question of why people think of taxonomy in the web world and usually only in the website world And where that disconnects to all the other systems comes from I think a lot of it just has to do with the the history of websites and content management systems I mean you think about Drupal, you know, you know 10 years plus ago Taxonomy was one of the core native features when you're building a new Drupal site. It's right there. What's your taxonomy? And so I think structurally It was forced on people a little bit in the web world for for good And I think that was a you know one of the positive aspects of those early approaches to content management system building But you don't have that and it's not as obvious a piece In a lot of other systems when you think about how CRMs are designed when you think about how Social publishing platforms are designed when you think about email marketing systems I mean, you know when it comes down to a taxonomy The difference between taxonomy and and metadata and tags It's all semantic. You know, they're they're all similar concepts. It's all information about the thing that you have Whether the thing you have is a piece of content on your website a person in your crm a message that's going outbound It it's all metadata and I think one of the one of the key things that differentiates taxonomy as you know capital T taxonomy Is that intentionality it is planned metadata It's metadata with a strategy metadata with a purpose and metadata that you use to organize your thinking You know the way you structure Everything that you do with your audiences And so I think that piece is really important And and I do think there is you know to that You know, how do you move forward with it having that intentionality where you say this is how I'm going to manage my content And in all the different dimensions, whether it's topic whether it's category region Audience intent call to action all of these things could be a taxonomy It's just a question of how you want to represent your content strategy and your audience engagement strategy in the systems that execute those things And and having that parity is is really crucial So, you know, I would say it took a from where you started there, right where People seem surprised that it should be in these other systems I'll say I'm surprised that in our data strategy practice how often it kept coming up from you Because I wouldn't have thought about that right in my experience being in communications or marketing and coming Oh, sure. Why do I need this taxonomy to go to my data strategy and my reporting? so I Yeah, what do you want to say about that because that that was new-ish to me But I'm totally supportive of you. I'd like the rest of the world to know why Why you talk about it though and where it it creates limits for the work that you do Yeah, absolutely. And I mean we've I think we have a whole other Um episode about this and I'm sure we will have many more But in short when people Ask questions of their data it is to inform their strategy And so the kinds of questions they ask are How does our content about this topic perform or how does our content by this department to perform? Or how does our content designed to get people to sign up for the annual gala perform? All of these things are context about your content about your organization And in order for analytics to report on that analytics needs to be informed about that and and Fitting your taxonomy into your analytics is what makes that possible because google analytics when you set it up It knows nothing about the website that it's running on it knows nothing about your organization And so until you teach google analytics, this is This this is what the topic is on any particular page unless you give it that context It can't report out certainly not cleanly not without hours and hours of tedious lining up rows And doing it in ways that you're certainly going to do differently next time And so that lost efficiency lost consistency So so having that mapped together from your cms into your analytics and then from your analytics back into your crm Um and and being able to follow the thread Of engagement across topics across content types whatever question you might want to ask Is is really transformational for a lot of organizations Yeah, just just to tag on to that if I could real quick, um You know one of the reasons we have this this approach this engagement architecture approach that we talk a lot about is because it's really An organizational operating system, you know, it's a way for organizations to understand How to cohesively and strategically Configure all of their systems their business processes and even their staff time and allocations In a way that marries up and supports the strategy that they're trying to pursue You know, and I think that You know step in what you're saying, you know, just fits that to a t and really explains it well Which is that you know, the organization to work well has to have a unified operating system for what content means What concepts mean what the strategies are what we're pursuing How we report on them how we adjust and try to optimize, you know The tactics that are you know being used to Pursue a strategy and what a strategy may have reached a plateau that is sufficient You know, maybe it's time to work on the second strategic goal because the first goal is sufficiently met You know and none of those things can happen if you're fighting yourself and fighting your own You know data inequality problems and all sorts of other things to try and get to the those sort of business insights and You know, that's part of what taxonomy is really critical for is that it is one of the you know key You know structural beams in your you know your platform, you know And if you don't have that your you know operating system is going to perform Inefficiently and you know probably inexactly Yeah, and once you have this in place so many new things become possible I think a lot of organizations that integrate this for the first time Suddenly learn a lot about their content I think a lot of organizations make assumptions about even even something as basic as what they produce Uh, and and once you actually start being able to track it you can say Oh, well, you actually produce five times as much about syria as you do about jordan And and being able to actually see that difference in terms of staff effort in terms of editorial process Uh, you know, there's so many things you can learn from this I mean if you include things like publish date, uh, you can actually see timelines of when your organization Talked about certain issues Um, there there's just so many insights About your audience about engagement, but also about your organization that you can start to to collect The more and more you represent your your content strategy in your data All right, so i'm listening to y'all and i'm taking a day and i'm absorbing it and you're winning me over but My head goes to two places again. What why? Every website, you know, we know this we even say we don't build websites, right? But we still do website redesigns for organizations, but we refer to them as business systems, right because it is But every website redesign goes back into let's talk about our taxonomy Why does it always end up there? Why are we not settled and then my my secondary thought to that is okay I redesigned two years ago And we fought for three to four weeks about these terms and nailed it down and whittled it enough Now you're telling me I got to change it again or do I have a solid base to build from? I leave my anxieties Well, I think uh If taxonomy is something your organization focuses on and has a lot of sunlight on then those website redesigns can usually Leverage it and use that as a jumping off point to make good decisions about how to improve the website You know and I think in the very best cases The website's deficiencies or the the reason you're you're improving or changing the website are based off the taxonomy You like the taxonomy is trying to do x and the website is preventing it from achieving that goal You know, but the reality is for a lot of organizations, you know The the organizations that don't have much sunlight on their taxonomy or don't treat it as a strategic planning tool Is it those redesigns become a way to? Suddenly rethink how outreach is occurring and to rethink what organizational priorities are about communications and and concept mapping and concept, you know communication to the outside world And so they kind of naturally always reopen the taxonomy door because they're really pointing at the real underlying problem, which is that there's not a consensus of what the strategic plan of attack should be for Content creation and outreach based off of that and education and motivation based off of that And you know if that core piece were well settled then the taxonomy probably wouldn't change that much Website redesign and website redesign, you know if it did it would simply be optimizing not wholesale changing, you know, but the reality is it's you know, most Executives at nonprofits or even most organizations have never seen their taxonomy aren't aware of it And we're certainly never asked to get strategic guidance or input into its creation And so I think that that just kind of highlights the problem, right? It's like the back of the train when it needs to be the front of the train and because of that when executives are trying to Notionally move towards it. It creates a lot of cascade effects down into it But it's always addressed downstream instead of being brought back up to the front and said, okay Let's nail this down. Let's get this. This is our guiding document from then doing other kinds of like web designing things Like site maps and content types and structures and all that I think I think what I would say first to your question, Tony is That if you have put work into your taxonomy, I am not telling you that you need to change your taxonomy The first thing you need to do is to Integrate your taxonomy into more of your systems. I humbly would suggest analytics first and I think With analytics integrated with your taxonomy You are going to learn a lot about it And you are going to learn a lot about how your organization uses it And you're going to learn a lot about how your audience is respond to different parts of your taxonomy Once you have learned those things Um, I think you may want to change your taxonomy because you're just going to start to see these are The answers. Um, these are the things that are working well These are the things that aren't getting any sunlight that aren't delivering any value And I think that's going to drive changes to the organization Organically without needing to have a summit without needing to do a week's long process I think just day to day and Meetings that your staff have with one another about how to plan the website I think you could start to see that evolution and then I think it truly is evolutionary and not something Fast and hard and painful. So I think I think that's really got to be the first step for a lot of organizations And if you allow for that kind of data informed growth, that's made possible by integrating your taxonomy into your analytics Then I think you can actually put off a lot of the hard changes that that you know, you're talking about I think you know to Nate's point if uh, if you have your taxonomy up to date and you're managing it well And you're using what you learn about it to improve the way it's represented on your website You're probably pushing off your next website redesign And and I think you can actually get more from what you have Uh for a longer term And just to tie in that one last thing that did make me think of something else, which is that uh You know one of the things that the taxonomy Can do from both the data perspective and the content strategy perspective this helped you understand if you are Inadvertently as an organization creating, you know too much content in one area and too little in another And most importantly on that what the cadence of that creation is, you know There are certain sorts of content that are kind of like gateway content to your your You know deeper materials and those ones are often the things that that you need to make sure are happening on a regular basis And the content pool and that is increasing in the right amount, you know Like uh, it's really common for say for think tanks to write a lot of expert content But not a lot of on ramping content and maybe not enough, you know Summarization content for policy makers, right? And like that's a simple place where like having a taxonomy in place that is reported on well from data might really Change your Internal focus about just content creation and you know that might have far more It's very likely to have better impacts than redesigning the website, you know Because even if you redesign the website to have a really nice on ramping place if it's a ghost town That's not going to help any, you know, I think you really have to have a whole You know 360 view of these things you can't just change, you know the delivery and assume that, you know The things you're putting into the delivery are better, right? You have to go back to the factory and figure out What's happening for you get to delivery? So, you know transformation digital transformation is big tends to require But every because you both have said the word several times now, which is integration But the integrator within an organization that you know Even if you're still siloed Work still has to start cutting horizontally to really be what you need to be as an organization now But the tools that are out there Where where should ownership of taxonomy live? Who should be in charge of that? Like where does it start? Who owns it? Are there tools to manage it? How would I manage it? What do I do? help me Help me everyone I'll put my two cents in first here Which is uh the higher the better in the hierarchy is the first thing I'd say, you know the more, you know executive insight The better because it's a strategic focus, right? Like if you if you have someone down in the weeds doing it They might be keeping it up to date, but it might be drifting from the organizational strategy Where really it needs to be a reflection of organizational strategy Um, you know, I'd say as much as possible that person or that department underneath that person should have a facilitator and an organizer and a convener of discussions because a lot of the conflicts that need to be resolved in a taxonomy discussion Are valuable for more reasons than just fixing the terms in the taxonomy, right? Like they have to do with Misalignment or overlap or you know, you know potentially a focus of effort that needs to be either You know coordinated more tightly or more clearly bright line. We separate it, you know, so I think that's key There's tons of tools for managing these things. Um, you know, I'd say The medium to larger size organizations Need to be investing in tools that not just allow the management of this from an editorial perspective to work out Well, but the distribution of the changes to work out. Well, you know, like if you make an update to it How does it get, you know announced to everybody who needs to get with the program? And you know, that's why for a lot of our, you know Engagement architecture or technical infrastructure We often recommend that there's a thing called a taxonomy service or taxonomy API And really what it is is it's a broadcast beacon that all the other systems listen to that say Hey, when I make a change here, I'm going to reflect it here. You're in here And in the very best and most sophisticated ways that often also will tell you what happens to any terms that have been, you know Merged or moved or depreciated and it says, oh, you know redirect term a to term b or term a is now part of term b Or whatever it is, you know, and I think that kind of system is going to be like the You know, uh, this is one of the big separators between really successful and dynamic organizations and ones that are less so Because you know, when you get to voice and other kinds of search Technologies, you don't get, you know, three pages of google results to get it, right? You get one or two answers, right? No one's going to listen to a half hour of Alexa telling them possible results, right? Not going to happen So there's a huge focusing moment coming which is like you got to get closer to the top of the Intention to quality ratio, you know, like if you're down in the like, oh, you'll find it eventually You're not going to be a winner in the new economy And you know, that's part of why things like these taxonomy services that are abstract and technical and behind the scenes Actually are going to be big differentiators for organizations I I agree completely and and I think that You know it answers both of the questions It's who should own it and and where should it live in the hierarchy? I do think higher up because it needs to affect so many systems If it's just the web team that owns taxonomy Then only your website's going to know about your taxonomy and you're leaving a lot of value on the floor And so I think it does need to be high up and and I do think that there needs to be Strong governance around taxonomy, you know, when you think about the organizations who have done it well Um, it never happens by accident It happens because there's a tony running around the office with a six page printout of words You know forcing people to to you know pitch in And and there is that expectation that I can't just click one or two terms and call it a day That we actually have to be thoughtful about how we use it how we relate content to it And then how that relates to to our other systems as well So it does require a good bit of discipline And in clarity and a mandate to do so. So I do think that's important And when an organization does reach the point where it it can invest in something like that taxonomy service That I think is a real game changer because the the lack of consistency or lack of Comprehensiveness in how taxonomy is applied is most often the failing This is something that we run into time and time again Even organizations that have a taxonomy even organizations that have integrated with their data We then report on that data And it says oh well only one percent of your content is about your major topic And and they're like well that that just can't be you know this your data is wrong Well, it's because your taxonomy is wrong because you haven't actually applied it anywhere And that's all we have that's the only way we can know that this content is about your mission and so You know solving that problem the the that discipline question whether that's done through business process You know make it a required field in your systems as you publish things Or just you know you have to tag it because you're going to have to report on it later Having those motivations can help But if you can get to the taxonomy service perspective There you have machine level excellence and consistency Everything goes through the same rules everything goes through the same process and instead of one percent You know coverage of your taxonomy you're instantly at a hundred percent And so that's one of the things you know we've we've talked about a lot and we've you know been looking into Is how our clients can leverage things like machine learning to automatically recognize What tags and terms apply to A piece of content and and make sure that you have that that consistency Yeah, I'll give you one step further on that which is uh if you want to extend your organization's business intelligence out into the social world Having a strong taxonomy lets you do things like map hashtags back to your taxonomy terms And then track how much your strategy has traction or has You know conversation out in the social world based off of those organic tags that are emerging that other people are having conversations about And guess what that's super duper hard to do if you don't have a good taxonomy You know there's been a lot of time debating the mappings of all these things back to things So So it sounds to me I mean we're going for this I could probably we could probably keep this conversation going for a while But we probably should get to a closure at some point So i'm convinced you got me right, uh, but you know when I when I think about the conversations I'm having with our clients prospective clients or just people in the community This always reminds me when I was working more in global development and everybody wanted to fund the vaccine Nobody wanted to build the road Right because building roads that was just well I mean before he dig ditches who wants to do that and but you need roads to get the vaccines to the people who need the vaccines, right? Taxonomy feels that way to me a lot and I think what I'm hearing here, too is There's going to be winners and losers and It's this is all going to happen so much faster than I think Everybody's ready for You know as the conversation was in yesterday Um the executive kept talking about AI in the next five years I was like, I think you need to shrink that down to three And that might even be not enough, right? It might even be less than that So it sounds like this is the type of thing. We got to dive in so What's the starting point? What what do I do today? I'm more organization X you just came in now you've you've got me. I I believe it. I am nervous I don't want to be one of the losers I don't want to get left behind Do I do Well, I think the first thing You know in terms is to narrow the question a little bit even for those organizations, right? Like what are the things the three things that you want to really help people Understand or know or get educated on and then to sort of use that as a jumping off point to think about all the different ways That you need to you know talk and educate them about those things because that's kind of the real basis of starting a structure Taxonomy, right? It's not what do you have? It's where do you want to go? And I think that's the key thing that a lot of organizations need to start with is they need to start seeing this as a way to Document where they want to go and where they want to be successful and a lot less like what do I already have and you know If you see it as a way to inventory the junk in your storage that you're renting Then you're never going to get anywhere, right? Like this needs to be a blueprint for the engine you're building I think that's right and I think immediately after that you need to be able to report on it And I think I think having that integration with the analytics is I mean It's so central to making the rest of your data worthwhile And and more interesting and able to answer the kinds of questions your staff ask And and I think that's probably if you already have a data practice If you have a culture of data if you have staff who are bringing questions about performance I think that's actually really Useful and perhaps unusual place to look to inform your taxonomy is figuring out what you want to know And that might show you some of the gaps in your taxonomy because if you want to know how people respond to content written for the media But there's nothing in your site. There's nothing in your taxonomy. There's nothing in your content types that say this was written for the media it's really hard to report on that and so being able to think through What are the strategic changes you're trying to make that people are asking questions about and you can look at those questions for inspiration That might paint the paint the path or whatever you paint paint a picture For for what your future state taxonomy ought to look like You know, I'm wondering for any of our viewers and an audience that might be made it this far in with us And they're thinking through this I mean, how do you if you have thoughts on How to create the the groundswell or the champions internally to start talking about this like please stop talking about the next system How is that system going to connect to this? Is there a way to find those champions internally? Yeah, whoever the champions the natural champions really are the people who need to get results You know, just to say like the people who who are on the front lines trying to actually make your mission go from theoretical to You know actual and enable, you know, and you know in a lot of organizations, especially in the nonprofit world Those are the people doing development work the people who are getting people to financially fund and support the organization They're natural People to be promoters of this right because they need to create and demonstrate value for the people donating they need to explain why the organization's mission and approach is Successful and likely to work and you know something that should derby should be more of in the world So there there's you know, really what it comes down to are the people who need things done Are the people who are the most likely champions of this the problem is they're rarely In the back office so to speak, you know worrying about all this infrastructure that's getting in the way of them being successful You know, and I think that's one of the tricks here for the empowerment Those are the best allies those people know what needs to be done and what they need to have Reported on what they need to be able to demonstrate what the real motivating factors are You know and that goes also for people who deal with volunteers or anyone else who's really supporting an organization directly right but like We need to connect those folks or those people in organizations need to get connected with the folks at the highest level who are saying Let's make our strategy from here flow through the organization to here where you're actually trying to use it at the edge You know and that middle is where most of this stuff doesn't get You know created or a champion strongly enough And so that's why you kind of need it at the top and at the edge and then they can kind of work the middle So they get it to you know, actually occur in a productive way Any thoughts on that Stefan? I think that's exactly right. You know where my head goes there whenever you're talking about Taxonomy and all the things an organization does all the ways in which an organization does and has thought about their their content their audiences Long-tenured staff You know is where my head goes because I think the long-tenured staff often have A wealth of organizational context knowledge about what things exist Why they were done how they've been used how they could be used You know what the original intent was that perhaps got lost somewhere along the way Um, so I think I think just bringing together, you know anyone who's been around and uh and can talk about that history Is really really powerful and I also think there's there's another piece there Which is that those long-tenured staff can often be the biggest blockers to change Um, and so I think making sure that you engage them in a forward-looking conversation About what could our taxonomy or we should be saying taxonomies Become because there are often many that you have to consider Uh and and really finding the the good ideas that got Left in the sands of time because you know We're not even saying that your future state has to be completely novel and totally new Truth is there's probably a lot of good stuff in your history And so you have to be able to bring it all together You know sift through it find the gold and uh, and then make that a part of the future while also making a plan for the retirement of uh of ideas that have Lost their value Well, it sounds like you know from That desired future state that vision of this transformed organization That the road and the pathway really is built by digging in and getting the right taxonomies laid out um and set into place So with that, I don't know. I mean that sounded like a pretty good close to me But I don't know if you had any last thoughts you want to leave our viewers with Well, just that you know, it's probably a lot of people who work in communications are thinking this but you know Taxonomy and and ontology and taxonomies are all sort of tied to Content strategy and this idea of you know user engagement and what are the stages of user engagement? And what do we need to do to nurture that user engagement? And it's just kind of probably worth pointing out that these are all sort of part of a sort of engagement triangle Right where you need to have the right stages figured out for how you're going to engage users You need content in each of those stages And you need conceptually to be able to measure and manage Where people are in that those stages and taxonomy has kind of been a critical piece of that triangle of making that all happen and You know, if you're not thinking about it that way That's a useful way for communications people to think about it But it is also worth knowing that that's a limiting way of thinking about it because it's not just a tactic It's a strategy And I think for me it's it's finding all the different ways in which you can use your taxonomy As a strategy but also as a tactic And and really making sure that you Well first and foremost connect your taxonomy to your data. I'm a big proponent of that. It's like it's my job But I think beyond that making sure that you Identify the ways in which having your taxonomy in your CRM can help so that you understand individuals interests and preferences Understanding how having it integrated with your email marketing can help so that you can start automating content based on those ideas and interests And I think the more opportunities you find to make taxonomy a part of your reporting or your analyses your systems your Your business logic Your editorial planning process you're both going to get more value out of your taxonomy and you're also going to create more stakeholders who care and Having more people who care about your taxonomy is going to improve How well it's managed and it's going to improve that consistency get you from 1 coverage to maybe 10 or 50 or 70 while you're on your way to Automation and you know artificial intelligence and all that I think there's a lot you can do By making sure you involve the whole organization and your taxonomy both on the consumption side But then also on the production side. So I think there's a yeah a lot of a lot of opportunities to grow Well, thank you both for the wonderful conversation I know I sure enjoyed it dear listener our viewer. If you also did please like us Send us some comments share this with a friend Uh, we are trying to get the word out on lots of different topics and things that we're really passionate about and you know If you're feeling this was good and quality, please share it out there and let us know to it It's fun to see feedback come in Well, thank y'all until next week. I'm signing off. See y'all later. Thank you. Yeah, cheers