I'd Rather Be Writing » content strategy

Content Strategy Workshops: Interview with Rahel Bailie

Tom Johnson — Fri, 25 May 2012 11:52:26 +0000

Content Strategy Workshops

This year Rahel Bailie and Scott Abel are putting on a new event called Content Strategy Workshops. It’s a two-day event, held October 9-10 in Portland, Oregon that follows the Lavacon Conference (held October 7-9, same hotel). I helped work on the website a bit, and I wanted to highlight this new event through an interview with Rahel.

Tell me about the new Content Strategy Workshop conference you’re putting on this year.

That’s a good opening question because I want to clarify that this is not a conference, but two days of intensive workshops where practitioners can hone their skills. Scott and I are excited about the Content Strategy Workshops (CSW) event because we want it to become an annual event that practitioners consider a valuable part of their professional development plan, and think of as a resource toward building their skill sets and maintaining their currency in the marketplace.

What prompted you to put on this event?

The practice area of content strategy has coalesced relatively quickly, and practitioners are still scrambling to come to a common vocabulary, come to an agreement on some best practices, define deliverables. There are no continuing education programs (at least not yet) that teach content strategy in any holistic way, so we wanted to fill that gap. Last year, eBay launched the Content Strategy Applied series, wherein practitioners could learn skills that they could take home and start using in the workplace immediately. We wanted to provide that same opportunity to content strategists in North America.

How does CSW differ from Content Strategy Applied, Content Strategy Forum, and Confab?

This is a bit of a complicated question, but an important one because it can be confusing to understand the conference landscape when it comes to content strategy.

The first Content Strategy Forum was put on by the Society for Technical Communication and was focused on the type of content strategy practices that technical communicators could relate to. The second year, there was a huge swing to focus on the type of content strategy topics of interest to marketing communicators in interactive agencies. I have no idea what the focus will be for this year’s conference. It has moved to South Africa this year, though, so it may be out of reach for many North American practitioners who can’t go around the world to attend.

Likewise, Confab is a conference, supplemented by a day of workshops. The first year, I found the topics more focused on areas of interest to strategists handling the editorial side of content: marketing, branding, and engagement strategies, content usability, and so on. There is obviously great demand for this, as they’ve had great success with this format. But any conference can’t address all the needs of all practitioners, and we’re focusing on the needs of a different segment of practitioners.

Content Strategy Applied is really the event that we connect with the most. That eBay-sponsored event is two days of workshops, bracketed by plenary sessions. We wanted to put on a sister event to CS Applied, and I’d like to acknowledge their influence in our decision to bring that format to this side of the pond. Quite frankly, we thought of calling our event “Content Strategy Applied – North America” but the complications of sharing a brand with a multinational just seemed an unneeded obstacle to overcome, so we struck out on our own. And Content Strategy Workshops says exactly what our event is about: skill-building workshops, delivered by industry leaders, that attendees can apply in the workplace.

Does content strategy fall within the tech comm discipline or the marketing discipline, or both? It seems like Confab is more heavily weighted to marketing than tech comm. Will your event have more of a tech comm feel to it?

Content strategy does fit “within” either discipline, but is actually a superset of these combined disciplines plus other related disciplines that produce content. Situationally, some projects focus on a particular aspect of content strategy, such as the “web refresh” project. But when you think about what’s on that website, you could have content of several genres: marketing content, technical content, user-generated content, social content, and so on. And because each content type serves a different purpose, it needs a different treatment. Some of that content may interact with other content of a different genre. So you can see where your question poses a bit of a challenge to answer.

Rather than the division being by discipline, I’d rather peg our event as more focused on the technical than editorial aspects of content, and particularly on delivery aspects. We do have some editorial, but it’s more of the technical side of editorial: benchmarking metrics for content quality, a strategy for integrating cross-silo content, content for international markets.

Both Scott and I are known for talking about how having a strong technical foundation is critical to being able to leverage content as a business asset. So a strong part of our workshop series is how to add some serious technopower to content. We have workshops on analytics, content typing and modeling, content migration, multi-channel outputs, and other technical aspects that can seriously hobble a content strategy if done wrong.

Content strategists are looking to learn about these topics, if not to immerse themselves in doing it, at least to know enough so that they don’t get bamboozled by developers or CMS integrators. It’s not easy to find that type of training – you often have to seek out a workshop from an adjacent profession, and then figure out how to transfer that knowledge to your own practice area – so to come to an event where you get to pick from eight different workshops in two days is like hitting the jackpot.

Why did you decide to dovetail the conference with Lavacon? Are you hoping to make it easy for tech comm professionals to attend the conference?

We owe Jack Molisani, the Lavacon organizer, a big thank you for working with us to figure out a way to co-locate his conference with our workshops. He would generally have a day of workshops adjacent to Lavacon, and the difference is that we’re running the workshops as a separate event. By doing that, we can curate the workshops to create an end-to-end experience for registrants.

The Lavacon audience, which used to be slanted more to technical communicators, has become a healthy mix of content professionals, and the Lavacon program reflects that – it’s not as tech-heavy as it used to be, and has more strategy sessions. It makes sense to offer the workshops to these professionals, as they’ve already travelled to the conference, and instead of taking a disconnected workshop, they can put together a workshop program that suits their training needs.

How exactly do the two events fit together? Isn’t 5 days of sessions a bit like an ironman conference effort?

Actually, it’s not five consecutive days – that would be a marathon! Many conferences are three days, plus a day of workshops. Lavacon runs two-and-a-half days: all day Sunday and Monday, and Tuesday morning. Content Strategy Workshops runs two days: it overlaps with Lavacon on Tuesday morning, and continues the rest of Tuesday and all day on Wednesday.

The two events share a plenary: the closing session of Lavacon is also the opening session of CSW. Because of the arrangement we agreed upon with Lavacon, both events are offering a very sweet deal to registrants: sign up for one event (both events are the same price), and get the second event for $500. So it’s quite flexible – two days of workshops, or a couple of days of conference sessions and a couple of days of workshops.

Is this the first event you’re running? What have you learned so far?

This is definitely not my first event. I was the conference manager for a wildly successful STC Regional Conference in 2002, and I was conference organizer for the first content strategy conference in 2008 called Content Convergence and Integration, which is still fondly remembered by the content strategists who attended for its high quality program. And Scott has been behind many a successful conference, and certainly knows the industry.

We’ve put our collective knowledge into the organization of the event: make the event repeatable by tapping into knowledge gaps and filling them, commit to program quality by getting input from industry leaders, start small and stay focused, charge what the event is worth but don’t overcharge. We’re both innovative people and have certain reputations in the industry, so we’re counting on leveraging our own knowledge and contacts to make this a not-to-be-missed event.

You can learn more about Content Strategy Workshops at http://contentstrategyworkshops.com.

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Confab 2012: Thoughts and Reactions

Tom Johnson — Sat, 19 May 2012 22:39:26 +0000

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 Kristina Halverson 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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Guest Post: Why I Love Wikis

Tom Johnson — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 16:04:49 +0000

Neal Kaplan

The following is a guest post by Neal Kaplan, a technical writer at Zuora, Inc.

Another post about wikis? Why not! Wikis are great!

Just to set the stage, I’ve been a technical writer for a while now, working for software companies in Silicon Valley. (In fact, I often forget that there are technical writers who don’t document software.) I’ve worked at large companies, where I delivered my source files to a production team and then moved on to the next project, and as a team of one, where I was in charge of writing, producing, and delivering PDFs and online help to the end users. I consider myself an expert user of FrameMaker and RoboHelp.

And I’m happy to leave both of them behind.

Falling in love

Back in 2005, I had the opportunity to join a video game company (!!!) as a technical writer. I was in charge of documenting how to use game engine for an internal audience of game developers. They had a wiki with a small amount of information (written by programmers), which could be accessed from the game development application, so it served as online help.

This was a new world for me, and I loved it! No more lengthy production process (waiting for Frame to build books, then troubleshooting when it hung on a misplaced tag). Instead, I could publish the documentation as soon as I wrote it. When users found errors (it happens even to the best of us), I could fix them immediately, instead of having to file them away and wait to make them available with the next release of the product.

Better yet, I could ask the readers to help. I found that most people were more comfortable sending me a list of suggestions, but I did get a few people to help with tips and best practices. That information almost always comes from your advanced users, and it’s the information that they love to share.

But wikis aren’t exactly online help, and using them solely as a help system limits their usefulness. Even if many users don’t contribute, every user can contribute if they want to. They don’t need to own a copy of the authoring application, or climb the steep learning curve that comes with many of our tools.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder

When that job ended, I went back to a traditional Frame-to-PDF environment. And I couldn’t stand it. What user wants to read 1500-page PDFs? What writer wants to have to regenerate a book that big, with 20+ chapters, just to fix a typo on page 835?

And what happens to the PDFs? You write the content, generate the file, then check it in to be included with the software or post it on the company’s web site. And that’s when it falls into the abyss of the internet: Does anyone read it? How much do they read? Did they find it useful, or as a foolproof cure for insomnia?

Another opportunity to work with wiki-based documentation came my way, and I leapt at the chance. So far, I’ve merged two existing wikis into a shiny new wiki. I moved to a hosted system, using Mindtouch TCS, because it offers a clean, easy to use system with built-in templates, rating and commenting, and a straightforward way to build a documentation hierarchy.

While I was moving the existing content to a new wiki, I was pushed into a “social knowledge” project, where we bribed people across the company to document answers to frequently asked questions and best practices. I admit that I was wary at first: It’s one thing to have people make edits to your documentation (which you can easily review and fix, if necessary), but it’s a frightening new world for tech writers when anybody can write documentation! (Fortunately, wikis come with revision histories, and the ability to revert to a previous version. I’ve only had to use that once or twice.)

Of course, this is the whole point of wikis, and this project produced great content that would have taken me years to research and write. I found that while some people might object to criticisms about grammar and word choices, they were happy to help if I asked them to clarify an explanation or provide an example. I’m fortunate to be in a situation where my coworkers are one of my audiences, and they understand the need for good documentation.

A handful of employees continue to contribute documentation. Some people write lengthy topics, and some provide quick tips and best practices. All of this is hugely valuable to me, and to my readers. The next step is to encourage our customers to contribute to the documentation.

But on the other hand…

Obviously, I love working with wikis. But I will admit that they aren’t perfect and don’t solve every documentation problem.

Structure (IA and Content Strategy): One thing became clear to me soon after I started using a wiki to create documentation: A wiki is not a documentation set, and it’s not exactly online help. I realized that I needed to learn more about web structure, and that meant learning about information architecture and content strategy. IA is probably more directly relevant, but the concepts involved in both areas help me figure out how to design a structure that makes sense. Or at least identify when a structure doesn’t make sense. In fact, I’m in that position right now: my next big-picture task is to rebuild my doc site to have a more meaningful structure, instead of being mapped to our product’s UI.

Curation and Content Management: Without someone acting as curator, a wiki will very quickly collapse into a mass of unlinked, unstructured topics. Once you have built the structure, you need to keep track of what people are writing, and where. At a minimum, you will need to review new topics to add metadata.

For example, with Mindtouch I can add tags to topics, and they control what appears in the Related Topics area. This is hugely valuable, but it means that the tags need to exist, and that writers are consistent in their use of tags.

Single Sourcing: Wikis aren’t known for their single-sourcing functionality. Every wiki that I’ve worked with has a way to pull information from one topic into another, but it’s a manual process. This is manageable on a small scale, but I can see it becoming a problem once I have more writers working on more projects.

Here’s my shameful secret: I’ve been trying to avoid DITA. It just seems too complex for me to bother with, and I was there during the early, terrifying days of Frame-to-help conversion tools. I don’t need to reuse large amounts of content (so far), and I don’t want to get stuck writing dry, contextless snippets of information. I’m not writing massive guides for IBM servers, so why do I need the headache of DITA?

Obviously, that’s just the (mis)perceptions of someone who has only skirted the issue. I’ve talked to other writers about single-sourcing workarounds that they’ve implemented, but I haven’t come across an easy, automated solution to single sourcing to a wiki. Maybe I’ll have to give in and embrace DITA…but I shudder at the thought!

Ending on a positive note

I don’t think that those problems are insurmountable, or unique to wikis. All documentation needs a solid structure, after all. And there are huge advantages to being able to publish immediately and allow your readers to easily rate and comment on your documentation.

Many wikis also provide basic statistics about your documentation, such as a list of popular pages (based on page views and/or page ratings) and topic aging reports. It was easy for me to create lists of the most recently edited and the most popular topics and display that information on the front page.

Mindtouch TCS also provides information about search terms and results, which allows me to identify gaps in the documentation and improve the search results. For example, if users are searching for a term and not finding the correct topic, I can configure that search term to return the result that I want them to see.

Plus, it includes the ability to save topics to PDF. Any reader can save a single topic, or a topic and all of its child topics. It’s easy to create a PDF containing every topic in the Knowledge Center (and a few people have asked for that functionality). Of course, I update the documentation daily, so those files are almost instantly out of date. But that’s a limitation with any static document.

I’m also using Google Analytics with my documentation site, which gives me an enormous amount of information. Besides getting more information about the number of people visiting the site, I can track how users are navigating through the documentation, which browsers they’re using, what screen resolutions they’re using, their language settings…basically, information that helps me determine what I need to support, and what I can do to make the documentation better for my users.

I’ve just hired a second writer. I’m excited to be working with another tech writer, and I’m looking forward to launching a new doc structure, getting more systematic about adding links and tags, and finally getting serious about adding videos to the site.

Neal Kaplan is a principal technical writer at Zuora, Inc., in charge of the Zuora Knowledge Center (http://knowledgecenter.zuora.com). Five of his 17 years as a technical writer have been spent working with wikis. Even after 17 years, he feels that there’s still a lot to learn about writing great documentation. Neal lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two daughters, and can be contacted at nealbkaplan@gmail.com.

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Managing 60 + Volunteer Writers

Tom Johnson — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 04:14:54 +0000

About four months ago, I posted a call for volunteer writers who might be interested in helping out with the LDSTech blog. Since that time, about 60 volunteers have joined the project. Some are more enthusiastic than others, and some have more writing talent than others. It’s not easy to determine talent and motivation based on signups alone. Some jump in eagerly right from the beginning; others lurk for weeks. Regardless of the variety of motivation, skills, and available time, one theme is constant: an overwhelming number of people are enthusiastic about volunteering.

The challenge, I’ve found, is figuring out how to harness this volunteer energy. I have about 90 topics to write about (which I list in the JIRA project for this work), but project management involves more than just assigning a topic to a volunteer. Many times the topics require some research and investigation. I may have a particular angle I want to take with the topic, one that’s only fleshed out in my mind.

The topic may require me to find out who the subject matter expert is (in a large organization, this is no easy feat). It may require me to contact product owners to ask permission to write about the topic, as well as to gauge timing of the article’s publication. I may need to interview people to get more information before even identifying the topic. There’s also an element of follow-through. You have to set deadlines for drafts, or else the drafts are likely to linger for weeks without being finished.

Getting volunteers to write is only the first step. Another challenge is what to do with a draft that needs a lot of work. If the writing doesn’t have enough information, or if it’s clear that the writer is having trouble structuring the information or articulating concepts, fixing the draft can require a lot of work. Laying it to waste demotivates volunteer efforts, while fixing it can leave me working on the weekends.

There’s also a need to give feedback to volunteer writers — being tactful if the feedback is constructive, or mentoring if the volunteer is looking to learn from the opportunity.

I don’t do a good job at all managing this project, since I am only engaging the most active volunteers at the moment. I guess I’m realizing just how much bandwidth it takes to manage remote volunteer writers.

Despite all of these challenges, it’s invigorating to be in such a position. I’ve always been an individual contributor rather than a manager. Now I’m not only managing, but managing 60+ writers. The list of volunteers only grows larger each day. My project is actually small in comparison. Other community projects have 130+ volunteers, with multiple project managers.

Despite the challenges, I find the interaction somewhat invigorating and fun. It’s new territory to be moving through. One day, I’ll figure out the magic elixir of successful community project management. It may take years before that happens, since there’s so much to learn. But one of these days, I will have 20+ engaged volunteers writing new articles every day. How will I keep up? I’ll have to designate more project managers, and more editors. I suppose it all scales … somehow.

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Interview with Kevin Cuddihy, Editor of the STC Notebook Blog

Tom Johnson — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:07:47 +0000

A couple of years ago, the STC started a Notebook blog. Recently I followed up with Kevin Cuddihy, editor of the STC Notebook blog, to see the impact has been for the STC.

How long has it been since STC started their STC Notebook blog?

It’s been just over two years—our second “birthday” was on 3 August. The assistant editor for STC at the time, Tara Ebrahimi, started it. I came on board 31 August when Tara went back to school and picked up the baton, posting as Your Friendly Neighborhood Blogger ever since. Yes, I was a Spiderman fan growing up. While this is the STC blog, I try to inject some of my own personality into it as well. It makes it more fun for me, and I think it makes it more entertaining for members.

I’m curious to know what the effect has been. Was it a good idea?

I think so, yes. Initially the blog was intended as a replacement for the monthly News & Notes email, but people receive their information in so many different ways that we eventually decided to do both of them. Now, however, News & Notes is more a monthly executive summary of the blog. Members can get the information first and fastest by reading the blog (or subscribing to the RSS feed), but if they don’t then we need to make sure they still get that information. And the blog has helped us get that information out faster than we could before.

Does the payoff justify the time and effort?

Absolutely. We’re able to get out more information and in a less intrusive way than if we were to email every single notice out to people. We’re always looking for ways to reduce the amount of email we send our members, and the blog lets us get information out there without inundating our members with email. And being STC, so many of our members are already taking advantage of social media, so it’s a way we know we’ll find them, and we know they’re familiar with it.

Originally, the blog was supposed to be a once-a-week thing, maybe even less than that, but we quickly saw that an expanded publication schedule was necessary to get readers, and more importantly keep the readers. Keeping the readers, and keeping them interested, is definitely worth the time and effort.

Do people get confused about having multiple sources to go for information?

I don’t think so, no. Primarily it’s a question of push versus pull communication. Some want the information pushed to them, and for that we have News & Notes and other periodic emails. And, of course, there’s the RSS feed for the blog. But regular visitors, or people who see links on Twitter, are actively looking for the information and the blog gives them an easy place to find it. And, in exchange, I try to provide some items on the more helpful, useful, and entertaining side as well—the links of interest, profiles of members and communities, etc. Different people get their information in different methods, and I think the blog provides a welcome option to many.

What have been the most popular topics?

By far, the two most popular topics have been Intercom and certification. Members rank Intercom as one of their biggest benefits, so we’ve had strong interest in any topic related to the magazine—the Q&As we used to run, the Notes from the Editor, and especially the discussion about open versus closed models for Intercom Online. And certification has long been a topic of great discussion in STC, so it’s no surprise that the discussion continues on the blog.

I also received some great feedback on our Paths to Fellow feature, where we invited first-person stories from STC Fellows and Associate Fellows on how they earned those honors. A lot of people loved seeing the paths their fellow members took and the way their careers went.

What technical issues have you run into?

It’s not really a technical issue, but continuing a member-focused series has been difficult. People are already overloaded with their day-to-day job, so it’s hard to find more than a handful willing to take some extra time and contribute to the blog. I’ve done community spotlights, the Path to Fellow, Intercom Q&As, and a few other things in the past. Each was well received, but each also had a shelf life, almost, due to the busy schedules of our members. It’s something, I think, where I just need to keep coming up with new and fresh ideas to draw people in.

What’s next?

Well, what’s next is to come up with those new ideas! I’m batting around a few things that I think will be fun and interesting. I work hard to stay away from being nothing more than an advertising venue talking about things to buy. I try to provide a service to our members. If anyone has any ideas on things they’d like to see in the blog, they’re welcome to email me.

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Google Plus as a Professional Communication Tool

Tom Johnson — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:43:29 +0000

Shay Shaked

The following is a guest post by Shay Shaked.

I’ve been messing around with Google Plus for about two weeks now. It occurred to me, after reading Tom Johnson’s latest post about content strategy and listening to his podcast about the same topic, that Google Plus is, perhaps unintentionally, the best professional social network with the right usage of content strategy.

I’m not going to explain what Google Plus is in this post. If you want to learn more about it, there are hundreds of articles around the Internet already. I suggest you head to Google’s official introduction to Google Plus, or check out Read Write Web’s excellent coverage on it. What I am going to do here is to contrast Facebook with Google Plus and explain why professionals, especially communication professionals, should give Google Plus a good hard look. Taking into account that the service is still in its infancy, many of the points raised here are still theoretical, especially with most people still unfamiliar or without access to the service.

Google Plus is not just another social network. It approaches the concept from a different direction — one that can make it an excellent learning and communication tool, not just the “no time for breakfast today, but my cat looks happy, lol” kind of shout-out platform. The reason behind this difference is in content strategy, or content management. Google has placed the content control back in the hands of the user. With Google Plus, each one of us gets to wear the content strategist hat and have a go.

Think about it this way: Facebook has had privacy issues for years. We can even say it redefined the term. It’s every professional’s nightmare. People don’t think of what they want to say and to whom: It’s just a jungle out there, so why bother? The two easy options are to either have a professional Facebook persona or simply avoid it altogether. Some of us maintain more than one Facebook account for this reason, while others dig into the depths of the privacy settings and create lists of who can see what. Either way, it’s usually ineffective and challenging to do.

Even if you can manage one of the two systems, the constant changes to the service tend to annoyingly restore the privacy settings back to what Facebook believes should be the default — the “share everything, regret later” philosophy.

As a result, most people do not take Facebook seriously as a professional platform. My Facebook account is full of restrictions meant to block certain people from seeing those photos and posts I don’t want to show up during a job interview. I would probably never use my current Facebook account for professional networking or interests; it’s just not serious and not filtered enough for that purpose. The only thing Facebook is good for professionally is to add contacts in order to spy on them to find out more useful information. This is exactly why you should have as little information on Facebook as possible.

Google Plus is something else. When I want to share an interesting article, I go to “Sparks,” which is a different application altogether, and share an article of interest with people from my professional circle. This specific aspect of Google Plus still requires much work, but the potential is evident in the concept. I created my professional circle (“network”) as soon as I joined Google Plus. Adding people to this circle was natural and quick. Within seconds, I had an article shared with only the people who I know would care about it.

My friends, who are more interested to hear about my latest date, will get the content relevant to them. In other words, I have the responsibility of creating relevant information. I need to choose what information to give and to who, and not just block certain people form reading everything I can come up with. Through the ease of sharing this information, Google Plus does not just invite me to share relevant information, it compels me to create and find information, something Facebook has never done for me.

Yes, Facebook fans can argue that it’s possible to create lists and groups in Facebook just the same. However, the lists are not immediately available and have to be maintained. Facebook’s lists work as filters. Google Plus’s circles work as, well, circles. Just like in the real world.

But there’s more to Google Plus. It also ties in the rest of the services Google already offers in a nice tidy box, waiting for communication professionals to use. All you have to do is to click on the black bar at the top of the screen, and everything is at your fingertips: your documents, diagrams and sketches, conversations and logs, calendar with appointments, and contacts. The potential level of integration here is huge. Think of what happens when you can share not just a link to a Google Doc from within the Google Plus stream, but also have it show up with a short blurb or a summary of what’s in it, perhaps with a thumbnail. Have a wireframe image saved into your online album, and have different people comment and add to it, if needed.

I don’t know if the folks at Google thought of Google Plus as a professional social networking platform, but I see it as a serious competitor of LinkedIn and Twitter, not just Facebook.

Shay Shaked is a professional information visualist with strong background in non-profit organizations. Currently completing his Masters degree in Professional and Technical Communications, Shay has always been passionate about communication and teaching. He is working part time as a teacher and hopes to pursue academia and education in the near future. To view Shay’s blog, visit Technically Writing.

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Building on Past Successes for Future Directions

Tom Johnson — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 06:56:39 +0000

The many directions one can go

I have a lot of flexibility and freedom in my job. That’s part of the appeal. The other day I was reflecting on the best route to take, the most fruitful path I should follow.

There are quite a few directions I could go. I could become meticulously detailed about style, knowing the ins and outs of every handbook (and being able to compare them with wit and perspective). I could become a tools guru in skinning online help, branding it with the right look and feel for our department. I could become a content producer, immersing myself in the product to write longer, more comprehensive topics.

Or I could become a SME project leader, organizing the writing efforts of a dozen or more subject matter experts (SMEs). I could become a manager, leading and inspiring my team. I could become a champion for usability, inserting myself into the design process and working towards better interfaces. I could become a content management specialist, managing the content for an entire team. I could become a community leader, or a single source champion, a taxonomist, a metadata specialist, a content strategist, a failing fiction writer, and many other things as well.

After reflecting on directions, I decided to focus on past successes. By successes, I mean those things from which I constantly hear praising feedback from customers. My main successes in tech comm have been with the following:

Quick reference guides
Screencasts

My longer documentation is fine, but no one ever writes in to say how much they enjoyed the user manual. In contrast, quick reference guides win users over every time, and screencasts actually show them how to use the product. People are always submitting feedback about how helpful the video tutorials were.

Outside of work, my two main successes have been as follows:

Blogging
Podcasting

Writing is my core strength, especially the blog format. And podcasts — well, I seem to go in spurts with them. I don’t think I’m a particularly good podcaster — I just happen to be one of the few people recording podcasts in tech comm. Regardless, I love the conversations and connections I make in my podcasts. That professional interaction is rewarding.

Of all the above, I think screencasts hold the most promising future. I plan to move more fully in this direction for several reasons:

I prefer to learn software by video (for example, by watching the videos at lynda.com). Text makes sense for a lot of things, but when people are learning software from ground zero (rather than searching for a specific question), visual learners prefer video more than text.
Videos are something others cannot usually do. Everyone seems to think they can write, but few can actually record a screencast. This ensures that I’m putting effort into a skill that can’t easily be replaced or outsourced.
Video has a lot of room for growth. I can learn so much about audio and video themselves. I want to learn After Effects so that I can better demonstrate concepts. This would be a powerful skill.

My screencasting prowess is only mediocre at best. Eventually I’d like to get good enough to create videos such as the WordPress release videos, or Mailchimp’s tutorials. I think there’s a high demand for people who can create this type of content.

That said, I’m also fascinated by findability, and there’s still so much here I haven’t explored. Even though it’s not my strength, perhaps I’ll add it as a key area of focus.

That’s me: quick reference guides, screencasts, blogging, podcasting, and findability. I guess that narrows it down enough. What’s your specialization?

——————-

photo from Flickr

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Groupon’s Copywriting Style

Tom Johnson — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 04:23:48 +0000

Valeria Maltoni from Conversation Agent recently wrote about Groupon as an example of a business employing a strong copywriting strategy. Valeria writes,

Great copywriting is the secret sauce of successful email newsletters.

Groupon is an interesting example of promotional writing that sells, when attached to the right deals.

(See Conversation Agent: How Content Seals the Deal at Groupon.)

If you’re unfamiliar with Groupon, it’s a daily deal site, meaning they send you one knockout deal every day in the city where you live. What’s unique is their copywriting — it has a unique, twisted, oddball style to it that keeps your attention. Here’s an example:

Often used for toting memorable subpoenas or slices of deli meat, books also make for handy spots to place noteworthy photos while ensuring minimal mold growth. Preserve images in a portable and rodent-repelling format with today’s Groupon: for $35, you get $115 worth of custom-designed photo books from Photobook America. There is a limit of two Groupon purchases, but only one book and any additional copies of that book may be ordered per transaction. This Groupon cannot be used toward shipping. (Photoshop America)

The Groupon creative manager spoke at Confab and explained their process. He said they have 425 creative writers. Granted, Groupon has daily deals in more than 180+ cities across the U.S., but still, that’s a lot of writers. Many of them are young creatives, fresh with writing degrees and ambitions to put their creative talent to use.

The Groupon strategy clearly works. Except for their controversial ads, which can sometimes offend or annoy readers, their copywriting seems to be driving their business forward.

I envy their voice. At times I wish I could adopt a unique style of writing in my own organization. But I also think Groupon is trapped in their own copywriting voice. Just as it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to adopt their style in my copy, I doubt they could adopt my style in their copy. My style is plain speech, friendly but without the [forced] cleverness, honest but not pushing the edge [of logic], thoughtful but not [weirdly] analytical. Regardless, Groupon shows us the power of engaging writing. It’s what’s making Groupon stand out.

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On Content Strategy and Identity

Tom Johnson — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 20:00:36 +0000

A couple of months ago, I realized I would be playing a larger role in web publishing at my work, moving more towards a user awareness role. Realizing this direction, and knowing I had some budget, I decided I should attend Confab, the first conference on content strategy. It was sold out, but by a stroke of luck the organizer offered me one of thirteen tickets held in reserve.

I never wrote much about the Confab conference. In part I was too busy with a presentation and workshop I was preparing for the STC Summit, which was the following weekend. But like most conferences, Confab turned out to be interesting and thought-provoking. This conference brought together experts from many disciplines. I even ran into seven colleagues from my own organization who I didn’t even know were going to the conference.

Developers, interaction designers, writers, marketers, and project managers were all drawn to this conference because they were faced with content challenges they hadn’t encountered before. This conference was the only one that seemed to address the growing issue of content — the common factor behind everyone’s attendance.

Except for a few tech comm notables, there weren’t many other tech writers in attendance. With all the cross-sectioning of disciplines, though, at one point I wondered who I was professionally. I was more than a technical writer. I had taken on web and wiki publishing roles at work, and this only aligned more with my blogging/podcasting/wordpress consulting role outside of work. I didn’t quite know who I was or where I should be anymore.

Later, as I met many people, I also began to realize that marketers and communications people made up the majority of the attendees (at least of those I met). This made me wonder if content strategy had grown out of marketing and the need to address the scope, need, and importance of web content.

I also began to realize that many of the exchanges on my blog I’d had prior to the conference about what content strategy is and isn’t were foolish. From the breadth of the Confab presentations, content strategy encompassed nearly everything related to content. One person defined it as anything you do to give your content an edge. This could be a simple as focusing on story, or defining a particular style and workflow for copy (such as Groupon does), or leveraging metadata and the semantic web, or using strategies for content curation, or infusing web copy with the right tone (“messaging”).

After the conference, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all. But I found that I kept searching Twitter for the hashtag #contentstrategy. The articles and discussions around #contentstrategy seemed to be a relevant hashtag that aligned with my professional responsibilities. Publishing, metrics, styles, curation, workflow, messaging — all of this becomes relevant when you’re creating content on the web. And no previous title, such as writer or web manager or information architect, seems to address all the aspects of content that people who publish on the web must take into account.

The shifting of identities that I felt during the conference was the beginning of a larger tectonic shift as I move closer to #contentstrategy. I recognize that many tech comm professionals implement content strategy within technical communication, and certainly Rahel Bailie has been exceptional at defining this influence and perspective within technical communication. But it seems to me that content strategy for the web is an easier fit for this emerging discipline.

The Confab conference ended registration two months early when they hit their attendance limit. I’m guessing that next year, Confab will be an enormous convention, with so many speakers and attendees that it will take the initial momentum of last year and dwarf it in size.

I do not think I’m the only one checking #contentstrategy on a daily basis. Kristina Halverson, the conference organizer, noted that five years ago, you could search for content strategy and find nothing. Today, many new articles, links, and discussions about #contentstrategy saturate the web. Clearly, as I found, content strategy is a term that many are finding aligns with their identity.

——————–

Post update: As soon as I published this, I just saw Waving not drowning: or how I gave in and learned to love the content strategy flood.

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Presentations Versus Conversations

Tom Johnson — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:34:40 +0000

Recently I listened to Moira Gunn interview Steve Rosenbaum about content curation in her podcast, Tech Nation. I heard Steve present on a similar topic at Confab. Interestingly, I found the podcast, which was a conversation between Moira and Steve, more interesting, fluid, and natural than Steve’s Confab presentation.

Steve’s presentation at Confab was great. But all presentations, by nature, have a different rhythm and organization than conversations. In a presentation, you usually have a deck of slides that you move through sequentially, following a predefined structure to your ideas.

In contrast, conversations are more spontaneous. At times you may pursue tangents, or skip around to topics that you might have originally thought to delay until later. Order is decided at the moment, based on the interviewer’s questions, his or her responses, and the level of perceived interest. Overall, I think conversations allow for more discovery and excitement based on the unplanned direction of the conversation.

In addition to presentation and conversation formats, other formats blend the two. Last Friday I participated in a MindTouch webinar that was a hybrid between a presentation and a conversation. Scott Abel is the host of a series of webinars by MindTouch. Before the webinar, he asked me to send him a slidedeck of my presentation. He then selected out the slides he wanted to discuss, and modified them a bit. He also inserted some of his own slides. About 15 minutes before the webinar, he sent me a PDF of the slides, but I hardly glanced at half of them before the webinar began.

During the webinar, we moved through the topic in a conversational way. Scott used the slides to move the conversation forward when it lagged. Sometimes this worked well, as the next slide provided a great segue to explore a new angle on the topic. Other times I realized that I already discussed the information on the next slide, or the slide took us backwards instead of forwards in the conversation. Regardless, the slides gave a sense of structure to what might otherwise be a loosely focused conversation touching a lot of different points somewhat randomly.

Regardless, I admit I prefer conversations more than presentations. Many presentations, particularly at conferences, can often lack engagement. In contrast, the conversation format puts the listener as a player in the topic game. You have some control about the direction and momentum, rather than just being a spectator.

At South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW), a lot of times the formats are panel discussions. A presenter may give a 20 minute presentation followed by 30 minutes of question and answers. I haven’t been to SXSW, but in listening to the recordings, these sessions are appealing hybrids of conversation presentations.

Preparing for a conversation to take place during a presentation is a somewhat risky move for a presenter. At the STC Summit, I presented for 30 minutes, and then opened up a question and answer session. It went all right, but the Q&A component was multi-directional, since it’s a conversation with a crowd rather than an individual.

The crowd conversation doesn’t work as well as a one-on-one conversation because the crowd’s questions are much more random. The questions don’t have the same focus and flow as the questions that a skilled interviewer might follow. A skilled interviewer will pick up with your response and build on that response with a new question. The conversation has a direction it’s heading, even if neither person knows exactly where it will end up. In contrast, the crowd Q&A is a start and stop motion, with no sense of forward momentum or progress building on the responses.

Having a conversation in front of an audience is another approach, somewhat like listening to a live podcast. The limitation here is that the interviewer’s questions may not represent the crowd’s questions.

Overall, what’s the best format for delivering information to a group? A conversation, a presentation, or a hybrid of the two? I’m not sure. Conference season has ended, so I don’t have any upcoming presentations I’m planning. But when I need to give another presentation, I think I’ll move toward a short presentation followed by a conversation. The job of the presentation should set up the fuel and momentum of the conversation. The presentation should naturally start the conversation.

I doubt this format will catch on for most conferences, though. It requires too much on-the-spot performance and risk. It’s much easier to bank on your own presentation content, load up your PowerPoint with 50+ slides, and sail your way across the harbor — even if your audience remains on the shore.