Building a Content Team: A #CMWorld Chat with Andrea Ames

Marketing departments are evolving. And that means the makeup of our teams is changing. If you’re building a new content team or growing your existing team, you may have a lot of questions about roles, processes, and measurement. To help shed light on some answers, Andrea Ames joined us on a recent #CMWorld Twitter chat. Andrea is Content Experience Strategist and founder and CEO of Idyll Point Group.

What follows is a brief recap of our discussion.

What skills are most critical when setting up your content teams?

A2: Augment core content skills with some additional, more specialized content skills:
– Info architecture & content engineering (@mrcruce) for optimizing and managing large content libraries thru modeling, tech, governance
– SEO
– Research & data analysis#CMWorld

— Andrea L. Ames (@aames) February 20, 2018

A2: I think it’s imperative to mix and match skill sets. When you assemble a team of people with the exact same skills, you restrict your growth. When you add variety in skills, you open up the doors to brainstorm and find a new, better way to do something. #CMWorld

— Maria Marchewka (@_MariaMarchewka) February 20, 2018

A2: Communication skills are crucial, no matter what size your team is. You need to be able discuss the work and rely on each other. #CMWorld

— Express Writers (@ExpWriters) February 20, 2018

How can you structure your team to ensure maximum collaboration and strong communication?

A5: Content teams are dynamic systems. Most important: Leadership. Setting the team culture & managing conflicts outside the team. Deeply understanding how to engage people to deliver impact. Systematizing & optimizing fanatically. Achieving and articulating results. #CMWorld pic.twitter.com/iRfYHqhPXx

— Andrea L. Ames (@aames) February 20, 2018

A5: For me it the 3Cs: Communicate clearly and often; show the return on Collaboration and work hard on building an inclusive Culture. #cmworld

— Wayne Hendry (@ideakid88) February 20, 2018

A3: Assuming someone is tending to the budget, it’s gotta start with strategy. You need someone to steer the ship. #cmworld

— BrewHa (@Tom_W_Brewer) February 20, 2018

We learned so much from Andrea and our community. If you’d like to see all of the responses from this chat, take a look at our Twitter Moment.

Hear Andrea discuss the strategic transformation of content teams at this year’s Intelligent Content Conference. There’s still time to register. Code SM100 saves you an extra $100 at checkout.