Rafaëla Ellensburg: Holistic, Semantic Content Engineering – Episode 191

Content Strategy Insights

Rafaela Ellensburg Serving personalized content about thousands of products to millions of people requires a sophisticated content operation. At Albert Heijn, the big grocery store chain in the Netherlands, Rafaëla Ellensburg established a content engineering practice that lets the company deliver personalize-able omnichannel content at scale. In the process, she also created a content engineering practice guild, positioned content within the company as an important enterprise asset, and began developing the semantic practices that will take their content operations into the future. We talked about: her work as a content engineering consultant at Albert Heijn, the big Netherlands grocery store chain how the quick growth of digital communication during the pandemic exposed the need to make their content operation more efficient how she repositioned content at Albert Heijn to be perceived as an important enterprise asset the need for holistic thinking when working with omnichannel content the importance of metadata in giving meaning to content how she semantically connects her content strategy work to broader company strategy their Content Engineering Guild, an org to connect content and engineering teams the broad scope of professional development for content folks at Albert Heijn how her study of Lean Six Sigma principles helped her improve content operations and workflows how she connects content engineering and semantics how metadata helps with content discovery for both end users and internal content authors and managers her advice to always keep in mind that content engineering is a holistic practice, imbued with meaning, and with lots of possible connections to be made Rafaëla's bio Rafaëla has 10+ years experience in e-commerce management, omnichannel content coordination, data-driven creative content marketing and analytics. In 2022, she established content engineering as a new functional expertise on the cutting edge of digital, data and tech within Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands. With her keen eye for detail, structure and strategic insight for profitable omnichannel commerce, she has helped organizations and teams grow and streamline their digital activities. Now, her mission is to realize the marketer's dream of enabling relevant omnichannel customer experiences in an operationally scalable way. Connect with Rafaëla online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM-SZj9m1_w Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 191. When you're managing the content for tens of thousands of grocery store products and serving millions of customers, each of whom expects a personalized shopping experience, you have to build a really good content system. At Albert Heijn, a big grocery story chain in the Netherlands, Rafaëla Ellensburg addressed this need by establishing a new content engineering practice, helping the company realize the dream of a truly scalable omnichannel content operation. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 191 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am super extra delighted today to welcome to the show Rafaëla Ellensburg. Rafaëla is a content engineering consultant at Albert Heijn. If you've ever been to the Netherlands, you can't miss Albert Heijn. They're everywhere. It's like a grocery store and convenience store chain that's all over. So welcome Rafaëla. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Rafaëla: Yes, thank you very much, Larry. I'm very excited to be here. What I'm up to these days, as a content engineering consultant, I'm very much into the organization and structuring of content across the organization. So you can imagine being the biggest retailer in the Netherlands as Albert Heijn, we have a lot of content to share with our custo...