Attending Content Ed 2024
Last month, Lauren and I attended this year’s Content Ed conference in Liverpool. We were both speakers, but had plenty of opportunity to learn from others and network too. These are our highlights.
About Content Ed
ContentEd is a two-day conference that leads the dialogue around the development and advancement of content strategy in the education sector. We’ve found it to be a friendly and welcoming space, and a great way to make new contacts with colleagues working in higher education content design and marketing.
Read our previous posts about ContentEd
This year it happened from 8 to 9 October at The Rum Warehouse, in Liverpool’s historic docks quarter.
Neil’s conference highlights
The number one highlight for me was the people. To be fair, I would probably say this every conference. I had the chance to catch up with friends in the sector and make some new contacts, learning about interesting projects, challenges and approaches in other institutions.
But there were some great talks too. My top three (in no particular order):
- Spotting and eliminating “action bias” – the desire to always publish something: Adrian Imms. In his often funny and frank account of experiences and tactics at Sussex, Adrian talked about the psychology behind colleagues’ desire to be seen to be doing “something”, the cost associated with saying yes to new content initiatives, and the tactics he’s employed to challenge and divert sometimes misplaced enthusiasm for new web pages. It was interesting to hear stories similar to things I’d encountered and get another person’s perspective on taming the Wild West of a university web estate.
- Beyond the social media post: humanising your brand through tone of voice and community engagement: Nat Green & Sophie Hawkesford. I’m choosing a University of Edinburgh talk without bias here. Nat and Soph’s work is in marketing campaigns and social media. So our teams complement each other but we don’t really interact that much in these areas. I attended partly because I didn’t have a strong desire to see any of the other parallel sessions on offer, and partly because I thought it’d be nice for them to have a friendly face in the crowd during their debut conference presentation. Despite this not really being a session where I was going to learn much relevant to my team’s work, I was really engaged and entertained by the story they told and inspired by the persona-led approach they’d adopted in developing social media communities and adopting different on-brand tones of voice to suit different scenarios.
- Enhancing your content intelligence and impact: putting AI assistants to work ethically and powerfully: Tracy Playle. I feel like I’m only scratching the surface in my engagement with AI so far, so Tracy’s talk was a great opportunity to put my limited learning into some kind of context. It was great to take away a few new ideas and new points of reference as I make this area a priority for personal development in the coming months.
Tracy Playle presents her keynote at Content Ed 2024
Lauren’s conference highlights
As Neil said, I always appreciate getting to catch up with my fellow industry colleagues at ContentEd. I was also particularly excited this year to give my new talk on the impact of visual design on content. I normally present something around ‘soft skills’ (terrible term), so it was a change of pace for me to present on something so discipline-specific.
I had two favourite sessions:
- Building better content brick by brick: using structured content and content models to create once, publish everywhere: Dana Rock. I’ve learned a lot about structured content working on our degree finder project, but I’ve never understood how create once, publish everywhere works in practice. Dana gave a great example of this from NPR that finally cleared my thinking in this area. (It also made me realise how far our siloed university is from being able to achieve something like this!). I also liked Dana’s better name for create once, publish everywhere, commonly called COPE. Dana suggested GOAT: gather once and tailor.
- Insight exchange: This was new to the ContentEd programme this year. We essentially had a mini unconference for one session, where we broke out into discussion groups based on suggested topics. I proposed a group around managing and upskilling content professionals. I had a really insightful and cathartic talk with other managers about this topic. I really appreciated learning about how Southampton have approached changing up their recruitment of content designers and the bootcamp they put new starts through to upskill them in the discipline.
Speaking experiences
We both enjoyed our speaking engagements at the conference, although contributing does get in the way of learning from others. Lauren had to miss out on some excellent talks happening at the same time as hers, while Neil missed a good chunk of the opening keynote while he had one last run through his slides!
Lauren ran a breakout session about the impact of visual design on content design.
If you want to know how a picture of Chevy Chase came to be in this slide deck, read the write up of Neil’s talk.
More about Content Ed
We’ve attended Content Ed a few times now, and even won a few awards.
Read more posts about Content Ed by the Team
