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’m so pleased to tell you that my book is available now from Amazon.com and BarnesandNobles.com and for sale in Austin, Texas at BookWoman on North Lamar. Published by XML Press, this book was fun to write, difficult to finish, and a dream come true for me, a kid who read 500 books in a school year in the second grade. I love books and I love this book especially. But I do want to keep improving it with blog entries here and responses to honest and thorough reviews, even negative ones.

This sample chapter is available (by direct PDF download or on Scribd) to start the conversation and I invite you to comment here or on Scribd.
Free Chapter Conversation and Community

If you’re here in Austin, I’m working on scheduling some book signings at local bookstores, and be on the lookout for an invitation to a book release party in the next few months! I want to share my excitement.

And lastly, I have to thank my blog readers – you are collectively loyal, smart, funny, and engaging. I couldn’t have written this book without you.

I like to keep an eye on what posts are popular, although with a blog, you can define popular in many different ways. Most comments, most views, or highest average daily views. So if you’re new to my blog, (and the recent uptick in subscribers might indicate that some of you are, so welcome!) you might enjoy these previous posts.

Here are the most popular posts based on total views (I think this is slightly inaccurate for the life of my blog but still interesting):

• Wiki as forum, FAQ, HTML editor, XML editor, or CMS?: Wiki as the new FAQ I discovered and have been meaning … 7 comment(s)
  
• EMC Adds Google Desktop to EMC Documentum Federated Search Environment: An excellent combination, Google search for your enterp… 0 comment(s)
• Twitter for usability testing or doc testing? Sure, here’s how: My coworker went to SXSW Interactive this year, and I m… 1 comment(s)
  
• Writing End-User Documentation in an Agile Development Environment: This article was original published in the June 2007 is… 17 comment(s)
  

Here are the most popular posts based on average daily views:

• Wiki as forum, FAQ, HTML editor, XML editor, or CMS?: Wiki as the new FAQ I discovered and have been meaning … 7 comment(s)
  
• EMC Adds Google Desktop to EMC Documentum Federated Search Environment: An excellent combination, Google search for your enterp… 0 comment(s)
  
• Love, love, <3 The Twitter Book: Wow, just got a print copy of The Twitter Book by Tim … 1 comment(s)
  
• Conversational robots: Move over qmail mailer-daemon*, Little MOO from moo.com… 2 comment(s)
  
• Twitter for usability testing or doc testing? Sure, here’s how: My coworker went to SXSW Interactive this year, and I m… 1 comment(s)
  

Here are the most popular posts based on number of comments:

• STC Intercom – themes and advice wanted: I’m quite flattered and humbled (and more than a little… 25 comment(s)
  
• Look out, updated headshots are coming: The headshots I’ve been using (including the one that s… 19 comment(s)
  
• Writing End-User Documentation in an Agile Development Environment: This article was original published in the June 2007 is… 17 comment(s)
  
• DITA and wiki hybrids – they’re here: Lisa Dyer and Alan Porter presented at last week’s … 14 comment(s)
  
• Arrrrrrr, mateys!: I haven’t been churning out blog posts for a while due … 14 comment(s)

What are your favorites – the most discussed or the most widely read? Feel free to leave a comment.

I’m always on the lookout for examples of social media tools used to write and maintain online help. One trend I think I am seeing is the use of blogs as the basic release notes for new features in products, especially web applications. Examples are new Google Calendar features and SmugMug, where the entire blog is dedicated to Release Notes.

I’ve also found the Jing online help is written and maintained in Movable Type, a blogging tool. Many blogging tools can be used as content management systems, and it appears that Jing’s writers see blog engines that way too. There are lots of nice built-in features that they are taking advantage of – a nice Search field at the top of every page, and the Categories link at the bottom of each help topic give a nice collection of topics. There’s only one “table of contents” for the help system, and that’s the top page, but it works nicely as a site map. The overall effect is a very simple and elegant user assistance or support system. One detail I did discover while trying out the site, though, is that the MT search engine did not find hits for a search on “mpeg 4″ when the topic titled contained MPEG-4.

The use of a blog overall seems like a great idea for release notes – give your product some Google juice and search power as well as generate buzz for new features by giving other bloggers a well-understood infrastructure to link to you and give your entries trackbacks. If your release notes contain a lot of bug reporting or issue fixes, I’m not sure a blog is a good match since that’s not exactly a positive spin on your product release. Then again, sometimes transparency and honesty is the best policy. What do you all think?

I’ve got more blog entries published on the Duo Consulting blog about social profiles, blogging policies, widgets for your web content (I like to call it bling for your blog) and general posts about online interaction and learning. I really enjoy blogging for Duo because it’s encouraging me to research in areas that are important for all content management but especially for the content that people make money on, where they content itself is what people are paying for.

If you are interested in web content, you want to take a look at the Web Content conferences that Duo offers – Tampa Bay in February 2009 looks to be a great opportunity to learn a lot, eat great food (according to one of their conference goers!), and meet like-minded individuals. I can swing a discounted registration your way if you email me via my Contact page.

But Mom, Time Online Is Not a Waste

Teenagers do think differently than the rest of us – you probably knew that already or could have guessed that. But did you know that the way teens develop their skills online is actually being studied by the MacArthur Foundation? They have released the results of their study from three years of interviewing young people and their parents. From the article, they conclude, “America’s youth are developing important social and technical skills online, often in ways that adults do not understand.” The two page summary report is a great read, and I was excited when I found danah boyd in the list of authors. Read more

Why Create Yet Another Social Profile?

Some days it seems like an invite to a particular network spreads like wildfire. First you get a smattering of invites for LinkedIn, and then Spock invites spread, and then, out of nowhere, Naymz appears in your inbox, telling you to worry about your personal brand management. It’s enough to give anyone social media overload. Read more

Widgets for Your Web Content

Bling is usually characterized as offering a special extra “punch” to an ensemble or outfit. Bling is an accessory, which is how I would describe sidebar widgets on your website or blog. Accessories can enhance the main site but can also offer eye candy or a shiny bauble to help the main site gain more attention at the social web party. Coco Chanel is quoted as saying, “Before leaving the house, look in the mirror and remove one accessory.”  Do you need to examine your website to see if it has one or two too many widgets that may detract from your site’s main messaging? Read more

How Did You Get To Work Today?

Have you ever stopped to think about all the signs, infrastructure, access, and coordination it takes just to get people to work each day in a major city? World Usability Day gives us a chance to do just that. The day itself was Thursday November 13. I hadn’t stopped on that day to take notice of what the day is all about so I thought I’d take some time now to look into it. Read more

Blogging and Social Media Policies

A blogging or social media policy describes how an employee or volunteer should represent themselves and the organization online. It also describes whose time and whose equipment may be used for blogging or other social media activities, and it also clarifies when someone is representing themselves, and when they are representing an organization. I’ve written blog entries based on a corporate policy at BMC Software, and it was helpful to know what were the expectations for my time investment and also where privacy lines could be drawn. Read more

From Written Reports to Visualization for Website Analytics

Duo uses a persona-based approach to website designs – which should help answer questions like, “Are potential clients or current clients the most common website visitor and your target for content?” Personas help designers and programmers visualize real people reading and acting on the content they find on a website. But after the design is done and the website is implemented, you have to know what your visitors are doing, how long they’re spending doing that, and whether your website is efficiently “converting” the behavior you want to see – buying a product, signing up for a class, or connecting with other like-minded individuals. So you constantly monitor your website to answer the questions related to your personas’ behaviors. Read more

Searching is Easy – Finding a Community is Hard

Twitter, Twine, and now Twing – I have signed up for all these web applications that start with “Tw!”

Twing is a specialized search engine for deep searches within community discussion groups or forums. So if you want to find niche communities or specialized discussion, actual online conversation, about a topic or a brand, Twing offers a way to search through community content that Google or other search engines may miss. Twing sports a directory listing of different communities so you can click down through the forums that interest you (or may be of interest to your clients or customers). Read more

Diane Wieland has a great post at the Duo Consulting blog called Free Expert Blogging Advice that points to the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. In the blog entry she encourages bloggers to learn from the reviews of blogs using a standard set of criteria found at Business and Blogging. They say:

Good Blogs will be:

• easy to find
• frequently updated
• written in an engaging manner
• relevant
• focused
• honest
• interactive
• responsive

Bad blogs will be:

• hard to find
• infrequently updated
• censored
• one-way communication
• unresponsive
• defensive

Ugly blogs will be:

• boring
• inaccurate or misleading
• filled with technical jargon (for a non-technical audience)
• full of regulations and legal disclaimers
• self-absorbed
• press releases in disguise

It would be interesting to apply these review criteria on technical writing tool vendor’s blogs. MadCap has what I consider to be a groundswell-blogger-style with personalities first, company second. Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite team’s blog has a distinct corporate and enterprise appeal while still identifying posters by name and letting you get to know them. ComponentOne has a collection of blogs and bloggers but buzz generation fills the first page. Author-it has a new nicely branded WordPress blog. WebWorks has a group of bloggers also and Alan Porter is my favorite blogger there. TechSmith hosts three blogs – the Jing Blog, Screencast.com Blog and The Visual Lounge Blog.

I won’t apply bad or ugly criteria to any of these. I’m happy they’re blogging. What are your thoughts as more and more of “our” vendors begin to join the blog world? Have I missed any of your vendor favorites?

For even more corporate blogging resources, see the link list on Rhonda Bracey’s post entitled Corporate/business blogging.

Bryan has the following ideas for finding and following conversations, and I think these are quite applicable to our role as technical writer also. The only item I find wanting in his post is – what keywords do you use? My initial ideas are: product name, keywords for the problems and solutions that your product addresses, and company name. Perhaps even the job titles for people who use your product like I’ve blogged about previously.

Finding and following conversations

1. Search on Google Blog Search
2. Search on Technorati
3. Use an RSS reader such as Google Reader
4. Start subscribing and listening to podcasts through iTunes
5. Subscribe to Google Alerts
6. Reading blog comments
7. Jump onto Twitter and establish a presence in Facebook

I found an excellent case study of technical writers engaging in conversation through Dee Elling, who is the tech pubs manager for a programmer’s IDE. She has a blog post called Help on Help where she gets lots of comments from users – some of whom are in her camp, others who are ready to go to battle for the help content, namely the code examples that had mysteriously disappeared between releases.

Dee answers honestly and really empathizes with their need for those examples, and has a plan in place for replacing them. Her blog post is a great case study for how to have ongoing conversations with your customers.

I’ve been thinking about the writer’s interaction with customers a lot lately, because of blogging and podcasting and wikis other social media pursuits that seem to lead us towards documentation as a conversation with customers. As Tom Johnson found in his Web 2.0 experiment, some users think that the help system has boundaries. How can we break down those boundaries (seems like search is part of the answer)? How could Tom have ensured that his customer sought out conversation rather than answers?

Sarah O’Keefe wrote up a nice summary of the WritersUA Pundits Panel, and Bogo Vatovec (of Bovacon)  made a statement something like this:

Introverted technical writers will not be writing help any more and will be replaced with experts moderating support forums. … Technical writers can no longer afford to hide in their cubes, they must go out and become experts and talk to the users.

I left a comment on her post that I see a similar future for our profession, although I do not have a value placed on introversion versus extroversion – likely introverts make perfectly good community managers and forum moderators since they can do that from their desks for the most part.

But, it does take some bravery to put your real personality online. I’ve found that a few of us are doing that – going from technical writer to blogger writing directly to customers.

While many of us blog to an audience of other professional writers, there are technical writers out there who are blogging to their end-user audience. Here are two examples:

• National Instruments here in Austin has a blog called “technically speaking” that they use not only to talk about their daily work but also to keep their end-users informed about documentation. For example, here’s a post about a wiki that LabVIEW users will find helpful.

• Another example is Dee Elling’s blog for CodeGear users. This entry offers a great example of a real conversation with customers. I applaud her bravery (and emailed her to tell her) in facing these sometimes abrasive responses with a sense of customer service and helpful attitude. She doesn’t always have a good message to bring (they are working furiously to give their customers more code examples which we all know is time-consuming and difficult). But she brings a message directly to customers anyway.

Is anyone else talking directly to their customer base with their blog? Consultants in technical writing and content management are definitely talking to current and potential clients – Palimpsest is Scriptorium’s blog, The Rockley Blog, The Content Wrangler, and DMN Communications to name a few. But what about conversations with end users? I’d love to see more examples.

Another one of my takeaways from last week’s South By South West Interactive conference is that it makes sense to use the term “social networking” rather than “social media” to describe sites and tools that help you stay connected with others. We’re not all journalists, and the “media” part of the term seems to signify that you want to share media, but in reality, you want to share interests, ideas, and connect with others.

Join the Content Wrangler Community on Ning

There seemed to be an amazing convergence for me last week, when not only did I witness some neat interactions at the conference in person, online I was also having neat interactions with other members of the Content Wranger Community on Ning. I’ve started a Blogging group there as well, and I posed two questions to the group – one is, How do you find time to write blog entries? and the other is, Blog engine as a CMS? Or CMS as blog engine?

Please feel free to add me as your friend, add a comment, join a group, connect with me on The Content Wrangler Community. I’d like to get to know my readers!

Austin’s own STC president Leah Eaton invited the most people to join the community in the 3-day timeframe for a contest, so she gets to choose from a list of conferences to attend. Naturally, I encouraged her to attend DocTrain West where I’ll be moderating the Meet the Bloggers session featuring Scott Abel, Darren Barefoot, Aaron Davis, Tom Johnson, and Scott Nesbitt.

This book was an easy, fun, read, and seemed especially pertinent after all the immersion into social networking I’ve been doing with SXSW Interactive. The 100-page book, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook, is aimed at your company’s marketing department for them to read before deep-diving into the social media landscape. Julie Szabo and Darren Barefoot share their stories and even their somewhat embarrassing lessons learned, sparing you from the same fate while also encouraging you to start the conversation.

At talk.bmc our entire intent was to start the conversation. So I know how daunting and intimidating it can be, yet you also have to dive in and sit back and listen. It’s not an easy road to walk. But sometimes ROI stands for Risk of Inaction, so eventually you should learn your way around the tools of the trade. I still like Reach Or Influence for the ROI acronym when applied to blogging.

This book gives you specific examples of tools and technology you can use to start the conversation, and also has the proper amount of caution about being genuine and having good intentions. One of my favorite quotes:

The vast majority of products are
ordinary. Worse, most customers
have made their buying decisions
about staple purchases years ago,
and it’s difficult to change their
minds.

So, what to do? Pull off the “online equivalent of a publicity stunt,” create a meme. To me, this is such a daunting task I can’t imagine writing a book about how to do it. But sure enough, these two have the experience and case studies to show for it.

I also liked the “influencer” chapter, describing the rules for interaction with bloggers. Looking at it as a blogger rather than a marketer, it’s good insider information to have. For example, check out this trick! Let’s say someone has a feedburner feed, but they haven’t published that little graphic that shows how many subscribers they have. Just insert /~fc/ into their feedburner URL, and voila, you have the little graphic! Example: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/JustWriteClick. Super secret way to check out your friend’s blogs and see if they have any subscribers to speak of.

Glory be, they like their technical writers as monitors!

Darren has a background as a technical writer, and when the book talks about who is a good candidate for the sometimes time-consuming task of monitoring the blogosphere, I’ll bet it’s Darren who’s giving the nod to the technical writer. My other favorite quote:

On the development side, technical support engineers
or technical writers are often a good choice. They’re good
communicators, tend to have a broad awareness of the
company’s products, and can even reply to basic
support-related posts.

I agree whole heartedly. I think the Agile technical writer that Sarah Maddox describes is precisely the right person to be identifying keywords, get RSS watch lists configured, and read, read, read, and respond when necessary or find someone in our company who can respond correctly.

Wikipedia doesn’t like marketers – tread carefully

And, my personal favorite topic, wikis, is addressed. The book has an excellent section about what to do and what not to do when it comes to the tricky waters of Wikipedia. To me, this section alone is worth the $29 for this book! Solid advice with the proper amount of respect for the community behind Wikipedia.

All in all, nicely done and a great read for marketers and bloggers alike.