Speaking at Publishing Expo 2012 [NF0]

For those considering the Publishing Expo Conference Feb 28-29 – I’ll be there with some favourite Congility speakers. We’re still accepting last-minute submissions for remaining speaking slots too.

Presentations should be educational, conceptual or "thought-leading" oriented presentations, i.e., not a commercial sales pitch.

They can sent by email to georgina.johnson@mekon.com.

Here’s a bit of background on the event:

Publishing Expo 2012 – Content Agility Theatre

The Content Agility Theatre is back at Publishing Expo 2012. It will focus on core challenges facing the modern publisher in today’s user-led publishing landscape, and educate and inform visitors on the processes, strategies and technologies required to overcome them.

Content Agility means making information agile, portable and reusable – abilities made ever more critical by eBooks, ePub 3.0, mobile web.

These tools are faster and more powerful than anything we’ve had before, but how do you leverage them without increasing complexity and risk?

The Theatre will feature key presentations from internationally recognised consultants, thought-leaders, and content strategists. They work with organisations the world over, helping them make relevant, excellent content available in the context and format of the consumer’s choosing.

Publishing Expo 2012 – CA Theatre Featured speakers:

• Rahel Anne Bailie, Senior Consultant and Content Strategist, Intentional Design, will discuss making e-Pubs relevant to the audience as well as the business.
• Noz Urbina, Senior Consultant and Content Strategist, Mekon Ltd., will discuss updating your content strategy for a community-driven world.
• Brett Freeman, Content Publishing Specialist, Aptara, will address publishing content to digital platforms.
• Anne Caborn, Co-founder and Content Development Specialist, CDA, will take you through governing digital content to achieve agility while avoiding risk.

http://publishing-expo.co.uk/content-agility-theatre

READ MORE - Speaking at Publishing Expo 2012 [NF0]

Musings On Choosing a CMS: Feature Overload [NF0]



Missing the point completely...

 I’m working with a major client choosing a CMS.

In this particular choice, it’s a multi-year, multi-million dollar choice.

If all goes well, it will eventually be a system that touches from at least 1000, to many thousands of staff.

Their demanding business context has quickly filtered the market from literally thousands to only a handful of systems. We’re now down to two major vendors. The first of these vendors is demonstrating their extremely powerful system.

Problem: it’s too powerful, and too customisable.

Spoiled for Choice

The system is positively bristling with functions, but as a result, it looks unusable. By the end of this week we’ll have spent 4 straight days digging through this thing.  As the product selection team, we’re looking at as many aspects as humanly possible before the selection process itself stops being cost effective.
What’s happening is that with too many ways to do something and too many options, the whole thing seems daunting.  If you’ve not used a CMS before, or used only lightweight or simplistic ones (you know who you are, Vendors!) then a big customisable beastie can start to look like something you’d dread putting your users in front of, then having to train on and support.

Metrics vs Feelings [NF1]*

As scientific and unbiased as we try to make software decisions, there’s a very real and human component. And it’s an important one. When I talk about brand I talk a lot about the brand “experience”.

The whole “holistic content strategy” thing is about looking at all aspects of how content affects the experience of the brand.  It’s crucial to whether we’ll move from one phase of a relationship to another.
For this project we’ve defined 31 high-level use cases which between them have nearly 350 specific points of evaluation. Each evaluation point is then given a score and weighting multiplier, resulting in lots of juicy math and pretty pie-charts to make everyone feel confident and rest easy.

But do you go with the system that’s better on paper, or the one that feels like you could live with it?

Take Aways

What I’d like to put forward here is two musings from my experience with buying CMSs:

Not Just a Pretty Face

Don’t dismiss UI discussions as a software ‘beauty pageant’.  UI discussions are important.  Bad UI in your internal systems is damaging to performance in the same way as bad design of the content you’re managing in it.  The message gets lost, and you’re slowed, if not prevented, from realising your goals. 
The fact that staff can be “told” to do their jobs but users can’t be “told” to engage with your content has some effect, but don’t rely on this factor. This is especially true for those looking at buying XML/DITA-capable CMSs.

It’s Not About You

That said, remember that this is technology we’re talking about.  Configuration options can be overwhelming, but especially with big systems, they’re there for a reason.

You want something that can grow with your business.  As the stakeholders in the system decision it’s your responsibility to understand how the system could look different to different user roles in your organisation. 
The fact you’ve got to sit through ALL those options, doesn’t mean they do. You’ve got to sit through 20 examples of how the interface could look, but they’ll only get one or two.  As with all decisions in business, we must step outside of our emotional reactions and think on behalf of others. 

Use the Math

The Use Cases and formal points of evaluation are your sanity check. As much as I think that people should weigh subjective user experience into the decision matrix, it is one – albeit important – factor among many.
Develop your use cases well, validate them with your users, then make your vendors go through them, ideally, with your content. 

Investing in your use cases is vital.  Then you’ve got to brief the vendors to make sure they walk through them properly.  It’s easy to squander huge amounts of time, and eventually not be comparing apples to apples in the flow of canned demos. 

If you don’t structure your evaluation, you’re only left with “I liked that one better, and I’m pretty sure they ticked all our boxes”. That’s not a reason to invest in any key system, and not a defensible position if anyone asks in 6 months time what you did with all that budget.

Any one else have CMS selection tips they can share?


* This is an NF (Nerd Factor) Rating

READ MORE - Musings On Choosing a CMS: Feature Overload [NF0]

Nerd Factor 4, Mr Sulu: Revising My Posting Metadata

Hello Readerinos,

I love to talk brand, and customer experience and ROI impact until I’m blue in the face. I also get lots of people asking me about some seriously hardcore stuff, and work on some of the world’s largest and meanest content munching machines. 

As a result, I’ve gotten myself blog readers at both ends of the content strategy technical interest spectrum. 

I need to help readers find the stuff that’s going to add value to them, and pass over (for now) the stuff replete with language and acronyms that to everyone else is gibberish. 

Presenting the Nerd Factor Ratings System

Photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NERD.png

So, from now on, I’m going to try rank and tag the technie-ness of my posts from 0 (General) to 4 (Gandalf the White Ninja of Content Coding). So watch for [NF0],[NF2], etc. tags in blog and section titles.

This extra metadata should help you find the content that’s appropriate for your interests.

I hope my readers take the opportunity to push themselves a bit, but I also want you to spare your time for the posts that are going to help you in your work!

Now that I’ve got the levels, I’ll try to make sure I’m blogging at each one with some regularity.

Enjoy!

Here’s some examples of questions I might answer or things I might talk about in each level:

General Audience Stuff [NF0]

• Content affects the customer experience! 
• Brand management and content management are kindred fields!
• Here's some tips on selling content value to managers.
• It’s about knowledge, communication, collaboration and money.

Somewhat Nerdy Stuff [NF1]

• Here's some tips on building a content inventory.
• Look what I found out by analysing the SEO of this content.
• Change management and process factors to think about before integrating CMSs between departments.
• How does terminology management affect content reuse and readability?

Definitively Nerdy Stuff [NF2]

• What metrics should I report on in an XML system to prove to management we're performing?
• How should I evaluate a DITA CMS before buying one?

Very Nerdy Stuff [NF3]

• What’s new in DITA 1.2? What is editor support like?
• Here’s a new webinar on DITA 1.2 keys!
• What’s the best way the set up my DITA metadata and folder taxonomy for organising my @conref targets?

About as Nerdy as I Ever Get [NF4]

• When should I use @conkeyref and when should I use @ttr conditions?
• Is it ANT scripts or XSLTs that you need to customise to get your DOT output ready for processing to XSL:FO/PDF and CHM deliverables?

READ MORE - Nerd Factor 4, Mr Sulu: Revising My Posting Metadata

2 New Webinars: Socially Enabled Help, DITA 1.2

Some new webinars coming at you! Both delivered in partnership DCL and their DCL Learning Series.

Upcoming next week and beyond, I’ve got some DITA 1.2

DITA 1.2 Interactive Tutorial: Three Part Online Mini-Series

Register/Learn more »

On-demand you’ve got:

Socially Enabling Documentation in the Cloud

“Social” isn’t limited to WIKIs, Forums, Facebook, and Twitter.

More and more organisations are looking at how community content can complement (and in some cases replace) their formal product content. Also, many are noticing how much overlap there is with social content platforms and their own intranets, internal business collaboration and knowledge sharing platforms.

For most, putting documentation fully in the hands of the users – even internal subject matter experts – isn’t an option, 1or is simply not desirable. Also, creating yet another silo of social content isn’t helpful for users trying to find answers.

So, how can community and formally created content play nicely together?

On this session see best practice concepts and case study examples demonstrating:

• The pitfalls of poorly implemented social functions
• How the DITA platform can form the core of a socially-enabled documentation platform
• The key social features that organisations are implementing – and the back-end processes required to prevent chaos
• How internal SME and external customer communities can be leveraged for maximum benefit to both
• The impact on: editorial process, metrics and measurement, version management, content models, workflow, and metadata strategies
  

View Online »

READ MORE - 2 New Webinars: Socially Enabled Help, DITA 1.2

Content Strategy Day @ Tekom / TCWorld Oct 19, 2011

Hello!

In a big rush but just wanted to let everyone know about the Content Strategy Day at TCWorld in Germany next week.

Led by Scott Abel, TheContentWrangler, this should be a great event within a great event!

Here are two links to more complete and tantalising blog posts:

Interview with the Michael Fritz, Executive Director of tekom:

http://bit.ly/tcw11cs

An overview of Content Strategy day by Scott Abel:

http://bit.ly/tcw11cs2 

Content Strategy Day Speakers and Topics

 

• Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler – Introduction to Content Strategy: Why do we need a content strategy, anyway?
• Joe Gollner, Gnostyx Research – An Introduction to Intelligent Content Strategies
• Ann Rockley, The Rockley Group – eBooks 101: Developing a unified digital content strategy for eBooks and apps
• Aaron Fulkerson, MindTouch – Thinking differently about customer support content: Designing a Help 2.0 strategy
• Rahel Anne Bailie, Intentional Design and Geoffrey Roberts, Nokia – Adventures in Localization: The oft forgotten stepchild of content strategy
• B. Noz Urbina, Mekon – Content Strategy is a many-splendored thing: Breaking down technical communication silos

Hope to see you there!

READ MORE - Content Strategy Day @ Tekom / TCWorld Oct 19, 2011

Socially Enabled Documentation in the Cloud: Dangerous, Benefits, Getting There

Hiddly-ho, Readerinos!

FYI - I'll be doing a webinar on one of my favourite topics Oct 12th: Social enablement of technical communications.

Socially Enabled Content…?

Social Enablement…? Socially Enabled Technical Communication? 

What on earth is that? Glad you asked!

“Social” isn’t limited to WIKIs, Forums, Facebook, and Twitter, and "Communities" doesn't just mean external customers, they're you and your colleagues as well.

Social enablement basically means taking traditional content, and complementing (not necessarily replacing) it with community-driven social functionality like:

• user contributions and conversations
• community activity monitoring
• tagging
• ranking and metrics

All for the good of the users and the enterprise. And in the Cloud, and using DITA XML, so that it's easy to roll out and access from smartphones, tablets, PCs and (gasp!) print.

I'll be going over some of the content strategy pitfalls, issues, and gotchas as well as walking through an example where we're prototyping social features in what was, 18 months ago, a traditional unstructured manufacturing tech docs environment

Hope we see you there!

Register: http://bit.ly/qmeeXQ or read more: http://bit.ly/qA1n0N

Noz

READ MORE - Socially Enabled Documentation in the Cloud: Dangerous, Benefits, Getting There

Mobile Content Busts Industry Silos

For me CS Forum made the penny drop for the “Why now?” question.

We’ve been harping on about the importance of product information and separating content from format for years. Why is everyone listening all of a sudden? Methinks it’s mobile.

When the web and CD-roms hit the documentation community we suddenly had a second format to which all our content just had to go.

Print content was not good enough anymore.  Content needed to be single-source, multiple output. Heads and tears rolled aplenty. It was an agonizing and painful lesson that some companies are still grappling with today, some two decades later.


Since then we’ve had a whole generation of professionals who grew up fully on the web, considering the browser and the personal computer to be the way to access information. A new monotheism for content.  Progress was over and nothing could ever be cooler than accessing content on your computer, it was just matter of refining how.

Until mobile.

Thank you Apple for the iPhone

As much as I am not a fan of Apple or their products, they have lots of things for which I respect them. High on the list is that they seriously took mobile devices mainstream. There’s a whole ecosystem of Android based devices (currently whipping their asses – burn!) specifically because Apple took smart phones from “nerd toy” territory to “normal phone”. Then they had the brainwave to say: “Tablets aren’t skinny crippled laptops, they’re big (crippled) phones!”

Now we all know how to use tablets, even if we’ve never picked one up.

We Are Not Alone

Mobile internet access is overtaking desktop-based access as our primary way of getting information (http://bit.ly/mobvsdesk).

Mobile and its nasty combination of “little website” and “web app” modalities has given the web community a running kick to the tenders, just like the internet gave us way back when.

Suddenly, single source, multiple output and separation of form and content look really interesting.

READ MORE - Mobile Content Busts Industry Silos

Information Beats Persuasion: CS Forum 2011 Afterthoughts

I spoke at CS Forum earlier this month on Content Strategy.

My presentation title (suck as it did) was "B2B Content Strategy: How to create company- and customer-focused content".  Terrible.  But still, people seemed to see through that and show up. 

Here's my feelings on, and inspired by, the event:

I liked CS Forum a lot. Like, a lot.  It was definitely eye opening!

People Are Getting Enable vs. Persuade

My most epic of blog of all time addressed the landmark case of Enable vs. Persuade, aka MarComm vs TechComm. Summarising 3000+ words into much fewer:

Focus first on helping people do what they want, and they’ll do what you want.


Check this post from just today on the CS Google Group by Ian Waugh entitled, “Product 'support' content as marketing/sales”:

“Wonder if you can help me? I've heard and read a couple of things recently about the benefits of providing support content like a PDF manual as part of a product description page in an ecommerce site, and the effect that it can have on sales.

I agree with this intuitively, I know I have bought products after looking at the user manual before purchase.
Guess it fits in with the whole "information beats persuasion" kind of approach.”

"Information beats persuasion" Wow. So, 3000+ words down to 3. Good ratio.

For me reading emails like this is like being handed water after running a marathon that lasted 11 years.

Now, there are many more people than I’d have imagined in the web content strategy community who are thinking about this stuff. They’re considering the overlap and touch-points between web/marketing content strategy and, for lack of a better description the "format agnostic" and “product content-centric” content strategy on which I focus.

If they weren't thinking about it before CS Forum, they were thinking about it after.

Killer Keynotes

Both of the first keynote talks - Gerry McGovern and Karen McGrane - were dead on.  They talked about task orientation, technical information and its role in the (modern, online) sales cycle. My favourite quote of the conference was Gerry's:

"The content that use to come after the sale, is now driving the sale". 

Karen even specifically did us a shout-out by name:

"The Techcomm folks have been doing this stuff [that we in the rest of the CS world need to do] for years. We need to engage with them." 

She talked about a "Content API" which was like a CMS which can content to any format you want, even ones that have not been invented yet, and allow mash-ups of content to any device easily and quickly. 
I realised that that was not a normal thing at this event.  This was a conference where CMSs publish to one format/channel: the web.  The extra fancy super-duper ones will do multi-language and serve up your mobile site. 

The stuff our customers bang on us for, was a bridge way too far. Stuf like:

• Generating content that goes to offline-capable mobile apps
• Delivering dynamically to user-driven, nicely formatted print-ready PDF
• Serving up content as a service to multiple internal and external websites

Just today I have a conf call about a customer who wants to move to publishing knowledge base content from one repository (authored by various flavours of support and service engineer) and standard content (written by technical authors and trainers) from another repository inside their product itself. 
The products have sometimes PCs attached, and sometimes they have data screens (like the data dashboard console in newer cars).  Why not get some real, dynamic content in there?  Embedded, integrated, social content.

Content Drives the Customer Experience

People are starting to realise that when you buy a TV for $800, you go online first - a lot - and when you do so, being told that it's "elegantly designed" and "sleek" is not compelling.  Being told it's got a USB port that can open those movies oh-so-legally downloaded is.

You may not know what your TV being 100 megahertz or 50 megahertz means, but if you asked anyone (and you probably did) then you at least have a feeling of whether it’s a good thing or not.

When it’s time to shop, it’s facts and product, not concepts or “brand messages” that you are seeking.  Brand messages aren’t dead, but everyone has to add “We’re here to enable you, not seduce you” to their core messages.

To quote a wise friend:

“Content drives the customer experience”.

To read more about how the web has had some fundamental flaws in how it evaluated itself, I suggest reading more on Gerry’s blog.

So after my CS Forum experience, I repeat my call for collaboration to web CSs, UX people, and IAs. We’re here to help and learn from each other. You do things we don’t, and vice versa. Let’s chat and build some content applications that drive customer experiences.

Has anyone other in the web community be thrust into a web project that’s pushed you out of your comfort zone? “After sales” material mixing in with your copy?  Apps? Print?  If so:

• How did it go?
• How did you handle keeping that all in sync with other deliverables?
• How did workflows, process and roles have to change vs. what you’re used to?
• How did management envision all this and what drove the new approach?

I’m been hearing experiences from the other side of the fence and I’m looking forward to more stories!

READ MORE - Information Beats Persuasion: CS Forum 2011 Afterthoughts

Making Socially Enabled User Assistance Better– “Help” vs. ”HEEELP!”

Someone posted to the Content Strategy Google Group asking about Help content.  I didn’t have a lot of time so I pinged over my fav article going on Help these days: Scott Abel’s The Future of Technical Communication Is Socially Enabled: Understanding the Help 2.0 Revolution.

Then I did a runner…

Since, Dana Chisnell then challenged me:

Why are you providing help? Any time you have a separate system for the help, you're in trouble. Embedding the assistance in the UI and surfacing it when the user needs it will work much, much better.

Which is of course, preaching to the choir.  I couldn't be more in agreement.  

Socially enabled help almost immediately begets socially enabled embedded help.  It's only logical, and it’s not even my idea, it’s already happening. 

Smart companies generally (regardless of social enablement) are bringing user assistance (the posh word for Help these days) into the UX and the UI, not making it retrospective. 

On demand is good, but you want to assist users before they ‘demand’ it. In other words: Help should help, not wait until the user needs 'HEEELLP!' (Tweet that, I dares ya!)

The Problem With The World Today

Today the user assistance UX story is:

“What's that?  I can't figure out this UI! Now my User Experience is broken and I hate this company! HEEELP!

It should be:

'What's that?'


Helpful bit of content appears to the rescue!


'Oh. Ok. Now back to what I was doing'

I’m sure Scott’s probably got this in mind too as our brain children go to the same school of thought. It’s nice.  Lovely play areas and recess is 9 times a day.  And they serve the kids wine…

What you need to do

Anyway! If it wasn’t explicit enough, I’ll provide some detail (in my own words, so I don’t want anyone to think I’m speaking for Scott without permission).  Here’s Noz’s official to-do list for the Help World:

• Help needs to be socially enabled (Scott’s already broke it down for you)
• Help content needs to be brought into devices and UIs (hardware, software, website - whatever!) so that those with content skills work in harmonious partnership with those that have UI, UX and development skills. 
• The application assistance architecture should be socially extensible so that the social components of help integrate nicely with the brand-generated components

Here’s some examples of companies that have it part right:

 

Adobe Photoshop Help Offline

Right-click and view/open in a new window to enlarge.


If you’re offline, hit F1 in PS and you go to a html-based help file (html, running offline from a folder on your computer).  Note the PDF link on top right! 

Defaultpagesayswhat? Community help!  In other words, to REALLY get the full experience, go online and join the party, silly!

Adobe Photoshop Help Online

Turn ye ol’ Net back on and Adobe takes you straight to a website that looks exactly the same, but new features abound! 

• Feedback
• Options to search through help for other applications
• Still available as PDF!
• Community intro link available (blue, bottom left)
• Commenting
• Comments RSS feed (subscribe to this piece of content!)
• And so on… explore it yourself for fun.

Right-click and view/open in a new window to enlarge.


Good, but could be better.

Let’s compare with one of my favourite apps, Ableton Live:

 

Ableton Live Context Ultra-sensitive Help

Right-click and view/open in a new window to enlarge.


In Ableton, help is in panes within the UI.  Once you’re experienced user, you hide them both away and only bring them back as needed.

• Big stuff like tutorials, walkthroughs, set-up instructions, is on the right in the main help pane (F1).
• Bottom left we have a little hide-able pane that constantly pops helpful information and short-cuts for ANYTHING I hover my mouse over (the 'Live Device Browser' in this case).  That is to say, new users just leave that baby open, and you instantly know what every UI item works, and the short-cut for triggering it:

Compare this to user's alternative workflow:


'What's this? How do I use it?'

Learns how to use it is somehow. By looking it up? Probably not...
Starts getting into productive work...


'Showing and hiding this thing is annoying....
Hmmm...maybe there's a short-cut...?
Do I want to stop what I'm doing and look it up?
No.
Actually, yes... this is annoying...I'll go look it up!'

...and how mad are they going to be if it turns out there is no short-cut after all? 

The Promised Land

Of course, we should bring the two together, so that the web snazzies of Adobe’s help appear in the UI like Ableton.  In time dear friends, but fear not, that is where we’re heading!

Agree? Disagree?  Let me have it in the socially-enabled comments!

UPDATE!

Dana pointed out I forgot to mention mobile devices and hit me with this great soundbite:

"...we should all be thinking about what will work on the tiny screen that will scale up, not the other way around."

I also forgot to mention:

• Great help doesn't mean UI/UX designers can all start leaving work at 3pm! The idea is to avoid needing to get help in the first place, no matter how nicely it's delivered.
• Those implementing DITA or any other Component CMS platform should be thinking about how this social content gets round-tripped back into source so that the brand-sourced content, service desk knowledge-bases, intranets, and the product itself are all improved by leveraging the crowd's contributions.

READ MORE - Making Socially Enabled User Assistance Better– “Help” vs. ”HEEELP!”

Time Go Bye Bye, DITA Training, Largest DITA Project Ever

Wow...

Time has just... gone!

It seems like last week I was delivering my opening address, somewhat exhausted, at Congility 2011.

The event wasn't even over and we were letting people know about the DITA Training courses on offer at Congility South.  Not to mention my having to prepare the course itself.

A heartbeat after I was whisked away to begin work on what is one of the largest DITA Content Management projects of my career, and the biggest Content Technology Audit (CTA, similar to a Content Strategy Audit but systems-focussed) I've ever done.  They have 1000 (one THOUSAND) dedicated technical authors worldwide with 10,000 (you heard me) engineers looking to contribute natively into DITA topics.   They said full roll-out numbers might be 30,000 users globally. If we opt to go for direct Engineer contributions, they will have more DITA authors than most companies have staff!

Oh, and they're working off the file system - no CMS support.

DITA Gone Wild

It's been a fascinating example of DITA pushed to the limits.  They products are set up in a 'platform>product' way where specific products are built off the platforms, so there is extensive reuse.  But:

• They various builds of the software run in parallel, meaning there's reuse from platforms but also any number of parallel builds of the software
• The need to keep maintaining all the various versions - current, plus 2 versions back
• They have to reuse extensively into training materials
• There's hardware too...
• Oh... and just for fun, it's full of client-specific stuff

They're handling this all with extensive branching and merging, and more conditions than I've ever seen.  They're conditionalising content by:

• Version - because of all the branching and parallel development, different versions are considered different products
• Audience - Including the employees, the public, and customers
• Outputclass: e.g., chm and pdf
• Platform - what base platform is the product derived from

Single lines like 'The XYZ product can boil a chicken in 5 minutes if you press the "boil" button' might be conditionalised to the point where it can say:

• The XYZ23 product can boil, or broil a chicken in 5-10 minutes if you press the "cook" button
• The XYZ27 product can cook a chicken in 15 minutes automatically
• The ABC123 product can boil a turkey in 20 minutes if you press the "boil" button
• The 321CBA product can nuke a turkey, squab or chicken if you press the "Angry birds" button

And so on, and so on and so on aaand so on... 

Imagine working on the sentences while looking at a document module (DITA Topic) where all that is being expressed simultaneously. and then sharing modules like that that were created by other people for use in your documents.  Without a database...

What is amazing is how well they're managing.  I have amazing respect for what they've already accomplished.  Now they've asked for help to go from managing to optimising and really tuning for the customer's interests. 

I'll let you know how we get on. 

Overall I'm really enthused by seeing such a huge DITA project be a success, and now, having the opportunity to help take it to the next level.  Lame, but that gives me the warm and squishies inside.

Geek corner

For the nerds out there, I'm seeing now just how interesting DITA Keys and Conkeyref are to the scalability of reuse, especially combined with Conditions.  I'm upping the focus on them significantly at Congility South.

Also, I've finally got a little workshop together on Context-sensitive help in DITA.  I had a real developer build me an actual application that I can use to demonstrate the concepts and make new context sensitive help on the fly for various formats from DITA source

Now I just need to work out how to use it to teach conditions as well... and make it call a website instead of a local help file...

  

READ MORE - Time Go Bye Bye, DITA Training, Largest DITA Project Ever

When Content Strategies Collide Pt 6: Conclusion, Unification

(Reposting this after it was deleted by Blogger’s maintenance update)

I’ve harped about Marketing vs. Technical Communication Content Strategy in this wacky World of Content for a while now.  The thesis in short is that we can and must integrate content strategy across these divisions for the sake of competitiveness and customer experience in the modern global market.

Now here’s the wrap-up and what I think we should really be doing about it. Your comments have indicated that there are some glowing exceptions to the trend of separation, but that others feel the challenge is hopeless. 

My final thoughts below, but here’s some links to the other posts:

• When Content Strategies Collide: Marketing versus Technical Communication
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 2: Customer Impact
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 3: War. Huh! What is it Good For?
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 4: Enabling vs. Persuasive Content
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 5: Is Communication Mired in the Past?

Conclusion

Content Strategy is at the centre of debate right now, not only because it’s a buzzy term, but because it brings together content together with the bigger picture issues of planning and accountability.  It links in with the overarching business goals that will take content to its rightful place as a strategic asset in any organisation.

Content Strategy unification, integration and sharing of standards.  Is it hopeless? No. Difficult? Yes.
Companies don’t get far in a globalising marketplace when we don’t even make strategic efforts to do things because they’re "hard".  We should be reassured more by our similarities than bothered by our differences.

Our customers will benefit most when we federate into a United Nations of Content, with common governance, standards, and practices which are tailored, as needed, for the business context.
 



We have much common ground to build on. In discussing this post with Scott Abel he articulated quite nicely that content professionals share a baseline of skill-sets like:

• analytical and structural thinking
• empathy for the user and usability sensibilities
• the ability to express oneself in words.

Everyone in this world of communications and content rallies behind (or should?) certain battles cries:

• Content is king
• Content is a strategic (critical) business asset
• Consistency helps us and helps customers understand and engage with us
• Business needs first, technology second

Joe Gollner wrote on this blog recently and defined content quite nicely: that which goes in a container. This is most apt. If you’ve been following this series you know I am organising Congility 2011. The "unwritten theme" is recognising that all content professionals are, in the end, concerned with how to best move those containers around amongst different formats, audiences and channels to best serve our customers and business goals. When it can, you can say your content has agility.

Once you are integrated and agile, we can break down silos in delivery as well as silos in the business, and that is really when the customer and therefore the revenue stream will see some effect.

Giving the Customer What They Want

The wisdom that content is king is second (in my mind) to the older wisdom: the customer’s always right.

We’re designing customer experiences; not web pages, not manuals, not help files.
It’s about the customers and what they want to do, how they want to do it; not your content nor what you want them to do. They (may) want to buy your product, if you show them properly why they should.  Especially true in the B2B space – putting meat behind the sizzle of communication is vital to engaging the modern mind.

Users want answers to their product and technical questions fast and easily in the format that’s most convenient for them.  Not just support post-sales questions, but presales curiosities and decision-making questions. Persuasion loses its effect if it is not backed up with enablement.

I’ll dust off this same “The Oatmeal” cartoon from a previous post:

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/sell_generation

It talks about how to sell to the new generation (but I don’t think that is generation just in age, this applies to the new generation of consumers). He pulls out three keywords; we must be:

• Sincere
• Helpful
• Knowledgeable

How are you really going to be helpful and knowledgeable without closing the communications loop?

Final thoughts for Web Content folk:

• You are less persuasive when you spend too much time focussed on persuading.
• When you’re selling technology products, the stuff that might bore you – like tables, specs, details, trouble-shooting, how-tos, and so forth – is often make or break to your customers.
• There are all sorts of skills and technologies already developed for technical content that do the things you want to do like control language, metadata style, presentation, and structure across multiple formats. Some may already be in your company. Go learn about them!
• There is a lot of process management experience and integration experience in the more forward thinking TechComms world. Each organisation moves at its own speed. Think of every organisation as being somewhere on a "Content Maturity Model" and check out the DITA Maturity Model, or JoAnn Hackos’ Information Process Maturity Model as examples looking at how a large business can develop its content smarts.

 

Final thoughts for TCs:

• No matter how good your information is, if it’s still “the documentation”, then you will struggle to get it considered as a first port of call for users in trouble. Diversify your delivery methods to engage people across different media and models.
• You have so much more to offer the business than you may realise. Your skills are applicable to many business critical operations on both sides of the sales / pre-sales cycle. You know how to deal with ugly, complex content. Teach your colleagues and they will thank you.
• Social media a) has already impacted your career and your customer’s preferred way of ingesting information b) is your pipeline to the user feedback you’ve been denied all these years c) is more trusted than you are by an order of magnitude – you can’t beat ‘em. Join ‘em.
• Search has changed everything.

Your turn

I’m really interested in hearing the from “the exceptions” – people in the collaborative, integrated, standardised teams out there.  There’s been a few comments from those in shining star organisations, and some saying it’s hopeless and that the populations of these worlds could never produce ‘viable offspring’.

Can we do it?  What are the half-measures in your opinion that get us at least on the road from point A to B?  Where does technology fit into all this?

See also:

• When Content Strategies Collide: Marketing versus Technical Communication
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 2: Customer Impact
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 3: War. Huh! What is it Good For?
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 4: Enabling vs. Persuasive Content
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 5: Is Communication Mired in the Past?
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 6: Conclusion, Unification 

READ MORE - When Content Strategies Collide Pt 6: Conclusion, Unification

When Content Strategies Collide Pt 5: Is Communication Mired in the Past?

My biggest, and possibly most controversial, post to-date continues with responding to and extending the question – is TechComms mired in the past? 

Yes. But we’re not alone.  Those of us in MarComms are at the beginning of a new dawn too.  If we’re in the the past, what does the future hold?  I take a little look at some cutting edge thinking…
Typewriter image used under Creative Commons License



See also:

• When Content Strategies Collide: Marketing versus Technical Communication
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 2: Customer Impact
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 3: War. Huh! What is it Good For?
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 4: Enabling vs. Persuasive Content
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 5: Is Communication Mired in the Past?
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 6: Conclusion, Unification 

Is TechComms mired in the past? Hell Yeah.

In Pt 2 of this series, we talked about Julie Norris’ mildly infamous comment about TechComms being mired in the past, and the voracious sh**storm that hit her after, causing her to erase the whole debacle from her blog (sadly).

The only quote I managed to save from Julie’s blog was:

“In any case, by “mired in the past” I mean a mindset that’s opposed to change, or trying new things. It’s not something new. I’ve seen it with every advance that’s come along in this industry, with every new method I’ve tried to help move along. I’m burned out with trying to explain to people the benefits of whatever is new, up-and-coming, or important to watch at the time.””

Hear, hear, Julie. There are loads of us behind you. Thought-leaders, consultants, leading bloggers and TechComms practitioners have felt the frustration of trying to move their peers in the TC community forward.

I was on a call with Ann Rockley moments after reading the firestorm about Julie’s original post, so I raised the issues with her. We’re both agreed that it’s always been this way since we started in Technical Communications – back when it was called ‘Technical Documentation’.

Ann noted that herself, Scott Abel, Rahel Bailie, and myself are all people who have, in her words, “Let but not left” – bridging the gap between the “world of TC” and the wider content community. TechComms is not to be left behind if you’re really promoting an integrated approach to content and customer experience.

---------------------------

UPDATE (18:19 18/05/2011):

Julie has commented on this post and part 2 to point out an error.  Because I was not able to access her blog directly, I was left with the misinterpretation that she had in fact ‘left’ TechComms for pastures new.  The truth was that was refocusing her blog away from TechComms, but she is today and will continue to be a Technical Communications practitioner.  I have left the rest of the blog as was, because the key point is the reaction that the mere idea caused.  At Julie’s request I have included this point of fact that she has not ‘left’ at all.  Any words not quoted directly from her blog were my interpretation based on Tom Johnson’s post and the contents are not to be attributed to Julie herself.

---------------------------

Scott pointed out a word of wisdom to me: “TechComms professionals should consider how having real-time analytics and unique IDs on every piece of content they create affects their process and measurements.” Seeing how content is used, shared, and consumed can help optimise and prioritise content and tasks. Why was this procedure shared or “favourited” fifty times, and this one twice?

What does that say about the content, or even the product and its design?

^{For more, see: http://lessworkmoreflow.blogspot.com/2011/01/social-media-and-super-role-of.html}

If you don’t have public facing documentation, what about socially enabling the intranet or secure customer extranet so that key clients, or your hundreds of support, services and engineering colleagues can give you feedback after the content goes live? Imagine. Well, we have the technology! These are the same SMEs who are always ignoring your requests for feedback and reviews before content release. Post-launch is not too late to fix things in the socially enabled web world.

But, TechComms aren’t the only group of Communications and Content folks mired in the past. We all are. If we’re only on the edge of major change with a clearly visible future, then we are all, ipso facto, living the past.

Is MarComms Mired in the Past? Hell Yeah.

But I’d say less so.

The web is fast and fickle.

Web-oriented, and Marketing-oriented folks are ok with that. They’re ready to adopt whatever’s hot, leave behind what is not, and are generally vision-oriented, not detail oriented. In the Archipelago of Internet Marketing*, they quite enjoy the fluid flux and flow of web work and the instant gratification of metrics and analytics. It’s all a bit more easy-going on Ze Islands! Basically, they are committed to brand and see it as their responsibility to root out all threats to its global domination. If that includes support and technical content, so be it.

^{*See the first post in the series.}

That said, there’s definitively lots of ‘mired in the past’ thinking. Often an Internet Marketing consultant comes in, maybe with their freshly minted Content Strategist passport, and is asked to look at a business problem. This involves the audiences, the workflows and of course the content. What are we giving these people? Too often we’ll consider these issues with a marketing or brand bias, because of our backgrounds.

Content can get neglected, or it’s assumed that needed content can come from the ‘usual’ content sources. Content that comes from deeper in the organisation (for example, technical content) is the harder content to get, and therefore the easiest content to neglect.

If the content the people want is coming from technical communicators, then we have to find a way to deliver that isn’t shoving up a forum and a bunch of hard-to-index, hard-to-share PDFs on the site and calling it a ‘Knowledge and Support Centre’.

I am still hearing a lot of agencies and consultants on the web-focussed side saying “My customer just wants to launch a website. They don’t want me complicating their lives”. Why should they change when the market is not asking for change?  How can you know how much more effective you can be if you don’t have other companies to benchmark yourself against?

Each consultant or software vendor is being engaged by one contact, with his or her own agenda, for his or her own department within the enterprise. Those individuals or teams are not pushing for integration the way they should be.

The true work of Content Strategy – as a field – is not done until that market mentality changes, and organisations are asking for unified, integrated content experiences for their customers.

A Glimpse at the Future

So, what does it look like when marketing and technical mentalities collaborate? Here’s just one example (I’d like to see more in the comments from all of you).

Firefox has overtaken Internet Explorer as the world’s leading Internet Browser. Look at the help content on their Sumo (Support Mozilla) site. It’s something any communicator could love. It’s engaging, aesthetic, re-enforces brand values and is tuned for the audience.



Note the stark contrast with a traditional manual or online help layout and feel.
Take this example of their help text (from the first link “How to set the home page”):

“Setting your home page in Firefox is easy. Can't decide on just one page? No problem. Firefox lets you set a group of websites as your home page.”

Friendly, chatty, and although it’s direct and to the point, has some “unnecessary” words like “Can’t decide on just one page?” that are there to connect to the user. This combination of community forum, support, and technical documentation into a single platform has enabled technical content to be tracked and measured en masse, but also by the individual author on their specific contributions. This is truly the best of all worlds.

All this content is volunteer generated. Content professionals spend so long talking about how we should speak to users, this is an example of the users showing us exactly how they want to be spoken to.

Part of what motivated this revolution in approach was: “Firefox quickly went from an early-adopters’ browser for the tech savvy (not because Firefox was hard to use, but because early adopters tend to have an affinity with technology) to a mainstream browser used by everyone.” They weren’t appealing to geeks anymore, and had to take on some slick marketing-esque techniques to make things work for the mainstream.

This line from their “Scope” topic discussing Sumo sums up the connection between content of this type, and revenue nicely:

“Firefox is one of the rare and probably the only open source project of this magnitude that has a business model. More Firefox users = More money for Firefox.”

They’ve embraced social technical content, with an aim to improve experience and revenues, and they have the metrics to prove it was a success.

To some extent, this is like gamification - i.e. rewarding positive acts with "points", levels and social recognition among peers.

Firefox are of course piping their support out through Twitter and Facebook as well.

^{For more see: http://blog.mozilla.com/sumo/2009/03/30/the-road-to-sumo-in-retrospect/}

People today (ask everyone you know who doesn’t know you’re a tech author) want to type a few words into a web page and be gratified ASAP. But, can every product be supported by online social platforms, or Twitter and Facebook specifically? No. Heck, some products still need printed manuals, because that’s the nature of their business context. Every communicator needs to explore how some new interaction models apply to their users and context, and assess if they’re still delivering the best possible communication service.

Do all products even need “technical content”? No. I’ve never read a manual for a piece of clothing, or a hotel package, but some of the websites that sold them to me might need some good guidance information to make the usable. Technical Communications aren’t just the failure of good design. Don’t think of them as a recourse, but as an asset.

In the next and final chapter, we wrap up and I solicit those exceptions that prove the rule*.  

*Don’t you just love that expression?  So delightfully nonsensical…

See also:

• When Content Strategies Collide: Marketing versus Technical Communication
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 2: Customer Impact
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 3: War. Huh! What is it Good For?
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 4: Enabling vs. Persuasive Content
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 5: Is Communication Mired in the Past?
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 6: Conclusion, Unification 

READ MORE - When Content Strategies Collide Pt 5: Is Communication Mired in the Past?

When Content Strategies Collide Pt 4: Enabling vs. Persuasive Content

Part 4 of my post comparing Marketing Content Strategy vs. Technical Communication Content Strategy.  A love letter to the community and a petition that yes, we can all just get along… even if we have several valid and deeply rooted differences. 

We’ve started with the World of Content: the virtual geographic landscape where content flows like water through various channels and lines, digital and otherwise.  Then the customer – the one who suffers our divide, and then looked at the nature of what separates us.

• When Content Strategies Collide: Marketing versus Technical Communication
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 2: Customer Impact
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 3: War. Huh! What is it Good For?

Now going into the cultural differences and ‘geographic’ differences between marketing and technical content strategy.

Cultural Divide

Supporting vs. Leading, Proven and Familiar vs. New and Sexy…

As far as I’m concerned, the most powerful thing that divides the content world is simple: “persuasive” vs. “enabling” content. Everything from the most technical – technical data specifications – to the most persuasive – ad copy, is all content that touches the customer. So you have:

• Persuasive – Content that leads the customer to your goals – the usual goal is that they buy stuff, or, promote your brand so that their peers buy stuff. When planning and creating this content there’s lots of talk of brand messages, engaging with the brand, calls to action, conversion rates, and so on. It’s front-line web pages, mailer content, ad copy, brochure copy, and the like.
• Enabling – Content that supports the customer in their goals. Here we’ve got manuals, tech specs, help, forums, self-serve support materials.

^{I also discuss this on a podcast on Idwratherbewriting.com}

Again, when these two content areas aren’t in synch, you get negatively impacted customer experience. No one in the World of Content wants the content consumers to have a bad experience.

Rahel put it very well on her blog:

I would argue that, despite the perception that websites consist of marketing content, for many sites, the marketing content is only the top layer – the icing on the cake, and what supports that top layer is a substantial amount of technical content – the cake itself.

^{Image: Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Note: Nerd that I am, I took 45 minutes to choose this cake.  I like it because the icing layer also shares content with the cake layers below, just more pretty and glossy-like.  : D}

That technical content is often far more valuable to the corporate or product brand than the persuasive content. In doing user research for one client in particular, a manufacturer of power generators and inverters, I saw how guys used their site. Consistently, they would bypass all of the marketing material and go right for the specs. (Of course, before the site revamp, a lot of the specs were missing or buried in a PDF in some obscure area of the site…)”

Andrew Bredenkamp, CEO of acrolinx – a product that has been very successful in major TechComms organisations helping people control their language, keep to a corporate terminology base and monitor style and writing, was recently blogging about how all these things apply to web marketing’s baby: SEO.

…what was most interesting talking to people in the Marketing space, and especially SEO, was how familiar the issues were to me. I kept hearing words like “shared vocabulary”, “establishing brand voice and style”, and *everyone* was talking about keywords and keyword research.

So, same tools, same drivers, different application and different content professionals benefiting. Web marketing folks: think about it. You might have already bought something in your organisation that helps you automatically police style and word usage on your website, or many other things you’re looking to do but don’t know how.

Generally, there’s divisive attitudes about new technologies and content channels. For example, XML and DITA are often considered scary, “techie” and complex by the web marketing world, whereas Social Media is often, unfortunately, considered frivolous and irrelevant by the TechComms world.

^{Related article on social media and TechComms available here.}

Geography

MarComms and TechComms generally exist on different branches of the org chart and generally, in the product life cycle. Marketing kicks into gear mostly late, when there’s something they can start to make noise about. TechComms wants to be integrated as early as possible into the product development cycle. To have the content ready for launch, they need lots of warning and lead time.

I’m going to stretch my analogy a bit here and include some real geography and another continental crash: the one of east meets west. The western world is hotly debating what will happen when Asia “hits”, and global competition ratchets up several notches.

For MarComms, we all keep getting reminded that the west will need to compete on service and brand, as price and even product quality can be duplicated more easily. TechComms is an asset here. By integrating processes with the other organisations, you have:

• Keyword rich information (it’s all about the product and related ideas)
• Content that many customers really, really want
• Content that helps do things like seed forums and that can sit side-by-side with user generated content
• A differentiator that supports your after sales experience, and therefore customer experience and brand

If TechComms provides you content that solves users’ problems, and other users can see that, share it, and help their friends solve their problems, then you’re cultivating happier customers.

For TechComms, globalisation REALLY matters

I live in Spain. I buy far more products than I used to that are made in countries where English isn’t the native language. As globalisation increases, I’m going to get even more clunky and/or badly translated manuals under my nose than before (the current crop are often hilarious). As a result, my inclination to bother even opening them to check if that particular company delivers good content is going to get smaller and smaller.

We’ve been begrudgingly discussing the comment “No one wants to read the manual” for years. Add the content of a new, non-native English, non-EU economy’s to the landscape. Now they REALLY don’t want to! At least not in its traditional manual/help format.

Is it safe to assume all content created abroad will be poor? Absolutely not, but with the number of companies scrambling to get involved, the chances of content being left behind are high.

Do any of you have any experience with trying to bridge the timezones and language barriers with content?  I’d be interested in hearing anecdotes and approaches.  Happy to compare notes.

Next post we’ll go into the question: Is TechComms mired in the past?  Is MarComms? And we’ll look at what the future could look like.

READ MORE - When Content Strategies Collide Pt 4: Enabling vs. Persuasive Content

When Content Strategies Collide Pt 3: War. Huh! What is it Good For?

This is Part 3 “When Content Strategies Collide – MarComms vs. TechComms”.
Today we’ll look at how the gap between communications departments (specifically Technical and Marketing) persists despite the damage to customer experience.




See also:

• When Content Strategies Collide: Marketing versus Technical Communication
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 2: Customer Impact
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 3: War. Huh! What is it Good For?
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 4: Enabling vs. Persuasive Content
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 5: Is Communication Mired in the Past?
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 6: Conclusion, Unification 

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Like many neighbouring nations, we get very excited about our little differences instead of focussing on our big picture commonalities. In my mind, the usual suspects that separate people are:

• Language
• Culture
• Geography

Let’s take a look at these areas and the impact they have on the people we’re all in the end working for: the customer aka, the content consumer. 

Language: We’re All “Content Professionals”

Whatever it says on your business card – your passport in the world of content – we have many words we share. We all talk about:

• Consistency of…
  • Language
  • Style
  • Structure
  • user-orientation
  • taxonomy / metadata
• Localisation
• Customer-specific content and understanding what the customer wants or needs
• Content management
• Content audits
• and now of course, Content Strategy.

Where we differ is in some of the details. MarComs and Tech Comm are the way that the organisation communicates with the outside world. The only other “Communications” group is “Business Communications” Take this list of words and see how many terms hit home with you:

Brand Values / Brand Management	XML	Information Architecture
Social Media	DITA	CX
Socially Enabled	CCMS	Personas
SEO	CMS	UX
Single Sourcing	Context Sensitive	Monetised
Syndicated	Reusable	Modular
Messaging	Style guide	Structural Templates
Analytics / Metrics	ROI	Content Modelling

I read Kristina Halvorson’s “Content Strategy for the Web” and in the margins of each page put little markers about whether the statements and language were applicable and understandable off the web and outside the marketing team. My markers indicated three things: “Yes (this idea is applicable off the web)”, “No”, “Maybe”, and “Not usually, but it should be!”

There were lots of each category, but the “No” items were in the vast minority, i.e., most content best practices don’t differ between channels. Let’s take an example which any content professional can immediately understand (or should):

“If your CMS metadata is inconsistent or poorly managed, your content’s going to pile up, and information will be buried. You’ll also end up creating redundant content, waste money on inefficient workflow, and generally rack up unnecessary content-related expenses and headaches.”

And then a bit that would leave other content professionals making a sort of slanty grimace:

“During the analysis phases, you collected all of your messages – the pieces of information you want the user to learn or the user wants to see. In the content strategy phases, you make recommendations about how the messages all work together to form useful, usable, enjoyable web content.”

So, we share some words, but not all, and those we do, we don’t always mean the same things by them. “Messages”, “Messaging”, “Messaging hierarchy” are all pretty marketing-specific for those in other departments. When defined as “the pieces of information you want the user to learn or the user wants to see”, then it’s more relatable. It’s not that different.

People outside the web team get shocked and offended by quotes like:

“The content strategist may collaborate closely with a web editor or web writer to oversee the creation, revision, and approval of all required content. In the absence of a web editor or writer, the content strategist may also be called upon to create all necessary content.”

... “All”?

Come again?

Naturally anyone in the Land of Tech Comm would be hurt and dismayed to hear that “all” content on the website, which probably includes tens of thousands of their words in HTML Help, How-To, FAQ, Release Note, and downloadable PDF form, and more, was being so totally left out of Content Strategy thinking.

I think it’s obvious, however, that Kristina, or any leading web content strategist saying something like this is talking about the new and website-specific words, probably in the context of only the web project in question. There are loads of words which only exist on the web and serve to gel together, relate, enhance, and support all the other content created by other sources that needs to go public via online channels.

So… chill.

In Part 4 we’ll go on to discuss the Cultural divide – the different way that MarComms and TechComms tick. 

See also:

• When Content Strategies Collide: Marketing versus Technical Communication
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 2: Customer Impact
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 3: War. Huh! What is it Good For?
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 4: Enabling vs. Persuasive Content
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 5: Is Communication Mired in the Past?
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 6: Conclusion, Unification 

READ MORE - When Content Strategies Collide Pt 3: War. Huh! What is it Good For?

When Content Strategies Collide Pt 2: Customer Impact

In my last post, I left off with my description of the two major continents in the World of Content:

• “The Archipelago of Internet Marketing”
• “The Land of TechComms (and a bit of Training)”

Here’s some links to all the posts if you haven't read them:

• When Content Strategies Collide: Marketing versus Technical Communication
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 2: Customer Impact
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 3: War. Huh! What is it Good For?
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 4: Enabling vs. Persuasive Content
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 5: Is Communication Mired in the Past?
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 6: Conclusion, Unification 

Today there’s a gap between them, but the two continents are starting to collide and create some topographical ruffles in the process. Here we look a bit more at some names and faces from the populations and why this is an issue for the enterprise. 
This was all born of my thinking when coming up with the theme for the Congility 2011 Conference in the UK this May.

The Lay of the Land And The Cloud

Wherever you picture yourself on this Communications landscape, the word wide web flows around and between us all like water. As they say, “location, location, location”. Everyone – inside and outside any organisation – can see the web and (theoretically) find the information on it.
On the web you can even package up bits of content and ship them stuck to other bits (related items, banner ads, pop-ups), to make them even more “findable”. Now in the age of social media, every single man, woman, and especially child is throwing their work into the growth of web’s wealth of information and the findability of that information.
This creates a friction along the coast as the Archipelago of Internet Marketing and Land of TechComms start to merge, pushed on, inexorably, by the underlying market forces.
Take for example some other posts from both sides of Web Content / Technical Content fence:
Kristina Havlorson’s posted “Why I Wrote Content Strategy FOR THE WEB” recently regarding her book and why the title and examples therein focussed on the web. On that post she’s provided further contextual links, and calls it a source of “serious frustration”. In the end, I’d say she’s not as webby as you might think, and she and her book are not to be dismissed by any content professional.
Kristina links her post to one by Rahel Bailie. Several conversations with Rahel and Rahel’s blogs regarding Content Strategy were further dominos leading up to this article.
There was also some feather ruffling in the blogosphere (see 18:19 18/05/2011 Update below for new information and correction on this) caused by notable blogger and Content Professional Julie Norris announcing she was leaving technical communications and transitioning into something more in the UX and social-media related fields (Here’s a post where TechComms blogger Tom Johnson then reacted to that). Almost as an aside in her announcement she was leaving TechComms, she dropped, grenade-like, the comment that TechComms was ‘mired in the past’.
Bam!
I, unfortunately, can’t quote directly or even link to it because the original post, its update notes, and even a follow-up post, have all been (tragically) removed from Julie’s blog. The evidence can be now most easily found via Tom Johnson’s blog “Technical Communication Stuck in the Past?”

So – we can see the wrinkles forming the landscape already. Let’s hope that like when real tectonic plates crash, it forces the horizon skyward, and everyone’s game will be raised. But why is this happening, and possibly more importantly, what is impact?

---------------------------

UPDATE (18:19 18/05/2011):

Julie has commented on this post and part 5 to point out an error.  Because I was not able to access her blog directly, I was left with the misinterpretation that she had in fact ‘left’ TechComms for pastures new.  The truth was that was refocusing her blog away from TechComms, but she is today and will continue to be a Technical Communications practitioner.  I have left the rest of the blog as was, because the key point is the reaction that the mere idea caused.  At Julie’s request I have included this point of fact that she has NOT ‘left’ at all.  Any words not quoted directly from her blog were my interpretation based on Tom Johnson’s post and the contents are not to be attributed to Julie herself.

---------------------------

The Point of Impact – The Customer’s Doorstep

I’m very interested in the rift* between those in the content industry who are generally taking a holistic approach, integrating across the borders, and those who keep to their ‘nationalities’.
^{* For more on TechComms rift see Sarah O’Keefe’s blog on 2011 predictions: http://www.scriptorium.com/2011/01/2011-predictions-for-technical-communication/}
This second rift is more important because of the victims: the customers. Oh please, won’t someone think of the customers! My most popular blog post to date was all about how fragmentation and division inside the organisation create fragmentation in our content and our communications. The result: customer experience suffers.

^{Every business is busy, busy, busy, especially successful ones. BUT, when you’re too busy working harder to work smarter, the customer is the one who waits in frustration while you try to get your act together.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/failpost/3758092256/}
I recently had calls with three companies (in one week!) who had:

• unified their writing style, structural and metadata guidelines
• implemented a content management system
• set up standards and collaboration across business units
• moved to a modular XML-based standard (DITA, for their technical content)

And by doing so had realised all sorts of great benefits. What were we talking about on the call? The fact that in the end, what they had done was set up a very efficient, collaborative silo of technical content that was isolated from the rest of the content in training, engineering, presales and marketing. Terminology, Language, Labelling/Taxonomy, Metadata, even things as important as product names, were not supported with the solutions implemented.
Many of the software vendors and even many consultants and experts only make this worse. Each of these organisations had Web CMS systems in place, but they weren’t integrated neither in process nor in software. Software vendors know that trying to bridge a departmental gap is only going to complicate and therefore lengthen their sales cycle. That ain’t gonna happen. So they “give the people what they want”.
However, it’s the customers who have navigate through all our output, regardless of source department, so the more rifts there are in our thinking and processes the more rifts they’ll have to traverse to get what they want. That’s annoying!
Today, the customer wants us to integrate.  They want us to work together to deliver the value-added, clear, CONCISE*, factual information about products and services.  Most marketers already know that today the more you appear to be trying to sell, the less affective, but haven’t got a plan yet as to how they’re realistically going to keep product information fresh, available and digestible.
Check out The (ever-brilliant) Oatmeal:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/sell_generation
There you have it.
In Part 3 we deep-dive into why we can’t get along.  Why does the rift persist?
_{*Unlike my blog posts…}


See also:

• When Content Strategies Collide: Marketing versus Technical Communication
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 2: Customer Impact
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 3: War. Huh! What is it Good For?
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 4: Enabling vs. Persuasive Content
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 5: Is Communication Mired in the Past?
• When Content Strategies Collide Pt 6: Conclusion, Unification 

READ MORE - When Content Strategies Collide Pt 2: Customer Impact