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Posts Tagged ‘social media’
Webinar available now from Scriptorium Publishing
I gave a webinar this week for Scriptorium that will be available online titled “Documentation as Conversation.” The fact that it’s recorded lets you avoid scurrying around rearranging meetings in Outlook just to attend it. It sold out which was great to hear, but I like that the message and conversation continues through the recording. One of my fun examples was the Wordle visualization of my tags from the social bookmarking tool, del.icio.us.
During the question and answer session, someone mentioned they felt like social media made her feel like we’re becoming paleontologists. I think she referred to my many examples of how to “stalk” your users to learn more about them and their goals, especially if you document software. I search for my product’s name in Indeed.com job listings as well as look for job titles with my product’s name in LinkedIn to learn more about the people I’m writing for. I wrote up the technique in this blog post, Find your user’s vocabulary and use his or her key terms as keywords.
I also had a follow up email saying that people want to know, where should my team start conversations? Or where should we focus our time if we do start? In my book, I talk about phases: Listen, Participate, Share, Build a Platform. I think you should start with listening and monitoring what’s already being said. Next, start by commenting on blogs or by blogging yourself. A baby step towards blogging is to blog on an internal site, behind your firewall, just to limit your audience if that makes you more comfortable.
Also I’d recommend trying out tools that are already installed that you don’t have to maintain and install yourself. For example, I started justwriteclick.com on wordpress.com and paid $10 a year to map my domain name. When I knew WordPress was a good fit for me and my blogging and site needs, I went ahead and found an ISP and installed WordPress myself. And two years later, I’m hooked on WordPress and I’m even attending WordCamp Dallas in a few weeks.
Sharing content is the next step, and the final step is providing a platform for users to bring their own content in. These steps take time but you will learn valuable lessons along the way and hopefully avoid any stumbling or disastrous results. It’s okay to fail, though. You learn new lessons with each attempt and approach.
So keep an eye out for the recording of the webinar, Documentation as Conversation. The price remains at USD $20 and you get to schedule listening to it any any time of the day. It’s an hour long and if you do listen to the recording, feel free to contact me via email with any questions. I am looking forward to hearing even more feedback!
Dangerous future for technical writing?
I finally got to watch the final season of The Wire and was fascinated with the interplay of the media in the plot lines that included journalists and editors a the Baltimore Sun. Over at the Duo Consulting blog, Diane Wieland wrote a great entry titled “Why Pay When You Can Get It For Free.” In it, she discusses the general freaking out of old media and their dated business models. Yes, people want news. Yes, people can get news for free. Previously the best way to get your news was through journalism and your daily newspaper – but the publishing systems have changed and allowed for citizen journalism and news updates through various channels.
I naturally draw a parallel between citizen journalism and user-generated content. After all, in software, technical writers are like the journalist is – finding the relevant story for a particular audience, interviewing to get the facts, presenting in a fair, nonjudgemental manner, and writing to a deadline. Must we be introduced to the new tech comm, like this lead in for the All things Digital article about the Washington Post admitting that the Huffington Post could take them to survival school?
“Old media, meet new media, meet old media’s new media.”
Will Google Wave be part of that new tech communicator’s arsenal? My fellow Agile writer Shannon Greywalker thinks so and describes its usefulness in this post, Google Wave changes everything you know about agile collaboration and technical documentation.
I signed a book contract! Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation
I’m simply buzzing with excitement because the ink is drying on my first book contract, and it’s with XML Press with the capable Richard Hamilton at the helm.
The title is Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. Here’s the announcement and description of the book. I’m nearly done writing it, the designer (the very creative and talented digital artist Patrick Davison) is working on the cover and interior design.
I hope you’ll put it here (on your well-stocked bookshelf):
Bookshelf photo courtesy of Stewart on Flickr.
Though it’s completely possible you’ll put it here (handy at the side of your work station or on your computer):
Workstation photo courtesy of Travis Isaacs on Flickr.
I was asked earlier, why don’t you blog about the process of landing a book contract? I’d love to tell some great story about a bright response on how I brilliantly negotiated a book contract. But there is no such story. : ) I honestly think writing two blog entries a week for the last four years or so has been the best way to explain the point I’m at today with a book contract in hand! Look for the book this summer mid-2009, as I have an aggressive schedule going right now.
Handout download for Documentation with Blogs, Wikis, and Online Communities
Ah, when I typed the title in the Quick Press book I originally wrote, “Documentation with Blogs, Wiis, and Online Communities.” If only we could write documentation with the haptic Wii controller. Brings a whole new meaning to drag and drop. 
I’ve uploaded a handout for the presentation that Janet Swisher and I just gave at the STC Summit. We only printed 20 copies but easily had 50+ and a standing-room only crowd! So please feel free to download and print this one-pager that contains links we referenced. And since you came to my blog to find this handout, you get an added bonus of the Social Technographics(tm) tool from the Groundswell authors, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.
Thanks to all who attended! Please fill out the speaker evaluation on the STC web site. Feel free to remind me that I talk too fast.
Climb collaboration levels with me in Atlanta
Photo courtesy lollaping
I finished my presentation about Climbing the Levels of Collaboration for the Collaboration Institute at the STC Summit and I’m so excited about it I can’t stand it! True confession: I was up until 1:00 AM finishing it up and uploaded it quite late.
I found this great collaboration exercise that I’ve incorporated into the session. So we’ll be drawing with Crayola markers. Maybe even collaboratively. I’m hoping for quite the Back of the Napkin experience.
This session walks through the different ways you can collaborate with your users (and co-workers) especially when wikis are enabling the collaboration. I’ll be talking about Book Sprints and FLOSS Manuals and tell stories from my experiences. I was inspired by the examples of amazing group accomplishments described in Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Groups can take action even quicker than ever before in history thanks to tools that amplify group communications such as wikis, blogs, and instant messaging. There are three distinct levels of collaboration that a group can attain and what they accomplish directly correlates to the level of collaboration.
People I talked with definitely wanted to know best practices for wiki authoring techniques. One person even wanted to know how to incorporate user-generated content into their help system. I’ve heard that request before – such as, how could you import wiki content into Robohelp? Also, what I learned at last weeks’ talk was a high number of people wanting recommendations for wiki engines. There are over 90 to choose from on wikimatrix.org. Eep. Writers also wanted to how to organize content on a wiki. I won’t promise to have all the answers or any of the answers but I am looking forward to sharing my stories and hearing yours.
Gather ’round, Wikify your Doc Set slides now available
I had a great time talking to the New York Metro STC chapter from my office in Austin, Texas last night! There were twenty-some in the room, plus an additional twenty or so online. This was a great turnout for a chapter meeting with a virtual component.
I found I needed the chat backchannel to get me through the blindness and silence on the phone – the audience was so polite and didn’t interrupt but I found myself constantly checking for feedback and realizing the only feedback I could get was from the WebEx chat window flashing orange and white every once in a while. And the discussion beforehand about Twitter (editing tweets and tweeting edits) was light and entertaining and certainly kept my nerves calmed by letting me snicker with my hand over the phone mic.
I’ve made my slides available on Slideshare and I hope you’ll comment there and ask any additional questions you may have. I was energized afterwards! I really appreciated the opportunity to talk about wikis and wiki-like documentation.
Social media and web content writings
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
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
Podcast production at talk.bmc.com
It went all too quickly, but for the past few months I’ve been working with Tom Parish on podcast production at talk.bmc.com. I’ve since decided I can’t juggle quite that many balls in the air, but I’m pleased with how these podcasts turned out. I learned a lot about the behind-the-scenes work of recruiting interviewees, finding topics, and producing the shows. With an assertive goal of four shows a month, you have to be constantly looking for the next person to talk with, setting a schedule, and researching the topic well enough to come up with a set of 5-7 questions to fill a 15-30 minute recording.
Our goal with talk.bmc.com/podcasts is to produce educational shows about Information Technology, ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), which is a set of standards published to help you tighten up your IT department and align it with the whole company, and Business Service Management which is a revolution for how IT departments can run in order to tie technology into business goals.
William Hurley – Seeing Transparency through Open Source and Enterprise Software
Mary Nugent – Preparing your Business Services for the Future
Dennis Drogseth – Value Proof for CMDB Deployments
Tom Bishop and Dan Turchin – The Mobile IT Worker – They Walk, Talk, and Keep Businesses Running
Mainframe Trends in Enterprise IT for 2008 with John Albee and Mike Moser
Peter Armstrong on Guiding Principles to Changing Behavior and Speeding the Adoption of BSM and ITIL
Doug Mueller – Taking the Service Desk to the Next Level
The links above go to the show notes for each show, which is basically a blog entry to entice people to listen to the show. My favorite is probably William Hurley with Mary Nugent a close second. And the Mobile IT Worker has some fun stories in it.
The neat thing about podcasting is that it lets people tell their stories. Stories are very difficult to convey any other way, although the Google Chrome comic does tell individuals stories in a unique way.
I’ve been on the interviewee side of podcasts a few times, and I’m planning another one this week with Scott Nesbitt and Aaron Davis of DMN Communications. But it was neat to be an assistant to podcast production even if only for a few months.
Reasons for moving towards a conversation, towards collaboration, towards the community
What if your user’s guide had to read like an Instant Messaging, or IM conversation – quick, real-time questions, fast answers, and tailored to nearly every potential customer situation? Harry Miller from Microsoft pondered this very question in a podcast in the mid-2000s.
Sometimes users expect precise answers from their user guide. When you work with a product, you want to be able to impress people with your knowledge and efficiency. Or, you have a particular aversion to truly learning a product that you have to use to do your job, but you only use the product once every other month to do a specific (perhaps boring) task. Your manual does not talk back to your users in either situation just yet. But the person who reads the entire manual cover to cover will have conversations in turn with the people to look to him as the expert in the office.
Even if your documentation system can’t “talk back” to your users, your documentation can help customers talk to each other and make the connections that help them do their jobs well, play at home with more fun, or learn something new in a classroom setting. I have ideas for how you can think about documentation and user assistance in a conversational way, perhaps with the help of some social media technology applications.
Now, there are plenty of good reasons for technical writers to avoid actual conversation with customers. We are not necessarily trained in diffusing an angry customer or in troubleshooting the product at the technical level that is necessary. But we are good at learning quickly and applying technology to solve problems. These are not skills left only to the young talkative type, the technically savvy geek, or the extreme extrovert.
You might think that the term social media or a buzzword comes up is that the technology is meant for young people only, or that you have to have a lot of spare time to appreciate things like social bookmarking or Second Life. But the reality is that communicators are already skilled with many of these technologies. We just have to be able to apply them to individual situations and build a business case if necessary.
Creating social media versus social networking
An interesting comparison and contrast with two recently added time-sink temptations while online.
As of a few weeks ago, you can submit news stories to the new WriterRiver.com, a digg clone site with the clever Sink or Float capability on news stories, built by Tom Johnson who writes the IdRatherBeWriting blog. A few months ago, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler blogger, started TheContentWrangler.Ning.com, where you can build a profile for yourself and interact with other members via discussions and postings.
So, all technical writers, technical communicators, information designers and architects and other such content wranglers: which online activities do we prefer? Are we networking online or creating online media?
In the last six months or so, have seen shift in thinking towards social networking as a preferential term rather than the phrase social media. I think that this change in the terminology is a result of the constant comparisons of old media versus new media, such as comparing printed newspapers to online blogs. But, for a set of future thinkers, blogs and blogging feel like old news, especially to the leading web design people. So perhaps this crowd is the one preferring the term social networking. I know I heard social networking much more often than social media at SXSW Interactive 2008.
It’s interesting, though, in contrast, Danah Boyd points out in a November 2007 O’Reilly Network interview, “I don’t call them social networking sites because most users aren’t “networking” per say [sic]. They are modeling and maintaining their pre-existing social networks.”
So this rambling brings me to our two new social sites. In the case of TheContentWrangler.Ning.com, people who are perhaps not natural networkers won’t “get” the site right away.
For WriterRiver.com, I’m not sure if non-natural networkers will “get” the site right away either, but there’s also a little bit of journalist enthusiasm and “scooping” a story that will help you “get” the usefulness and entertainment out of the site.
For anyone who has read The Tipping Point, I ask this (and I’ve mentioned this to Gordon McLean so I hope he gives his take as well): are people who tend to be technical writers naturally Connectors or naturally Mavens?
Connectors are the people who “link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together.”
Mavens are “information specialists”, or “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.”
With all this in mind, I offer my personal take on how I can use each site.
How I use WriterRiver.com: If I like a story, and think it’s relevant to writers, I copy the URL, then go to WriterRiver.com and enter the URL along with a brief description of the story. Others can come read the story and my summary and “float” it further up the river. I check in on it every few days to gain new insights or see the freshest stories. I also see how far up river my submissions have gone, and check on any comments, especially from writers I know through online communications and in real life.
How I use TheContentWrangler.Ning site: I built a Profile page with my blog feed as content, then I started or joined groups that I think would give me connections to mind power that I wouldn’t already have through some of my other connections. I set notifications only to email me on specific discussions that I started or want to watch, and I pop by every week or so to see what’s going on with discussions, the blog entries on the front page, and other media.
Please, let me know if you find this helpful, or if you have suggestions for your own uses that are different from mine.
Anne Gentle is the author of 
