Most of my activity on these social media channels is sparse and sporadic — a few minutes on an occasional hour. However, lately I’ve felt that we aren’t tapping into social media’s potential. We’re hardly using it at all, despite the fact that we have a sizable following.

As a result, I decided to think more about developing a real social media strategy. In coming up with a social media strategy, there is a myriad of hard-to-answer questions, but the whole process of thinking through them has given me more purpose and motivation. Below are a series of topics and strategies that any corporate social media maven should consider.

Broadcasting versus listening

The first question to assess is how your company views social media. Many people view social media as mindless chatter and distraction. If this is how your company views social media, it’s unlikely you’ll get support to dedicate enough time to implement a real strategy. With a non-support model, the infrequent tweets on the occasional hour may be all the bandwidth you can spend.  And the return most likely will be similar: an infrequent response from an occasional follower at random times.

But suppose you change your strategy from one of broadcasting information to a strategy of listening? Instead of only publishing updates, you use social media to gather information, ideas, and feedback from to your followers. What are they posting about? What are they feeling? What are their hot buttons and interests? And who are they?

This information could be useful for informing product directions and communications. The more you listen to your followers, the better chance you have of releasing products that meet your followers’ interests. In this light, engagement on social media is more of a user research endeavor than a marketing endeavor. It’s a way to get a pulse on what your users want, what frustrates them, and what interests them.

This user research paradigm radically changes the social media endeavor. Rather than pushing information out to inform your followers, you’re pulling information in to inform your company. This direction changes the whole tone of social media. It changes it from a potential stigma of “mindless chatter” to a respected effort for understanding user trends and issues.

Generating content

Although listening is important, unless you also post content on these channels, you’re not participating. But what should you post, and how often should you post?

In general, most companies post news and and articles related to their products and services. They also post tips, resources, events, and other information that aligns with their company’s direction.

This information gathering takes time. One way to solve the posting bandwidth issue is to assign the social media updates to an intern. After all, interns are social-media saavy and inexpensive, right?

However, if the employees posting to social media sites aren’t in the loop about the latest projects, releases, initiatives, or other organizational goals, they may find it difficult to know what to say. What they post may not align with your company’s mission.

According to Meredith Singleton and Lisa Melancon, an intern or young employee may not have the knowledge needed to guide the social media endeavors with the right direction. They explain:

Someone must have ownership of the social media strategy. The initial reaction is to look to the new intern or the youngest employee because he or she is probably using many of the tools, but this can be an unsuccessful choice. An individual’s goals do not always align with a company’s goals. Individuals are often looking to share personal thoughts, photos, and news with family and friends—probably not the same goals as a company. The strategic choice is someone who understands the mission of the company, the goals of implementing the strategy, and how the tools, and the message delivered therein, may have positive or negative effects.” (“A Social Primer for Technical Communication, Intercom. June 2011.)

In other words, although it may seem logical to designate a young, social-media savvy employee to handle the social media updates, such an employee may not have the right information and direction to post in alignment with the company’s goals. The social media maven needs to be saturated with the right company knowledge and direction.

Regardless of whether you’re a senior or entry-level employee, saturating yourself with this knowledge does’t come easy. You’ll likely have to spend time attending meetings, keeping up with news and other information, integrating yourself across groups and departments, reading company-related news, and contacting key leaders.

Staying in the information loop takes time, but the information you glean feeds into other endeavors as well, such as producing content for your company blog, wiki, or other news channels. As such, it will probably be most efficient if your social media crew sits on the same team as the ones publishing to the blog and other news channels.

However you gather it, you’ll need a constant stream of information to publish out — probably at least three updates a day to maintain visibility with your audience.

Note that you don’t always have to post new information. You can mix up your posts with questions, tips from help material, information about lesser known (but not new) resources, employee highlights, or retweets of industry-relevant posts.

Brand and voice

Let’s talk about brand. You know you need to follow an established voice, style, and message with your updates. What do your followers expect when they see updates from you? How do you want your followers to view you? According to Jay Baer, your brand should be distilled into one word that encapsulates what you’re all about. For Apple, he says that one-word brand is innovation. For Disney, it’s magic. (See 3 Steps to an Effective Social Media Strategy.)

Whatever your brand, you represent your company in some way. If you work for a large organization, as I do, and your brand involves technology (perhaps because you’re in an IT department), you’ll likely get questions about all the technology your company produces. When readers reply with questions, how will you support so many questions, for so many products, from so many departments, with so many product owners? Will you speak on behalf of product owners about their products? If you don’t respond quickly, will users still think you’re listening?

Even if it takes time, answering the questions is important in establishing the authority and expertise associated with your brand. Answering the wide variety of questions will require you to be in constant communication with various product owners through your organization. It will require you to contact them about the responses you should post. You may see your role converting to a support routing board of some kind, a go-between who finds answers to questions of all kinds.

However, rather than looking at this support routing board role as a drawback, consider the connections you’re making. Not only does your involvement in social media make you visible to the outside community, it makes you highly visible within your own company. Your constant contact with product managers, departments, and other groups can increase your team’s visibility and awareness of your role across the organization. (Again, in small companies this may not be significant, but in a large organization with many silos and unknowns, these connections can be a huge advantage.)

Finally, your connections with users help demonstrate a tangible benefit from your social media endeavors. Product owners will see the impact the social media engagement is having. Hopefully they will not see the users’ questions as another annoying e-mail to reply to, but rather as an opportunity to peer curiously into the usually murky void of actual end-user space and time.

Demonstrating ROI

Another question to consider in your social media strategy is how you track and demonstrate your success. After all, someone is paying the bill for you to be on Twitter and Facebook on company time. And though you may see a lot of responses, retweets, likes, and other activity surrounding your posts, how can you measure the effect you’re having? How can you communicate that effect to upper management, so they recognize and feel the value of social media engagement?

Each company may be different, but I imagine most would agree that increasing the adoption of company products, as well as the awareness of company products, would fit into a worthwhile ROI. Other factors, such as a stronger relationship with the company, or more positive corporate perception, are harder to measure.

You could easily track several metrics related to increases in adoption and awareness. You could track the increase in followers. You could track the retweets of your posts and the reach of those retweets (using tools such as Tweetreach). You could periodically send out polls to your users to gauge their awareness and adoption of various company products, and measure changes to these responses over a period of time.

However, these measures are somewhat inaccurate. Followers grow gradually over time regardless of one’s efforts. It might take a viral campaign to establish a direct correlation between social media and the results. A good example is the Old Spice campaign. Lauren Fisher explains:

Through their campaign, which included sending personalised video messages to social media fans and celebrities, they’ve managed to gather some pretty impressive stats that show the money where the buzz is. The reach of the Old Spice campaign is not in doubt, but did it actually impact sales? According to the marketing agency behind the campaign, it did. Since the original campaign launched with ‘Mustafa’, sales increased by 27% year on year. But in the 3 months after the height of the campaign, sales were up by 55%, reaching 107% in the final month of the social media campaign. And of course, Old Spice is now the number 1 body wash brand for men. However you choose to look at the campaign, these figures stand up to show that a social media campaign, well executed, can drive significant ROI for your business. (The ROI of Social Media: 10 Case Studies)

When your content goes viral, and you trend on Twitter and gather hundreds of likes on Facebook, you can probably draw up some persuasive graphs about the value of social media engagement.

Even if you can only show a  slow and steady progress, this progress may align under a larger marketing effort for your company’s products. If it aligns under a marketing effort, you have less burden to justify the social media effort in the first place. After all, not many would say, “We don’t need a marketing plan for our products!” If you’re doing marketing on Twitter for your products, Twitter becomes just one more marketing avenue to get the word out.

Other considerations

I haven’t covered a hundred other questions one should explore in a social media strategy. For example, what social media channels should you focus on? Is it better to restrict your involvement to just one channel so that you can go deeper, or is it necessary to spread your efforts evenly across a variety of channels? Should your profile reveal  your own self or simply be the company’s logo? Should you follow your audience when new followers follow you? How do you surface the predominant trends of thousands of followers in a short amount of time? What safeguards do you have in place for the time when you make a huge gaffe and mispublish information?

These are all valid questions, but I don’t have the space to explore them in this post. What I have written covers the most important elements of a social media strategy: listening, generating content, finding a brand and voice, and measuring ROI.

The overall key, I think, is to remember that information flows both ways: you treat your audience as a group who can inform you just as much as you can inform them. With such a relationship, social media efforts will have value.

photo from Flickr

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In the goal to find something, I relied on the social assets around me. In Greg Nudelman’s Designing Search, he talks about how people are increasingly turning to their social networks for information. Not only do social networks provide quick answers, but finding through social means allows you to draw upon people with similar interests.

For example, I have a large network of technical communicators that I follow on Twitter. If I have a question related to tech comm, it makes sense to ask my tech comm network. Most likely they could give better advice then simply searching the general web or turning to a friend on the basketball court.

Anne Gentle has written about social search on her blog Just Write Click. She notes that there’s an increasing trend to turn to your social network for answers rather than the help documentation. She explains,

Lastly, counts on click-throughs on Google searches may soon be surpassed by counts on click-throughs on social sites. Think about this for a moment. … you are more likely to get useful links by asking your friends and colleagues about certain topics than you are going to get them by searching on Google. This finding is a serious disruption for the web, if it turns out to be true. I haven’t seen studies yet that have numbers to support this claim, but I’ve seen it in slide decks about social support communities, community management, and the like. (See The Big Shift From Search to Social)

In other words, people may be searching on social sites like Facebook more than they search on Google because they get more useful information from social sites. As for metrics to support this, I recently saw this 60 seconds graphic:

Infographic by- Shanghai Web Designers

Unfortunately the original post doesn’t cite references, but if it’s true, in one minute there are 694,445 search queries on Google, while there are 695,000 Facebook status updates and 510,000 Facebook comments, along with 98,000 tweets on Twitter. If even ten percent of these social posts and comments are questions and answers, that’s a huge number of people using social networks as a means of finding and sharing information. It’s not a source to be ignored in the effort to make your content findable.

One challenge with increasing your influence in social search, of course, is bandwidth. It’s not possible to connect with so many people, right? One has only so much time to respond to forum posts, comments, and other social threads. Maybe not.

In a recent internal conference, one presenter explained how to get customers to adopt new products you’re rolling out. The presenter encouraged development teams to connect with key influencers in the community. If you can get the key influencers on board, they can help others, the presenter explained. Every department has that one person whom everyone goes to for help. If you give these influencers access to beta test software, reach out to them personally, and reward them for their helpfulness, they can be a huge asset in social findability.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell calls attention to several key types of people that can cause products to tip. Mavens and connectors (the terms he uses) can be key touchpoints for increasing awareness. When I walked into Home Depot and found a clerk, she immediately routed me in the direction I wanted to go. Although there were probably 50 people in the store, and only about 5 clerks, if I wanted to share information with all the people in the store, I’d focus just on the clerks.

The following graphic shows this workflow. As a technical writer, you don’t need to interact with the social web in its entirety. You just need to interact with the influencers (the mavens and connectors). These influencers are the forum champions who regularly interact with scores of people and thrive on helping and guiding others. They may be the administrative assistant in a department of executives, or perhaps prolific bloggers. The influencers will then interact with the rest of the user base.

If you focus on mavens and connectors (the key influencers), the rest of your end-users will get the information as they reach out to them.

In contrast, if you interact with users on a one-to-one basis, you’ll be overwhelmed with individual support requests and time-draining questions. I know that in past experiences, I’ve reached out to some users to gather their feedback. Later, I became their personal support assistant at beck and call whenever they had a question or problem. That kind of relationship can be very time-consuming.

If you do have the bandwidth to embed yourself in social sites and interact on a one-to-one basis, at least transfer the information you provide into the help content (assuming it’s not already there). This way you’ll convert the one-to-one interaction into a one-to-many interaction and allow influencers to get the information they need to help others.

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But while short texts are met with smiles and cheers, many of my blog’s readers suggested that raising up a standard of brevity may be misguided. In fact, in many contexts, readers don’t mind long texts. What readers truly want, they explained, is simplicity, and simplicity is not always achieved through brevity.

As long as we strive for simplicity, illustrate our ideas, and focus on business relevant content, perhaps even the most technical user’s guide (such as a Network User’s Guide, shown below) might become as pleasing to read as a novel.

Is it possible for help content to be as pleasing to read as a novel?

(Drawing based on a photo of Clark Gable.)

Reading Modes

First we must distinguish between two critical modes of reading: reading to do and reading to learn. The distinction between these reading modes is an idea from Ginny Reddish (which Caroline Jarret expands on here). If you’re reading to do, you’re searching for an answer to a specific question.

Here’s an example of reading to do. You’re giving a presentation using PowerPoint, and 10 minutes before your presentation, you’re trying to figure out how to separate your slide notes from the projected slide display. In this scenario, lengthy help text is your enemy. You want the answer in as brief a space as possible, and as quickly as possible. You’re reading to do.

Ginny explains this mindset in one of her slides:

From Ginny Redish -- reading to do

(See “Understanding Web Readers (and Non-Readers) — Creating Usable and Effective Web Content.”)

I’m sure you can guess which guy in the above slide has a PowerPoint presentation in 10 minutes. But consider this other learning scenario. You know you need to improve your presentation abilities, and you’re tinkering around with Microsoft PowerPoint. There are so many buttons and features on the ribbon. It’s really overwhelming. You’re not looking to learn a specific feature, just the tool in general. You may have set aside 20 minutes a day to learn PowerPoint. In this case, you’re reading to learn.

Help content will never approach novel-like pleasure reading when a user is operating in the first mode: reading to do. But in the reading to learn mode, there is potential for something other than the frantic, frustrated help-cursing mode.

In Reading to Learn Mode, Length is Irrelevant

Let’s stay in the reading to learn mode. As long as the content is business relevant, entertaining, and simple to understand, there’s no reason to doubt the reader’s ability to become immersed in the content for long periods of time. Length becomes much less of an issue in this mode.

I don’t have hard evidence for assertions about length, but in Wired, Clive Thompson notes that the most popular blog articles are about 1,600 words per post (“Clive Thompson on How Tweets and Texts Nurture In-Depth Analysis”). This is about a seven-page essay. Writer/editor Tim Rich notes an eye-tracking study from Poynter showing that users skim until they find relevant content, and then they read for longer periods of time. Many other readers tell me they regularly consume long novels, and even wish the novels were longer.

Clearly in some contexts, length is not a problem. When content is interesting, you can have it any length you want. In one of Tim Rich’s posts, he quotes comedian Jerry Seinfield, who says, “There is no such thing as an attention span. People have infinite attention if you are entertaining them” (“Attention Spans”).

I think most will agree that text can be long and still be acceptable to readers. However, the real question is whether help content can be long and still be acceptable to readers. If not, why?

Is the Genre of Pain an Exception?

Let’s consider a basic reality. Help content is in the genre of pain. It’s right next to the tax code, your car manual, and a trip to the dentist. But does help always need to be trapped into a category of boring text no one wants to read unless they absolutely have to? Must it always be on par with a trip to the dentist?

Going along with the dentist metaphor, can the dentist ever change the experience so that you actually prefer to lengthen the visit? His fundamental activities, drilling, sticking his hand in your mouth, doing painful things to your teeth — it’s never something you want to prolong. Just like the tax instructions, no one wants the experience to be any longer, for goodness sakes. The last thing we want to do is extend the pain, right?

But Shorter Does Not Mean Less Pain

Although we do not want to prolong the pain, shorter is not always less painful. In fact, sometimes brevity increases pain. Imagine a tax booklet instruction that was just two paragraphs long. To the accountant writing the instructions, trying to keep it “as simple as possible, but not simpler,” as Einstein says, he or she may look at the concise set of instructions and feel satisfied. But this concision will likely leave me in the dark. I’ll end up scratching my head trying to understand terms, wondering if I’m interpreting it correctly, wishing there were some more examples and clarification. The time I save with shorter text is balanced by increased confusion time afterwards.

What we really want isn’t brevity. What we want is simplicity. As Whitney Quesenbery points out, “the repeated complaint about ‘too many words’ isn’t really about the word count, but about the density of the information and how this makes us feel about the information.”

When you hand users a two-page quick reference guide, their faces light up with excitement because they think the application must be simple. Project managers are cheering as well because the brief instructions seem evidence of a simple application, which means they did something right.

A sample quick reference guide. Users assume shorter means simpler, but that's not always the case.

But in reality, a two-page instructional document (such as the one on the right) for a complicated application may only leave users confused. As users make their way through the quick reference guide, they may encounter even more frustration than they would with a longer guide.

In a world of extreme concision, the novice user may be especially lost, like a hiker with a dim flashlight trying to navigate out of a rough patch of woods. The dim flashlight may be small and easy to carry, but in this situation wouldn’t the hiker prefer a larger floodlight instead?

As I said, what users really want isn’t brevity or shorter texts. They want simplicity. Who wouldn’t mind a 20 page guide if it were full of clarifying illustrations, examples, screenshots, and maybe even a glossary?

Illustrations and Simplicity

If simplicity is the goal, not brevity, you can implement a variety of techniques to simplify concepts. One of the most important strategies will be illustrations. Nothing clarifies a concept more than accompanying it with an illustration that drives the point home.

Before I push illustrations too much, let me start off with a caution raised by Tim Rich. Rich says,

There are times when a striking image expresses something in a more powerful or accurate way, but there are also countless occasions when words are an extraordinarily moving or precise media, when words can do more, say more, show more or achieve more (“On Pictures and Prose”).

In other words, images are often overrated in their ability to communicate information. A well-written paragraph full of description can sometimes communicate more information than an image. But without getting into semantic contests between text and images, I think we’ll all agree that combining the two is almost always a winning strategy. To keep the reader’s attention as you move through concepts and strategies, insert a concept diagram on every page, separating blocks of text.

A concept diagram explains a concept visually rather than merely decorating the page with a pretty picture. The concept diagram reinforces an abstract idea through visual means. Here are a few sample concept diagrams from Robert Horn’s Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century (p.60).

Concept diagrams from Robert Horn's book on Visual Language

As you can see, you don’t need to be a great artist to create a concept diagram. All you need is some basic graphics abilities and an idea of how to communicate your ideas.

If illustrations are so helpful in simplifying concepts for users, why don’t more technical writers illustrate their help? Several reasons:

• Lack of graphic design skills (or feelings of inadequacy in a world of professional expectations).
• Lack of conceptual material to illustrate (it may all be procedural).
• Not enough time to create the illustrations you need.
• Difficulty in coming with a clever way to depict an abstract idea.

All of these reasons contribute to a text-heavy help. But if writers were to focus more effort on illustrating help content (and not in an Ikea-like way), you would see a complete turnaround in the reception of help content. Length would become less of an issue, and readers would welcome help content openly rather than resisting it at every level.

Screencasts

Illustrations aren’t the only solution to helping users learn a complicated process. Videos are also key. A simple screencast takes just several hours to produce. The dynamic visual interface combined with your human-narrated voice can have a powerful influence on user learning, since it allows users to see tasks in the context of an interface.

I’ve written about screencasts and voiceover techniques at length on my blog, so my purpose here isn’t to explain techniques, but merely to suggest that writers include more screencasts. Screencasts should be a more common deliverable than they currently are. Right now, based on my interactions with other professionals, I’m guessing only 1 in 10 technical writers creates screencasts, even though screencasting software applications such as Camtasia Studio or Jing are simple to learn and use.

Relevant Content

Another element required to convert help into a more pleasing reading experience is to focus on relevant content. A lot of times, we technical writers explain how to use a software application, but we leave the details of the particular business context alone. I know that when I worked as a technical writer for a financial firm, I rarely wandered into business context and use, preferring instead to merely describe how to do various functions in the application.

Why didn’t I describe more of the business use? Financial analysis is complicated, and uses are multiple. I clearly ran into the edge of my knowledge of the subject matter and didn’t feel comfortable getting into more in-depth business strategies and uses.

However, often the business context is more important than mere how-to within the interface. Many users, especially tech-savvy ones, can get the hang of an application easily enough. Look at even the simplest of apps out there — Facebook and Twitter. People aren’t clamoring for instruction on how to post updates to these web applications. Instead, users are confused about how or why they should even use the applications at all. In what contexts would they be useful or strategic? Why is it that nearly everyone has a Facebook account, but only a fraction of these people actually uses Facebook? Same with Linkedin and Twitter. The instructional material about business use and strategy is perhaps lacking (or unpersuasive).

Most help material has the same problem. The writer explains how to run a report, for example, but doesn’t say why the report might be useful, or how you might interpret the report, or who would be the most relevant audience for the report.

As another example, look at Google’s Chrome comic documentation.

Chrome's comic documentation failed for me because it lacked business relevant content.

When this first came out, it looked cool. I tore into the first few pages with a new-found enthusiasm, because this format seemed to open up documentation into a world where it was fun and fresh. But after about five pages, I lost interest, as did many other people who started reading it. It seemed to get boring and somewhat irrelevant, as well as technical, and so I clicked elsewhere. A cool idea, still, but perhaps not enough focus on business relevant content. (By the way, I have not seen Google produce any more comic documentation since then.)

There’s usually an entire dimension to help authoring that is missing from most help material: help about the business context and use. That’s the manual I would pay for, not the simple how-to about tasks already intuitive in the interface. And when you start delving into relevant business content, you have the power to keep a user’s attention at length.

Conclusion and Disclaimer

I’m not saying all help material needs illustrations, screencasts, and business relevant content, because every application or project is unique, and clearly generalizations don’t always apply. But as a guideline to follow, help could be a lot better if it more often contained these elements.

If you do include illustrations, screencasts, and business relevant content, you might not need to worry so much about brevity and word count. Your users won’t glance at a giant block of uninterrupted text and throw up their hands in exasperation. They may even start reading page after page with interest, forgetting about the time or page number.

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The sixth sin in my ongoing series on the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging is being unfindable. (The other sins include being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, irresponsible, and inattentive). Admittedly, lack of findability seems more a sin of omission than commission. Being unfindable seems like a sin bloggers commit against themselves.

I’ve written more than 1,000 posts on my blog, but usually the posts on my home page are the only posts people read. In this sense, blogs are like the news. A newspaper that’s several days old lines bird cages. Reading blog archives is like reading yesterday’s news — there’s no appeal.

And yet, many times archive posts have more substance that news commentary. The posts incorporate research and get into issues in depth. They don’t deserve to go into the garbage can once they slide off the home page.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com compares blogging to reaching down and grabbing a handful of sand. The sand slowly slips through your fingers. You have to reach down and grab another handful of sand, and another, and another. In the metaphor, your readers are the sand; your reaching and scooping — those are the new posts. Perhaps if the content were more findable, you wouldn’t have to do so much reaching.

How can you enable readers to naturally find the content in your archives? How can you make the hundreds of posts you write more visible and prominent, especially if readers are looking for it? This is partly what the field of findability is all about.

Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, wants to move toward a world “in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime.” He admits we might never achieve it, but it’s the direction we’re moving. To start, Morville says to ask three questions of your content:

1. Can people find your website?
2. Can they find their way around your website?
3. Can they find your content, products and services despite your website?

Aggregation Techniques

You can implement several easy aggregation techniques to increase the findability of your content. You can add tags and categories to your posts, and readers can navigate your content this way.

Tags function similarly to categories. You usually add tags as you would index keywords, including as many as you want to describe your content. Categories, on the other hand, are more like folders. You usually have only about a dozen categories on your site.

You can display your categories in a list on your sidebar, which could be helpful except that hardly anyone reads this way. And you can aggregate your tags into one of those jumbled masses of words called tag clouds. But like the list of categories, tag clouds don’t seem that useful to readers. At least I never use them. They’re merely a visual novelty.

Another way to increase the findability of your content is to add a string of related posts below each post. A variety of WordPress plugins do this for you (for example, the Contextual Related Posts plugin). Their matching algorithms vary a bit — some match by tag, others by keyword, others by custom keywords. Mostly, I think lists of related posts help searchers who land on your site from search engine results. These searchers are usually looking for information and sometimes prefer to drill into additional content on the same topic.

You can also aggregate your content through plugins that compile your most popular posts, such as the Popularity Contest plugin. Popularity is defined by hits, links, and comments. Your most popular posts may not be the posts you want to showcase, though. This is why I chose not to implement the Popularity Contest. My most popular posts are apparently posts on grasshoppers that look like aliens, a WordPress image gallery plugin, and notes from a keynote on WordPress 2.7.

You can also manually pull together your best posts. I recommend using the links feature in WordPress to manage your lists. You can also use the Section Widget (a tabbed widget) to show various lists in a compact way. Note that the tabbed section widget slows down your site’s loading time a little (I was intrigued by it earlier, but I removed it). It also seems to consume a lot of memory on the backend.

SEO

Let’s recognize a basic fact about websites. The majority of your readers — anywhere from 50 to 85 percent of visitors — find you through search engines. The web is mainly used for research, so these stats make sense.

But if visitors mainly find you through search engines, shouldn’t your content be optimized to rank high in search engine results? Search engine optimization (or SEO) should be a key influence in the way you write your posts, right?

Jakob Nielsen agrees. He says,

Web users are growing ever-more search dominant. Search is how people discover new websites and find individual pages within websites and intranets. Unless you’re listed on the first search engine results page (SERP), you might as well not exist. So, the first duty of writing for the Web is to write to be found.

Yes, you must write to be found. To do this, to make your posts SEO rich, you have to integrate the right keywords into your title, first paragraphs, headings, image alt tags, and other places (without going overboard).

However, in Google’s search engine results algorithm, links pointing to your content from other sites matter more than anything you can do alone. So more than anything, write compelling content. Compelling content invites links back to your site.

One trick that allows you to get the best of both worlds is the All in One SEO plugin (if you have a WordPress blog). This plugin allows you to make two titles: a title that Google sees and a titles that readers see.

For me, I sometimes don’t bother with SEO because I’m not sure my content would rank for a specific topic. I’m not necessarily writing just to attract more hits. Maybe with some posts, sure. With other posts, not so much.

Formats

Another technique for increasing findability is to push your content across as many formats as possible. Recognize that readers have a variety of preferences. Some like Facebook, others Twitter, others email, others RSS readers.

You can automate all of this so that when you publish a post, notification of the new post is syndicated across each of the formats. The RSS feed is automatically pushed out (if you’re using any standard blog platform). Twitterfeed allows you to hook up your RSS feed with a Twitter account. Facebook allows you to pull in a Twitter feed. And Feedburner allows you to create email subscriptions for RSS feeds.

Audio and Text

One challenge that still remains with formats is the interchangeability of audio and text. I regularly publish podcasts, and people who don’t listen to podcasts often request transcripts of the podcasts. It can take hours, however, to record and produce a podcast, and 5+ hours to render a transcript of the audio. It’s a tall order to fill just to make the content more accessible.

I believe Adobe Sound Booth will transcribe audio (though this is application isn’t free). You can also outsource transcription for about $1 a minute (and a two-week turnaround). A direct transcription of the audio, however, often sounds incoherent and unreadable.

Going from text to audio is much easier. Services like Odiogo will automatically read your post. For an example, see Todd O’Neill’s Doing Media blog. The problem with these text-to-audio services is that they’re read by a machine, so it sounds like robot. Additionally, people who are blind probably already have screen readers that perform with similar functionality. Odiogo is really designed for people who want to listen to your content on the go, while they run or drive or work in the yard.

Nevertheless, if you want to make your blog perceivable, a conversion to other formats is what Glenda Watson Hyatt recommends. In her book How POUR Is Your Blog, she writes,

Content must be perceivable through sight, hearing or touch. Since not everyone has the same abilities or equal use of the same senses, one of the main keys to accessibility is ensuring that content is transformable from one format into another, enabling your blog readers to perceive it in multiple ways. (p.6)

(POUR stands for perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.)

Apart from making your content findable for the disabled, rendering your content into text and audio increases your reach. An hour long podcast transcribed into text theoretically gives you rich SEO keywords that will bring in many more search results from Google. (Of course, the extra time you spend transcribing the content means less time to produce new content, so perhaps it balances out.)

Mobile Platforms

Finally, as you design for different formats, make sure your content is visible on mobile platforms. Mobile browsers are getting to the point that they can display many websites well regardless of whether you have a mobile stylesheet, but it’s still a good idea to add a mobile plugin.

Hyatt recommends going to http://ready.mobi to test how your blog displays in a mobile browser. If you receive a poor rating from MobiReady, try installing Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition plugin and rerun the test.

MobiReady also has several emulators that show you how your blog looks on various phones.

Other Findability Tips

To wrap up findability, I suggest adding a few more simple, commonsense practices.

1. Let your URL match your blog title. This helps readers remember how to get to your site without having to google it each time.
2. Include an About page. Your About page is one of the most visited pages on a blog because people want to see information about the person whose opinions and advice they’re reading.
3. Use Feedburner to route your RSS feed. If you ever change platforms (for example, from Expression Engine to WordPress), you can update your RSS feed on your new site so you don’t lose all your readers who subscribed to your old RSS feed.

To conclude, remember that the goal of findability is to help your audience connect with your content. On A List Apart, Aarron Walter writes,

The fundamental goal of findability is to persistently connect your audience with the stuff you write, design, and build. When you create relevant and valuable content, present it in a machine readable format, and provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability, you’ll help ensure that the folks you’re trying to reach get your message. A website that ignores findability is whispering into the wind, hoping that someone passing by might catch a hint of its message. (A List Apart)

Don’t whisper to the wind. Don’t let your content blow around aimlessly. Make it findable. When it’s findable, you get to keep it forever. When it’s not, it disappears into the wind.

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DandyID

You enter your profile links for the services you participate in. Then you simply add a Dandy widget to your sidebar and voila, the widget pulls all of this information from DandyID and displays it in a nice list on your blog. (If you’re on WordPress.com or Blogger or just LinkedIn, DandyID also has widget code for you here.)

Rather than having multiple rectangular badge buttons of various sizes and shapes littering your sidebar, the DandyID widget keeps each social media button in an orderly list. I just implemented this on my site, if you look in my sidebar (see “My Profiles on Social Media Sites”).

By the way, looking over the 300 social media sites on DandyID.org is a bit overwhelming. It’s kind of cool just to click through to a few sites and see what has been conceived already.

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• 3Rabbitz book
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• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

I say it should have been a day of celebration. Instead, it was an event I knew was out of date. The client flipped through the manual, glancing. He then set it down and we talked about reviewing schedules, because no one felt the client would actually read the manual on his own. Yes, we had to nail down a schedule and force him to choke it down in weekly bites.

In truth, I dislike delivering “the manual.”

In “Move over DITA – Chaos Is Coming!,” Alan Porter suggests that rigid structural writing, such as DITA, is at odds with the looser, more chaotic social media so prevalent among the younger generation. Rather than trying to force-fit the DITA standard onto our documentation, he says we might instead “step back and look at how [our] kids do their homework. Because in five to ten years they will be [our] new workforce, and perhaps more importantly, [our] new customers.”

In other words, we should rethink our documentation model. Rather than a rigid structure, we might consider following the pattern of how people actually access and use information today.

Exactly how do kids do homework these days? Alan says his daughter uses a variety of social media applications — wikis, social networks, instant messenger, folksonomies, social bookmarking. Observing his daughter complete her homework, he writes,

The first thing she did was google “Pearl Harbor” and started visiting links. First stop was Wikipedia. Then she got on Facebook and YahooIM and started using messaging to ask friends who were online for recommendations. These friends were literally from all around the world, so she was given access to resources that gave totally different perspectives than those given in the classroom. …One friend suggested going to a social bookmarking site and searching using a variety of user applied tags. Instead of taxonomy she was now applying folksonomy.

In a recent IT Author podcast, Alistair Christie interviews his daughter about how she uses computers, and his daughter explains that she never uses the help, because it’s almost impossible to find what you’re looking for. Instead she learns by simply using the interface, clicking buttons, looking at labels, and asking others for help if she needs it. The world of traditional help deliverables — long manuals with table of contents and indexes, expandable books in online help, even video tutorials — these all seem last resorts in user’s mind.

I don’t use the DITA model, but I do use standard topic-based authoring methodology, single-sourcing between online help and a printed PDF. Reading Alan’s post and listening to Alistair’s podcast, as well as hearing the feedback I always hear about help –- “I try to learn the application on my own first, and only turn to the help when I’m stuck” –- makes me think the old-school paradigms of help (the manual and the online help) are falling by the wayside. They aren’t harnessing the latest social media technologies. They aren’t appealing formats.

Alan also observes a sad truth:

For most of my working life to date, the technology I used at work far outpaced that I used outside of work.

But not any more.

Now the technology I use at home has generally outpaced that found in most workplaces.

This is the tragedy of technical communication. Rather than embracing and leveraging the latest web technologies, tech comm is stuck in the early 1990′s, delivering the same old content that no one wants and few can make sense of.

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• Southern Polytechnic: Information Design and Communication
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Sigur Ros Interview

With the Sigur Ros, the interviewees have little to say. Despite Luke’s continual questions, their responses are terse, uninsightful, and often consist of 1-3 word answers. Luke recognizes that the interview is bombing, but he doesn’t quite know how to fix it, and the interviewees don’t ever open up.

It’s partly the band’s fault for their unresponsiveness, but it’s also Luke’s fault for asking questions that don’t elicit good responses. Questions like, How do you write your songs? How do you feel being a phenomenon? And so on.

There’s no question that the interview is a complete failure, but Luke makes an ingenious comeback with a follow-up commentary, where he invites Jancee Dunn to give a play-by-play analysis on the wreckage. I absolutely loved watching this. It shows Luke’s humility and humanity — and endears his audience back to him.

Zuckerberg Interview

With the Mark Zuckerberg interview, Sarah Lacy gets Zuckerberg to open up quite a bit (apparently he’s a little like the Sigur Ros band — shy and untalkative). But near the end of the interview, the audience revolts and insults Sarah’s interviewing style, which makes her defensive, a little confused, and stunned.

If you watch the Zuckerberg interview, it doesn’t seem too bad. Sarah is relaxed and playful, even teasing the Mark a little, telling stories and making jokes about throwing water on him. But for some reason, much of the audience hates her style. They want her to be a lot more invisible, shining the spotlight more on Mark.

The interesting parts are from minutes 49 to the end. Also, if you listen to the MP3 recording, you can hear Sarah’s reaction while the audience cheers for her to simply shut up and ask questions.

Weave’s comment on the video best sums up the audience’s discontent. He says there are 5 things to learn from this failed interview:

1) Understand your audience, regardless of what you think of them. If you have contempt for them, keep it veiled. This group: pretty vocal.

2) Ask questions, step aside and allow your speaker to engage directly with the audience…even if the speaker is not the most practiced. “Mmm-hmms” and interruptions are unnecessary and detract from what the audience wants to hear.

3) Remember who the audience is there to see. Leave your own book, TV show, etc., out of the conversation. It wasn’t a panel, it was a keynote.

4) If the audience isn’t as professional or mature as you’d like them to be, don’t be unprofessional or immature back to them.

5) Twirling the hair, jokingly threatening to throw water at the keynote, belittling/laughing at the keynote, yelling to someone else in the back for clarification, saying “screw all you guys” to your audience: COMPLETELY UNPROFESSIONAL AND UNBUSINESSWEEK.

But unlike Luke, Sarah is unrepentant. She doesn’t acknowledge the interview’s failure. She doesn’t ask someone to step her through it play by play to learn where she went wrong.

My Analysis

In both interviews, the interviewer faced uncooperative people. With Luke, the interviewees themselves were uncooperative. They didn’t want to open up. With Sarah, her interviewee was cooperative, but her audience was not. Rather than play along, they mutinied against her in a “Digg-style mob revolt,” as she says.

So what do you do when you’re interviewing someone and you realize something is going wrong? In the moment, when you realize something’s not working, that something isn’t right, you’re filled with stress and paralyzing confusion. You know you should change course and move in a different direction, but you’re flooded with emotions and you have to continue saying something.

While your reaction may be defensiveness or anger, or sarcasm, the best response is to be humble and honest. Admit vocally that something isn’t going right. Luke could have candidly asked the band why they weren’t responding to his questions. When Sarah sensed her audience was turning against her, she could have asked them — in a humble way — what she was doing wrong.

After admitting things aren’t going right, Jancee’s advice seems the best strategy for getting things back on track. She says to memorize 10 emergency questions you can ask any time you’re in danger. For example, one question of her questions is, “What was the name of the first band you were in?” This helps people start telling stories about themselves.

In Sarah’s situation, she could have simply said to her audience, “What questions would you like to ask Mark?” and then turned it over to them. She eventually did this, but not before saying a few things that turned her audience even more against her.

As I prepare for some upcoming conferences, I know I’ll be interviewing people on the spot, without much preparation beforehand. At the last STC conference, I usually ran out of conversation topics after 5-7 minutes. This year I will work on memorizing some emergency questions that will elicit more personal stories. And if I sense something isn’t going right, I’ll try to humble confront the reasons why.

Music Note

While writing this post, I’ve been listening and re-listening and re-re-listening to the three Sigur Ros songs Luke posted in the original NPR article:

Their music is beautiful and moving, so much so that it doesn’t matter that they’re singing in a totally made-up language.

Click the links to listen to their music. They really are good. Especially that first song/link (desire? e-sire?). This post is going on an hour now and I just keep listening to them.

This Interactive conference “celebrates the creativity and passion behind the coolest new media technologies.” Basically, everyone who is doing anything cool on the Internet ends up speaking there. 37 Signals, Facebook, Wired — they’re all there.

Many of the presentations are interactive panel discussions. Everyone twitters and blogs and texts during the presentations, etc. It’s like a gathering of the Internet geeks and hackers and designers and content creators.

Important: Because almost every session is recorded and distributed practically the same day, you can start attending sessions yourselves. Here’s a list of all the feeds available.

The interesting thing is, although the sessions are recorded and distributed freely, the attendance at the conference seems as high as ever. I haven’t seen statistics, so I’m making an assumption, but I’m guessing that attendance at the conference actually increases every year because people hear how engaging it is.

Listening to the podcasts makes me wish I could attend. The high energy, the new technologies, the experimental successes, the young entreprenuers — it looks like a big tech gathering with continual parties and meetups between and after sessions.

I wish that the STC Summit, WritersUA, Atlanta Currents, Doc Train, and the dozen other technical writing conferences that take place each year would do the same as SXSW — record the presenters and distribute them in near real-time. If I ever became STC president, I would do this. People are often afraid of the unknown. That’s what Jason Fried of the 37 Signals said in his presentation (listen to MP3). At 37 Signals, they recently switched to 4 day work-weeks (not 10 hour days), and they help fund their employees’ personal hobbies.

I’m about 12 minutes into the Mark Zuckerburg (Facebook founder) keynote (mp3). This is a must-listen-to interview, not only to hear Zuckerburg talk about the grander mission of Facebook, but to evaluate for yourself whether you think the interviewer tanked the interview.

Before you listen to the interview, read this post by Jeff Jarvis.

Jarvis writes,

She pulled some basic mistakes in interviewing. She interrupted him. The first minute of the conversation, he wanted to talk about people using Facebook to organize against Colombian guerrillas — a fascinating story — and she didn’t let him finish, trying to show that she already knew this. The real mistake was that she wasn’t listening.

… When it became obvious that the audience was hostile to her — cheering Zuckergerg when he told her to ask a question — she acted hurt, as if this hour was about her. Worse, she told us how tough her job was. It wasn’t tough. It was a privilege and she was blowing it. And at the end, when she said that people should send her an email telling her what went wrong, she was so 1994; she didn’t understand that the people in the crowd were already coalescing in Twitter and blogs into an instant consensus. Oh, if only there’d been a back-channel chat projected on the screen beside her. Then, she could have seen.

As I’m listening to the interview, in places I can see exactly what Jarvis is saying. The interviewer isn’t so bad near the beginning, in my opinion, but it’s annoying when she interrupts Zuckerburg and redirects the attention to herself.

Personally, I still haven’t caught the Facebook frenzy. Scott Abel has started an extensive community in Ning for the technical community crowd. You might want to check that out after listening to Zuckerburg.

Update: I finished listening to the Zuckerburg podcast. At about the 49 minute mark, the interview takes a really interesting turn. Definitely a spiral downward for the interviewer, as the audience rallies in a  “witch hunt” — as Michael Arrington calls it — against her. It wouldn’t have been so bad if Sarah Lacy, the interviewer, had just shrugged her shoulders at the 26 second applause for her to shut up — and then turned the questions over to the audience.

But in such a high pressure situation, she got a bit angry and confused and defensive, which made things worse for her. I wasn’t there, so my perspective is distorted, but I think the audience was immature to revolt. And Zuckerberg’s commentary wasn’t that interesting in itself — he kept saying Facebook’s mission is to help people “communicate and connect,” and also to “increase empathy” yada yada yada.

Download MP3
Duration: 27 min.

In this podcast, I talk with Bill Albing, founder of KeyContent.org, about the impact of social media on technical communication. Bill talks about different ways social media helps audiences interconnect and interact. Good social media technologies enable professionals to collaborate easily, without being encumbered by complicated technology or even burdened by managing and filtering feeds.

Bill explains that the web is more than just a venue for publication — it’s a medium that allows people to interconnect and work/collaborate with information. This is the direction we’re moving towards, and technical communicators are starting to integrate social media, such as user forums, directly into their help.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast

• Keycontent.org
• KeyContent blog
• Naymz
• Bill on Naymz
• Facebook
• Linked in
• Content Wrangler LinkedIn
• Last.fm
• Myspace
• Amazon
• Tikiwiki
• Flickr
• Secondlife
• Flare’s online help file with Feedback server
• My instructions for installing mediawiki
• Yahoo pipes
• Joann hackos’ blog
• Ann rockley’s blog
• Neil perlin’s blog
• Alan houser’s blog
• Bill’s slideshares on social media
• Slideshare

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