Improving the effectiveness of information

Action requested: Please review

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 08:34:00 +0000

In case you missed it: I am writing a new article on Robotics. My writing process consists of the following steps:

Set the goal, audience and context
Prepare structure, overall storyline and title
Write the first draft
Review
Publish

After writing the draft (took me 30 minutes as I knew the storyline and title), I have now arrived in the phase in which I want my article to be reviewed. So here is the deal: I provide you with my draft article below and you will use the comments fields to provide me with feedback, encouragements, corrections and suggestions. Let’s go!

Title: Why Every Great Leader Should Love Robotics (draft)

I hate repetitive work. When I was a teenager, my two brothers and I had to do the dishes. On two out of every three days, I spent almost 30 minutes on something I hated instead of doing something more meaningful like reading a book, watching television or doing my homework. So how did I feel when my parents decided to buy a dishwasher? Was I afraid they would send me away now that they no longer needed me to do the dishes? No, of course not. I valued their decision to ease my life and spend my time wisely on something more valuable.

In his remarkable TED Talk, “Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe”, Simon Sinek states that being a great leader is like being a parent. Like good parents, great leaders are dedicated to providing their people with the opportunity to build self-confidence, education and discipline when necessary all so that they can achieve more. A great leader is also someone who makes their people feel secure and draws them into a circle of trust. So how does robotics fit into this picture? Isn’t it invented to replace people rather than offering them opportunities?

With Simon Sinek’s definition of a great leader in minder, there are three reasons why every great leader should love robotics:

Robotics motivates people and makes them achieve more
Robotics leads to a better customer experience
As a result of the above, robotics will lead to more business and higher revenues.

Motivating people

Robotics allow leaders to drastically reduce the amount of repetitive work in their organization and make room for more meaningful work. I have met specialized HR Consultants that spent a significant amount of their time on employee boarding and filing employee data in case of a change. Automating the employee boarding and archiving processes relieved them of this repetitive work and allowed to focus more on talent development in their organization. And what about compliance consultants that spent most of their time detecting new rules and regulations instead of creating the controls to follow-up on them.

Reducing repetitive work and allowing people to focus on meaningful work, will lead to higher motivated people and better productivity.

Better customer experiences

Robotics allow leaders to offer error-free services to their customer, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. When implemented properly, robotics will also lead to shorter response and delivery times. By utilizing the full potential of intelligent automation, enterprises can handle every single request as a separate case, considering the unique context and expectations of that customer. Take for example the Customer Services process at telecom companies. The number one reason for customers to call Customer Services is when they have received a higher bill than usual. Even with the customer service explaining in detail where the costs are originated, the overall customer experience is poor. By pro-actively signaling their customers of higher costs and offering them a chatbot that guides them through the various components of their bill and advices them on potential actions, these companies now manage to not only reduce the amount of calls on this topic but also boost customer experience. In addition, the automated advices from the chatbot – that originate from an underlying rules repository – can lead to additional sales, leading customers to products or services that can help them in avoiding high incidental costs.

Better business

Great leaders create trust and safety according to Simon Sinek. This means they are taking on a huge responsibility, especially if the competition is focusing on cost-savings and competing on price. How can you – as a great leader – stay relevant to your customers while still offering your people a secure and motivating place to work? The answer is: by cutting down the costs of highly repetitive work and investing these hours in new business concepts, a better customer experience thus drawing customers into their circle of trust.

Robotics offers a great business accelerator, providing highly predictable process results and allowing enterprises to focus on their real differentiators. By choosing a People First approach on Robotics, great leaders enable and inspire their people to instantly make the most out of business opportunities and utilize technology to offer a highly personalized, context-driven experience to customers.

Wonder what your journey towards intelligent automation will look like? Or what the impact of it could be on your organization? Start your journey now and get in touch.

(end of the draft article)

So: did you like it?

Well the whole goal of a review is to improve the document based on comments. I am open to all suggestions, either in the comment field (preferred) or by sending me an email with your feedback to kees.van.mansom@accenture.com.

Laying the foundation for an effective article

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 03 Nov 2017 12:38:00 +0000

In this series of articles you can follow my process in writing a new article on Robotics. In the first episode I explained my approach towards writing, the second article focussed on setting the goal, choosing an audience and finding the right approach. Now that we have a clear vision on goal, audience and approach, it is time to start setting up the structure.

Writing requires a structured approach

Writing is all about structuring your thoughts. And although this is a process that most of us do in a more implicit way, it sometimes helps - and is actually best practice - to write down your structure on a very high level.

The goal of my article is to change the opinion of the reader towards accepting Robotics as a something that brings value to a business and motivates employees, rather than being limited to reducing FTE. So the structure of my article should be build up around the motives used to build up this case. As I want my article to be short and sharp, I don't need a long list of motives. Three is a nice number, so I decided to build up my structure around three motives:

Robotics can be used to motivate people
Robotics can be used to create better customer experience
Robotics can lead to new and better business.

Include an introduction and you will get the following blue print:

Introduction
- Example
- Why is this relevant
- How does it work?
- Motivation
Motivating people
- Reduce amount of repetetive work
- Example
- Result
Better customer experience
- Offer error-free services, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week
- Shorter response and delivery times
- Example
- Result
Better business
- Staying relevant
- Robotics as business accelarator
- Conclusion
Call to action

Writing style

The theme 'Robotics' has already been adopted by leaders that aim for cost reduction. With this new article, I want to reach out to the leaders that are not primary looking at cost reduction, but want to aim for something higher. Also I like to bring in a personal touch and address my audience in an informal way, making it easier for them to make the step to reach out to me. As I will be posting the article on my LinkedIn profile, the style should match the way I present myself to the outside world; being consistent with my branding. Personal sounding examples and a direct writing style will help me in reaching my goal and maintaining my brand.

Choosing the title

A good title is essential; it either triggers the reader to read your article or discourages them to do so. I like provocative titles; titles that raise the curiosity of my audience.

A title that would cover the content of the article would be: "Three new motives for Robotics". Too boring in my opinion. Then I thought about the link to Simon Sinek's defenition of Great Leaders. I want to use that in my article, so why not reflect that in the title: "Why Great Leader should look at Robotics".

Still not satisfied, I tried to make it sharper, a little bit less conventional and more appealing and ended up with: "Why Every Great Leader should Love Robotics".

Ready to go

Having defined my title, writing style and overall structure, I am ready to start writing. My next article will be the draft text. In the meantime, please don't hesitate to provide me with feedback on my approach.

First steps towards an effective article on Robotics

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 07:05:00 +0000

As mentioned in my previous article, writing is a structured, goal-driven activity. In order to get to an effective article, we need to make explicit choices:

What is the goal of the article, what do we want to achieve?
What is the target audience of the article?
What is the context of our article?

These choices help us in making the first sketch of our article. They will also influence our writing style, the level of detail and use of technical terminology.

Setting the goal

Those of you that have followed my articles on Personal Branding know that I consider any form of professional communication as a goal-driven activity. An effective article supports in my opinion the author's branding and aims for one or more specific goals. These goals can be divided into three categories:

Convincing the reader to perform an action. This can for instance be contacting you, ordering a product, signing up for a newsletter or visiting an event.
Changing the opinion of the reader on a topic or on you.
Persuasing the reader to share the article in his or her own social network

For my new article on Robotics, I want to leave the paved roads and convince my readers there are more and better reasons to choose for Robotics then just FTE reduction. This is also perfectly alligned with the my employer's branding at the World Summit AI, where Accenture stated it focusses on the "use of AI to support society" and with my own goal, which is establishing myself as the expert in business process innovation.

Main reason for me to put an article on LinkedIn is to generate new opportunities. So for this new article, I have selected the following main goals:

Changing the opinion of the reader towards accepting Robotics as a something that brings value to a business and motivates employees, rather than being limited to reducing FTE.
Convincing the reader to reach out to me

In general I would of course also like readers to share my article, but these two goals are my main objectives.

Target audience

The target audience for my article is "Decision makers on the business-side of enterprises". This means that I need to adress business challenges they recognize and avoid too many techical details and jargon. Also I need to find a way to trigger their curiosity and make sure they recognize themself in the article.

Context

There has been some discussions on the impact of Robotics at clients. Some leaders find it hard to look into Robotics because they want to avoid having hard conversations with their team on FTE reductions. From a commercial point of view, it is also good to focus on the more motivating elements of Robotics, as it opens up new opportunities.

I have been looking at Simon Sinek's definition of 'Great leaders'. He describes a great leader as someone that is trusted by his or her people and cares for these people as if they are family. This might help me in positioning Robotics as the tool for great leaders. And who doesn't want to be a great and inspiring leader?

Next steps

Now that I have set the goal for my article, defined the audience and looked at the context, I can proceed to building up the structure of the article and then start writing. You can follow my progress in my next article.

This is just a Tribute

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 08:23:00 +0000

“I wrote the first thing that came out of my head. It just happened to be, the best article in the world.”
(Inspired by “The best song in the world” by Tenacious D.)

The best articles in the world are shaped in our mind; we dream them, we think them through but we actually never write them. In the past I wrote several articles on Intelligent Automation and Robotics. The first of these series came easy, later on creating a new contribution started to become more and more of a struggle. It’s been more than 6 months since my last article and about time to write a new one. But where to start? And how to finish?

In this blog series, I will guide you through my writing process, including my first drafts and potential revisions.

How to write an article

Writing is a structured, goal-driven activity. I have studied Linguistic Competence (The science of communication – in my case Writing) at University and I have learned the following activity plan:

Define your goal
Define your audience
Define the context
Create the overall structure
Write
Revise
Publish

So, let’s see how this works out with the new article I am about to write. In my next article in this series I will focus on the first 3 steps out of this activity list. The end result - after step 7 - should be an article on LinkedIn.

No Humans Allowed: The Top 5 Pitfalls In Robotic Process Automation

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 15:33:00 +0000

By using Robotic Process Automation (RPA), we are able to create a digital workforce. But how autonomous will this workforce be? And how can we manage such a workforce?

For our rapidly growing organization, we are currently looking for claim handlers. Your work will be to ensure that insurance claims are handled efficiently and that payment for valid claims is made to their policyholders. You need to decide on the extent and validity of a claim, checking for any potential fraudulent activity and further process the claim. You will work 24 hours a day for 7 days a week and you will cost us 75% less than the workforce you will be replacing.

RPA is shaping the workforce of the future

Well, this is a job offer no robot can refuse. Robotic process automation (RPA) is quickly shaping the workforce of the future. Gartner predicts that current RPA vendors will add more process or task-specific capabilities to their software, while in the meantime vendors in the process domain will add RPA-like functionality. This suggest that in a couple of years most of our human administrative workforce would be replaced by robots.
The question is however: Are robots suitable for every job? Can we simply replace every human worker by a robot or will the future offer us a workforce that exists of humans and robots working together?

Read the full article on Accenture Insights

A robot took over my work… and I feel fine – Episode 2

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 09:57:00 +0000

In my previous article I stated that I think that every single individual on this planet will be impacted by robotics. Of course for some individuals the impact will be larger than for others. I would personally welcome the help of a robot that could take over part of the administration that comes with my job.

The robot in me

Photo by: Matt Cooper
(https://www.flickr.com/photos/matt_briston/)

One of the things I do as NL Lead Automation for Accenture, is performing assessments at clients to figure out what processes could be automated. In most cases I simply sit next to a person that is performing a task, counting the activities and assessing the constraints in the process. In other cases, we receive videos or a report from an assessment tool.

Could I - in this role - be replaced by a robot?
I would say: yes.
Can I design the robotic solution that replaces me?
Yes, again.
Would my clients benefit from a fully automated process?
I doubt so.

The human in me

Technically there is nothing wrong with replacing repetitive manual work by a robotic process. But imagine what would happen in your office if you have a robotic system running in the background that assesses your actions and then decides that you can be replaced by an automated system? One day you would simply find your computer locked with a simple message that the system has decided your work can be performed by a robotic system.

A robotic system will not look at the talents of an employee or spot opportunities that are outside of the predefined set of rules. A large part of my job involves talking to people, both at the client side and on the technology side. This is the part that in my opinion cannot be replaced by a robot. Also the cognitive decisions I make in my work, have a huge impact on whatever solution we are offering to a client.

A hybrid solution

What would work in my opinion, is a hybrid solution in which one or more robotic processes support me in my work and provide me with advice and the information I need to create impact. And as I am pretty sure that this is where we are moving to, I stand with the title of my article: "A robot took over my work… and I feel fine." By taking the robot out of me, I would be able to focus more on the things that require my (human) expertise.

Let's explore in the next article with what kind of technology we can support these kind of hybrid solutions and enable humans and robots to work effectively together.

Relevant articles

Accenture Insights: An Innovator’s Guide to Contextual Intelligence and Robotics.
See more at: https://www.accenture-insights.nl/article/contextual-intelligence-personalized-robotics

A robot took over my work… and I feel fine – Episode 1

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 14:00:00 +0000

The title of this article sounds like the title of a rock song. It contains a contrast that represents the feeling a lot of people have when it comes to robotic process automation: Fear and acquiescence.

Is Robotic Process Automation the new job killer? Or does is provide us with new opportunities and perhaps new jobs?

There has been a lot of writing recently on how the rise of the robots will eliminate millions of jobs. According to World Economic Forum research, about 7 million jobs will be lost and 2 million gained as a result of technological change. Administrative and office jobs will account for two-thirds of the losses, with “routine white-collar office functions at risk of being decimated.”

Impact on IT and BPO business
Now let’s take a look at the business I am working in: IT and BPO. Analyst firm Horses for Sources has estimated the total impact of automation on IT/BPO Services Workers.

Source: http://www.horsesforsources.com/indias-services-industry-set-to-lose-640000-low-skilled-jobs-to-automation-by#sthash.AVrPulvs.dpuf

They predict that there will be a worldwide decline of 14% in the IT and BPO Workforce. In India the decline is expected to be 14%, in the US 12%. Interesting detail is that the impact on the workforce in the Philippines is expected to be positive: resulting in an increase of 8%. For the rest of the world a decrease is expected of approximately 5% (UK 4%).

Understanding the impact of robotics
To understand the impact of robotics on our daily work and on our clients, we need to be able to:

Assess our own work and point out which parts would be a candidate for robotics;
Understand where the opportunities are for utilizing our unique skills, as humans and as individuals.

Do I think that robots will take over all our work?
Hell no, there is going to remain a need for the human touch.

Do I think robotics will impact the work of every single individual on this planet?
Yes, I do.

How would I feel about a robotic system taking over (part of) my job?
Let's discuss that in the next episode.

Relevant articles

Automation Impact: India’s services industry workforce to shrink 480,000 by 2021 – a decline of 14%
See more at: http://www.horsesforsources.com/indias-services-industry-set-to-lose-640000-low-skilled-jobs-to-automation-by#sthash.AVrPulvs.dpuf
Rise of the Robots Will Eliminate More Than 5 Million Jobs
See more at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-18/rise-of-the-robots-will-eliminate-more-than-5-million-jobs

Robotic process automation: Do robots dream of a personalized world?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 06:25:00 +0000

To cope with the rising customer expectations of the current ‘click and buy’ generation, organizations need to offer their customers a highly personalized, context-driven experience. The required processing speed and complexity - combining data from various sources and devices - cannot be delivered by a human workforce alone anymore. Could Robotic Process Automation (RPA) bring organizations the level of contextual intelligence that is required to make the first step towards intelligent automation and fully customer centered products and services? Let’s explore.

Beat the typist: Robotic versus Intelligent Process Automation

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 08 Jul 2016 11:00:00 +0000

Rotating wheels are destiny, in flame the city lies. Machines call out for followers far out into the night. The calls of the machines drowning in the steam.

(P-Machinery - Propaganda)

The vision that the band Propaganda created in the 80's, with humans operated as puppets, comes close to the fear a lot of people still have when we are talking about robotics and the automation of processes. Despite this fear, robots and robotics are hot and the technology is advancing so fast that it is hard to keep track. With this blog I will give a brief introduction to two trends that I consider as leading in current process automation:
1. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
2. Intelligent Process Automation (IPA)

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

According to the Institute for Robotic Process Automation (IRPA) "Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the application of technology that allows employees in a company to configure computer software or a “robot” to capture and interpret existing applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses and communicating with other digital systems."
It is a collective term for tools and technologies that operate existing systems within an enterprise, almost like a human operator. The technology is booming and companies like BluePrism and Automation Anywhere are working together with system integrators like Accenture to deliver RPA solutions in different industries.
The advantages of this technology are very clear: it mimics the steps of an existing high-volume, highly transactional process without compromising the existing IT architecture. For comparatively low costs and in a short time period, organizations are able to get a tremendous reduction of operation costs while increasing accuracy.

Intelligent Process Automation (IPA)

Where RPA mimics a process on existing applications and systems, Intelligent Process Automation often (partially) replaces existing applications and systems and leads to processes that are designed to be performed automatically. Most of the software providers in this area have a background in the more traditional Business Process Management and/or Case Management, others are introducing new approaches that are less process-driven and more based on constraints (decisions, classifications and calculations). A good example is the Be Informed platform, which is used by immigration services in the Netherlands and the UK to automate parts of the intake process. Instead of mimicking process steps and operating existing applications, an Intelligent Process Automation system is integrated with the legacy systems and offers a process that is running independently on top of it.
Compared to RPA solutions, an IPA solution has far more impact on existing applications and systems and often comes with a higher price tag. The advantages of IPA are however that all processes are designed for automation from the start and are capable of changes in context because there are no predefined routs. Also, due to the fact that IPA systems do not depend on the performance of existing systems (SAP, Oracle, Siebel) they are capable of handling much larger volumes at the same time.

No verdict

RPA and IPA both have proven their value in the field and have offered us great opportunities to really help our clients reduce costs and improve accuracy. Both are often referred to as robotics, but it is important to understand that the technology behind them is completely different. Depending on the situation organizations can choose one over the other.

In my next blogs I will dive deeper into the world of robotics and intelligent process automation, linking it also to my ideas around contextual intelligence. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you have a question or comment related to this topic.

An Innovator’s Guide to Contextual Intelligence and Robotics

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 13:59:00 +0000

I have an annual travel insurance. It is not that I travel a lot, but it gives me the flexibility to come and go whenever I want. It saves me the trouble of ordering a new travel insurance for every vacation and it guarantees me that I am always insured. You could say that it provides me with the suggestion of freedom to travel.

But isn’t it strange that I need to take an annual insurance, just to avoid the hassle of ordering a new insurance every time I want to travel? And what about my coverage? Should I choose worldwide coverage just in case I want to travel outside of Europe? And why do I have to pay for the days that I am not traveling?

I demand a personalized product that automatically adjusts itself too.
And I only want to pay for what I use

We are the ‘click and buy’ generation and these days, everything is getting personalized. In a series of articles on contextual intelligence and robotics, I want to give you insight in the state of the technology and it's application. To start off: what exactly is contextual intelligence?

Read the first article of this series on Accenture Insights

Personal Branding: lessons learned from product marketing (PART 5)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 06:34:00 +0000

In the previous episodes of this blog series we have looked at the lessons I have learned on Product Branding during my days as a product marketer:

In this final episode of this series (for now), we are going to look at lesson 5: Keep your brand intact. This is based on the lessons I have learned on what works and what doesn’t work when your brand value is impacted by external factors like bad publicity.

Lesson 5: Keep your brand intact

Imagine yourself being the product marketer of company that delivers business software. You have established a strong brand for your company and its products and you are planning to continue working on this brand. But then something happens that immediately impacts the value of your brand: one of your clients has published a rather negative article about your product. The article gets a lot of attention both in printed press as on the social media. A very common reaction to bad publicity is to go into defense and deny everything. It is in our nature to react in such a way to accusations, but is it the best thing to do? By denying your clients accusations, you in fact accuse your client of being either a liar or bad informed. The signal that you in such a case send out is that your company not listens to its customers. And that will impact your brand even more. A better approach – though often hard especially if you feel the criticism is unfair – is to publically apologize for the inconvenience of your client and let the public know that you understand the complaints by repeating them one by one. Ignore the urge to immediately offer a solution but instead ask your client – and through this client the public – how they would like to see the problem solved. In this way you will start a public conversation which – if handled well – can in the end increase the value of your brand and make the brand even stronger than it was before the incident.

From product branding to personal branding

Although bad publicity seems to be something that is more related to product branding than to personal branding, the problem can be very similar although often on a smaller scale. Ask yourself: how do you react when a client provides you with negative feedback? Or how do you respond to negative responses on your social media? And what happens if you choose to deny – or ignore – these messages? Right, you can end up in a downward spiral. So if someone – either directly or through social media – provides you with negative feedback or criticizes your behavior, it is in general best to follow this approach:

Carefully listen to what the other has to say (if it is in a face to face conversation)
Confirm to the other that you understand the problem
Repeat all aspects mentioned by the other, if possible as literal as possible
Ask the other how you can solve the problem
Keep the conversation going until the problem is solved and the other has confirmed to be happy with the resolution you have provided.

I can assure you this will not only keep your personal brand impact, it will even make it stronger.

All (good) things come to an end

In this series on personal branding, I have shared my personal experiences and lessons learned from my days as a product marketer. With this lesson we have come to the end of this series. I have enjoyed documenting my experiences and providing you some insight in my thoughts on this subject. But this series wouldn’t be complete if I wouldn’t ask for your feedback on my ideas and lessons learned. Please share your thoughts, questions and remarks and keep this conversation going.

Personal Branding: lessons learned from product marketing (PART 4)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 04 May 2016 06:55:00 +0000

In the previous entries in this series, we have talked about setting a goal, the balance between facts and future and about expressing your motives. In this post we will look into the aspect of timing.

Lesson 4: Don’t wait for tomorrow

When you work as a product marketer for an innovative product manufacturer, one of the worst things that can happen is that one of your competitors positions its product exactly in the spot where you wanted your product to be. When it comes to branding you don’t want to brand your product as an alternative for your competitor’s product, which means you have to think of a whole new messaging structure. You want to be the original.

In my work as a product marketer for a software supplier, I have always managed to avoid such a situation. Two aspects were important in this approach: our efforts were strongly goal-driven and we moved fast. Important in this approach was to keep an eye on both our competitors and our clients. On the competitor side it was important to see what they were doing, so we could anticipate on their efforts. On the client side it was important to stay close to their perception of the product, emphasizing the aspects they value and counter-effecting the aspects that left room for improvement.

In personal branding a similar approach is valuable. In personal branding you create a brand for yourself that is unique and appealing to others; your audience or target group. Creating an unique offering for yourself makes it easier to set yourself apart from others and establish a strong personal brand. Timing is in this case important as is keeping an eye on what is happening in your environment . Look at trends and immediately react if you see something that is relevant to you.

When I look at my own personal branding, establishing myself as a thought leader in contextual intelligence requires me to respond immediately to developments that are related to this domain. Apart from that it is important for me to keep spreading the word that implementing contextual intelligence will be the next step for 21th century enterprises. And although this requires careful planning (which I actually do) it is important to keep this continuous stream going, respond to questions and comments and link new innovations to this topic.

To be continued
In the next – and final – episode of this blog series on Personal Branding, we will look at how you can keep your brand intact over time.

Personal Branding: lessons learned from product marketing (PART 3)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 15:03:00 +0000

In the previous entries in this series on personal branding, we have looked at the similarities between product branding and personal branding, learned the benefits of a goal-driven approach and defined the optimal balance between using facts and future developments in our personal brand.

Lesson 3: Be clear about your motives

As a product marketer I have worked for a company that used strong statements to set itself and its product apart from other software companies and its solutions. These included statements that could be seen as ambitious or even arrogant. The goal was obviously to show the world how innovative and ground-breaking our product was, but why would we take the risk to go as far as calling ourselves – our product – a revolution in IT? Think of lesson 2: the further you get away from the facts, the harder it is to live up to the expectations.

On top of all this, people were wondering what the company’s motives were for this distinct type of branding. So they didn’t understand the motive, guessing that it was no more than a sales trick to make the competition look outdated. The truth was however that we all – not only the C-level – believed that what we were doing was revolutionary. Our product brand was based on pride and confidence.

It was the combination of being able to live up to the expectations and making the real motives for the product branding clear that in the end prevented negative publicity and loss of brand value.

Motives in personal branding

As with product branding, in personal branding most of us focus on building up a strong brand based on our capabilities and knowledge. But what about our motives? Wouldn’t it be good if people knew why we do things in the way we are doing them?

If you read through the previous entries in this blog series, you can see that I am very clear about my goal: I want to be seen as a thought leader in contextual intelligence.

Why?

Because everything I do comes from the believe that technology should be used to offer organizations the opportunity to instantly make the most out of business opportunities and take well-informed decisions.

How?

This level of contextual intelligence requires more than just a technological solution: it requires a change in the way we look at processes and technology.

What?

My purpose is to guide organizations and its individual key players through these changes and make the most out of current technology innovations.

The thing is, if you are clear about your motives and make it part of your branding, it will make your brand stronger. Also people will be more forgiving if there are some minor gaps between facts and branding, as they understand what you are aiming at.

Please feel free to share your own experiences and ideas in the comments. This might be a good place to start explaining your motives as part of your personal branding.

Next time we will look into timing and speed in Lesson 4: Don’t wait for tomorrow.

Personal Branding: lessons learned from product marketing (PART 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 08:01:00 +0000

In my first blog in this series, I explained the similarities between product branding and personal branding and how I learned that branding can help you promote your product and reach your goals.
The first lesson was about using a goal-driven approach to branding. Lesson number 2 is about finding the right path between facts and suggestions when establishing your brand.

Lesson 2: Stay close to the facts

For a product marketer it is not very uncommon to introduce a product as the solution to everything. But once consumer reviews come back, a brand can easily be damaged if the product doesn’t meet with the expectations.
The same is true for personal branding. If I promote myself as being an expert on java development and during my first project people find out that I have no clue what I am talking about, the value of my personal brand will drop immediately.

On the other hand, branding is all about creating an image. An image that can be closer or further away from the cold facts. For product branding it could be based on how you want your product to be, hoping that product development will pick up your change requests and save you from negative customer responses. In personal branding you have it all in your hand. If you brand yourself as an expert in a certain domain, you have in fact committed yourself to a standard and you need to prove to yourself as well as to your colleagues and clients that you can live up to their expectations. Of course branding is all about creating a favorable view, but both in product as in personal branding it is not wise to get to far ahead of the actual facts.

As an example I will look at my own personal branding. As mentioned in my previous blog post, my goal is to establish myself as a thought leader in Contextual Intelligence. The first question then is: how should I brand this product – my self – to reach this goal? Or one step further back: what are people looking for when they are looking for a thought leader?
My idea is that I am successful as a thought leader – and reaching my goal – once I have established this Pavlov effect: IF Contextual Intelligence THEN Kees van Mansom.

My Personal Brand

So how can I do that: What aspects should be in my brand? This is what I came up with, I am pretty sure it is not complete but it gives an idea:

Innovative: Comes up with ideas that you wouldn’t have thought of yourself
Knowledgeable: Knows his domain and can quickly translate generic solution scenarios to specific, client-related solutions
Professional: Can be trusted with confidential information
Pro-active: Self initiating actions
Social: Is easy to communicate with, asks questions, challenges ideas
Helpful: Will never say No when help is needed
Fast: Will answer your question before you knew you had a question.

Now that you know which aspects I find important in my brand, it is easy to analyze my actions and look how they fit within this profile. I am looking forward to reading your feedback in the comments.

Next time: Lesson 3 – Be clear about your motives

Personal Branding: lessons learned from product marketing (PART 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 11:58:00 +0000

Personal Branding is a hot item these days and there are already various blogs and articles written on this topic. But where does is come from, how should we use it and why is it so important?

To answer these questions I want to go back to one of my former roles, being the product marketer at a software company. It is there that I have learned how branding can help you promote your product and reach your goals. Although product branding and personal branding seem to be two completely different things, there are a lot of similarities in my opinion.

My lessons learned:

Define your goal
Stay close to the facts
Be clear about your motives
Don’t wait until tomorrow
Keep your brand intact

Lesson 1: Define your goal

All marketing activities – branding included – are goal-driven activities. For a product supplier branding is a tool out of the marketing toolbox, not a goal. The goal is to sell the product, or more specific: reach new audiences to sell the product to.

With personal branding we – as programmers, testers, consultants, writers, architects, project managers, plumbers etc. – are the product. So the product at personal branding is “me”. Similar to product branding, our goal is not just to establish our brand but to take things one step further and “sell” ourselves (our capabilities and ideas) to customers. In order to do so we have to establish our brand and make it known within our network and beyond. The ultimate goal is to help us in getting or keeping interesting work and make progress in our career.

For me, personally, my goal is to establish myself as a thought leader in Contextual Intelligence.

To be continued

Rather than sending out all lessons learned in one long article, I have divided them over a number of blog posts. In my next blog post I will focus on the second lesson learned: Stay close to the facts.

Smarter solutions for a better coffee making experience (Part 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 09:51:00 +0000

Let’s continue our exploration of the contextual intelligence domain and see how simple things in our everyday life could potentially be affected by this development. Our goal in this blog series is to design a context-sensitive, smart Nespresso Machine that can provide us with exactly the right cup of coffee at the right time and that can support us in performing simple maintenance activities.
In my previous post we looked at the variables of preparing a cup of coffee with a Nespresso Machine:

Brewing ratio: ristretto, espresso or lungo
Additions: sugar / sweets, coffee milk / coffee milk powder, steamed / frothed milk
Flavor
Intensity

Other important aspects like temperature and pressure were left out of the list, because they cannot be influenced with a setting on the machine.

Relevant Context Variables

So, what are the relevant context variables that influence our choice of coffee. In my opinion all of these variables can influence our choice:

Taste
Flavor / smell
Intensity
After-taste
Caffeine
Day of the week
Time of day
Location

Taste

In order to determine the taste preferences of a user we could map specific coffee tastes to more generic tastes and ask the user one time – during registration – for its preferences:

Spicy
Cocoa
Roasted cocoa
Dark Chocolate
Bitter
Fruity
Caramel
Cereal
Malted cereal
Citrus
Winey
Sweet
Flowery
Mint
Hazelnut
Vanilla
Milk

Of course combinations of tastes are possible, creating an unique taste pattern for each user.

Flavor / smell

Like with taste, the flavor / smell preferences could be asked to the user during registration or initial set up:

Intense
Roasted cocoa
Roasted cereal
Woody
Flowery
Caramel
Citrus
Malted cereal
Mint
Hazelnut
Vanilla
Winey
Sweet
Neutral

As you can see, some of the flavors / smells overlap with the tastes. Of course this is not an exhaustive list, it is merely a first attempt to capture the flavor / smell characteristics of different types of coffee.

Intensity

The intensity could be classified into five options:

Very intense (viscous, dark black)
Intense (dark black)
Neutral (black)
Mild (dark brown)
Very mild (brown)

Caffeine

For the caffeine we can simply identify two choices:

With caffeine
Caffeine free

After-taste

Some people like to still taste the coffee minutes after they finish it, others want to avoid such an after-taste. For this example we can use a generic classification:

Strong after-taste
Mild after-taste
No after-taste

Day of the Week and Time of Day

Some people have one coffee recipe that fits their preferences every day of the week. For others the weekend is the time that they drink Latte Machiato’s, while on working days they stick to regular coffee with added milk and sugar. The same is true for the time of day. Perhaps someone likes to drink coffee with caffeine during the day and caffeine free coffee after 5 pm.
In order for our smart coffee machine to be able to predict the right cup of coffee, it has to learn the habits of its users, see patterns and predict what is valid based on the available information.

Location

Another context variable that could influence our choice for a cup of coffee is the location. Although a coffee machine typically has a fixed location, I can see the benefit of a smart coffee app on my smart phone that can operate coffee machines at home, in the office, at my clients office, perhaps even in my car.

Combining all of these context variables into one smart solution

It takes the experience and knowledge of a barista to mix all of these variables and define the best coffee experience for each user and context. Combine this with a self-learning system that lets users evaluate their coffee after drinking it and improve its advices based on that to create a system that can predict for every user within every context how its cup of coffee should be made.
In this blog series I used the example of a smart coffee solution to illustrate the possibilities of Contextual Intelligence. With this example in mind it is pretty easy to imagine how these principles can be used in the business domain to automate business processes based on context variables. To be continued….

Smarter solutions for a better coffee making experience (Part 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 10:07:00 +0000

In one of my posts, about a month ago - I complained about the fact that my new Nespresso coffee machine was not able to assist me in performing simple coffee making tasks. The manual - of which the author probably has heard of minimalism but never actually read Carroll's books - didn't help much. These are the primary tasks of the machine:

Preparing for first use
Adjusting the water level
Preparing coffee
Emptying the system
Resetting to factory defaults
Setting the energy saving mode
Descaling the machine
Cleaning the machine
Troubleshooting

As exciting as all these tasks may be, there is only one that is really influenced by the context: Preparing coffee. Let's zoom in on this task and see how we can optimize our coffee making experience.

The variables of a cup of coffee

Assuming we use the Nespresso machine to prepare a cup of coffee, we can identify the following variables:

Brewing ratio: ristretto, espresso or lungo
Additions: sugar / sweets, coffee milk / coffee milk powder, steamed / frothed milk
Flavor
Intensity

Other important aspects like temperature and pressure are left out of this list, because they can not be influenced with a setting of the machine. Or there must be some magic double tap button control that I have missed in the manual. As I am not a coffee connoisseur or Barista, it is possible that I have missed some aspects here, so please feel free to add them in the comments.

Predicting your next cup of coffee

So now that we know what the typical aspects are that define the character of our cup of coffee, we can focus on the next step: predicting the characteristics for each of these aspects based on the personal preferences and context of the coffee drinker. In my next blog I will dive deeper into this topic. Any suggestion which context variables I should take into account?

Note: This blog not intends to criticize Krups or Nestle products. I use these products (which I actually like) merely as an everyday example to illustrate how contextual intelligence can help enterprises create smarter devices that will lead to an even better brand experience.

Smart devices for cool people: We don’t need no documentation

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 06:50:00 +0000

I have bought a new coffee machine this weekend. Not that the old machine stopped working, I just didn’t like its coffee anymore. The old coffee machine was one of those Senseo machines, very cool 10 years ago, but not really living up to the expectations when it came to the quality of the coffee. Plus that you really needed to apologize up front to visitors for having such an example of ancient technology in your kitchen.

But then the new machine: it is cool, it is white, it is small and it makes excellent coffee. Even better: by buying it I became a member of an exclusive society of coffee enjoyers, amongst who George Clooney is probably the best known. So with high anticipation I unpacked the machine.

First came the exclusive black menu card holder, containing a menu card with an overview of all the special flavors that were now within my reach and an invitation to become a member of this exclusive coffee drinkers club. Next came the starters set with 16 exclusive coffee cups in 8 different flavors. Then the machine: white and shiny in all its exclusiveness. In a corner of the box I also found two simple booklets: one being the warranty booklet, the other one being the user manual.

George Clooney doesn’t read (manuals)

I know, normal people don’t read manuals unless they have a problem. But I am not a normal person, I always browse through a manual to find the hidden features and possible optimization steps for the equipment I have bought.

Considering the fact that my new coffee machine only has two buttons, I didn’t expect a lengthy explanation of its functionality, but a short task-based explanation on how to operate it would be handy. Instead I found a set of instructions that looked like a comic book full of short stories, not sure where one ended and the other one started. Every page showed me the name of the instructions that were on the page in more than 10 languages, making it very hard to find my way. In the end I gave up and got myself a cup of coffee using the button that looked like a regular coffee cup on top of the machine. The coffee tasted good, but I would have liked something to read while I was drinking it.

Simple tasks for exclusive club members

So let’s have a look at the functionality that this coffee machine has to offer. What does it do? Well, it makes coffee: either regular coffee (Lungo) or espresso. But there is more. There are a number of tasks that I need to master in order to make great coffee, keeping my machine in good shape and perhaps even saving electricity:

Preparing for first use
Adjusting the water level
Preparing coffee
Emptying the system
Resetting to factory defaults
Setting the energy saving mode
Descaling the machine
Cleaning the machine
Troubleshooting

Let’s have a first look at the instruction on how to prepare the machine for first use.

It would take me at least a full page to do a complete analysis of this instruction, starting with the ambiguous first picture all the way to the 8th picture where I can either hold a button – or both buttons – for 25 seconds or wait for 25 seconds. Not to mention the 7th picture that instructs me to press either one of the buttons or first start with pressing the right button and then the left button. By doing the latter the machine will immediately start spooling water, so that was obviously not what I was meant to do.

Cool people want smart apps

Of course Nespresso offers a cool app to their members, suitable for both iPhone/iPad and Android users.

Immediately after finishing my first cup of coffee, I registered on the member website and downloaded the app on both my iPhone and iPad. Trembling in anticipation of this whole new, exclusive world that would open up at my fingertips I browsed through the menu option, finding out that the app offers not much more than an electronic shop that makes it possible to order Nespresso cups everywhere at any time. Handy if you know that you need to refill your stock, but what if you ran out of stock without noticing it? A smart app would warn me and help me order my favorite cups in time. This app doesn’t. Neither does it help me preparing my machine for first use or adjusting the machine to my personal taste.

An even better brand experience

Bad documentation, complex routines with two buttons and an app that lacks functionality can only mean one thing: Nespresso expects its members to be smart. But I don’t want to be smart, I want to drink coffee and I want my devices to be smarter than me and supporting me in complex – and not so complex – tasks.

So in my next blog I will do some suggestions on how to improve the overall experience for George Clooney and countless anonymous Nespresso members by offering a smart – and exclusive – coffee making solution using technology that is already there. I think this offers an excellent show case for contextual intelligence in our everyday life.

Note:

This blog not intends to criticize Krups or Nestle products. I use these products (which I actually like) merely as an everyday example to illustrate how contextual intelligence can help enterprises create smarter devices that will lead to an even better brand experience.

An introduction to contextual intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 13:40:00 +0000

Contextual intelligence is the practical application of knowledge and information to real-world situations. This is an external, interactive process that involves both adapting to and modifying an environment to accomplish a desired goal; as well as recognizing when adaptation is not a viable option. This is the ability that is most closely associated with wisdom and practical knowledge. It is the best predictor of success in real-life performance situations.” Charlie Brown PhD (http://headinthegame.net)

It is inevitable that enterprises need to become more intelligent as they are facing increasing complexity, global competition, severe cost pressure, demanding stakeholders, constant change and uncertainty. An intelligent enterprise is social, high performing and future-resistant at the same time. To reach such a status, in my opinion enterprises need to be able to systematically adapt knowledge, input from smart devices and data.

The Internet of Things

Current developments in mobile devices make it possible to gather information on the entire context of individuals: their location, movement, health, tasks, changes, environment. On itself this is already a major step forward. But what if we could combine these data with context data from other devices - like surveillance cameras – and make use of Big Data and Linked Data? And what if we could automate decisions, make calculations and provide advices based on these data and embed these into processes?

Contextual Intelligence

Contextual intelligence offers organizations the opportunity to instantly make the most out of business opportunities and take well-informed decisions - whether automated or not - that take into account the specifics of each situation. These decisions lead to effective and result-oriented actions that are both based on a good, complete and unambiguous understanding of relevant signals, facts and circumstances as on correct interpretation. As a result organizations transform into intelligent enterprises that not only excel in the social domain, but that are high performing and future-proof as well because they evolve with developments and are able to deal with uncertainty.

To be continued

In my next blogs I will explore the various aspects of contextual intelligence:
- Technology
- Solutions
- Examples and cases

New iOS8: first steps in contextual intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 06:21:00 +0000

The new Healthkit app and the improved Siri in combination with HomeKit - introduced in the new Apple iOS 8 - are two perfect examples of how contextual intelligence enters our daily lifes. Although Healthkit seems to be focusing on monitoring, making it possible to share this data with your doctor, the next step could be that your phone advices you to go on a diet (or even tells you what to eat) or go to the hospital.

Siri in combination with HomeKit is also interesting. If you tell Siri (your phone) that you go to sleep, the HomeKit system is able to switch off heatings, dim the lights and lock your doors. What I would find interesting to see is what happens if you add more context data to this system, like data from a video surveillance system in front of your door, or location data provided by your phone. Combine these with dynamic rules and you could have doors that automatically unlock in front of you and lights that follow you through your house (when it is dark).
I have found these key features of iOS 8 on: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/11070732/iOS-8-key-features.html

Wrap it up and do it again!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 19:30:00 +0000

We’re at the final episode in this blog series about writing effective articles. In this series of blog posts I have explored the criteria for a successful article, providing you some best practices, lessons learned and examples from my own work.

The recipe for an effective article

So what is the recipe for an effective article? For those of you that just jump in, I would recommend going back to the first blog post. For those of you who have followed me all the way through, let’s summarize it:

Push the Publish button

Publishing your article in your personal blog is simply a matter of pushing one button in your browser. But what about publishing your article in a magazine? This would require a few more steps.

The first step is to select the magazine you are targeting on, this is typically something you do at the moment that you define the goal and set your audience. If you for instance want to reach managers, you are typically aiming on a magazine like the Journal of International Management. If you aim for technical communicators, you could choose for the Intercom, the international magazine for technical writers and information developers.

Use your network to get your article published. I have tried several times to get an article published by just sending it to the mail address of the editors, only to receive a response (if I would get a response at all) that they either had no room for another article in the next editions, or the article didn’t fit into the predefined themes. Using the same article through someone in my network resulted in an almost instant publication. Use LinkedIn to find out how you are connected to the editors of the targeted magazine or journal and ask your contact to recommend your article.

Practice makes perfect

After the successful publication of your article you can relax and enjoy the success. Take the time to evaluate the impact of your article on your target audience. Did you reach your goal?

If your article was successful, chances are that the editor of the magazine will gratefully accept a next article. So enjoy your success, but not for too long: your next article is waiting for you!

Writing effective articles 6: Don’t be hasty

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 11:41:00 +0000

As a writer I am always eager to get my articles published. Unfortunately – like with all processes – speeding up things often has a negative effect on the end quality of your product. Taking the time for a serious QA step, pays of in a more effective article.

There are two processes that you can use to improve the quality of your article:

Review process
Pre-test process

In an ideal situation you do them both.

Get reviewed

Although most of us are excellent writers, capable of delivering the message to an audience, it is always a good idea to set up a review process for your article before you post it on your blog or send it in to a magazine.

A review process in an ideal world consists of two activities:

A peer review by someone who knows the topic: technology, method or issue;
A grammar & style review by a trained editor.

For the peer review it is important to always provide the goal and audience definition to the reviewers, so they know what you are aiming at. When you receive feedback, don’t be overwhelmed by the number of comments and corrections. A fully marked-up document means that the reviewer took the time for a detailed analysis of your text. Try to be open-minded and accept a different view and possible suggestions for your article.

Pre-testing your article

In commercial product and interface design, pre-testing used to be a quite common step. Companies like IBM have specialized usability labs where they could monitor and record the behavior of users while using one of their new applications. Due to budget restrictions most of these labs are closed down by now, but that doesn’t mean that designers don’t pre-test their products or interfaces anymore.

For commercial writers – especially the ones that work for government – pre-testing brochures and leaflets is also a common step before publishing. By pre-testing your text within your targeted audience you can get an unique insight in how your reader will react to your article and what parts are not clear to the reader yet.

There are basically two methods that I would recommend using for pre-testing an article:

The Plus-and-Minus Method
The Think Aloud protocol

Combining both methods with 3 -5 test persons would give you a 360 degrees view on your text.

Plus-and-Minus Method

I first learned about the Plus-and-Minus Method (Van Woerkum, 1982) in the early 90’s, when I used it to pre-test brochures. This method is quite simple to use and in my opinion very effective:

First divide your text in building blocks. A building block is typically one paragraph, a list, an image or a table.
Number the building blocks, place the numbers to the left of the text
Print out your article, leaving enough space at the right side for people to write down a ‘+’ or a ‘- ‘.
Ask 3 – 5 persons from your target audience to read the text and while reading
Place a ‘+’ next to every block that they enjoyed reading, found useful or perhaps had a general good feeling about
Place a ‘-‘ next to every block that they didn’t enjoy reading, found boring, didn’t understand or for whatever other reason felt negative about
Interview each test person individually and ask for a motivation of every ‘+’ and every ‘- ‘.

You can optionally also ask some general questions about the article, to see if the person understood the article and/or enjoyed reading it.

Think-aloud protocol

The Think-aloud protocol (Lewis, 1982) is especially known for being used during usability testing, but it is also very useful for pre-testing articles. The method is easy to use although it may ask some getting used to by the test persons. All you need is a concept version of your text, 3 – 5 test persons and a sound recording device (for instance a smart phone or Dictaphone):

Ask your test persons to read your text aloud and ask them to express their thoughts while they are reading. You recording will contain a mixture of your text combined with the remarks from your test persons (“I don’t understand this”, “Oh, this is brilliant” , etc.)
After your test person has finished reading the text, ask some questions based on the feedback gathered during the reading.

In some cases I have also combined the think-aloud protocol with the Plus-and-Minus Method, asking test persons to mark up the text while they are reading and commenting on it aloud. The end result is a great insight in the strengths and weaknesses of your text, making it possible to adjust it to your audience.

Publish and promote

After this final check and optimization of your article it is time to publish your article and make it known to the world. In my next blog I will summarize the process of writing an effective article and share my thoughts on publishing and promoting your article.

Writing effective articles 5: Beyond the empty page

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 05 Aug 2014 07:04:00 +0000

Until now we have in this series of blogs about writing effective articles focused on the preparing steps before the actual writing. In this post we have finally reached the point where we have been waiting for: the actual writing of our article. So sharpen your pencils and your wits, put that empty sheet of paper on your desk and start writing.

Your sheet is already half filled

If you have followed the steps described in my previous posts, your sheets is actually already half full. You know your goal and audience and you have created that overall structure of your article, right? Then it is simply a matter of copying that overall structure into your empty page and you have the outline for your article, including the main topics and subparagraphs.

A strong article has a strong opening

Get your readers involved from the moment that they start reading: your introduction is the key to the overall success of your article. Make sure that the introduction offers a strong statement, issue or question, something that triggers the curiosity of your audience and makes them want to read on. It sometimes helps to be a but provocative in your introduction, but don’t overdo it. Take a good look at your audience definition and make sure that what you write will trigger the desired reaction from your audience.

Keep it short

Your article serves a goal; make sure that your readers make the transition you want them to make before they abandon reading your article. Short means:

Avoiding long complex sentences as much as possible
Writing brief paragraphs with a strong focus on the message and the goal you are pursuing
Adjusting your writing to the audience, only providing the information that is necessary for the specific target group with their specific education level

Support predictive reading

Use headers and sub headers to support predictive reading. Readers often scan an article to find the information that is relevant to them before deciding to read the full text or to get an idea of the structure of the text. By using well chosen, well-marked headers and sub headers you can highlight the structure of your text and make it easier for the reader to quickly find the information that they are looking for. In addition it is always a good strategy to put the most important information in the first line of a paragraph and repeat or summarize it in the last sentence.

No techtalk

Avoid jargon and technical or complex terminology that is unclear to your audience or make sure to introduce them to your audience first. Focus on the knowledge level of your target audience and try not to introduce too many new words and avoid abbreviations, because these are one of the main reasons for readers to put your article aside. If you introduce a new technical term, make sure that people understand the meaning before you proceed and introduce the next term. Using simple synonyms and in a subtle way repeating the explanation in the course of your article can help your reader understand and remember the meaning of a term.

Prepare for the final step

Well, the final step in the process of creating an effective article, is the publication of the article. But before we do so, it might be wise to check if our article will have the desired effect. Can we reach our goal with this article? In the next episode of this series, I will talk about the review process and introduce some ways of pretesting your article before sending it to the press. Although this is an optional step, this could mean the difference between an almost effective and an effective article.

Writing effective articles: 4. Sketch, define and then detail your story

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 08:03:00 +0000

In the previous episodes of this blog about writing effective articles, we have looked at two things:

Defining your goal
Defining your target audience

Now that we have a clear vision of our goal and know for who we are writing this article, the next step is to create a conceptual model of the article. It is like creating the blueprint for your new home: starting as a sketch and in a number of increments it gets more and more detailed until you have reached the point that you can start decorating the house.

Creating the overall plan for your article

During my study in Linguistic competence, I learned to represent the structure of my text in an hierarchy. While this may work for informative articles, this is in my opinion not the best approach for goal-driven articles. For a goal-driven article the overall structure should in my opinion look like a process: a serial structure of steps leading towards a conclusion. In this first rough sketch of your article, you start to define the road that you want your readers to follow from their starting point towards the end of the article, where you must have reached your goal.While doing this, keep the following things in mind:

Think your story through
Start with a teaser to attract your readers, then gradually work towards your conclusion
Keep in mind your goal!
Think of your story as a process, as linear as possible

Suppose you want to write an article in which your goal is to convince the audience to hire consultants from your company (Accenture in this case) to help them create more effective websites.

Your first sketch could than look like this:

This is a typical problem-solution structure, starting with the definition of the problem and then quickly leading the reader to the solution and the actions to take.

For this particular series of blogs, I have also created an overall structure. It looked like this:

So after a general introduction, I lead my readers to the (sort of) definition of an effective article and then dive into the method. As my end goal is that my target audience starts using the method, I will summarize my method and my final statements at the end of the article (or in this case: series of blogs).

Detail your building blocks

Often creating this high level first structure is enough to start the creative process that is needed to build up your text. Gather all the information you need for your article and start to place it under one of your building blocks. This is a fairly simple process that doesn’t need to take hours.

In this stage changing the order of your story is still simple, once you start writing it gets a lot more complicated. If you are working with a co-writer or reviewer, now is also the time to discuss your approach and overall structure. By doing so you can avoid time and frustration, changing the goal and/or structure of your article in a later stage is much more time consuming.

Write!

After we have detailed the overall structure to a level that we have a general feeling what our article will look like, it is time to move on to the next step: the actual writing. Read all about this step in my next blog post.

Writing Effective Articles: 3. Pick Your Audience

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 07:38:00 +0000

In the previous blog posts, we have talked about the criteria for effective articles and how important it is to set a goal before you start. Now suppose you have decided to write an article about new technology that enables organizations to perform better and make more profit. The goal of your article is to persuade the reader to come to one of the conferences where your company demonstrates this new technology. Would you be interested to hear what your neighbor – a software engineer – thinks of this article? Or the gardener? Or your kids?

The audience is part of the goal

Aim at a specific audience and define them

If you write an article that is supposed to generate new opportunities for your organizations, you are typically aiming at decision makers within a specific industry. So while your neighbor – the software developer – can find your article too shallow and lacking the technical details he is looking for, your targeted audience of decision makers could possible find it too technical and detailed. Of course you can try to write an article that would be attractive for all of them, but to be honest: what is the point? As I have stated before in the previous blog post, writing effective articles is a goal-driven activity. So choose a target audience that is aligned with your goals.

Defining your target audience

In my last blog post, I stated that writing an effective article means that you focus on one of more of the following goals:

Motivating the audience to do something;
Changing the way people think about a topic;
Making the audience share your thoughts with others.

When defining your audience, you can use these goals to create open questions which help you to define your target audience:

Who do I want to motivate to do something?
From which group of people do I want to change the way they think about a topic?
Who do I want to share my ideas to others, who could be my advocate or preacher?

Remember the example I have used in my last blog post? In 2013 I wrote an extensive article (and a series of blog posts) about improving product and brand engagement through smart documentation. My goal in that case was to persuade a pre-defined target group to register on the Be Informed website and start using the software to make smarter documentation. So the question I had to answer to define my target group was:

Who do I want to register on the website and use a free version of our software?

The answer to this question is: technical communicators working on documentation products in mid- to large size companies.

Are you in or are you out?

Now let’s have a look at the target audience for the article you are reading right now. What could possibly be my target audience? And more important: are you part of this target audience?

The goals of this article – as defined in my previous blog post – are:

Motivate my audience to start writing more effective articles
Convince my audience to follow a goal-driven approach in writing articles
Motivate my audience to share and discuss my thoughts on writing articles with others.

Looking at the goals, we can conclude a number of things about the target audience:

The target audience consists of people that want to write an article or have already written one of more articles
The target audience consists of people that are willing to try something new
The target audience includes people that are active on the social media and / or in writing related organizations

I would define this group as subject matter experts, thought leaders and experienced consultants. For a first overall description of the target audience this will do, next we will get into more detail and specify our target audience in a way that we can really anticipate on their knowledge, attitude, expectations and needs.

Through the eyes of the reader

To be able to adapt your message to your readers, you need to know them. The best thing to do so, is by performing an audience analysis. Normally this would involve doing a demographic research and a possible attitude analysis among your possible readers. In a goal-driven approach we still need to think of our audience, but we can limit ourselves to our targeted group and only analyze what is relevant for reaching our goal.

Start by defining your audience in terms of demographics, for instance:

Age
Gender
Profession
Culture and / or ethnicity
Religion
Education level

Of course you don’t have to specify everything, just focus on the relevant things: anything that helps you to identify your target audience. For this article I would say my target group is:

Age: 30 - 60
Gender: M/F
Profession: Consultant, thought leader, subject matter expert
Culture and/or ethnicity: all
Religion: all
Education level: High

The next thing we need to define is the attitude of the target audience towards the topic. In the case of this article, this would be:

Attitude towards writing: positive
Attitude towards a goal-driven approach at work: neutral to positive
Attitude towards goal-driven writing: not decided / neutral

And finally we have to think about the knowledge of the target audience about the topic. In this case I would say:

Knowledge about writing in general: Practitioner to expert
Knowledge about writing methods and techniques: Novice to expert

So to summarize:

My target audience consists of experienced consultants, thought leaders and subject matter experts, age 30 and older, with a high education level, a positive attitude towards writing and at least some knowledge of writing in general.

Know your audience, act accordingly

Now that you know your audience, the next step is to set your strategy and create a conceptual model of your article. During this step – and all following steps – you can use your goals and targeted audience as a reference, constantly verifying that you are still on the right track to reaching your goals.

My next blog post will be about the final step before the actual writing: Creating the conceptual model. In this step we will make the outline for our article. When the conceptual model – the blue print of your article – is ready, we can finally start writing. Next we will look into the reviewing process, followed by some advices about pretesting.