This guide includes tips for:

• Feasting—tips for creating a festive culinary environment
• Gifting—how to recognize and secure the “perfect gift”
• Greeting—how to spread good cheer

This guide is intended for people who celebrate one or more holidays during the month of December (Gregorian calendar) and hope for them to be happy. Such holidays can include, but are not limited to, Chanukah, Christmas, Boxing Day, Kwanza, and Festivus. This guide is also appropriate for persons intending to celebrate New Year’s Eve, but does not cover palliative measures more commonly associated with New Year’s Day.

This guide is not appropriate for curmudgeons, killjoys, or party-poopers.

Feasting

To create a festive atmosphere, incorporate whimsy in your daily meals during the month of December. Some tips to try:

• Sprinkle colored sugar over your breakfast oatmeal, buttered toast, or cold cereal.
  NOTE: Sprinkling colored sugar over eggs and bacon is not recommended, and is likely to lessen festive atmosphere.
• Wrap your dinner plates and silverware in pretty paper and adorn them with bows. Every evening, your family will delight in carefully unwrapping each dish and utensil. Environmentally conscious individuals can repurpose used wrapping as napkins or to insulate drafty doors and windows.
• Substitute eggnog for milk in all your favorite recipes.

Gifting

For the purposes of this guide, “perfect gift” is defined as an item of tangible monetary or emotional^[1] value:

• Given without expectation of reciprocation
• Reflecting a like, need, or sentimental whim of the receiver
• Not resulting in the giver’s inability to make future payments toward their mortgage, automobile loan, or other essential living expenses

To select the perfect gift:

1. On a clean sheet of paper, write down the name of the intended perfect gift recipient (if possible, attach a photo of the recipient taken during a pleasant occurrence, e.g., birthday party, holding a puppy, winning a triathlon).
2. Quietly reflect on the recipient for a period of up to ten (10) minutes. You might find it helpful to ask yourself the following questions:
   • What activities, experiences, or objects make this person happy?
   • Is there anything that would help this person resolve a particular issue or challenge?
   • Does this person enjoy vacuuming up glitter for three (3) weeks after receiving a gift?
3. Write down a list of words or phrases you would use to describe the recipient. Prioritize the list and highlight the top five (5) words or phrases.
4. Take the sheet of paper with you when you shop. When you find a potential perfect gift, review the list and determine if the prospective gift is an accurate representation of recipient.

Greeting

To have a merry and relaxed seasonal celebration, take every opportunity to wish others peace and happiness and cheerfully accept any greeting that is intended to wish you the same. The exact greeting that you give, or receive, should not be a point of stress. For foolproof happiness, use the following rule of thumb:

If a stranger takes the time to smile warmly and wish you a happy _______, do not worry that you typically don’t celebrate _______, or even that you might not actually know what _______ is. Instead, focus on the wish—the sincere wish of a stranger—that you experience joy on whatever day that is important to you.

Show some love for your customers

In a business world that seems to favor reducing costs over increasing revenue, SAP has made a bold move to return to that traditional principle of good business: take care of your customers and they’ll take care of you.

Business news is rife with reports of layoffs, off-shoring, departmental reductions, and dual-purposing of skilled resources. Sadly, individuals pay the price twice for these decisions.  First, in job losses. Second, in  diminished quality and usability of the products and services on which they depend.  Last Wednesday, SAP emerged as a bright spot in the otherwise dreary landscape of modern business practices with their announcement to roll-out an “Everyman” SaaS (software as a service) suite of their business intelligence tools. Built-in user guides and data-visualization and -exploration tools in the new SAP® BusinessObjects^TM OnDemand will ensure that users of all levels can quickly get maximum benefit from the new suite.

We should be, but rarely are, indignant when a company allocates substantial resources to marketing while sacrificing attention to usability. Every time I have to search for a feature, struggle with functionality, or wade through reams of user-generated helps, I am struck by the gall of companies that seem to care so little for my business that they chose to cut corners in testing and user documentation. It reminds me of Google spokesperson Chip Dunn’s tongue-in-cheek response to flagging customer criticism on their new Google Buzz.

But, it’s no joke when I’m struggling with a tool that’s essential to my business and for which I paid a substantial sum. How dare they improve their own bottom line at the expense of my own?!

The irony, of course, is that companies, like SAP, who listen to their customers’ needs and ensure a positive user-experience, will succeed. Those that continue to place a higher value on their own time and resources than that of their customers, will struggle to survive.

Kudos, SAP, for remembering, and embracing, that long-forgotten golden rule of good business—the customer is always first!

Julia McClung is President of InContext, Inc., a technical and scientific writing company in RTP, NC. Julia thinks good user documentation is the first, best step in improving customer satisfaction and really likes companies who think so too.

1. attorneys are very expensive
2. ramen noodles are as good as I remember them
3. your product is only as good as your ability to explain it

It seems surprising to find that last item in the list of ‘lessons learned’ for a technical communicator. After all, clients who understand the value of clear, consistent, and well-organized technical documentation are the only clients I’ll ever have. The owner of a technical writing company should, ipso facto, be able to clearly explain technical writing.

So, how can it be that I’ve listened in shock and dismay to the incomprehensible mutterings of myself as I tried in vain to clearly describe what my company does and why we do it better than anyone else? “Well you see…” “unique model…” “if your CMS…” ” Wah- wah, wah-wah, wah wah… “.

It’s not easy. I know we, InContext, have a good product. No, we have a great product! But the more passionate you are about a topic, the easier it is to get carried away with details and forget that your audience likely doesn’t need, or want, to hear the intricate details of your brilliant business model and the technical minutiae of the latest XML authoring tool. My customers have the same question every potential customer has: “How will your product improve my life?”

So, it is with a renewed sense of clarity that I offer to everyone I’ve confused, bored, and frustrated:

“InContext? We write, organize, and deliver your high-level technical documentation and improve your customer satisfaction while saving you time and money.”

Oh, and we’ll also keep you from sounding like Miss Othmar.

It seems like we shouldn’t need to be told this. But as freedom of expression has become so much, well, ‘freer’, there seems to be a genuine pressure to say something, anything. One of the attendees (I apologize for not being able to credit her appropriately) mentioned that she had recently written a post on “content obesity”. I loved this phrase because I could so readily identify with the bloated sensation I myself experience when trying to choke down the endless buffet of daily content.

In the mid-80s, fewer than 10% of American households owned a personal computer and there was no such thing as Internet access. Those were the days when you still had to seek out entertainment. But by 2006, nearly 80% of American homes owned at least one personal computer and 70% of those were surfing the Web.⁽¹⁾

Today, you don’t have to seek out entertainment. You have to shield yourself from too much of it. Because, somehow, everything has become ‘entertaining’. Our news, our products, our services, our food. [Don't believe me? Check out www.cheetos.com.] All this entertainment has made it very difficult to find the actual, relevant information. There is so much competition for our limited attention spans that people feel that they must simultaneously employ every available glittery, flashy, noisy, crawling, popping, feeding tool in order to be heard. But we’re forgetting that aspect of human psychology that leads us to eventually tune out the loudest voice in the room.

I know. I’m in the information trade and it seems that I’m attempting to latch on to the hand that feeds me. Au contraire! Technology and access to sophisticated media are wonderful! They provide an unprecedented ability to inform, educate, and enlighten. But we seem to have gotten so distracted by the shiny objects that we’ve forgotten that the technology is intended to showcase our information… not replace it. The real problem with this veritable feast of content is the frustrating, and frequent, inability to find the useful information in it all.

If a beautifully wrapped package contains the brightly-colored confetti of a hundred shredders, I’m not likely to open it more than once. But opening a simple package containing a few, useful, well-organized pages will become a favorite pastime. Ah, sweet, simple information in context.

The basic rules of good information still apply: know your audience; write clearly; organize your information; make it accessible; and, yeah, have something to say. It seems we are all becoming so busy trying to think of something entertaining to say that we’re ignoring what people actually want to hear.

So, just the facts, ma’am, I’m already full.

¹ Source: http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/computer.html

Making Your Web Site Work for You
October 13
Carolyn Rhinebarger of StrategicGuru

Good overview of forming a Web strategy for small biz. Very nice of Carolyn to solicit a dialogue with me, as there is some overlap in our Web design services. Thanks to LaQuinta Blackmon of Sweetooth for the cake sample. I’m guessing that she’s the most popular person in any given seminar.

Google Adwords and Analytics
October 15
Steve Hong of CrossComm

Nice overview and good detail. Lots of imponderables about this subject, so I’m not sure of the real benefit to newcomers. If you don’t have a Web component in your marketing strategy, a lot of this topic would be noise, even though it’s not highly technical.

Steve made a concerted attempt to demystify where necessary, and to clarify, especially when asked. Lots of questions, so it took some time to start the sample campaign. Also, the adwords and analytics dashboard options change so often, it’s tough to be very precise in a demo.

Very good addition to the Durham Tech small biz slate. I’d like to see more such programs for people who want to extend their knowledge base.

Grow Your Business Through Online Social Media
October 20
David Mooring of CrossComm

Very thorough and detailed, good dialogue with the attendees. I liked the information about tools that the audience might not know (e.g., tweetbeep). Social media is all about confidence, and I certainly felt buoyed (hence my Facebook and blogging jag tonight). Second seminar from a CrossComm presenter; seems like a tight outfit.

Saw LaQuinta again — she had more samples. I ordered two pies for Thanksgiving. Crap, now I’m hungry.