I’m reading (with vigor!) the The State of Community Management Report: Best Practices from Community Practitioners
from the Community Roundtable, and finding so many wonderful tips about content from people who are community managers. I had to start a list of items that are relevant to technical communication and web writing to share. I naturally tend to target technical communications when I interpret the report, but this report is rife with content strategy.

I agree with this statement, and I think it means a positive impact on technical writers and web writers who are paid to create content by businesses.

The percentage of content that is desirable and
feasible to be formally produced versus community-generated
will have a big impact on resource and
budget planning. This aspect is likely to change – often
dramatically – over time, although it should not be
assumed that content should ever be exclusively
community-generated.

I personally haven’t found that completely community-generated documentation will serve most business goals. In the case of FLOSS Manuals, though, the community-generated content meets the main purpose of supporting and documenting  open source software. Still, hiring professional writers makes sense when you need to create content that meets very specific goals for a community, whether your goals are raising awareness, troubleshooting, or learning.

Now, this particular comment puts a bit of a stake in the heart of technical communication’s beloved single sourcing. I like the idea of associated content for technical writers to create. It’s branching into new media, such as audio or video, while still valuing the technical content that you work so hard to create. It’s not that one births the other, but rather the two types can compliment each other.

Instead of directly repurposing content from one format to another, create
associated content. For example, instead of turning a white paper into an
audio transcript, create a podcast discussion about it with the author.

Another line that causes me to press pause and ponder for a bit:

People seldom form relationships with text alone.

Instead, offer images, video, or music as part of the user experience in order to grow relationships. Fascinating.

And finally, the one that might be the toughest for professional writers, copy editors, and technical communicators to accept:

Learn to accept imperfection. Concentrate on making content interesting
and relevant rather than perfect. Imperfection actually allows community
members to better relate to it and engage with it.

And with striving towards imperfection as my excuse, I’ll close out this blog entry and encourage you to read the report for yourself, drawing your own arrows from the quiver and targeting what is important to you.

I’ve put together a Facebook page for my book, Conversation and Community. I’ve had requests for a place for people to talk about the ideas in the book, and after talking it over with others, I settled on Facebook as a good place to bring together all the different sorts of communicators who have found my book helpful. From a pastor in Michigan to a small business on the west coat, to all the technical communicators who have found it useful, let’s gather together to socialize and talk about this shift towards enhanced social communication techniques.

I’ve published a long-ish article on the WritersUA site where I describe techniques for user assistance that let the user participate. It starts with simple techniques such as comments and moves towards community documentation efforts. Please read and share Putting the User in User Assistance. I’d love to hear what you think about these techniques.

While doing some research for LugIron, a startup here in Austin where I serve in an advisory role, I found a slideshow discussing signs of successful community launches by Joe Cothrel, a VP of service at Lithium.

Now, what they mean by “community” is a larger than 5,000 person audience, enterprise-type (B2B or B2C focused communities), and containing primarily forums and blogs (followed by everything else.) So, it’s not quite the same as the wiki communities that I’ve studied and participated in. But, what’s interesting to me is that one of his Warning signs on page 8 is a quote from the enterprise:

“We want to do a pilot.”

Huh? Really? Wanting to do a pilot is a warning sign of eminent failure? I guess with blogs and forums, you would want full dedication to the efforts and the goals of the community. But with wiki communities, I think a pilot is a great idea. Pilot content, pilot collaborators, pilot wiki.

What do you think? Do wikis fold up easier than forums? Are pilots getting a bad name in corporate-sponsored communities? Is this a case of the vendor wanting full dedication in their sales engagements?

Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.
Pablo Picasso

Someone pointed out a bit of a dichotomy in technical communication the other day. It was such an interesting observation that I’ve been thinking about it for a while. The dichotomy is between the power of plain old writing skills and the power of “sexier” specialized skills.

What are the specialties?

Directions for tech comm that  Tom Johnson and Alan Porter discuss on their respective blogs is a movement towards videos and screencasting (screencasts category on Tom’s blog) or graphics and illustrating (comics category on Alan’s blog). Mostly the posts talk about how users don’t read the manual (which is apparently okay). Perhaps specialization is a wise direction to take, because it’s a specialty that won’t be taken over by “the crowd” as easily as writing. WordPress.tv, for example, was seeded with 20 professionally-produced how-to videos, and the community can add videos to the site as well. You can mostly detect which were made by professional film-makers, so it would appear they’re employable longer.

Content farms go moo

Since anyone can write, and content farms are impacting the web, filling it to the brim with quickly written, search-engine baited fast-food content, hone more specialized skills in order to thrive in the shifting sands of the web, right? However, content experts like Brian Massey say that all content, no matter the source, is what’s driving the successful websites and web applications today. The written word is still effective with measurable results, and is overwhelmingly more prevalent on the web today, page for page. Mint.com, for example, is a wonderful redistributor and aggregator of banking and investment accounts, a specialized type of content. Mint also creates content, such as the weekly summary newsletter, that encourages you to return to the site. This content is text and numbers, with lovely graphs, but it’s really the numbers that shine.

To summarize

With both sides pointed out to me now, I’m leaning towards the broader content strategy movement. I will help people get content from any source, even if it’s built by a community or (gasp) ordinary users. But I do see the value in video and especially in non-text-heavy mobile content as we roll into the new year and a new decade.

Here’s my observation. If it’s true that bit.ly, the link shortener that’s popular on social sharing sites, has counted over a billion click-throughs per month, then it’s possible that social sharing will overtake search engine optimized content. As noted in 5 Trends That Will Shape Small Business in 2010, “Social search has the ability to eclipse the value of traditional SEO efforts.” A comment counters with the trend to go from text to video, saying clients should “record, record, and then record some more.”

Let me repeat that. Eventually there could be more people reading and clicking through links on social sites than searching and clicking through links in search results. How will that shift change how you create content, and how will you strategically choose the content that you create?

Community purposes vary as widely as the people who comprise a community. You know that participants on Twitter Moms are not the same people as those hanging out on Dad Labs community, instinctively. But what are some of the factors that differentiate communities?

Types of communities

As I learn more about open source communities, support communities, and documentation communities, I’m finding that people who talk about community in the enterprise use categories for the types of communities that exist: business to business is B2B, business to consumer is B2C, and customer to customer (or consumer) is C2C. Besides the audience and membership targets, what are some other factors that differentiate these communities from each other?

Participation

Does 90-9-1 hold true for B2B communities? Apparently, no. The participation inequality ratios are even more, well, inequal in a B2B community. Here are notes from a Twitter chat on the socialtext.com site, as recorded by Shara Karasic @sharakarasic. “Mike Rowland doubts the community manager’s myth of 90-9-1 participation ratio. In B2B space, blog metrics have a ratio closer to 99-.9-.1. In support communities where people can ask a quick question, the 9% expands.”

Focused communities

I also heard an interview with Gartner’s Adam Sarner where he addresses the question, “What if it’s drill bits, not “cool,” products that generate lots of buzz and conversation between consumers?” I’ve often wondered as a technical writer, knowing that not many of us work on products that would generate “fan” feelings, whether “fandom” indicates whether its worthwhile to pursue community or social interaction techniques. Apparently, focused communities can generate just as much excitement and connections, whether it’s drill bits or accounting tools.

Trip-ups for communities in categories

I think one basic flaw in categorizing communities is that talking about who talks to whom makes you think of community like it’s a publishing channel, which is not a good analogy. Whether you’re publishing reviews or complaints or questions or answers, the type of community matters a lot because of the changes in audience and author. But, not all the work of a community has to do with content production, and a community is not a “channel.” Connections, building trust, communication, and maintenance of all of the system are other tasks within a community.

In summary, I appreciate the desire to strictly focus a community. I’m learning more about how those communities operate, and it looks like lots of good people are doing the same. Feel free to point to more research in the comments, and I’ll continue to share my findings.

I’ve been collecting examples of wildly inconsistent writing lately. I’m not sure why these have stuck out to me, but when I think of book sprints and community writing events, consistency is an important, though sometimes difficult, goal and outcome.

Why consistency?

You may not be a big fan, especially if you’re a creative type, because you appreciate when something interesting and new pops out at you. Unfortunately, you may be one of the few who appreciates something popping out while they’re trying to learn a task or evaluate a concept or analyze a pending purchase. I don’t believe consistency has to mean “dull” but I do believe consistency gives you expected results both in reading paragraphs and in overall organization.

SkyMall – catalog copy example

For some reason, this bit of catalog copy stopped me in my tracks while I was reading the latest SkyMall, waiting for my plane to take off.
Catalog copy for a watch description:

When you want to raise some eyebrows or have an excellent ice breaker for you next sales meeting, the jaw dropping Gforce MatrixPC is your best resource. The stunning design will tell people that you are someone who is confident, secure, and successful; all traits that will attract the right people into your life. The MatrixPC makes everyone aware that you know what it takes in life.

The last sentence was the most jarring, I suppose. Compared to other catalog copy in the same publication, this one struck me as sloppy, not tight.

Little House on the Prairie – narrative example

I’m re-reading the Little House on the Prairie books as an adult after loving them as a child. This time through, though, I’m amazed at the differences in style and tone and the placement of quite technical descriptions of cheese making, contrasted with stories of children not listening to their parents. I didn’t notice these differences in voice and style as a child, but as a grown-up this roller coaster reading was making me a little nauseous.

Then I learned from this New Yorker article, Wilder Women: The mother and daughter behind the Little House stories that Rose Wilder added much of the “flourish” to the books before they would even be considered for publication. Fascinating. The books still hold together and offer a wonderful viewpoint into American history. But there will always be that reader experience of the feeling some paragraphs are misplaced.

How to achieve consistency with community writing projects

On the FLOSS Manuals site, Adam Hyde writes about tone and style swings in the Book Sprints book, saying:

A book can be frustrating if it switches tone in the middle. One author may write in a jazzy, loose style, such as “Don’t panic–we’ll reveal the wizardry in a minute,” while another might write in a more formal style, saying “The following example is complex, but will be understandable by the time you finish the chapter.” Each style is legitimate and useful, but the reader will feel queasy if the tone makes a big swing from one style to another.

I think that “queasy” feeling is one you want to avoid for your readers.

We’ve worked through this for book sprints with a couple of different techniques to ensure consistency in style, tone, and organization.

One is to hire an off-site editor who reviews and modifies new content nightly during a book sprint. By having that person be off-site, they do not get caught up into the intense group dynamics that happen during the sprint, which is such a focused documentation and working group that they may argue unnecessarily about edits.

Another technique is to start writers out with a simple style guide.On the FLOSS Manuals site, each manual has a link to Agreed conventions for writing this manual. It’s not complicated but it does give writers an idea of what expectations they should meet when writing content.

For book sprints, we outline ahead of time, using simple Post-it notes or even laying out paper printouts on the floor.

These chapter or topic titles will give writers an idea of what type of chunking of information we’d expect for the manual.

And lastly, lead by example. By providing copy in the style and tone that you expect the entire body of work to follow, other writers are more likely to follow suit.

Are professional associations going the way of bowling leagues? I don’t think so. And I certainly hope not since my employer, ASI, provides software for non-profits which includes professional associations.

But it is certainly an interesting premise that there are fewer mechanisms for casual introductions because of a shared activity like bowling or bridge. Robert Putnam wrote an article in 2000 called “Bowling Alone” that turned into this book, Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community. It’s a fascinating premise and I’d like to read more just based on this quote, “Our growing social-capital deficit threatens educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health and happiness.”

Technology – part of the solution?

If you’ve read my book, Conversation and Community, you might think I’d advocate for online activities like Scrabulous (now Lexulous) for casual introductions and getting to know people. And there are certainly stories where Twitter has introduced people to each other in new ways, such as Michael Hughes discovering common interests with others unexepctedly through Twitter and Facebook  interactions. In his post, Social Web: This old dog finally gets it, he says:

As an officer, I’ve taken quite a bit of heat over some unpopular decisions and problems lately from well-meaning and articulate critics. Twitter and Facebook have given me the opportunity to interface with some of these critics at the level of home-brewed beer and love of musical instruments.

A strong personal touch

Yet, there are some technologies that can make group work more difficult. As Clay Shirky eloquently explains in “Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software,” mailing lists can have the most difficulty with signal-to-noise ratio. You know you’ve seen it happen on lists over and over again. Someone writes something that everyone needs to respond to, and then the responses don’t add to the original discussion. Even the best-behaved list members have difficulty obeying rules of conduct set forth. Naturally, the problem is more difficult when the list is large, because people who crave the “upset” attention will get more drama on a larger list.

On the other hand, blogs and wikis have built-in rules of engagement that assist with this problem. Clay Shirky outlines many assistant design decisions in the essay referenced above. But you still have to be willing to moderate comments when you are a blogger or a wiki administrator. And you have to be willing to work hard to build a community that uses the technology in a productive way.

I just received my pre-ordered copy of the Art of Community and wow! I am learning so much already. Jono Bacon is the author, and his experiences with communities come from years with the open source Linux project and now Ubuntu.

I believe many types of communities can benefit from reading this book, from professional organizations to preschool boards. So far I’ve only read about bikeshedding, governance, and conflict resolution, both areas I need to know how to handle!

The book opens with a story of a teen-aged boy racing across England to go to a meeting with people he has only met on the Internet – and he’s late! I loved this story as a hook for the book.

It reminded me of my own first-time experience with “Internet friends” (as the friend’s wife in the story calls the group.) My perspective was as a girlfriend whose boyfriend had the “Internet friends.”   Here’s my story.

It was the mid-nineties and my boyfriend Paul was working at a university as a system administrator. In his spare time, he stumbled across a group with a single goal that captured his attention – the distributed.net team, the Internet’s first general-purpose distributed computing project. Their goal was to win a contest to crack or decode an encryption key using many computers, each one doing a small amount of the calculation work.

From Cincinnati, Paul got more involved with their project, and chatted with the group on IRC quite a bit. As strange as it sounds, I got to know the group through their IRC handles – cow, dbaker, Nugget, Moonwick, and decibel, to name a few. One week they decided it would be great to get together for dinner in Indianapolis. My girlfriends from college who lived in Indianapolis didn’t quite know what I was talking about. “You’re coming to visit? And visiting us as well as some new friends of your new boyfriend? And he only knows them through the computer?”

Paul and I drove over from Cincinnati to Indianapolis, about a two-hour drive. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I trusted Paul knew these guys well enough to want to hang out. I was a tagalong but my curiosity, which I have in abundance, was piqued. Would the first meeting be awkward or natural? Would I have anything to talk to them about?

As it turns out, we had a fun time at a fondue restaurant. We were stuffed full of food and good laughs. The guys happily played with their gadgets – Palm Pilots were the popular one of the time.

Oh, good times. That meeting was the first of many for our group. We traveled to Atlanta later to scope out different locations for a company and at the end of that quest, many of them moved to Austin to work at the United Devices startup company in 2000.

I had such a great time at the book release party for Conversation and Community. I know I’m overdue in posting, but wanted to write something up about it. It was fun!

Party planning was fun too. To set the conversation scene, I brought these Table Topics games – the original edition and the book club edition. The cards have questions like, “what did you get into trouble for the most when you were young?” or “what alternative title would you give this book?” These were a lot of fun.

To represent “community” I brought in nearly all of my sons’ Lego figs on square Lego boards as table toppers. They were great fun! I learned later that some of the Star Wars figs are now priced at $10-12 each so some of those centerpieces were in the same range as floral arrangements, ha!

We had so many people stop by and we filled the room pretty quickly. Often it felt like a reunion of the people in the book and all the writers with whom I have worked which is great fun! My parents came to the party from Dallas, then traded places with my husband so he could attend for a while too. Here’s a picture of me and my awesome husband at the party.

I signed books like crazy. I sold out of the box of books and my dad had to dig into my small stash in my car to meet demand. (Thanks Dad!) I also set aside books for people who had asked for signed copies and it’s a good thing I did!

The photographer of the Danish keyboard on the book cover, Jude Theriot, drove up from Houston and brought a signed, matted print of the photo as a gift! It was such a lovely gesture.