The Importance of a Personal Face — On Halloween
In taking my kids out trick or treating last night, I paraded them past many lavishly decorated homes with “cute spooky” arrangements, outdoor music, and other scary yard setups. One guy’s display definitely outperformed everyone else’s on the block. It looked like he dropped $500 on Halloween gear and other decorations — lights flashed with thunder sounds, revealing a ghost and other ghastly figures overlooking a yard cemetery.
But as we kept walking down the block, the house I enjoyed the most was the home of an old friend who sat in his garage next to a table with a jug of hot apple cider and a plate of cookies. He sat and chatted with me for a while — which turned out to be far more enjoyable than the expensive cute spooky yard setups of the other houses. In these other houses, owners were sequestered away and only opened the door to briefly distribute candy.
The experience made me realize the importance of the personal face. No matter what product we sell or promote online, nothing gives it quite so much power as a personal, friendly face. Even in an era where people are drowning in emails and other social media noise, the personal response, the one-on-one “mom-n-pop” type of customer service, which seems impossible given the volume of responses needed, is more powerful than any other type of marketing. The personal interaction is what makes the experience engaging. This is what Eric Karjaluoto spoke about at Confab 2011 last year in his talk, Speak Human.
I’m not sure how to find time for that personal touch, but Larry Kunz’s tips for building trust in a corporate blog — revealing yourself as a person, speaking with conviction, and interacting with comments — seem like a good start.
———–
photo from Flickr
![Thoughts on the Accumulation of Stuff [Junk]](http://idratherbewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/boxes1-150x150.jpg)
Tom, you make an excellent point, and one that may perhaps apply to the tech pubs profession as a whole.
Technical communications has traditionally been anonymous. Not only is the ideal of a technical manual that it shall sound like it was written by one person when it was actually written by many, but all the contributors should be anyonymous as well. It is not the writer speaking to the reader, but the corporation speaking to the customer. But now we are told that the next frontier for tech pubs is socially enabled help. Can one maintain this traditional anonymity in such an environment?
I have noted elsewhere that there is nothing new about social help delivered over the Internet (http://everypageispageone.com/2011/08/03/is-help-2-0-any-different-from-usenet-1-0/). What is new is the idea of merging documentation with the social help systems that have long existed, and thus engaging the writer with the reader directly. But social help systems have always been personal. Every forum and Usenet group has it gurus, and they are known by name (or handle) and appreciated as individual personalities.
The participation of technical communicators in these types of forums has been rare, but it has certainly happened. When I was managing technical publications for OmniMark, I participated regularly on the developer mailing list. It was some of the most satisfying and interesting technical communication I have ever done. And I was a person on that list, known by name (and also by face to the many OmniMark developers I met at the developers conferences).
Has the time come, I wonder, to finally tear off the mask of anonymity behind which most tech writers work and begin to show a personal face?
Mark, I like how you’re able to open this topic up to help me see the larger issue. Technical communicators have certainly explored delivering a more personalized help experience, but this usually means tailoring the TOC to the user’s role or location. Another personalized help experience is when the author reveals him or herself as an actual person, either through personal interaction or through a more distinctive voice. We see this frequently with third-party tech comm books, but rarely from corporate instructional materials.
I think social media helps change some of this person-less tradition. Since we opened comments up our technology blog at work, and I’ve responded, I think I’ve come across as a more real person. After all, some name has to respond to comments. It’s a bit impersonal to make responses as “admin” or as the site name.
Just curious, but where do you work now? It seems you have a lot of insights and experience in the profession. What has been your career trajectory?
Hi Tom,
I’m currently working in my own company, Analecta Communications Inc. (The website is currently down for a revamp. Theoretically, it should be up by the end of the weekend. This theory is based on certain forward-looking assumptions about the cold I am fighting, so we’ll see.)
Apart from the consulting work I have done, a couple of things in my career have helped me gain a broad perspective on the state of the industry.
The first was a benchmarking exercise I was part of when I worked for Nortel. We visited and interviewed docs teams in a number of leading companies, looking to extract best practices. That really got me interested in improving the efficiency and efficacy for the tech pubs process.
After that, I worked for SGML pioneer OmniMark Technologies, and got to see a large number of organizations that were either implementing structured writing solutions or trying to repair broken ones. That really taught me to pay attention to how a proposed solution will scale, and to how you maintain order in a system over time.
Having trained as an historian, my natural approach to fixing a system is to ask how it got to be the way it is. If the fix does not address the causes of the current situation, it won’t really solve the problem. So I have become something of a student of tech writing in the modern era.
(A current example of the tendency to ignore root causes is the number of organizations that have nominally embraced topic-based writing only to start building books out of topics. New tools alone do not break the book-bias of these oraganizations — thus the emphasis I place on the concept that Every Page is Page One.)
My aim in Analecta Communications is to promote the Every Page is Page One concept and a query-based (as opposed to map-based) processing architecture I call SPFE. (That’s another website I hope to have up soon.)
Thanks for sharing more about your professional background and career interests. ” We visited and interviewed docs teams in a number of leading companies, looking to extract best practices.” This sounds really interesting. Your direction to move toward the philosophy in Every Page Is Page One, as a result of your study of tech pubs groups across companies, is also intriguing. I didn’t know how invested you were in this idea. It certainly seems to be something that has formed after years of investigation. It’s also neat to know that you’re a historian.
Oh, and on the subject of the value of personal relationships, one of the things I have come to realize is that high tech is a field were respect is based almost entirely on personal reputation. Doctors and accountants garner a large proportion of their professional respect from their qualifications, but this is not true for anyone in technology.
One of the things I have noticed is that, in most companies, individual tech writers (the ones who are any good) tend to enjoy more respect in the organization than the tech pubs function itself. You can see in in forums as well: certain contributors have high reputations based on the quality of their contributions, not on the degrees of affiliations. Only high-tech, I suspect, could dream up indexes of personal influence like Klout and Peer Index.
It follows that, if they are any good, a tech writer who shows a personal face to the customer base may gain more respect that the company’s anonymous missives, precisely because the contributions are personal and backed by the respect that the customer base has for that person.
In a sense, people with their own reputations can become halo employees for a company, attracting people to the company and its products. The greatest example of a halo employee, of course, is Steve Jobs. But I see no reason why a good tech writer could not become a halo employee for their company, if on a smaller scale.
Good points. I think you’re right that tech writers can grow better reputations as individuals rather than a tech pubs dept as a whole, which will always drag in connotations of the poor user help. This has certainly been my experience in the past.
Often, people do not come back to check the comment replies. So, if they have asked an important question in the comments, I make sure that I personally email the responses to them. They often reply back thanking for the response.
I use a plugin for this. Subscribe to Comments, or something. It sends people an email when you reply.