Thomas Chan, content designer scaling brands through bilingual content systems
I'm a content system designer based in Hong Kong, working with teams globally. I've spent 8 years building bilingual English and Chinese content for fintech, crypto, eCommerce, SaaS, banking and insurance products: payment-flow microcopy, investment commentary for retail investors, electronic direct mail (eDM) and social media management, and webinars for blockchain launches.
Now I focus on building AI-automated content systems that move real numbers. Performance marketing, SEO/GEO, UX/UI or localisation, whichever of those you need, we can make it work together.
The path
My passion for content comes from a love of telling stories. Every brand deserves to be heard and to connect with someone, and the way that happens is through content you can measure. Plenty of brands still believe campaigns and paid media are the key to success. What actually matters is trust, and trust gets built consistently across every channel or not at all.
Automation makes all of it far faster. It still cannot replace a skilful brand storyteller. Put the two together and you get range that neither reaches alone.
What the work has covered
Eight channels, from social media and thought leadership through announcement centres, SEO/GEO, content design, video scripts and the website to brand campaigns. Content teams of up to 16, led and structured, with governance systems built from scratch. A multi-market translation and localisation team running a US$900k quarterly budget across more than 12 languages, covering new and existing projects.
Governance lives in GitHub, not a PDF
Every project runs against a version-controlled framework: a tone of voice for each language, a vocabulary of words to use and avoid, a stated purpose for each stage of the journey, real examples pulled from past work or competitors, and a running list of phrases to avoid outright. All of it sits under expert human oversight.
AI can draft against all of it, but a person still leads the creative direction and checks the output line by line. The simple craft of this trade is the most efficient defence against AI slop there is.
Writing to solve problems
The gist of the game never changed; only the formats have.
GEO/SEO, social media, campaigns or UX: different labels, same underlying task.
That's carried over from my journalism training, where the first question was always why a reader should care before a single line got written. Writing to solve problems and build authority is still the job, whether the deliverable gets called SEO copy, an AEO answer or a GEO citation.
When brands shape messages around the reader's actual problem, authority follows.
Credentials
Bilingual in English and Chinese. PMI-ACP® (Agile Certified Practitioner) certified, with a master's in International Public Affairs from the University of Hong Kong (HKU), a master's in Marketing from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and a background in economics. Published on Button Events, Content Design London, Ditto and UX Content Collective. Panel speaker at TransPerfect NEXT 2025 and 2026.