Confab 2012: Thoughts and Reactions
I recently attended Confab in Minneapolis. I was one of about 5 technical writers among the 650 attendees, which is why I found it surprising to hear Erin Kissane say, We can learn a lot from tech comm. Let me repeat that. We can learn a lot from tech comm.
I felt pleased to hear this shout-out to my profession, and then tried to unpack exactly what she meant. Throughout the conference, a number of presenters emphasized the need for structured authoring. This refrain seemed loudest in Karen McGrane’s talk on Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content (a presentation she is also giving at the STC Summit).
I believe they respect tech comm for our expertise in structured authoring, which theoretically gives rise to an ability to publish many different outputs from one source. If you can publish to web, mobile, tablet, flipbook, print, intranet, blog, white paper, social media, brochures, and other content from one source, because you’ve tagged that content in the right way, then you have a strong competitive advantage in the marketplace. Yes, “structured authoring is definitely the way to go” was the message I kept hearing.
If you want to write your content once and “spray” it (to use a verb I heard in Karen’s presentation) to a dozen different publishing destinations, then you need to structure your content with the right tags, metadata, and other semantic markup to make it flexible and adaptable to the platform and context it resides on.
Despite all the enthusiasm for structured authoring, I didn’t hear much about the nitty-gritty technical details. In fact, in one presentation, the speaker talked extensively about metadata, and had us map out a taxonomy for a website. The idea was that through metadata, the content management system (CMS) would dynamically pull content into various spaces on the website based on the metadata and content model rules.
I guess sticking with concepts is fine, but I would have appreciated some refreshing realism about the difficulty of doing this. Does a CMS that pulls different objects based on metadata require about 100K and a team of programmers to implement? Or are we talking about something much simpler here?
And to write once, publish everywhere, do we have a dozen or so custom XSLT transforms to manipulate XML-tagged content into different outputs? From what I’ve heard, setting these transforms up requires developer-level expertise, and getting the PDF deliverable is so difficult that the most one can hope for is a plain-looking output that is merely acceptable rather than downright ugly. Or is responsive design the model instead?
Two words I didn’t hear
The Confab conference had many top-notch sessions. I listened to Lou Rosenfeld, Jared Spool, Mailchimp content strategists, and other well-known people. Their sessions were lively and memorable. However, I must confess that I was disappointed not hear the words “collaborative authoring” or “blog” during any presentation (except maybe as a brief word on a slide).
Why are these two concepts downplayed? First, I do not think the content strategists who attend Confab have any interest in wikis or collaborative authoring. From what I can tell, most attendees are content strategists in their organization, which usually means they write/edit/review the copy for their organization’s website and other collateral, provide a style guide, and help in myriad other undefined ways. (To be honest, I’m always a little curious to hear what people who call themselves content strategists actually do in their organizations.)
I can understand the absence of discussion around wikis, because wikis are more the domain of tech comm. Wikis are more suited for technical publishing, when you regularly interact with subject matter experts, work with constantly changing information, follow an agile methodology, and draw knowledge from product users. Wikis are not typically for marketers.
But why no discussions about blogging? In fact, no sessions scheduled for the STC Summit address blogging either. What happened to blogging? Is it simply aggregated into a larger umbrella of social media? Is blogging now just considered another form of content? Or has the unthinkable happened — has blogging become … passé?
It wasn’t too long ago that it seemed blogs were discussed more directly, and as a powerful, new form of content, rather than simply another form of social media. Where else can you publish thought-provoking, idea-soaked content with a personal voice and transparent tone? Few forms of content do more to build relationships, increase visibility, and spur interaction than a well-written blog. After all, not to call attention to myself, but MindTouch did name me #1 most influential in tech comm this year – not for my content strategy, or for any books I’ve written (which I haven’t), or for a preponderance of tweets, or for speaking engagements, or webinars, but rather for my blog.
And yet, ironically, having a blog nowadays doesn’t have nearly the impact it used to. Now pretty much everyone has a blog, even though they may not post to it more than quarterly. And the quality of the posts? If it’s a blog, it seems you’re allowed to drop the quality several notches. You don’t even need to proofread or spell check your content, really. It’s just a blog. Synonymous with blah.
In one session, Erin Kissane presented a session on “Ideas Worth Stealing.” She looked at innovations in writing and reading. Near the end, she mentioned a new site she has developed called Contents. Contents is an online magazine focused on content strategy.
From what I can tell, the style follows a similar approach as A List Apart. The site runs on WordPress, has a weekly publishing schedule, favors longer articles, probably includes an editorial workflow, has a list of regular contributors/editors, and is packaged in a responsive theme (making it mobile/tablet friendly).
Now, in looking at Contents, how is it really different from a group blog? One point Kissane made during her presentation is that lines and boundaries of content are blurring. What does it even mean for a book to be a book, now that you have mobile versions, online web versions, flipbooks, and so forth? What defines content as a book in this digital age? How does a blog post differ from a magazine article? Maybe it’s better just to refer to it all as “content.”
I like Kissane’s style, and I definitely welcome the new Contents magazine. I just don’t want us, in all this talk and praise of content, to forget about blogs.
Vivid = Verbal + Visual Interdependence
Let’s switch gears a bit. Another major focus during Confab was the emphasis on adding visuals to content. Dan Roam gave one of the most energizing keynotes I’ve listened to for a while. It was one of those keynotes where something clicked inside of me.
I used to be more gung-ho for visual illustration (see my 10 post series on visual imagination). During Dan’s presentation, I kept thinking back to my post on VITA (Video – Illustration – Text – Action) as my answer to the evolution of how one should do help content.
Somehow, in the busy-ness of life, I’d forgotten about the importance of visual content. Dan Roam reminded me of what I’d forgotten. Thank you, Dan. I was also pleasantly surprised to find a complimentary copy of Dan Roam’s latest book, Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don’t Work in my free Brain Traffic tote bag. (The conference staff really knows how to put together a nice conference.)
Dan’s main premise is that you must combine the verbal (words) with the visual (pictures) to make your ideas vivid (hence the acronym).
I also attended a session on comics by Kevin Cheng. Comics are just sequentially told visuals, usually in story form. Kevin continued some of the points Dan made, but applied them in different ways.
If I were to combine more visuals with my writing, the appeal of my content would triple. The tragedy of tech comm is that we’ve focused too much on authoring efficiency over the past decade, rather than trying to solve the problem of why so many users find help useless. If help were more visual (and I’m not just talking about inserting more screenshots), both with the illustration of concepts and with videos, I think users would welcome help material, arms wide open.
By the way, I think some of Roam’s ideas about connecting text with visuals ties back to Robert Horn’s Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century. More on that later (when I finish reading Blah Blah Blah).
On the Ride Home
On the ride home, I thought I was done with Confab, but the flight attendant saw my Brain Traffic tote bag and, somewhat stunned, asked, “What’s that about – Brain Traffic?“ I thought a minute, and then said, “It’s a writer’s conference.” (Who wants to explain content strategy to a flight attendant?)
Well, it turns out the guy sitting next to me was a Confab conference attendee, returning to Colorado. We chatted for about an hour. He had a lot of great insights and feedback about the conference. One of his criticisms was a lack of dissent during the conference. Few people disagree about anything, he noted. And you know what? He’s right. I’m starting to get sick of tweets and blog posts that do nothing more than agree, praise, repeat a quote, and bemoan how others in their organization don’t get it.
What exactly would you disagree with, I asked? He mentioned Ann Rockley’s talk on governance. In the web publishing world of his clients, implementing a governance board that meets regularly to review content guidelines would be something his clients would downright laugh at. They have a need to publish immediately and regularly, without any kind of structure that introduces more bureaucracy into the system. Many of these companies aren’t big enough to merit a “governance board.”
He also pointed out that the idea of writing once and publishing everywhere was a flawed idea. You can’t publish the same content that was intended for a blog post in a white paper, a tweet, and a brochure, he explained. Different forms require a different emphasis, style, and approach. To think that you can create content that can live everywhere and anywhere because you’ve tagged it intelligently is nonsense. It doesn’t fit the world I live in.
We then got to talking about some of his projects. He is in fact a bonafide content strategist, and has begun his own company doing content strategy. He quit his regular job to do this, and has had good success so far, since the competition is scarce in his area.
With one of his clients, he explained that they publish regular blog articles to attract new readers. Readers are pulled in by the blog articles, and they are then presented with contextual links for the services the client sells. He said it has been a very successful strategy for the client. He didn’t think blogs were passé, and he was a little surprised that blogs didn’t receive more attention at the conference (though he hadn’t considered this until I pointed out their absence).
Concluding thoughts
Overall, Confab is an excellent conference. Other attendees compared it to conferences put on by A List Apart. I walked away with a lot of insights and ideas, and I have been very open in this post. In the coming weeks, I’ll try to post some notes from sessions I attended.
If this conference weren’t back to back with the STC Summit, I would recommend that more technical writers attend it. If you’re interested in learning more about content strategy, I recommend that you attend the Content Strategy Workshop that dovetails with Lavacon in the fall.
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Thanks very much for your writeup and insights, Tom. I didn’t attend Confab, but I have heard most of the people you mentioned present similar topics in the past. I don’t think that blogs are passe. I do think that there are so many of them now that it is hard to find the good ones in the midst of the other content noise.
Adaptive content – content that can be written once, and the ferreted out by Content Management Systems via extremely intricate tagging – do pose many technical problems. They also pose many structural and lingistic problems. I think we are still in the infancy of adaptive and responsive content. You almost need a PhD to figure out most of the tools. That said, the idea of creating different content for different devices (that then needs to be translated into different languages) is as onerous a task as creating dozens of XSLT transforms. Updating multiple versions for each new release or product or acquisition would take more manpower than a 100k CMS and the engineers to build it.
I am not disagreeing with you. I agree that the idea is great, but the execution using our current toolsets is next to impossible, I do hope that as time goes on we are able to develop tools that make writing and using content in a structured environment a lot easier. Of course, by then who knows how many different device types we’ll have! Hope to see you in Chicago. Thanks again for your insIghtful blog post.
it’s Halvorson, dear writer.
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I’ve read Halvorson’s and Kissane’s books about Content Strategy, and although I think that both books are very good, they seem either dismissive of or defensive about technical writers. I’m not sure that I could point to anything in particular, but they seem to have an attitude that we’re merely content creators and wordsmiths.
And yet reading Karen McGrane’s tweets from the conference, it seems like content strategists are excited about discovering things like structured authoring and modular content, things that we in the tech comm area started talking about and wrestling with 10 years ago (or so).
So I’m not sure why it’s taken so long for content strategists to realize that they can learn from us. On the other hand, maybe it’s because us crotchety old tech writers have been dismissive towards those young know-it-all upstarts?
OK, sorry to be repeating a quote and agreeing here, but I really like your remark “The tragedy of tech comm is that we’ve focused too much on authoring efficiency over the past decade, rather than trying to solve the problem of why so many users find help useless.” Couldn’t agree more.
Tom, we definitely need some dissent in content strategy — a theme I explored recently in a pair of blog posts, Am I an Content Strategist, and I am a Content Strategist, in which I raised the question of whether content strategy is a field at all, or just a particular philosophy.
My key beef with the current state of content strategy is that it essentially takes the old publications management mindset from the 80s and applies it to the web. This, naturally, excludes blogs from consideration, since blogs are not publications on the old model.
The fundamental problem with this model is that it treats a website as a publication, which is most definitely is not. A website is not a publication but a colloquium. (A blog, of course, is precisely a colloquium.)
I wrote an article a while back in which I argued the we needed a new doctrine of technical communications (http://techwhirl.com/business/itc/its-time-for-a-new-doctrine-of-technical-communications/). I would make the same argument about content strategy. We need a new doctrine of content strategy that recognizes that publications are no longer central to the engagement of a corporation with its customers. Publications still have the place, but conversation is now primary.
The web is a colloquium. The strategic imperative is to figure out how to engage effectively in that colloquium, not how to publish content on a website.
I’ll also echo Dave in endorsing the passage he quotes. Our job is not to publish better, but to help better.
The current crop of content strategists, for the most part, could not (as I have said before) strategize their way out of a box. Yes, there is some dismissive and defensive (both) undercurrents from the marketing and web side of the content strategy world (often with good reason), but there is also a lack of knowledge and understanding of content challenges that many of these folks do not comprehend. That will change over time, but for now, content strategy is a discipline and a way of thinking.
Yes, it’s all over the place, but it doesn’t have to be. You can out into place a good content strategy regardless of whether the rest of the content world is doing so or not. That’s the great thing about being on the forefront of content production as a source of improvement (reduction in operational inefficiencies, increases in leveraging content for customer satisfaction — and even to drive sales). Content strategy of the type Ann Rockley describes in her (now second edition book) “Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy” have been good guides for technical and other content for over a decade and this approach is in use in global and smaller companies around the world.
And while some content strategists are clueless about the advances in content creation, management and delivery that technical communication pros have driven forward the past decade or so, some do actually recognize our value. Kristina Halvorson, for example, wrote the forward to Ann Rockley’s latest book on content strategy.
Eventually, we’ll all get on the same page (or at least in the same book).
Hi Tom,
What a meaty, excellent write-up. One quick correction: I think the “learn from tech comm” quote in your first paragraph is actually from my Confab talk, though I believe Kristina also mentioned tech comm. (Here’s a tweet from Ann Rockley about it: https://twitter.com/arockley/status/202860217984237568)
The supposed tension between tech comm and CS continues to puzzle me. Many of have been talking positively about, borrowing from, and working closely with tech comm folks for years and years, yet some still seem to perceive us as defensive or hostile. Which…maybe someone is? But I don’t know or work with them.
The thing is, there are many kinds of content strategists. Some have been working with structured content and data models since the 1990s. Others focused more on editorial work. But it’s becoming increasingly clear, I think, that even “editorial” CS people can’t ignore the more data-oriented aspects of content work any longer, as much some of us might prefer to. Thus the “mainstream” CS community begins to discuss more seriously these ideas that have previously been the concern of our more tech/data-flavored CS practitioners.
Maybe the tension stems from a cultural divide. All I really know is that I’d love to see it die a speedy death. We don’t really have the luxury of internecine squabbling with this much work to do, and we’ll do it better and faster together.
I did spend some time considering your comments about Contents as a blog. We call Contents a magazine because our lengthy and intensive editorial process borrows extensively from magazine publication, because we run thematically unified “issues” with beginnings and endings, and because we acquire work from many authors instead of working with a repertory-company approach (only three of our writers contribute regularly). In those ways, I think we have a magazine-ish editorial sensibility. On the tech side, of course, it’s a blog with some weird custom archives.
We’re excerpting this post in our round-up of Confab tomorrow, btw, and I hope some of you will consider contributing to the magazine in the future. Our reason for existing is to bring together ideas and people from all of the digital content disciplines and subfields, and we have some issues coming up that will veer pretty sharply into tech comm territory. And you’re very much welcome in our tent.
Cheers,
Erin
Erin, thanks for commenting. Sorry for the error in the attribution. I updated the post to be accurate now. I did really enjoy your presentation and many others at Confab.
Re the divide between marketing CS and tech comm CS, the separation is a bit puzzling, I agree. One challenge with content strategy is that it tries to be so massive and all-encompassing — spanning marketing, tech comm, and other disciplines — that it is difficult to connect with a specifically targeted community. At tech comm conferences, about 80% of the attendees seem to be technical writers. At Confab, I met people with myriad job titles, none really a trend.
Re the Contents magazine, I didn’t realize you published themed issues. It really is a great endeavor, and I hope it’s successful. I think in this post I was reacting to the perceived notion (not sure where I got the impression) that blogging is a second-rate activity for fluffy, opinionated people. There are so many poor blogs out there, they give a black eye to blogging as a whole. One almost needs to find a new title for the activity.
When it comes to structured authoring, I didn’t include this in the post, but most technical writers just use help authoring tools to achieve the single-sourcing and multi-channel output. Help authoring tools and more robust content management systems do all the heavy lifting with code. Most technical writers aren’t hand-coding their XML and creating sophisticated transforms on their own. (Some do, but very few.)
I’ll consider contributing to Contents. I’ll be on the lookout for your upcoming themes. Thanks again for commenting.
Great post Tom, as a relative newcomer to Content Strategy I have also encountered the loose definition that defines the discipline. I come from a user experience background and have also worked in publishing, so I come at it from multiple avenues. As I discover more and gain new experience, I have begun to uncover the various levels at which the field works.
At a high level is the strategy side, thinking about the ins and outs of content without delving too far into the details. On the other end of the spectrum, is the more editorial approach, primarily focused on the specifics of content and often skimming the world of copy writing. Content strategy lives within this wide spectrum and is all the richer for it. Aside from the confusion and lack of a singular definition, this works to our advantage because content also works across this spectrum. It needs champions across the board.
I think that this ambiguity is a good thing for now and maybe we will find better ways to classify what we do down the road.
Great post, great discussion in the comments.
Having worked in both marketing (as a copywriter) and tech comm (as a tech writer and manager), and now being a content strategist for a tech company, I am constantly puzzled by the divide between the worlds of marketing and technical content. Maybe it’s because we report to different departments (in most companies) that you rarely find people who do both. But the reality is, we have a common goal: to inform and help the user.
I’m with Erin: we have too much work to do and too little time for squabbling.
As for single-source publishing, I’ve been trying to get my brain around this for a couple of years. I read in the books that systematic reuse is the Next Big Thing, yet I talk to consultants who tell me that it’ll set you back six figures and a year of migration time.
It’s great that we’re looking forward toward a vision of single-source publishing. But I, like you Tom, would love more information how to get there from here. What’s the next step?
Thanks!
(p.s. You should present next year on the topic of blogging.