I'd Rather Be Writing » content strategy

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.

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Content Strategy for Content Agility

Tom Johnson — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 09:25:57 +0000

The following is a guest post by Noz Urbina, organizer of the upcoming Congility conference, held May 24-26 in Gatwick, UK.

We live in a multi-in, multi-out world. There are so many information pipelines running into, out and around the organisation these days that it’s overwhelming companies the world over. The famous information overload is in stark contrast to an endless pressure to deliver excellent content — quickly and cost effectively.

The only scalable answer is to change not (only) the process and skill set (or sheer number) of the people working on content, but actually change the content itself.

We need content that inherently does more for us than it does today. I call content that does this magical ‘more’, content with ‘agility’. But what does that even mean?

I put the question to the Congility 2011 speaking group and got some very interesting replies. One of my favourites was Mark Forry from NetApp:

For many organizations, the expectations of their customers have outpaced with the information managers can provide — and in some cases, can even conceive of. The notion of ‘agile content’ would thus seem to encompass several aspects: development of increasingly sophisticated information in multiple media, storing it in such a way that it is accessible and relevant throughout an organization, and designing the optimal user experience when the information is needed.

In my own experience as a field consultant, the ‘can even conceive of‘ part of this snippet rings very true. Just this month I was doing an onsite Content Strategy Audit for a high tech company. They said to me quiet succinctly and eloquently:

We can’t keep up with the information requirements of customers as they are today, both internal and external ones, and yet we’re expected to up the pace dramatically in the coming years.
As a result we spend far too much in hand-holding and live support.
Content is going out in a mix of old and new templates (Word, in this case) because it takes too long to move things from one to the other and you can’t apply templates globally.
We can’t assure that either marketing messaging or technical info is consistent and actually representative of the reality of product.
We want to start localising and translating all this too.
Competitors are breathing down our neck for our business and provide a far more integrated product and information experience.
We would love to be able to deliver to both web and print formats.

So — they get it. They could be delivering presentations at an CCMS or structured content conference discussing the business drivers. But they actually couldn’t even envisage a solution. Several dialogues included phrases like, “Maybe a solution is just not feasible”, “Maybe I’m asking for magic”, or “It would amaze me to see something that could actually solve these problems”.

What this tells me is that the world is far too divided into the haves and the have-nots when it comes to content with agility. Even though solutions have been around, and falling in price, for decades, understanding of them has not permeated the market nearly far enough.

In my own opinion, content has agility when it is meaningful, optimised for business and user goals, reusable, portable and accessible. To do these things it needs to be:

Freed from proprietary formats. If I have to spend time converting, QA’ing or waiting for a software company to release an update with ‘output to format X’, then my content is not agile.
Freed from its visual style and page paradigm. Have you seen PDF-based ‘eBooks’ on a Smart Phone? With little ‘flippable’ pages you need to zoom in and out of to read, with no social media features? Pathetic. If your content can’t be represented differently and automatically according to the target media, it’s not agile.
Freed (as much as sensible) from its original context. Context is king, yes. But can you reconstruct context flexibly, or are you locked into only one potential arrangement, forcing you to cut, paste and rearrange every time you want to adapt things? It needs to carry its metadata with it, so you can find it, and know what contexts it can be both used and understood in. If it’s not findable, shareable and reusable, then agile = no.
Freed from the bias of the creator. Content should be optimised for the audience and support business goals. Commercial content’s business goal is to persuade users. That means delivering the optimum information to best reflect the brand and support the messages to that user, making customers comfortable and motivated to hand over money. Technical (tech communications, support, training and service) content enables. Users should get the content they need and want, no more, no less. In both cases, inaccurate, out of date, hard to consume, or published ‘just because we’ve always published that way’ are major detractors from customer experience.

I’m impassioned enough about these issues to, for the fifth time, be organising an international event gathering globally recognised experts around breaking down these barriers.

Congility 2011, this May 24-26, just outside London, England, is for content professionals looking to advance their organisation’s goals with better content strategy, management and process. It is the only European platform bringing together such a diversity of content experts and learning opportunities under one roof. Learn from ‘The Mother of Content Management’, Ann Rockley, renowned content strategist Rahel Bailie, and case studies from eBay, Nokia, AMD, IBM, AGFA and more.

As part of an arrangement with this blog, you could attend completely free, by taking advantage of this unique discount code. The first person to use the code below will be given access to the conference (but not workshops) at no cost to them besides travel and expenses. Everyone else who uses the code will be entitled to the 20% discount*:

IWBWCA11BLG20SD

* If you can’t go even at 20% discount, you can cancel your registration without commitment or penalty.

B. Noz Urbina is a marketing and presales manager for Mekon Ltd, where he defines and enhances the customer engagement process from beginning to end. With years of experience as a content strategy and content management consultant, he has provided services to Fortune 500 organisations and small-to-medium enterprises. Since 2006, Noz has chaired the Congility events platform (formerly known as X-Pubs). You can connect with Noz through the following links:

Blog: http://lessworkmoreflow.blogspot.com

Twitter: @nozurbina

Linkedin: http://es.linkedin.com/in/bnozurbina

Congility is a sponsor of I’d Rather Be Writing.

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Topic Chunking and The Broken Alarm Clock

Tom Johnson — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:48:24 +0000

It’s been about 9 days since my last post, and yesterday my colleague leaned over and asked why I hadn’t been posting — was something wrong? He himself has been working on a novel, so he hasn’t posted anything for a month.

No, nothing is wrong. I always chuckle when I see blog posts in which people apologize for not posting on their blog, or when they provide reasons for their lack of blogging activity. I chuckle because it’s like, hey, I didn’t miss you. I have 1000+ unread posts in Google Reader and content overflowing on Twitter, books from Amazon, and other sources. There’s no dearth of content on the web, so your short absence of content isn’t something I’ve been agonizing over. I suspect the same is true for my readers.

If you really want to know, though, I’ve been exhausting my creating energy writing a debut article for work. I’m still waiting on the outcome, but it involved doing some historical research, and that kind of stuff you just can’t crank out with clever typing.

Now, on to the broken clock. After my last post about rocks and cairns and chunking, some people thought it was funny that I went to Arches National Park and all I took were pictures of dinky rock cairns. So for those waiting for something more camera-worthy, check out Park Avenue.

Park Avenue in the Arches

And if you prefer people in your pictures, here I am skydiving off a rock in Sand Dune Arch.

Skydiving off Sand Dune Arch. The sand below is really soft. Otherwise I wouldn't do this.

I will spare you the 60 to 70 pictures of the baby crawling through the sand, as well as the other hundred pictures of my other kids doing all kinds of funny poses with rusty-orange arches in the background.

But digital pictures are not entirely irrelevant here. In David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous, he says the digital camera has encouraged people to take many more photos than they normally would. After a while you end up with thousands of photos on your hard drive, with almost no way to order or arrange them. Do I tag the above photo Arches? Utah? 2011? Jumping? Age 35? Soft sand? Rusty orange rocks? Sandstone? Falling? About the only thing you can do, without a specific metadata strategy, is tag the photo haphazardly. (I actually don’t tag my photos at all, really. They just sit in various folders.)

But the scenario, if I were to tag my photos, is relevant to the ongoing discussion about chunking. The trend in previous comments I received was that your metadata strategy informs the size of each topic. If your metadata requires you to identify certain characteristics, then naturally your topic will need to be a certain size in order to accommodate that metadata. This makes sense to me.

But the most thought-provoking comment was by Mark Baker, who pointed me to a post on his site comparing granular topics to a broken clock. Mark says that as you start dismantling an alarm clock into its pieces, the pieces soon become meaningless in isolation. The broken clock is similar to a topic: the more granular it becomes, the less meaningful the topic becomes to readers. You also have less potential for attaching metadata to the topic. Mark explains:

Now start taking it [the alarm clock] apart. First you will disconnect various assemblies: the case, the clock mechanism, the ringer. Some of these, at least, could still have interesting metadata attached to them. But you continue, taking each of these assemblies apart until what you are left with is a collection of screws, gears, and several pieces of bent metal about which you can say nothing meaningful other than that they used to be part of an alarm clock. (Why Fine Chunking and Rich Metadata Don’t Mix)

I couldn’t find a picture of a disassembled alarm clock, but here’s a flayed alarm clock below. You can see all the components here — capacitors, transistors, wires, tubes, square things, bands, and other parts. Would it really be wise to isolate each one as a separate topic?

Look at all the pieces in an alarm clock. Would it make sense to separate them out and sort/arrange/call by various pieces? Probably not -- unless you're an alarm clock maker.

Keep in mind that the broken alarm clock is a metaphor, and all metaphors break down at some point. But it’s quite a good metaphor since many of us do not understand the insides of alarm clocks. In fact, if you were to disassemble any technology in my house — the refrigerator, a DVD player, a digital camera, an automatic pencil sharpener, etc, I probably couldn’t make much sense of the individual components. They are meaningless in isolation.

A while ago I was reading DITA 101, by Ann Rockley, Charles Cooper, and Steve Manning. In the introduction, the authors assert that a well-written topic can stand alone in nearly any medium. A well-written topic is versatile in its placement, and is a logical unit in and of itself. It doesn’t require much context to make sense.

To accomplish this self-contained unit of information, I think a topic has to be a fairly decent size. It probably wouldn’t be a short standalone paragraph, nor would it likely be a short list of three steps. In my mind, it would be a somewhat sizable topic — probably a conceptual description followed by a list of task steps. One needs a certain amount of substance to prevent the type of content that seems fragmented and incomplete to the user when viewed alone.

That’s it for now. By the way, if you’re going to the STC Summit, I’m giving a presentation titled Organizing Help Content: Breaking Out of Topic-Based Hierarchies on Tuesday at 4:00 pm. In it I hope to present the ideas I’ve been exploring in my Organizing Content series. Unfortunately my presentation is at the same time as Karen McGrane’s We Are All Content Strategists Now and, judging from what I saw on Vimeo, she looks like a really good speaker. So my Summit audience may be a passing janitor and an assigned room monitor, but that’s okay. Expect to see more posts in this series on my blog.

Also, I can see that the topics are moving toward metadata and taxonomy. If you have any good recommendations for books on metadata (in the context of technical communication), please let me know. I am finding that, despite the abundance of well-written blogs, books are sometimes more enjoyable to read in the long run.

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The Importance of Chunking for Sorting

Tom Johnson — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:39:25 +0000

If you want to be able to sort information by various classification schemes, such as by most popular, or by role, or by problem, your content has to be chunked in a granular enough way to facilitate the various means of sorting.

Consider a work that is one large book, with no chunks at all. In that case, it would be impossible to sort anything, because you have just one object. With one object, the only pattern you can configure is itself. But if you have a handful of objects, you can arrange those objects into as many patterns as you want.

To use an analogy, let’s say you have a pile of rocks. If you have 1,000 small rocks, the potential number of patterns you can configure with the rocks is infinitely greater than the patterns you can configure with just a few rocks.

I noticed this in a recent trip to Arches in Moab. While walking along trails, we saw a lot of rock piles called cairns that act as guide points. The cairns can be stacked and arranged in myraid ways, because they consist of little rocks:

But the big rocks are much more pattern-limited. They mostly just sit there, alone:

Thus if your goal is to enable a variety of patterns or classification schemes, so your users can choose from myriad classifications, according to their individual needs, you must chunk your content in a granular enough way to facilitate the classifications.

Granular chunking poses some difficulties for help content, because if you chunk things too small, the help system becomes arduous to navigate. If each page contains just one topic, you end up with so many pages, navigating the pages will give users a headache.

To avoid this, on my calendar help wiki, the Viewing Calendars page has the following topics on the same page:

All of these topics appear on the Viewing Calendars page.

Now, suppose I want to manipulate this content on a more granular level. Suppose the “View Calendars of Other Wards” topic is a popular topic; the “FAQ” issues would be appropriate in a problems-based classification. The “About Subscribed Calendars and Subscribed Locations” belongs to a conceptual table of contents. The “View Churchwide Calendars” belongs to a “Coming Features” type of organization, and so on.

In short, let’s say I want to add metadata to each of these sub-topics so that they can be sorted, rearranged, recompiled, or otherwise organized in different classification schemes. If they are compiled in one giant topic, they can’t be manipulated at all except on a more macro-level. This is why chunking is such a fundamental principle to technical writing, because without small chunks of content, you don’t have many options for manipulating it.

Whether you use a wiki or not, deciding how granular to chunk your content is a challenge. For example, on Microsoft Word’s Help, this is the topic for Changing or Setting Page Margins.

This topic on working with margins really contains five separate topics.

By combining these five topics into one topic, it becomes more difficult to manipulate the individual sub-topics as their own topics. The metadata you add to this topic must account for all the sub-topics within this topic.

Now consider the opposite strategy. Let’s make each subtopic its own topic. You can see the effects of this approach in the following Office help search:

When you chunk things in a granular way, it becomes harder to find the chunks, and you lose some context.

Here the topics on formatting are all chunked into their own topics, so you end up with Clear all text formatting, Show or hide formatting marks, Apply strikethrough formatting, and so on. When a user clicks on a topic, the topic is short, such as the following:

This is a short topic. This is all that's there.

This short topic either answers the user’s question or it doesn’t. There’s not much room for error, since no similar topics are grouped together. If it’s not the right topic, the user must return to the list of results and click another, and another, and another until he or she locate the right topic.

In contrast, if you combine a larger number of topics together on the same page, you give more context to the user. He or she can read conceptual introductions followed by a handful of sub-topics that all deal with the general topic. The user can easily scan down the subheadings to find the right sort of task for this topic. But it’s harder to manipulate each individual sub-topic separate from the larger topic. And your metadata can’t describe each of the individual sub-topics but must cover the larger topic generally.

Chunks that Consist of Chunks

I’ve been contrasting big chunks versus little chunks without acknowledging that big chunks can consist of combinations of little chunks. So in each of the examples above, the topics can exist separately but be grouped together into the larger topics that you see.

With Mediawiki, this method of reuse is called transclusion. Last week, convinced that I needed to chunk each topic more, I separated all the topics that you see in that first calendar screenshot onto their own individual pages. I then “transcluded” these chunks to form a longer page.

Currently, from the user’s point of view, it looks exactly the same. But really, I can now arrange and manipulate these chunks however I want because I can apply unique metadata to each one of the topics.

However, this poses a new problem: searches will find the individual chunks and the larger pages that combine these chunks, which means content will be in multiple places rather than one place.

The Collage and the Painting

Don Day’s post on The Collage and the Painting describes how search becomes problematic with little chunks. Day is writing in the context of DITA, but the challenge of working with small chunks is the same. Day writes,

A common talking point about DITA is how the topic-referencing architecture makes it easy to reuse topics in new maps of information. By extension, searching on a facet of interest should bring up a collection of topics that you can read as a focused subset of a larger whole. Print it as a PDF, or output it in eBook format, and you’ve got some good reading for the commute or for the weekend. But how practical is this vision?

The flaw in the theory comes from loss of context when you pull a set of topics by query. Imagine doing a web search on a subject of interest and then printing the whole list of hits, as is, into a single PDF for later reading. Obviously you will have the problem of duplicated content, possibly some older and less reliable content, a good deal of discussion by people who are not experts on the subject, organizing the hits in a reasonable manner (by timeline, by author, in a hierarchy) and so forth. Metadata might help in preserving bits of a former organization or rationale, but the new use might be totally different from how any of that content was originated. Bringing order out of disarray is the whole drive behind the growing trend of Content Curation.

Don Day uses the metaphor of the collage and painting to distinguish between small topics pulled together without order and a larger chapter that provides context and sequence for each of the topics.

In other words, if you pull together all topics that have specific metadata, such as all topics related to scheduling events, you may get an unordered collage of topics. The order of the topics may not reflect any kind of sequenced or arranged reading. The list of topics no longer forms a larger, well-written chapter that contextualizes each topic, but rather may seem like little scattered objects here and there.

The effect might be compared to taking an entire book and ripping out all the pages and throwing them on the ground, mixing them up, and then reading the randomly arranged orders. That reading experience is dizzying and un-fun.

In sum, when you run searches on all the topics together that have similar metadata, you end up with assortments of small chunks that lack the continuity and context of a larger chapter or book. This simply seems to be the tradeoff of chunking your content. Your search results become more like a collage, but you have more flexibility in how you arrange your topics.