Subscribe to RSS
Posts Tagged ‘social’
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.
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations
I’ve listened to about the first 45 minutes of Clay Shirky’s talk on “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.” http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2008/02/shirky. Well worth the time spent – especially for my current employer’s product set, which enables organizations to manage their data used to communicate with and connect their members with each other through event planning - all the goals that associations and non-profits strive for every day.
My favorite example, since I’m fascinated with wikis for documentation, has to do with setting up a community of practice faster than ever known in history. On Flickr, a group dedicated to High Dynamic Range photography became a popular destination and learning and collaborating connection.
Before the web, it would have easily taken five to seven years to build up the community - starting from the time when a professional photographer figured out the technique, to the time when ordinary people having the knowledge to accomplish HDR. Using Flickr, it took three months to build a community of practice, because when a photo goes up, people talk with each other, ask how photos were done, and examine the photo examples to learn. In this case, the technology became a platform where people help one another get better.
This group has no commercial incentive whatsoever, as a side note.
The community is as important as the content, a humbling thought for us writers. Just like the Architecture of Participation that Tim O’Reilly talked about in 2004, the participation of community members to generate and test content is as key as the content itself. He even states, “the fundamental architecture of hyperlinking ensures that the value of the web is created by its users.” Google Page Rank further adds to the value by including inbound links in its ranking algorithm.
On The Content Wrangler site there’s a great post asking where does user participation fit in our world? There are plenty of answers, and my interest lies in the case studies that show the amazing power of what results when users actively participate. If you’re interested in user participation and social networking, check out Tom Johnson’s interview with Scott Abel about social networking.
