As a writer and consultant, Alex Sventeckis has crafted compelling content and built expert content teams for companies in B2B tech, physical/cybersecurity, manufacturing & logistics, and public relations. His past roles at Indiana’s technology accelerator TechPoint and B2B SaaS PR agency BLASTmedia (now PANBlast) shaped his passion for strong narratives and a journalistic approach to content.
Through his firm, Alex Sventeckis Content Consulting, he now helps brand and comms teams train their in-house talent, extend expert writing capabilities, and scale bespoke, revenue-generating content programs. Alex also teaches digital marketing strategy as an adjunct professor at Ball State University.
This is the latest in a series of interviews I'm doing with top content creators, editors, and writers. Subscribe now, and you'll get each of them:
So tell me what you're doing now, Alex. What have you been up to in the past year?
Alex Sventeckis: I've been focused on helping agencies build teams and programs and develop content as a business function. That's developing into working with brand and comms teams at organizations themselves.
If content is critical to your business success, I can help you do it better through targeted training and coaching. That includes brand voice development, helping to develop new tools and tech, and putting more structure and process around content creation so you can understand and quantify the impact of what good content work looks like.
I'm also teaching digital marketing strategy at Ball State. I'm helping students to develop a sense of what digital marketing even looks like.
I love doing this stuff: Helping folks understand all of this, seeing the light go on in their eyes and they go, "I get it." That's so rewarding.
“If you really want quality content, you need someone running parallel with the content process as a supervisor and mentor.”
How do you define good editing? What is a good editor?
Sventeckis: The value of an editor has always been understated. If the idea is that we just edit the piece, run a spellchecker, and change words around, that doesn't really capture it.
A better word is a development partner. It's someone who works alongside the process from the outset. Too often, we shove the editor in at the end of the process, at step four out of five, and say, “Fix it, make it better, make it sound good.” But without the contextual elements around that, you won't get the best help. You're going to get whatever bandaid we can slap on there.
If you really want quality content, you need someone running parallel with this process as a supervisor/mentor.
You need to be enabled by the organization to spend that kind of time, being that partner, to follow that process from initial ideation through subject matter expert (SME) interviewing, through the writing piece.
When doing this kind of work as an editor, how do you balance your voice with what the client needs?
Sventeckis: This is why that development partner piece is so important, because you will develop that sense of voice alongside the writer and the organization itself. I build out my own internal "voice guide" every time I start with a new client. I'm keeping notes about how they want to sound, how they're being presented, and how that presentation might shift.
It's almost like I have to inhabit a character. I have to build this character of the company editor, and all the notes allow me to build a schema that I can then step into. Then I execute from the vision of this character: If I am the editor for Acme Company, how would I approach this?
It's a skill that takes time and practice. It feels very unnatural, especially as you're first starting.
This is where fiction writing has been really helpful for me. I have to think of, if I'm the character in this book, what do I know? What don't I know? How does that get reflected? Am I using different speech patterns in different ways?
It’s similar when you’re inhabiting a company’s voice. It's about giving yourself enough of a backstory, the company lore behind all the content you’re creating.
What's your advice on getting the most from subject matter expert (SME) interviews?
Sventeckis: Too many folks approach interviews as a formal process, where you just go down the list of questions. We don't really train people to lean into the conversational side. It's okay to nudge up a bit and put a toe over the line as long as you're doing it from a place of respect and understanding.
You’re developing a shared mutual understanding. I think it's incumbent upon writers to lead that conversation with that in mind. Doing that through active listening shows that you care about what the interviewee is saying. You care about that response. You're not just gathering sound bites. You want to have a real conversation. That opens up people to give you the good stuff.
“In good interviews, you’re not just gathering sound bites. You want to have a real conversation.”
You told me in your responses to my survey of content professionals that moving goalposts was a big problem. After one or two drafts, the client says, What if we added 500 words about this neat idea, or actually, I don't want to talk about this anymore. And you said that you've seen this happen SEVEN TIMES on one piece before it got scrapped. How do you handle that?
Sventeckis: This is where leadership, especially content team leaders, need to step in and have their voices heard. When you've got seven revisions for one piece, there is some massive miscommunication going on, and someone has to unpack that.
It is a tough job to go to a client and say, “You're wrong.” So we couch that. We make it sound nice. We won't be jerks about it, but the message is, “You are wrong.”
If you're in a leadership position, you need to have a proactive conversation with your boss and their boss's boss, so that it's not a surprise to somebody when the client’s CEO calls up your CEO. You need to have built the coalition to back you up.
This is where many things go awry, especially in younger teams or teams that are less certain about where they sit in the organization. Either they're worried they're too much of an expense, they're worried that they're not feeling heard, or they're too far outside the rest of the organization. If you haven't built those relationships internally, if you don't have the social capital to use on that, these issues feel very isolating.
But if you're thinking proactively, if you're willing to confront the problem before you get to that point and to create an environment where your teammates can bring this to you before they cross this seventh-draft place, you're in a better place.
Do you have advice on what gets you to that point? I'm just thinking of client reviews. How do you set expectations with a client so that you can get feedback and proceed toward approval with a greater likelihood of success?
Sventeckis: My team always used a ton of templates and a lot of documentation. That worked in our favor because we had created a process to get buy-in and agreement when bringing on new clients. Content was a part of that conversation, and we would walk through the process of what that looks like. We've got all the right stakeholders in the room, saying, “Hey, here's what this will look like in the typical process.” We have identified the right person to give me final approval on each content project.
We also set limitations. For instance, if we have more than two rounds of revision, Alex is coming in for a conversation. We set those ground rules at the beginning.
Then, four months later, when a problem comes up, we can say: “Here's the process we agreed to,” and every step within that, every template we had, reminded the client of that process itself. With the templates, every piece is a reminder that we are following the steps we have laid out.
“You can’t hide your head in the sand about it, but you don’t have to cede your entire job to ChatGPT.”
Do you have guidance or tips on working with AI?
Sventeckis: I have spent far too much time with AI. Honestly, especially among writers, we're caught in a cycle of hype and fear about AI. But there are practical uses.
For example, I hate writing proposals. My workflow is to use Otter to record sales calls or discovery calls. Otter will track all that for me, and then it has an onboard LLM that helps me to identify key points, build an outline, and figure out what I need to talk about.
I take that information and use my custom GPT to build the pricing and the structure for my proposal. The final step is to take all that and put it in a tool called Gamma, which is a presentation generator. Then I go in and tweak it a bunch. This process saves at least 50% of my time.
My advice for writers is to at least try to start using AI.
I have used GPT to help me brainstorm interview questions. I give it a biography and the eight or ten interview questions that I started with to ChatGPT, and I tell it: I want to do an interview that's aimed at helping me develop an interesting byline or feature. What questions am I missing? What other questions should I ask? And it often comes up with great suggestions.
There are a lot of good resources to help you lead the AI adoption conversation. You can't hide your head in the sand about it, but you don't have to cede your entire job to ChatGPT. It's about being willing to have that conversation.
