Usability SIG Newsletter interview

I was recently interviewed by David Dick for the Usability SIG newsletter. The title of the interview is “I’d Rather Be Writing – The Man Behind the Words.” Check it out.

They also reprinted my post on Customizing Sharepoint, which has gotten more hits than I ever imagined.

Author-it joins the blogosphere with a stylish new WordPress blog

I had a sneak peek of the blog about a week ago and contacted Kathy Howes for an interview about it. The questions I asked her are below.

Why did you decide to start a corporate blog?

We see blogging as an essential part of an organization’s content strategy, and a great opportunity to directly interact with our clients at many different levels.

What hopes do you have for the blog?

We hope to use it in a number of ways, but our key goals are to communicate our very unique company culture, to build on thought leadership, to assist in educating and informing on key content management issues, and to get honest feedback on current and new products.

We also see this as a very real opportunity to connect on a much more personal level with our client base. We hope to see some real dialogue and feedback going on that will assist us in ensuring our solutions continue to reflect the needs of our clients.

What reservations did you have about blogging that caused you to wait so long to start one?

We were concerned as to how we allocate resource and ensure the topics covered would continue to be interesting and thought provoking for visitors to the blog. We had also heard numerous stories of corporate blogs that failed, and wanted to ensure we got it as right as possible! This meant researching successful, and not so successful, corporate blogs, and reaching out to industry bloggers and champions for advice and feedback. Their assistance here was invaluable.

We also engaged with staff, particularly those who blog regularly on a personal level, to ensure we had ongoing resource and commitment. We have been amazed at how positive the feedback has been and we have staff already preparing material for the coming months.

How will you handle potentially negative comments below posts?

I hope we will see it as an opportunity to learn how to do things better, or perhaps even as a vehicle for potential future changes or enhancements. It will be a learning curve for us, but this is the great thing about two way dialogue, you get the real story. To be honest, we are more concerned about the spam and thinly veiled competitor postings than genuine but negative comments.

Who will be writing your posts?

A wide range of employees will be writing posts, from the CEO and President of the company right through to front line client services staff. We will also be inviting guests or industry specialists to blog for us on different subjects.

How will you ensure your content is actually interesting and not a rehash of marketing material?

Yes, this is always a challenge, especially for a marketer. I guess at the end of the day it is about remembering that we are all very busy, with far too much to read and do during our typical work day, and time is precious. However, our clients or prospects come to our blog for a number of reasons, and we need to try to ensure we cover this off without simply becoming a micro website plugging our products.

For us the challenge will be informing  without turning it into a sales or marketing pitch, and ensuring we stimulate feedback and engage dialogue.  We will in many cases be focusing on personal experience and ideas which should take us away from the traditional sales/marketing path.

What kind of transparency will you have with your blog content?  Will you be open about what you’re working on, the challenges you’re facing, how your company works, and so on? For example, Adobe won’t tell you what they’re working on until they actually release it. Other companies, such as Madcap, won’t tell you how many employees they have. Every company has a degree of transparency they allow. To what extent will your blog give readers a glimpse behind the scenes at Author-it?

That is an interesting question. I guess part of our intention is to ensure clients, or potential clients, know when we have exciting or innovative products coming out and we will be talking about these as soon as they are ready to go into beta. We don’t generally talk about them earlier purely in case development schedules change.

As far as challenges go, we will include those that are relevant, such as current market conditions, or changes in government for example. One of the purposes of the blog is to open up our company culture and values, so we will be reasonably open about how our company operates and who we are. However, like Madcap, we do not typically reveal details such as our company size, or specific employee details.

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 is an indirect way of giving people the weekend to finish their proposals, and also a hint that they want more proposals. (Perhaps after the low acceptance rate from last year, many people were intimidated from reapplying?)

I initially wasn’t planning to submit a proposal, because last year at Doc Train West I learned that it’s tough to both present and try to interview people at the same time.

Still, I’ve been thinking about the upcoming STC Summit in Pennsylvania (June 1-4), and I’m pretty excited about it. I had a blast at the STC Summit in Minnesota last year, which I attribute partly to the 20+ interviews I did. I talked with everyone I could find, both notable and unknown. It was an exhilarating feeling. I’m excited to return again this year. The audio setup I used worked great, and the proposal I submitted itself is on podcasting (called “The Art of the Podcast”).

Having spent a full year and a half as a podcaster, it should be much easier to prepare a presentation on this topic. I also found at Doc Train West that I really like giving presentations (reminds me of my days as a teacher). Also, given some cool recent sponsorship of my podcast lately, I’m planning to step up the pace with more podcasts.

If my proposal is accepted, I’m also planning to hold a little podcaster meetup session, where I can meet the people who listen to the Tech Writer Voices podcast, and also where I can trade tips and tricks with other podcasters. Or I might just hold an informal technical how-to session to show people how to use Audacity and WordPress.

If you’ve never attended the STC Summit, I highly recommend it. Most employers will sponsor you to go. It was so enjoyable last year, even if my employer doesn’t sponsor me, I’ll most likely go anyway.