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.

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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.

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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 

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.

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 

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?

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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.

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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 

Ann Rockley and Rahel Bailie Congility 2011 Podcasts

As promised – here are the two Featured Speaker podcasts for Congility 2011 where I interview two major players in the content industry.

Both are delivering workshops and featured presentations at Congility 2011.

Ann Rockley

Ann Rockley, President of The Rockley Group, Inc. is interviewed by Noz Urbina, Mekon Consultant and Congility Conference Chairperson.

Sometimes known as the "mother" of content strategy, Ann introduced the concept in 2003 with her best-selling book "Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy".

We talk about:

• Unifying content strategies across silos like technical communications, marketing, support and more
• The role of Darwin Information Typing Architecture and content consistency
• How content affects the customer experience
• Speaking with a single voice to multiple audiences.

Watch Ann Rockley’s video podcast (8 min)

Rahel Anne Bailie

Rahel Bailie, Principal of Intentional Design, has many years of experience in the areas of content development and user experience environments, including environments producing localized and/or internationalized content.

Rahel has been making waves in the Content Strategy community as of late and in European circles was recently the Keynote speaker of the Content Strategy themed STC France chapter event.

We talk about:

• Knowledge vs. Data and Information
• Combining and recombining content to create context (e.g. in a mash-up)
• How all content today - technical, marketing, commercial and user generated - is becoming a unified body of 'presales' content
• How standards help content converge for better experiences for customers
• "Big picture" content strategy

Watch Rahel Anne Bailie’s video podcast (6.5 min)

When Content Strategies Collide: Marketing versus Technical Communication

We’re in an intensely exciting time now in “the World of Content”. Content Strategy and Social Media are the buzzwords on everyone’s lips. Like any new and game-changing hot-button, there’s as much debate about what we’re even talking about as there is about why it’s important, or what we should do about it.

_{See a discussion on what Content Strategy is on the CS Group on LinkedIn}

This multi-part blog is going to take a look at how Content Strategy is affecting the ‘Word of Content’ and the world of the content professional.



By the time I’m done I'll have concluded that both Marketing and Technical Communication are both mired in the past – and probably annoyed and offended some people in the process for which I apologize in advance.  I won’t be saying that that I’ve got the magic 100% effective snake-oil/silver-bullet-salve to fix it all but hopefully I’ll have gotten some discussion started about what potential solutions could and should be.

Whatever type of content-related work you do, be it Content Strategist, Tech Writer, Brand Manager, UX, IA, Web Writer, Content Manager, etc., this blog’s for you.

Here in part one we look at the fact that we’re seeing the early impact-zone wrinkles of a bigger collision to come: I think what we’re going to see is a unifying and blurring of the content functions around an organisation. There will be increased collaboration, re-titling of staff, new services offerings from traditional teams/consultancies/agencies aimed towards closing the loops in and outside the organisation itself.

We’ve been talking about content standards unification and integration for decades now, but now, with the recognition of Content Strategy, we have the catalyst for change.

Why? What difference does CS make?

Because once you really start to think of content itself as a strategic asset, and put a well conceived strategy together, our artificial traditional separations need to come down to support the business’s true goals.

To put it another way, you can’t serve customers best interests while maintaining high walls between the communications and content-centric parts of your operation. Ergo, they’re going to start to integrate. This will delight some and horrify and confuse others.

Content Strategy as a discipline is generally focussed around content that is for communicating. There are two main Communications areas in the average enterprise. On one side, you’ve got MarComms, where Content Strategy concerned mainly with the public web, and websites and closing the loop with brand management and the sales cycle. On the other side, TechComms is working to close the loop with product development, training, the support lifecycle, and training. Traditionally, they’ve scuffled over the word “content”, approaching it with different personalities, tools, budgets, departments and sometimes perceived goals.

This blog addresses major topographic changes coming in the World of Content, integration of silos, and the customer experience. The theme of the Congility 2011 Conference, May 24-26th, is “Content Integration” and its effect on customers. It, and this post, will focus on how the work of all of us as content professionals is similar in important ways and would benefit from increased collaboration. Our efforts should seek to close the loops in the customer lifecycle, user experience, user interaction design, and often benefit from similar processes, skill-sets and even underlying tools and technology.

The World of Content, Communication and Content Strategy

As fast moving as the details are, ask anyone who’s been specialising here in the World of Content for 10 or more years, and they’ll likely tell you that in fact, in many ways, it moves at a tectonic pace.
The chasm of time between a methodology or technology’s introduction and its going truly mainstream can be huge. There are still jaded old SGML folks hollering, “I told you so! In 1970! Without us there’d be no web!” from their dusky digital retirement homes. And they’re right too. Content Strategy is by no means new. What is new is the recognition it’s receiving, and the effect it’s starting to have.


_{Some content professionals really like to think before they cross the chasm.}

I see it as two Continents of Content colliding right now, in “the World of Content”. I’ve dubbed the continents:

• “The Archipelago of Internet Marketing”: Not really a unified landmass, but more of a well connected set of large islands peopled by Web Copy Writers, Web Editors, User Experience Designers, Brand Strategists, Marketing Managers, and the rest. It’s enjoyed a rich past of big budgets, booms and bubbles (there was a .com burst, but it hardly killed the internet, now did it?), its wealth is fed by of the most valuable of natural resources in the content world: visibility.
• “The Land of TechComms (and a bit of Training)”: Peopled by robust and hearty breed, they’ve put up with neglect, starvation, apathy, segregation, misunderstanding, and sometimes commoditization to a point that resembles slavery. I picture the land without a lot of trees, considering all the printed paper that gets used up...

Along the borders of both nations, there are those that make their living crossing back and forth across the gaps – consultants like to live here. Generally the disciplines of Information Architecture, Content Modelling, Minimalist Writing, Taxonomy, etc. are all on the borders, but generally only familiar to the more forward thinking of Tech Communicators.


Inland on each, you have those who are more known for their work in their own nations, like JoAnn Hackos in very forward thinking TechComms, Training and Support material, and Kristina Halvorson for the Web.

But… so what?  It’s always been this way…

Related posts:

In Part 2, we’ll look at the differences between these worlds and why the separation between them is creating problems for even the most forward thinking of organisations.

Update – since the time of authoring, the recent tragic situation in Japan has developed.  Of course no insensitivity or relationship to that situation is intended or implied.  I debated rewriting the entire piece to remove the metaphor, but that also seemed inappropriate. 

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 

Congility S1000D – May 24th

S1000D is a sufficiently focussed and sufficiently important area of structured content and dynamic publishing that we gave it its own day at Congility 2011. 

It’s the first dedicated S1000D event to hit the UK since 2003!

If you’re in Aerospace and Defense documentation, Military documentation or various other heavy manufacturing and safety-intensive areas of technical communications, S1000D is the event for you.

It’s in parallel to the Congility 2011 workshops, so you have to choose, but you can get great deals on attending both conferences for one price.

A Quick Overview

Congility S1000D, London May 24, 2011 is the UK event for anyone that is currently needing to produce, evaluate or implement S1000D.

The one day event will cover a broad range of topics appropriate to your objectives and current level of understanding. Topics include S1000D and the ASD suite of specs, Business Rules, the Software Selection process, addressing legacy data, and more.

Fees have been subsidised by our sponsors to encourage easy access and attendance by Aerospace and Defence organisations. Register early to save your spot!

http://www.congility.com/s1000d

Speaker Highlights

Speakers from A&D house-hold names will be there, like:

• Horst Luetzelberger from EADS Cassidian
• Ian Proctor from CDG, a Boeing Company
• Mike Day from Rolls-Royce Defence Aerospace
• and many more!

Pre- Congility Conference Podcast on I’d Rather Be Writing

3 podcasts recorded this week: Ann Rockley, Rahel Bailie, and me.  Running an event like Congility is really fascinating.  Most interesting in the industry buzz has been seeing how we seem to have struck a chord with the ‘Content Agility’ concept, and have seen a sudden spike in people referring to content that is ‘agile’ on other events, blogs and websites.

Check out my podcast here (audio only) and watch this space for quick (<10 min) video podcasts from both Ann and Rahel.

“Podcast: Content Strategy and Agility, with Noz Urbina”

Download mp3

Congility Speaker Insights – Discuss!

To make this year's conference more interactive and try to blunt the ‘cutting edge’ a little, we asked speakers:

• What does "content agility" mean to you? Why does content need agility?
• Why do you feel Congility 2011 is an event of which you want to be a part?
• What impact do you feel lack of integration has on customers (i.e., siloed internal processes, or inconsistent and fragmented published content)?
• Anything else you want to tell us about your talk? For example, who will benefit from it, and what practical things they would learn to take back to their organisations?

Many of the answers give food for thought and nail this year’s message right on the head.

Disagree?  Have at them with the feedback features.