I recently needed the assistance of Apple Care when my iTunes account went a little wonky. Long story short, I needed to disconnect my iTunes account from my credit card.

The support rep was friendly, kind, and understanding. She worked pretty quickly within the system to get me what I needed. All in all, a great customer service experience.

The next day, I received a link to an online survey and was happy to fill it out – whether a sense of obligation or plain appreciation motivated me, I took the time to fill it out.

After submitting the survey, this page displayed:

I love it! It’s simple, minimal, and international. I instantly recognized “Tack” as Swedish thanks to my recent guidebook purchases in preparation for my trip to speak at UA Europe. It doesn’t contain any links, as if to say, thanks for your time, we won’t tempt you to take any more time reading.

On today’s web, where some manipulate content to manipulate people, this was a wonderful page to land upon. Thank you Apple.

Engaging technical documentation isn’t written by Tina the Brittle Tech Writer. Who is she?

She’s the technical writer in Dilbert’s engineering department. Tina believes any conversation within hearing distance is intended as an insult to her profession and her gender. She strives to maintain her dignity while surrounded by engineers who don’t have a proper respect for her work.

Tina cares more about defensible positions on the engineering department than serving the customer. I love it when I hear people say, “I no longer work for development. I work for the user.” They say it with disruption and evolution in their hearts and minds. They fully intend to serve the user the best they can.

Of course, even the best laid plans can get thrown out the window in a tech writer’s daily work. But here are some ways to engage users with technical documentation. If you’re skeptical that these techniques are effective, go straight to the content analysis of user ratings. Helping 800,000 users in a year is an impressive number.

Go beyond text

People are drawn to images on a computer screen. The Community Roundtable has a great report available that you can glean many content best practices from. For example, the report indicates that “People seldom form relationships with text alone.” Boy, that’s true, and should compel us to incorporate pictures or a video.

I know, I know. Screen captures are a pain to take in the first place, and hard to maintain over time. Let’s think outside the box for a moment. Another way to incorporate images is to use artwork, however simple or stylistic. Take a look at this watercolor created by Oceana Rain Fields, a participant in this summer’s workshop at the Rural Design Collective web site. Illustration used under the CC Attribution 3.0 license (credited to Oceana Rain Fields with permission).

This image sticks with the readers of the manual, especially kids like the child-like figure shown. It should help the users identify with the manual (available online) and get cozy with it.

A friendly, helpful, and confident voice goes a long way in building a relationship in this asynchronous conversation. Screencasting, where you narrate while demonstrating a software feature, is one way to go beyond text in user assistance delivery. As an example, WordPress.tv offers screencasters and users a voice by enabling video uploads to their site. They pre-seeded the site with about 20 professionally-created videos, but after that, users were encouraged to upload videos.

Write informally

Michael Verdi, the content manager for support.mozilla.com (SUMO) has an excellent slide deck talking about Awesome Documentation where he describes some writing style choices they made recently to “Engage the Brain” including inserting humor or surprise and writing conversationally, such as “Can’t decide on just one page? No problem. Firefox lets you set a group of websites as your home page.”   Janet Swisher noted on the FLOSS Manuals discussion list that he also rewrote pages to not just answer what you can do, but why you’d want to do it.

Measure and adjust

Copywriters for campaigns know to do AB split testing – try out two brochures or two web pages on a sampling of people in the database. See which copy and design does best, then stick with that messaging until you see a drop off in use of the information. We don’t employ that technique often in technical communications, but as our copy becomes more web-enabled, I think we should start.

For example, some of the rewrites to pages on the support.mozilla.com (SUMO) site had measurable impact to the helpfulness of the page. For two of the rewritten pages, ratings were enabled. They could measure a 13% increase the number of people who clicked “Yes” for “Was this article helpful?” at the bottom of the How to set the home page article. Because of the high traffic on their site, that’s over 1,000 people per day. Given the number of people who view that page and the similarly-edited Profiles page, the two re-written pages were helpful to 800,000 more people per year. This demonstrates the power of web analytics, especially on high-traffic help sites! This example is fantastic.

Comment and be commented upon

I have many ideas for implementing comments in nearly any online help system in my article on the WritersUA site titled, Putting the User in User Assistance. Comments connect users to each other and to the authors of the content.

Enable storytelling

Your users have stories. Can you find them with some online searches to discover a hurdle they recently cleared or a snafu they’ve found? While case studies are typically under the purview of a marketing department, try to let users tell their stories, or find a way to showcase user stories periodically by linking to their blogs or tweets.

What other ideas do you have for engaging users with documentation? I’d love to hear more ideas.

I’ve been immersed in Social Media Metrics working with LugIron since early 2010. Because of this recent immersion I took a nerds-eye view of the recent post on the MindTouch blog, The Most Influential Technical Communicator Bloggers. Pretty exciting to be in such esteemed company. Excellent to have a badge to display, check it out!

Thanks go to Mark Fidelman and the MindTouch crew for compiling this list. The metrics nerd in me wanted to investigate further and do some more analysis. So here goes.

Metrics for bloggers and more

To be sure, social networking metrics do not have to be the same as blogging metrics. One missing metric, oddly enough, was number of subscribers. Understandable though. It’s not easy to find out subscriber numbers for other people’s feeds. It’s straightforward to get statistics for Feedburner feeds using either their API or the ol’ ~fc trick (See http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/justwriteclick for an example and my own subscriber stats.) But unless each blogger is willing to share their subscriber numbers, that column couldn’t be filled out. Plus, I know that some bloggers don’t worry about RSS subscribers and focus on building up an email subscriber list instead. For example, Scott Able’s RSS subscribers likely total less than 10,000, but his email lists are upwards of 70,000 addresses.

Then again, perhaps subscriber numbers aren’t all that descriptive of someone’s influence. As it turns out, Google’s PageRank is quite good at social network analysis. It’s on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest rank. The highest of all the tech comm bloggers has a 7/10, which is the same as TechMeme. That’s great for tech comm!

In case you’re curious about the formulas that go into Google PageRank, it takes these four factors into account according to Lithium’s Principal Scientist of Analytics Michael Wu in his post, Are All Influencers Created Equal?:

1. Degree centrality: measures how many connections a user has.
2. Closeness centrality: measures how fast a user can reach the whole network.
3. Eigenvector centrality: measures how reputable a user is.
4. Betweenness centrality: measures how many critical diffusion paths go through the user.

With those centrality measures in mind, you can see how each blogger’s blog works to help them acquire higher page rank. And these work into other scores on the list, such as Twitter Klout and so forth.

What is influence, really?

Very recently there was a quite loud backlash to Fast Company’s Influence Project. Check out these scathing posts.

• TechCrunch: Fast Company Creatively Combines Link Baiting With a Pyramid Scheme
• Amber Naslund: How Fast Company Confused Ego with Influence
• Laurel Papworth: 3 Surefire Ways to Win the FastCompany Influence Project
• Esteban Kolsky: Breaking Rant: Fast Company is Incredibly Stupid

Wow! The project was not about influence, nor even popularity. It was plain old link baiting. There didn’t seem to be any goal from the start. Without goals, influence is useless anyway. The supposed goal of a participant in the FC Influence project would be to get a big picture on the Fast Company site. Unfortunately it ignored the fact that many people want not to get attention paid to them but to their cause or passion.

Earlier this year, Lithium’s Principal Scientist of Analytics Michael Wu posted about the six factors of influence in online communities. His model is wonderfully simple – there are influencers and targets. Two factors for influencers are credibility, meaning how much expertise the person can provide in their domain) and bandwidth, the ability to transmit on a particular channel. In this case, both their blog and Twitter use was measured as a channel. The list would be a bit different if it were to measure influence in STC, on the Techwr-l mailing list, or on Twitter alone. I believe combining Twitter and blogging is a good move, because as Technorati points out in the 2009 State of the Blogsphere report, “Bloggers use Twitter much more than does the general population.”

Without targets, though, the influencers cannot share their passion.

Any keys to success?

I’m presupposing with that section heading that you actually want to know how to become an influencer. Perhaps you do not. But here are some takeaways from my experience and from my book about using social media for tech comm goals.

• Relevance – Make sure your message is nearly always relevant to the subject matter. It’s okay to stray once in a while, to blend the personal with the professional, and make sure people know there’s a real person sending out these messages.
• Timing – Understand when your audience is listening and looking for articles to read. Be aware of a follow-the-sun message system when your audience spills beyond your time zone borders. If you are looking for a decision to be made based on the timing of the message, put yourself in the readers shoes and walk through their decision process. Watch the stats and see when the most visitors come to your site and when the most conversions occur.
• Alignment - You can align yourself in one channel for the greatest payoff. For me, I don’t spend much time on mailing lists or forums but mainly use my blog as an outlet for my thoughts. This laser focus over the last five years has paid off for me.
• Confidence – Being the right person at the right time is one key to success. You have to make sure people have good reason to trust what you say. Whether that’s through proving what you know or admitting when you’re wrong, you have to instill confidence in people to be a good influencer.
• Proficiency – I’m not as proficient with video for communication as I am with text and images. I’m aware of that in my blogging work and haven’t tested myself recently to stretch those boundaries. Tom Johnson has become increasingly proficient in audio and often works in new media such as screencasting to improve his channel reach and message. We can certainly learn from his good examples.

Notice that I don’t have super prescriptive keys here – I don’t tell you to blog twice a week or make sure your posts are at least 500 words long. You have to find your own ways to make these keys work for you.

My goals certainly involve influence, but also to be helpful. I think you’ll find that in my blogging. Personal and professional connections are also important to me – call them weak ties but I enjoy meeting people through my blog. It has offered me opportunities I hadn’t imagined when I first started blogging for my employer five years ago.  I’m extremely happy that tech comm has emerged as a profession as “one to watch” on the blogosphere.

I’ve written a pair of highly interesting blog entries for LugIron in the past month, looking at user engagement for brands varying from cameras and photography to airlines and travel.

Check ‘em out if you’re interested in social media metrics for brands especially, and user experience in interacting with brands.

Engagement Measures: Kodak versus Polaroid

Engagement Measures: Southwest versus JetBlue

I’m going into a listening phase for a client, where I observe their customers and partners habits online.

I thought I’d write up some of my techniques. The overarching task is listed as “Set up a monitoring system for “listening” to the social media participation by customers or partners.” The deliverable for this monitoring system is in the form of a report. But I’m also thinking of ways to set up a Google account so their technical writers can continue to monitor for months and years to come.

For starters, though, I’m going with who I know as much as what I know, picking the online brains of people who are close to this type of product. First, I searched through the archives of a blog of an industry analyst. I found a great post about a set of opposing videos the company had responded to when they were called out by a larger company (my client is the small company). What a find! Definitely set the tone for what they had recently gone through on the social web.

Next, I set up Google Alerts for the company name and two or three keyword phrases that relate to their products. I found a small group of blogs and bloggers dedicated to discussions about the technology behind the products, but not the product itself. There is also some standards work related to the product, which is good to know.

I also searched on LinkedIn for people’s profiles that have this company’s products listed. Then I made a list of their job titles. This client is already providing me with personas, which is great, but I want to add on more information if needed.

I searched on Indeed.com for jobs in high-tech metro areas where the job description contains some of the key skills the product requires as well as the product name itself. This search also reveals job titles.

I also set up a Twitter search that summarizes keywords and the company name, mimicking the Google Alerts. This search yielded more news and marketing information than I expected, which I could interpret as users aren’t on Twitter, but the companies are on Twitter.

Finally, I want to segment the customers by demographics, such as men in the U.S. aged 35-44, to see what their tendencies are for using online information based on the latest Groundswell Social Technographics ladder and data.

I’m also going to revisit the user assistance research that Scott Deloach put together, assembling best practices for user assistance.

Today’s Technology Tools and Social Media for Growing Business was the title, and this session was the last one for Tech Fair, and the Panelists and their company names form an impressive lineup:

Doug Whatley – Human Capital Consultant, moderator

• Scott Ingram – Sales Director, Bazaarvoice / Founder, Network-In-Austin
• Julie Niehoff – ConstantContact
• Dave Evans – Principal, Social Web Strategies
• David Armistead – Principal, Social Web Strategies
• Britton Manasco – Manasco Marketing Partners

After a development manager from Paypal gave a great inspirational talk about how the inflection point for electricity’s usefulness came after an electrical washing machine was invented, bringing the outlet from the ceiling to the wall, Doug Whatley introduced the panelists. Each panelist talked briefly about their perspectives on social business. Here are some notes from the valuable session with interesting insights. I mostly wrote down quotes that I found insightful or that offered a perspective I hadn’t heard.

Britton sums up the social technologies that enable businesses to get work done with a simple phrase: Guidance imperative – the ability to provide expertise, advice, coaching, to be a trusted authority and advisor in the marketplace. He says, social media outlets amplify our ability as authorities – helps us personally brand ourselves. Helps us target and reach prospects.

David Armistead says his perspective is that the C-suite is grid locked on what social media is and what it can do. He typically explains it as, social tech does 2 things well – lower cost of communication and lower cost of coordination. There’s a lot of work to do in comprehending the change and effecting the change – transforming the way we work. No piece of the org will not be affected. We are not “messaging’ any longer, taking a known message through the structures in place – we’re talking.

Dave Evans has been working with groups in Argentina, Netherlands, US and Canada. He observes that 15-45-year olds are doing the SAME things with social tech across all four countries. The other countries just need time to catch up. For example, in India, the 3G spectrum bidding has started, and will enable much more mobile technology. Dave also sees opportunities for businesses monitoring the Social Graph – using TweetDeck and BuzzStream in combination he can monitor microscopic conversations.

One example of business tie-ins with people’s social graph – Social Web Strategies uses the LinkedIn API to build a specific landing page on the 2020 social site that shows C-level people who visits their site a page that shows anyone in their 1st tier who has used their social site. He said later that this is their highest converting landing page. This is B2B lead generation, folks.

Dave also says, this shift affects the whole organization – not just marketing. His example – marketing can’t possibly respond directly to comparison of carbon footprint of products. Basically, consumers can take out their smart phone and scan the barcodes of products while shopping to find out carbon foot print and make your purchasing decision based on the data. That type of decision isn’t made due to marketing or sales team’s efforts.

And next, Julie Niehoff, a development manager at Constant Contact, spoke on her perspective as an email marketing and list segmentation provider. They also acquired Nutshell mail this week, which caused a bit of excitement in the room. She reminds us all that you need a strategy first. Know what your objective is, try and test, then stop doing that when it doesn’t pay off. Loved hearing this as it validates my thoughts in this area. She said, always test just 10-20% of people on your list to try something new – don’t make them all dislike a new method or approach. Later she asked, “Can you segment your lists based on ‘raving fan/brand ambassador’ vs ‘kinda maybe’ vs ‘never gonna’? Do it. Treat brand ambassadors well.”

Another speaker noted that the gaming generation has gained a lot from the mentality that it’s always okay to hit reset and restart.

Where technology turnover is higher, adoption rates are higher. The pay offs are doing business faster, easier, or cheaper.

Scott Ingram spoke from BazaarVoice’s viewpoint, where one of their clients, Sephora, garners lots of reviews, such as 17,000 reviews on a base foundation. Goodness. He noted that people are starting to “live’ in Facebook. One of their customers has 20% of traffic from Facebook. Wow.

I think it was Scott who also said that Twitter is a relationship accelerant. It allows you to stage when you personally and physically interact with others. For example, sales people don’t get on planes until they know what people are looking for. Julie noted that there are also tools that actually mask the relationship – ratings and reviews set the rhythm of the relationship, but you can screw it up with the wrong copy.

The panel session had a question about privacy as the last question, though I think discussion continued after I departed. I liked David Armistead’s assertion that we mostly format questions around privacy when what we need to discuss is security. Julie had good points that there are laws around data collection and privacy policies and companies need to be governed accordingly. She also noted that as individuals we personally need to draw our own points of privacy in what we share online, read the policies before sharing info, and prevent certain connections in order to prevent correlation of data for those people under 13, for example.

What a great session – I could tell many people in the room were learning, taking notes, and nodding in agreement. Thanks to Matt Genovese for starting Door64, to Paypal for sponsoring the session, and to the presenters for sharing their valuable insights.

Less talk. More do.

I’ll be blogging less this summer and trying to gain more hands-on experience with building social, community-based user experiences around documentation. I’m wrapping up some contracts this month and starting an exciting new one with a wee bit of overlap.

So let’s just say there’s lots to do besides blogging.

And, my kids are at such fun ages (well, I do think all kids ages are fun). Take a look at this Zhu-Zhu pet flying transporter my son made with pipe cleaners, wooden clothespins, rubber bands, and some paint and markers. With this kind of creativity swirling around, I want to join in at craft time!

Less bark. More wag.

I could take the bait and comment on a post about women in management roles in technical communication, but I’ve decided against it. I’ve said it before, I am who I am, and that happens to be a woman, spouse, and parent. Besides, Mark Fidelman over at MindTouch is tearing up the blogging scene with great saber-rattling, make-you-think posts about the future and present for technical communication. Complete with infographics, these are not to be missed.

How about you? Whatchadoin’ this summer? There’s a hundred and four days of summer vacation, you know. (Not really for us, but kudos if you know the song lyric reference.) I plan to make the most of some great opportunities that have come my way.

I haven’t done a round up of other places I’ve been writing lately, so I thought I’d offer a roundup of articles I’ve written for other sites.

What I’m writing

10 ways to motivate employees to use your CMS – Fierce Content Management

As a content strategist, what motivations help you meet your content goals when integrating a content system? Often the tool selection gets the most attention, yet the motivation of contributors is going to make or break the success of the project. Motivation is a psychological feature–a willingness to act that precedes behavior. You might think of a points system with rewards as a motivation system, but rewards are only one type of motivation. Read more

Putting the User in User Assistance – WritersUA

People on today’s social web are accustomed to participating in conversations, having a voice, giving opinions, offering reviews, and generally interacting with content and with each other like never before on the web. How can we enable users to respond to or contribute to user assistance? The answer could be a wiki, but a wiki is not required to enable more interaction with users. Here are some specific techniques, starting with the simple and moving towards the more complex, including wiki implementation practices. Read more

What I’m reading

I’m also posting reading items to my delicious.com/annegentle account that might interest my blog readers.

First Steps in Flex Screencasts

We meant to do that… (part I) | MsCyra’s Web Development Blog

How developers learn survey results – interesting

WDVL: ‘Users’ Versus People–Understanding What Motivates Online Behavior – Page 2

I did it! I passed and received my individual qualification (IQ) for Google Analytics. Hurray! And Whew!

The site offers a way to look up people who have passed their IQ test so you can verify if someone has it (here’s mine). I wouldn’t call myself an expert yet, since I think expertise comes with more and more experience. The test itself had well-worded questions, and you need 80% correct out of 70 questions.

I got 81% correct (hence, the whew). I double-checked all my answers, and if I didn’t know an answer for certain, I looked up information either in the Conversion University site or the Google Analytics help site.

With 90 minutes to take the test, my look-up-to-verify method would not have worked for all the questions, and I had to be quite familiar with the University lessons in order to verify what I needed quickly. I wish I could find out more about my incorrect answers. Apparently I need to work more on ecommerce, which makes sense since I’ve never run an ecommerce site so I don’t have hands-on experience with one.

Why pay for an individual qualification? Avinish Kaushik has an excellent post where he says for every $100 you invest in web analytics, you should spend $10 on tools and $90 on people with the brain power to think about the results from the tools. So for me, it made sense to test my brain power on a tool, but I realize that each site needs its own analyst behind it to choose the measurements and connect the site to the business.

I love reading different community perceptions of both FLOSS Manuals, where we write open docs for open software. I’m also lurking on mailing lists and forums where open source projects are figuring out documentation needs for their users. Forgive me if I ramble a bit, but I’ve been thinking about these concepts lately while discussing them with other writers.

Attention on FLOSS Manuals

Here is a great quote from a recent outburst of articles and blog entries mentioning FLOSS Manuals. On the Linux and Open Source blog on ZDNet, Dana Blankenhorn summarizes his post explaining “Why open source documentation lags” by saying,

If programming is like bicycling, documentation is more like basketball. The best players don’t always win.

He offers great explanations for the lags in documentation, and let me tell you, the reasons are not just tied to open source software, all software documentation could use more team sport and collaboration efforts to create decent documentation.

On Network World in a post titled “Creating a library of FLOSS Manuals,” Amy Vernon asks, “…why do so few applications have manuals to start with?” Her initial answer is tied into the use of manuals, asking her readers, “When’s the last time you read a user manual?” Fortunately, she found the offerings on FLOSS Manuals to be quite useful. And I think that’s the key to software documentation, whether it’s open or closed, the usefulness of the doc no matter what form it takes will be its final measure (such as, distance to be tossed or microseconds spent on the page).

What’s Free and Open Software?

At the STC Summit someone asked me quite earnestly, “But what is FLOSS? What does Free, Libre, Open Source Software mean?” I think she wanted to know, is it a philosophy, a concept, a rubric, a religion? I believe the explanation she sought is available in a question and answer set on the FLOSS Manual’s About page, describing both free and open.

Open Source emphasizes availability of source code to software users. … Free Software emphasizes the freedom to modify and reuse software, which of course also requires that source code be readily available.

I wish I could pull these great quotes out of my back pocket when speaking about FLOSS, but I keep learning myself and integrating the definition more fully in my own mind.

Talking Even More about FLOSS and Docs

Last week I talked to Michael Cote last week about wikis, open source documentation, and so on, for his new “make all” podcast. See Coté’s People Over Process » Beyond Documentation – make all #004. I immediately jumped to “who are you writing for?” as the very first question to ask. I think you also should ask, “What are they reading already?” Audience analysis is important everywhere but even more so in open source I would say, because much documentation effort is focused on the developer, which sometimes means non-technical end users get ignored. Also, there is so much free, liberated content in open source, you have to visit (ans answer!) the question, do we make it or gather it.

I also said that FAQs are a perfectly good starting point, especially if customer support is your main goal. In an email exchange later, we talked about how documentation is a great conversion tool for website visitors. With web analytics, that measurement is possible. In essence, your documentation can be your storefront. Aaron Fulkerson describes it well on the MindTouch Blog, in “Your Most Valuable Storefront.”