How to Implement a Company-Wide Taxonomy with A.I.

‍

‍Writer is now an official Superpath partner! Its A.I. writing platform offers a suite of features to power smarter, faster work. Superpath members can get 20% off enterprise plans—just let them know you came from Superpath. By the way, the following post was written with Writer. 🙂

Taxonomy is the practice of classifying and organizing data. For companies, this includes everything from product names and descriptions to customer persona descriptions. A taxonomy helps to keep everyone on the same page, using the same terminology.

Content at scale is a challenge because it is difficult to keep track of all the different pieces of content that need to be created, updated, and translated. A taxonomy can help with this by organizing content into categories. This makes it easier to find and reuse content, and to keep track of what needs to be updated.

Writer's A.I. writing platform makes it easy to build a taxonomy, then check all writing before it's published in your CMS, email or social channels. Here's CEO May Habib showing it in action.

May Habib: Hi, everybody. I'm May, the co-founder of Writer, an AI writing platform for Teams. We are doing a series of tutorial videos with Jimmy from Superpath to teach folks how best to use Writer for content acceleration.

Jimmy Daly: Okay, cool. Well, we're going to go a little bit deeper on the adhering to guidelines use case. For many teams, especially at a certain scale, the team has to sit down and agree on what is the terminology we use? How do we address features of the product, personas? When we cite a customer, what language do you use around that? That can get really messy. Actually, and in my experience, if you don't agree on that, sometimes not only do you use different terminology, but people might use the same terminology and mean completely different things. We found that at a previous job, where key copy that we used in a lot of things was totally misunderstood by two different departments.

Anyways, we'd love to go a little deeper on this to understand one, how Teams can get on the same page, and then in a practical sense, how to use a tool like Writer to make all this happen basically automatically as things are being written.

May Habib: Yeah. Wonderful, Jimmy. Taxonomy is everything from, what do we call the products to, what do we call the features to, what do we call the micro features to, what is the verbiage? Literally, what are the product actions that we're going to be to name in a consistent way, whether somebody is on our marketing site or in the product or in support or reading the help docs.

Writer has a feature called terms that is really robust taxonomy function for folks. So in the same way you saw all those automated corrections everywhere where people write, we can automatically help folks make corrections and build their terminology in the first place. So you can see here, I'm going through an example of a terminology that's got almost 600 terms in it. These folks have done everything from add the CTAs to their keywords to their product functions.

And so what it means is when I am writing, let's pretend I am a customer support person and I am responding to a customer and I say something like, you can authorize your account here. A yellow underline tells me that I actually don't use the word authorize in this context.

Jimmy Daly: Oh, it explains why.

May Habib: And I have a lot of examples why, and I have an alternative that I can use. And so the back end of all of that is terms in Writer. 10, 15 years ago, we actually had Taxonomists that worked at large companies that help people organize their thoughts. Now, we are in a world of 800 Figma layers in one file. It is very much help yourself. And so a lot of content strategists and marketers are actually taking it upon themselves to say, we will have a definitive understanding of really our information architecture that we are going to use, and it's everything from stuff that touches marketing all the way to how we support customers. So this is a really important part of the product.

Jimmy Daly: That's super cool. That's really interesting because not only does it make the workflow easier, it kind of forces the team to sit down and agree on all this stuff in the first place.

May Habib: Yes, it's a great forcing function.

Jimmy Daly: And then once you do, then it just happens.

May Habib: Yep. And even if you don't have a C for a Writer, we've got the terminology going live at styleguide.com. So this is an example from what I was showing. This is the front end. So you can send people to my company.styleguide.com/terminology. Whether it's an agency or a partner or a contractor, you've got all of the terms with the examples and the alternatives for all of the words that mean something in your context.

Jimmy Daly: That's cool. That's super cool. So styleguide.com, that's part of Writer. I didn't realize that.

May Habib: Yeah.

Jimmy Daly: Oh, super interesting. I love that. I'm also just imagining one of the first things that comes to my mind is agency use cases just because a lot of my background is in agency. Adhering to style guides and taxonomy is kind of a nightmare because you have to accommodate however many clients you're working with. Assuming you're a good agency, you're charging a lot of money, the clients are going to expect that the stuff that they get back doesn't need to be cleaned up by someone later, so I could imagine.

May Habib: Totally.

Jimmy Daly: As teams are doing this, building out their style guides, it just become super easy for them to bring on vendors and save everybody a bunch of time. Whereas sometimes the stuff one freelancer writes doesn't feel or look the same as the stuff agency writes versus in-house team, whatever. Super interesting.

Okay, cool. Next up, we're going to talk about some more performance advertising stuff. We'll talk about writing copy that's trained on your best performing ads. So let's jump over to that and we will see you there. Okay, cool. There you go. Thank you so much, May, and your team over at Writer for being such a great partner to us at Superpath. You're building an awesome product. We really appreciate you spending time to help us get up and running with it. And frankly, your support is what helps us keep this community free. So we really are grateful for that.

For those watching, if you do want to learn more and give Writer a try, go to writer.com. There's a couple of different plans you can choose from. There's also a free tier if you just want to kick the tires, so writer.com. Thanks so much for watching and thanks so much to the team at Writer for your support. Take care everybody.