Webworks and Twitter -- Innovative uses of Twitter with documentation

Earlier this week I asked how others are using Twitter in their documentation and branding strategies. Alan Porter at WebWorks wrote me with details, saying:

As you know we have a branded Twitter account (webworks_com) that we use for product announcements, information on speaking engagements, webinars and just general company updates. We also have a hashtag set up for information related to our annual RoundUp users conference.

We are also encouraging our partner companies, and consultants that we work with, to set up Twitter accounts, and several of them have set up accounts and are using them.

We actively follow all the top Tech Doc twitter accounts like yourself, Sarah O’ Keefe, Scott Abel, Anne Gentle, Paul Mueller, Alan Houser, etc., as well as any STC region that is on Twitter. We also follow any customers that we know have Twitter accounts.

Several of the WebWorks staff have personal Twitter accounts. The two most active are:

• Me — I tend to post on my STC related activities, and my freelance writing projects.
• Jennifer Whitley — Jen posts a lot about social media; she is also a pilot and posts a lot about flying.

There are several other people at WebWorks on Twitter, including the CEO and Support Staff, but as yet they aren’t as active.

OK, so how do we use Twitter as part of our documentation strategy?

1. Currently we use an RSS feed from Twitter search to be notified of anyone asking questions about the product. When that happens, we respond by Twitter giving them a link to either our documentation wiki or our Help Center wiki as needed.
2. We tweet about updates and new topics added to the wikis on Twitter.
3. We tweet about technical blog posts. By the way, we just launched a new blog site at http://blogs.webworks.com.

We are considering doing some prototype work on the following:

1. Integrating the Twitter feed directly into the documentation wiki based on hashtags and RSS.
2. Having recent changes to the wikis automatically generate a Tweet.
3. Have the WebWorks Twitter account feed directly into the product online help for instances where the install is connected to the internet.

As I said these three are just conceptual ideas at the moment, and we are doing some experimental work around them. I’m also talking to a couple of other companies that are looking at integrating Twitter (or social media in general) with their corporate publishing strategy.

I’m impressed at the extent that WebWorks incorporates Twitter into their work, especially their use of hashtags to identify different areas of their documentation.

I was about to post Alan’s response when I saw a tweet from Dan Maurer, a technical writer in a rhetoric and professional writing program, saying he might write a masters thesis on Twitter and technical communication. I asked Dan what he thought of WebWorks’ use of Twitter.

Dan thinks Webworks’ use of Twitter focuses on the user, which is a good thing. And services that send Twitter direct messages when a wiki entry is updated are useful, especially for people who prefer this type of communication.

However, Dan fears that this is “just another method of getting word out to the user. A new way, and one that’s useful, but not really different from an e-mail list, blog, or RSS feed.”

So exactly what is the value of Twitter, in contrast to other means of communication? What unique quality does Twitter bring to the table? Dan lists three unique characteristics of Twitter communication:

1. Low attention threshold. (140 characters)
2. Mobile capability.
3. Networking. Our @ conversations are public … that’s how I find new people to follow.

But if given the option to subscribe to Twitter, RSS, or email to stay updated about a product, Dan says he would choose RSS, because it keeps his inbox free.  “I use Twitter for conversations with interesting people, not to learn about the newest gadgets. Again, that’s what RSS is for,” he says.

I agree with much of Dan’s analysis. If one technology already fulfills a need, there’s little value in duplicating it with another technology. However, given the increasing amount of information we must sort through daily, the limitation of 140 characters per message is appealing.

Last week while walking past Temple Square my friend John, a product manager where I work, painted a very different picture of connectedness. John asked me about Twitter, and as I was explaining it, Twitter seemed liked just another of the dozens of social media site out there.

“People always talk about how great it is,” John said, “that new media allows you to communicate and connect with each other, but that’s exactly what I don’t want. I don’t want all these people I don’t know emailing me and pinging me through Twitter, and Plurk and Linkedin and so on. I don’t see why anyone would want that.”

Too much communication becomes like noise and leads to a dystopia of connectedness

As we walked, I started to wonder why I myself would want it. Each day I’m bombarded with enough information to bury me. Email, tweets, instant messages, phone calls, SMS, blog comments, trackbacks, pingbacks, spam, newsletters, invitations to LinkedIn, Pulse, Plaxo, RSS feeds — it all gets to be like noise. Communication noise.

In my inbox now, I have 784+ unread messages. Most I’ve never opened because they aren’t … anything. In my RSS feeds, Google Reader constantly tells me I have 1,000+ unread posts. The comments on my blog pour day after day, whether I write new posts or not.

Sometimes the communication noise is even louder. Last week an anonymous lady called me at dinnertime to ask how to convert her WordPress.com site into a shopping cart to sell her art. Then “Sam” from New York (no idea who he is) called to say he’d followed my instructions on adding WordPress photo galleries with lightboxes but could not get it to work. He went on and on as if we were old friends.

(By the way, I now no longer answering my phone to see who it is.)

The more you blog, the more people you attract through Google. The more search-engine-optimized your posts are, the more people find you. The more tweets you send, the more people follow you. The more social networks you join, the more people add themselves to your page. The better posts you write, the more people subscribe to your RSS feed. The more content you generate – in whatever form and media – the more trackbacks and links people generate about you. The more you produce, the more emails and questions you get. You become like a content cloud – attracting Google searches.

Last week my kids pulled out an old home movie taken about 5 years ago — before we were all sucked into the Internet and Web 2.0. We seemed to have all the time in the world: sitting on a couch, or on a picnic table outside. (Yes, outside! in the sun, surrounded by …. nature, and grass! Haven’t seen that in a while.) On the video we smiled and laughed. Time moved much more slowly. No one was checking his BlackBerry, or posting to Twitter, or staying up late to blog. No feelings of concern about email. This was before the Web 2.0 deluge, before we received 100+ emails/comments/feeds/tweets a day. It seemed back then life was so different — before connectedness enveloped me like a fish net.

If connectedness is such a dystopia, why not just cut the wire, or unplug the cable? No one forces me to stay online. If the game is getting boring, no one’s preventing me from going home before the final buzzer.

Truthfully, I am somewhat addicted to connecteness. While 75% of it all is meaningless noise, there are some contexts that become extremely meaningful. Having a public space to write and publish my thoughts — where people actually read what I write and respond with comments or email or trackbacks — it’s motivating. My words no longer live solely in Word documents on an old hard drive, intended to be published in an obscure literary journal after months of slush pile dormancy. My writing freely propagates around the Internet. It freely connects with others. (No doubt for some, I am communication noise.)

Overall, to have a space to write and publish, to wake up the next morning and see half a dozen new comments on a post, to throw out a Tweet in a moment of total consternation at the grocery store, to read meaningful insights from others about topics I’m interested in — whether from social networks, RSS feeds, blogs, comments, listservs, or Twitter – it gets my mental wheels turning. The network cables are already too deep and intertwined to unplug them from my nervous system.

Nonetheless, I admit that I am conflicted. My oldest daughter is seven. She has her own blog. Should I encourage her to post more, and respond to comments from Heather, her little seven-year old friend (who also has a blog, and whom she has met once in Arizona)? Or should I encourage her to play outside, enjoying her offline childhood?

It’s not entirely an either/or scenario, but I’ll let her define her own paths in or around Web 2.0.

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photo from Flickr