How to increase awareness of tech comm inside corporate walls

By Tom Johnson / @tomjohnson
idratherbewriting.com

Slides available at
idratherbewriting.com/slides/workplace_influence.html

(press s for speaker notes)

Introduction to influence on the web

Paradox of my career. Something that’s always bothered me. To be visible, influential on the web, but invisible, non-influential in companies. Never really understood why. Is the workplace really so different from the web? Could the same techniques apply?

Not a vanity thing. Consequences of lack of influence in the corp.

Informed at the last minute, if at all. Not kept in the loop of things.
No one knows much about your team – how to update content in the dev portal
No one really knows how to work with your team. Edit and publish, or write from scratch? What is the process?
Treated like a second-class citizen. Tech writers have been complaining about their value in the workplace since the profession began.

Purpose of a conference is to confer. I don’t have all the answers. This isn’t something I've figured out, not returning after years of experiment with a formula that is tried and true. More like I'm thinking about this and trying some things, would be nice to get feedback/input.

Overview of presentation:

Talk about dynamics of the web
See how they could apply inside corporate walls

The web has created a new dynamic. Content creators are poised to be the kings of influence.

Influencers don’t need special credentials, vetting, position, platform
Megaphone effect – anyone can shout into the megaphone
Emergence of influencers. Uncredentialed, someone who has good taste, who consumes experiences and relays them with honesty, transparency, who tells stories, not afraid of truth.

Influencer formula is simple on the surface. Pick a focus, generate lots of content, share that content, build up an audience. Sustain this momentum over years. You amass influence. Much easier to say than pull off, of course.

Not everyone who creates content builds an audience. You must also be likeable, interesting, engaging. Also problematic is finding the time to create all this content.

Metaphor of the handful of sand. Need to have an endless well of creativity and energy to create content over and over and over. Not enough to write a brilliant post every few months. You need to churn one out each week, as an extracurricular hobby.

Must enjoy creating content for its own sake. No other way to sustain the effort in the long term. I’ll get into this later too.

My hypothesis about influence. What if we were to use the same techniques on the web inside the corporation? Would the effects be the same? Could a tech writer have much more visibility and influence to increase awareness of tech comm with those all around him or her? There are a lot of details to work out, but for sure this is one angle to experiment with.

Spoiler alert. Experiment is new and ongoing. Not something to measure overnight. Might take a couple of years to even evaluate, and even then, hard to measure what could be considered influence or awareness.

Initial attempts and failures

The initial content I started creating:

What’s new. First started sharing a list of everything that’s new to the group. Did this at Amazon for probably 2 years, off and on.
Doc reports. Then at current company, expanded this to doc reports. Doc reports cover sections such as what’s new, doc metrics, goals/initiatives, notes, doc needs/requests. Sent monthly to a big list. All content stuffed into the same email.
Meeting notes. Thought it would focus on issues, be less formal, smaller and more frequent. Posted to a meeting notes group.

Measuring the engagement? No way to track engagement except occasional replies that would say “Great report” or something.

My quick test for reads. Loaded up all meeting topics into a list, pointed to an online doc. How many people are clicking? 5.

Realized I was making many mistakes. Forgot some basics of what I’d learned on the web.

No ability to track clicks. All content was consolidated into one massive email. No way to know which articles were interesting, how many opens, etc. If you can’t track clicks, you can’t track interest. In contrast, when I send out blog newsletters, I break everything up into separate posts and measure clicks on each link.
No ability to track page views. No google analytics. Fundamental model of web is to bring people to individual pages. Lets you know what’s popular and what’s not. This is how I discovered that API docs was such a popular topic. 75% of traffic was to content on that site.
No website, no SEO. No home for content beyond the brief blip in an email inbox. Content would be lost forever after the send. Missing readers who were late to the party. No taking advantage of organic SEO. Yet organic SEO accounts for 75% of my blog’s traffic. No discoverability in corporate search.
Relying too much on email to structure and navigate the info. Email is hard to navigate. Inboxes are flooded with notifications from dozens of lists. A firehose of information. No ability to easily maneuver around to content. No IA possibilities.
Limited point of view. Content not story driven, not my thoughts on anything. Just raw information – what’s new, metrics, initiatives. No voice to expand in any interesting ways. Since all content must fit into email, I didn’t have much space to expand. Would become a really long email.
No ability to capture new subscribers. Didn’t have a dedicated group for the newsletter.

Building an audience on the web

Pivoting my approach. Decided to pivot my approach by returning to fundamentals of the web for building an audience. These are some basic principles that are so familiar to any online endeavor, but as I explained, these details got lost in the corporate communication effort.

Principle 1: Build an engaging website. Bring users to individual pages on a website.

Principle 2: Include link trackers when sharing content. This means each section has its own link leading people to an individual article.

Principle 3: Monitor page analytics. Identify popular versus unpopular topics.

Principle 4: Make content findable with organic SEO. Be findable in enterprise search. What medium is best indexed in your company’s search? Open up permissions, build keyword landing pages.

Principle 5: Capture subscriber emails or signups. Need the ability to reach out to people after they leave your site.

Creating engaging content

Timeworn advice on the web for what to focus on. Write what you find interesting, the audience will materialize. Web is vast and wide enough to allow for this dynamic. But the corporation is much smaller. Not so sure the audience will naturally materialize.

Can’t sustain long-term creative efforts if not emotionally engaged with the topic. Content creation will consume a lot of time and energy. Very quickly you will assess whether this effort is worth it.

Company productivity secrets are to align employee interests with projects. Most effective, productive employees are engaged with their work, interested on a deeper level. Some companies allow employees to match their interests with the right projects.

What do you find interesting within a corporate context? A lot of work within the company is boring. Not something people do after hours, on weekends, in their spare time. Kind of hard to find something that interests you.

Easiest path is to leverage the knowledge you possess. Writing about anything requires more in-depth knowledge of the thing. Easiest way is to take the topics you’re already working on with docs and expand them or something. There will be a natural direction to your content, a cross-section of your current focus and knowledge.

Another perspective: the writing/thinking process versus the subject. Writing, thinking, inquiring, organizing, etc., the writing process might be more valuable to you.

Finding a focus

Corporate audience vs. web audience. Inside corporations, I am interested in engaging with business and engineering teams, not other tech writers. On the web, you have the commonality that comes from multiple people all working in the same discipline. What brings people inside a business unit together? Common product/domain.

Points of intersection: the user. Pain points. Everyone is more or less interested in the user experience. Can be a good way to ground a lot of the focus. Problem is that tech writers are usually focused on next release, not the current experience. Support, devrel more focused on current experience.

News and trends in the industry focus. News can be engaging but doesn’t brand your effort with much documentation expertise related unless you tie it back to the roadmap or what you’re currently working on.

Comparisons to competitors. That Amazon competitive analysis doc you wrote. Very insightful. Problem: hard to get access, takes a lot of time.

Docs will naturally surface. Must bring them up in order to reinforce the brand of your team. Let topics naturally come to you (but prob. unconscious ability here due to years of this).

The newsletter in the corporation

Formats differ between the web and workplace. On the web, it’s very common for someone to have a blog. Fabric of the internet is individuals having websites. That’s not so common in the workplace. Blogs in the workplace are pretty rare.

Newsletters are common in the workplace. Newsletters have been around forever in corporations. Not out of place. Most newsletters are just stuffed into emails, but not always so. Newsletters typically come from teams. Can be sent out monthly or biweekly.

Function of newsletters. Newsletters are how leaders communicate to employees, how they develop relationships with employees. Vary by degree of transparency. External newsletters have the function of developing relationships with customers to have a favorable outcome with products. Same sort of model but with companies and employees.

Follow common patterns. Discourse in the workplace should follow common workplace patterns. Much less resistance if you’re starting a team newsletter rather than an individual blog. But what if the newsletter ends up mostly being articles (individual thoughts, perspectives) from an individual?

Independent voices vs. propaganda

"Internal newsletters are used to raise employee morale, to boost productivity, to communicate a company's culture, and to encourage ethical behavior. In pursuit of these goals, editors also struggle with the issue of candidness versus corporate politics. How much does journalism apply to a company newsletter, if at all? ... If the readers perceive the newsletter as being used for a "message boy" by an organization, the readership will drop off as credibility is lost." ("An Analysis of the Corporate Newsletter...," by Myra Lavenue Cole)

Workplace dynamics and culture

Assumptions about the corporate landscape. The web opened up a different set of dynamics that created new opportunities. Megaphone effect, decentralized communication channels, SEO, influencers, etc. But corporations are a different space. Let’s highlight some of these differences.

Org chart and hierarchy matters. People listen along their own leadership lines. For this reason, you kind of need to stay in your realm of expertise. Authority is not decentralized at all. In contrast, on the web, there’s not a sense of an org chart in the same way. And no one really knows your position and seniority within your workplace.

Employees are much more transient, quick turnover. Someone is rarely there after 3 years. Internal transfers. Move to another team even inside the same company and you basically never hear from the individual again. This might make it hard to build a long-term relationship.

Separated by org lines and boundaries. Orgs are often siloed from one another. Organizations have distinct cultures. Might have specific channels for discourse. One group might use a lot of email, another might have chat, another might do reports, etc. hard to find a common communication approach that is universal within a company.

Information overload already present. Employees get bombarded with email. If a newsletter is only discoverable through email, it could be like a rain drop in a bucket of rain.

Emphasis on OKRs, bottom line. People rarely move into action without a bottom line rooting the agenda. Things are tied to OKRs. In contrast, I said the motivations to create content on the web are much more natural, rooted in a love of the topic and the enjoyment in creating the content. Might be much harder to translate this effort into the workplace. Bloggers typically don’t have OKRs for their blogs.

Workplace politics might create more landmines. Depending on what you write, people might perceive you as being critical of their jobs. It’s harder to mask any kind of criticism or objections. You might take an approach that is much softer for fear of creating battles. People who are your seniors might feel threatened that you are eclipsing their role and seniority by taking the spotlight.

Linkbait temptations, transparency

Linkbait temptations and limits of transparency

Clicks favor short-form, visual content with alluring titles. Short content is easier to produce and gets you in front of eyeballs more. Want to get more clicks? Write linkbait, shockers. Browse reddit.com/r/popular for examples of alluring content People are drawn in by grotesque, bizarre, shocking, weird, funny content. Not in-depth articles that are heavily researched, data-driven, and comprehensive. But this cheapens the endeavor. No long-term engagement from linkbait content.

Temptation to pull on the psychology of users. Long, boring posts don’t get read. If you want to get some attention, it can be tempting to hit a nerve. Gets people discussing things. Can be easy to troll things. Example: on my blog, can post about how DITA promotes a bad information architecture, or say that tech comm academic programs are a waste of time, or say that all systems are moving toward docs as code. Easy to stir controversy, which leads to clicks and attention online. This might quench desires for visibility, but you’ll soon learn to avoid this controversy because it can lead to very uncomfortable exchanges.

Transparency in the workplace. Transparency is credibility on the web. People crave raw, truth-telling voices. But in the workplace, transparency might be quickly misconstrued as an attack, and you could easily get into hot water. As a result, content might migrate toward milder, say-nothing type of informational articles. E.g., how to work with us, not frustrations that we don’t have this information on our portal because the person who owns it won’t add it.

There’s a dial you can turn with content. If you want to get clicks, it’s not hard to figure out how. But you run the risk of major controversy. You have to know where the danger zones are. Don’t write something that is going to get you into trouble just for the sake of getting more attention or attracting reads. Example: Org lead announces new strategic pillars. You won’t want to write an article deconstructing these pillars or parodying them or showing how short-sighted they are – even though that article would surely raise eyebrows and get clicks.

Other forms of internal marketing

Written content isn't the only way to influence. One-on-one meetings with key people you want to cultivate relationships with might go further. These meetings can initiate two-way conversations. Not just speaking into a megaphone, you’re listening too.

Brown-bag sessions, informational presentations. Informational presentations that allow people to get to know your group and workflow. Maybe within a series of onboarding sessions. Many bloggers online give presentations at conferences and so on. It’s not all pumping out blog posts.

Training. You could also provide some training of some kind. Give classes to engineers on how to write. Or train your PMs about how to comment on a changelist. Or even give some presentations on grammar and such. This can be a way to attract more people to your site by reaching channels that you might not be tapped into.

Measuring outcomes of engagement

Not an overnight experiment. Can take years. Similar to the web – not overnight results. Must be a labor of love kind of activity. With short employee turnover, the long-term game might not have success.

Evidence of impact? Parasocial relationships. Hard to measure evidence because the longer you’re in a group, the more people you interact with and who come to know you anyway. So you can’t really distinguish how you built the relationship, or how they came to know you. Parasocial relationships start to form. They know you, but you don’t know them. That’s evidence that your content is reaching them apart from any personal one-on-one relationships you’ve developed.

You might be the biggest beneficiary. Part of the appeal of any writing is to sort out and organize your thoughts. Writing is a tool for thinking. Benefits would be to become a more critical thinker about issues that matter to you. If you see that as a goal, then readership doesn’t matter much. Also, if you’re getting a lot out of it, then others might be too.

Questions/comments?

The end

Tom Johnson
— idratherbewriting.com
— @tomjohnson
— [email protected]