Less Work, More Flow

Part 2: Applied Content Strategy: How DJing a House Party Taught Me How My Brain Works [NF0]

2013-06-05T13:15:00.000+02:00

Lessons and big-a** failures

In my last post I walked through the challenge of curating content (digital music) on a tight schedule. I responded by developing a content strategy with a taxonomy and system of ‘likes’, to build up useful metrics and deliver accordingly.

My content strategy worked a treat, until cops shut us down.

Here are are the rough-patches along the way, and the wider CS lessons learned.

People Don’t Like What They Ask For

Curation is a skill. Think about WIKIs. Without a strong curator/strategist keeping things going you often get content soup, and even the people who created it don’t like it.

Deliver according to the metrics! Many organisations I’ve seen have released this or that content on a hunch, or because this or that manager used their weight to push it through. The result is never as good as when a combination metrics and good content professionals are used.

In my applied content science experiment, I used my DJing taxonomy and generally stuck with my model of how the content should be structured. However, later in the evening, I started opening up user-generated content, aka, straight-up “requests”. It was ok at first, but soon the users started taking over and crowding out the curated content. Result – they hated it.

Individuals may have liked this or that song, but when the structure and coherency of the taxonomy was gone, the genres started mixing and content that wasn’t high quality started surfacing to the whole user group. So, I learned giving people exactly what they wanted can create a mess.

Structure and control feedback channels

Organisations sometimes take on more channels than they’re actually ready for, without a strong underlying strategy and plan. The result is a lot of messy conversations where the content and its provider end up looking worse for their half-assed presence.

When I stopped using my taxonomy board and let the users submit directly, feedback become overwhelming and, worse, contradictory.

Planning for reuse is fun and effective

When planning content, whether content marketing or technical manuals, structuring for modules and reusable assets as early as possible can get you more bang for your buck. We often forget the simple idea that a bit more up-front work in your writing and structuring will smooth later leveraging of assets later.

When I came up with my approach for the party, blogging the outcome was always in the back of my mind. In the true spirit of designing reusable assets, I crowd-sourced not only the evening's content list and structure, but got them to actually be the assets so I could hopefully teach a fun lesson later on my blog.

After the party, I realised I didn’t have a DJ Facebook page, and of course the assets I’d created for the blog could be reused in a new, previously unconsidered context. This is living the dream of content reuse.

This was all happening with the Content Strategy Google Groups discussion “To Tech Or Not To Tech” going on in the background (related discussions in LinkedIn and Google+) where we were discussing how much CSs can or should relate with the deeper, more ‘technical’ aspects of what we do. My believe is we can and should, we have to discuss such things in a way people can relate to. And serve cocktails.

Proven again: the best tech is humanist

In all my workshops and classes I try to get people to approach new fangled techniques and technologies with from a “humanist” perspective. Thinking of ourselves first as people, then as users and technologists.

In my opinion, most of what a content professional needs to know about content technology is a simple 1-2 punch:

Make semantic meaning explicit: Make content structured and meaningful through explicit semantics and metadata (if you don’t know what this means, ask, as it was 3 chapters in the book). This structure and meaning makes it so that computers can understand content in a way that’s more similar to the way people do.
Design experiences leveraging semantics: When computers can understand it more, they can create meaningful and engaging experiences with the content downstream.

When I teach semantics, structure, XML, adaptive content, and DITA, I try to explain them not as new things, but as the common interchange languages between humans and systems. Life is structured and semantic, and our brains operate naturally in taxonomies, building relationships and narrative on top of them. They exist in the digital realm because they mimic our natural understanding of the world.

When I explain content technology from the human-centric perspective, I get a lot further than a decade ago when I started off lessons with “XML and HTML are based on their predecessor language: SGML…”. Snore!!

…For example, taxonomic metadata is innately human

We don’t remember every song we hear and tuck it away for instant recall (if only!). We group by genre, speed, rhythm, culture of origin, etc.. We explore them in our minds by traversing the indices. It’s not a skill. We don’t have to think consciously “I’ll store this in my brain under ‘Easy Listening’,” that’s just how we work. (Remind me to curate some links to TED talks about this!)

Think of when you when you can’t quite remember a song. What do you remember? Some of the content, like melody or snippets of lyrics. But aren’t you always able to rattle off something like this?

“It’s a medium-fast song, dance-y, with a sort jazz feeling, and there’s a guitar part that’s quite rock-y and then the guy goes ‘Riiings! Pearls!’. It’s a rock classic, man!”

So we have just referenced the categories in your internal taxonomy:

Mid-tempo songs

Dance

Jazz
Guitar music
Rock

Classic rock

Male singers

And ta-dah! Led Zeppelin's “How Many More Times”. Implement this in computer code and ta-dah: Last.FM, Pandora.com, Spotify! These are systems that use taxonomy to tell you music you like before you knew you liked it!

Note – it’s often easier to remember things by their taxonomical categorisation than something in the content, like, say the lyrics, or the f***ing title itself!

Amazon.com: always leading the taxonomy pack

On the same point, just last week I was considering a recent purchase. I thought, “I bought an Xbox Kinect on Amazon and it’s going to arrive soon. What games can I get now?” I had opened up the “Kinect" part of a product taxonomy – a category of games that previously I’d closed my mind to – and was starting to explore it. Amazon, in their taxonomy-driven brilliance, emailed me just this morning with the subject line, “Amazon.co.uk recommends "Kinect Sports: Ultimate Collection”. Awesome.

More?

I’m hungry for more examples of this "real-life" content strategy applied, so please do submit yours in the comments!

PS – For Those Whole Like Sound Tech …

This bit is just for those who care what hardware and software I was using.

I was spinning Mp3s in open-source Mixxx. It’s good, but not great, and I think 20k songs was too much for it as after a few sessions my database file died and I needed to re-index everything.

I was running the whole lot through a Yamaha home hifi amp (RX-V795RDS) 5 x 125 watts RMS to 2 channels 8ohms, running both A and B outs to 4 speakers (didn’t use the surround outs).

I supplemented that with a 200w, 10-inch Klipsch subwoofer and was running out to Tannoy Reveal monitors (crappy as studio monitors, decent as speakers).

The interesting bit I think was that I was running 3 sound cards. One was the one built into my (kinda crappy) Asus laptop and two USB soundcards (both by Creative) to run separate outs to my cue mix and mains. Worked great!

Part 1: Applied Content Strategy: How I DJed a House Party [NF0]

2013-06-04T13:15:00.000+02:00

This one is a bit of thought-provoking fun; an applied content science experiment. The question: can you apply primarily digital content concepts in day-to-day physical life? I tried to get an uninitiated crowd to help me curate some content in near real-time, by setting up a taxonomy and system of "physical likes". To put it another way, I crowd-sourced my way through DJing a house party.

It turns out you can use content concepts directly in real life, but people might call the cops.

I present you a case study in traditional form:

Part 1:

The business context
The content strategy
Implementation
Conclusion, results and take-aways

Part 2: How DJing A House Party Taught Me How My Brain Works

Lessons and Big-a** failures

The business context

I have a sort of fetish for my work. I love it. My network will have noticed that I get caught up in the whole international whirlwind of it. But, Noz loves to party too. In one of my various previous lives I used to DJ house parties, private functions, and the occasional club that could be tricked into having me. I haven't done so in years, and never in Spain, so when I landed a sweet gig last week at a penthouse pad DJing for a mixed-age (mainly 20s-40s) crowd, I had a bit of a problem.

It was a highly international crowd of about 100 strong, from at least some 15 countries - NATO and UN staff, international students and au pairs, and locals of Valencia, Spain (where I live). They had come for a BBQ, one in a series of about 5 so far this year, but I was supposed to get the dance-floor really moving for the first time. What content should I deliver? I'd only worked in Toronto, Canada, as a kid, DJing for other kids my age, over a decade ago!

The business goal: be ready in 24 hours and keep ‘em rocking for the whole BBQ.

The content strategy

I decided to apply my professional methodology to this problem. After all, a DJ is really just a (digital) content curation and delivery system. What would I tell a client to do if they were in a pinch like this? Start with the basics:

Inventory and audit

What do you have and what good is it? This was the easy bit.

All my assets were 100% reusable and high quality (Mp3s), and I had LOADS. Too many in fact as 20,000 songs is a lot to choose from…

How do you filter all that and deliver the right “stories” to a mixed, largely unknown audience? Well, if you’ve got no metrics (and no time) you’ve got to:

Crowd-source some meaningful metrics, and fast!
Set up a manageable, user-driven curation and delivery system according to what the metrics tell you.
Keep iterating, monitoring success closely.

Taxonomy

I needed a framework to work against to build these stories, so I built a genre taxonomy the day before. After much thought, I eventually settled on this:

Pop
- Old
- New
Funk
RnB
Hip Hop
Soul
Rock
- General Rock
- Classic Rock
- Heavy Metal
Dubstep/Drum & Bass
House
- Pop House
- Funky House
- Electro House
- Hard House
"Don't Care"

I took my taxonomy and put it on a large-format card in a sort of structured “tag-cloud”.

Light and happy genres on the left; dark and aggressive music on the right. More electronic music across the bottom. “Don’t care” was in the middle (In Spanish: “Me da igual”):

^{Please no freaking out at me about this taxonomy. I’m sure yours would be different!}

A DJ (or at least a good one, in my opinion) thinks this way. You have taxonomy in your head, and you build up content sequences – little stories – from your assets, and you see how they go down. Feedback is as fast (faster, even) than it is online, so you can dynamically adapt, but you’ve got to have a framework to work against. Be too fast and ready to react outside of your framework, and things fall apart (which we’ll see later in Part two: “Big-a** failures” when things weren’t going so well…).

User interface for gathering metrics

I needed a system of “likes” – something that would allow people to give me metrics against the taxonomy, rather than pelting random requests at me (which is death, as we’ll see in Part 2).

Enter: stickers!

I grabbed a few sheets of little kid’s stickers from a corner store; the kind that kindergarten teachers would put on good finger-paintings. I thought these would make great analogue “like” buttons, and people could like the genres they wanted to hear.

^{Analogue “Like” buttons.}

User assistance content

I then needed some minimalist, multi-lingual help content that would allow zero ramp-up time and prevent calls to the support desk (me).

I wrote a sentence once in English: “Take a sticker and put it near your genre” and then crowd-sourced translations from the early BBQ arrivals into the 3 next most popular languages of the target audience (Spanish, German, & French):

^{The shortest user manual I’ve ever worked on. Yes, would have been better to say “…put it near your preferred genre”, but I was working to keep it short. The other languages translate long and I had limited page real-estate, crowd-sourced content and limited resource (paper) for re-writes.}

Technology

Here I am with the final set-up (user manual got cropped out on the right unfortunately).

(I’ll actually talk software and hardware as a post-script for the music tech fans.)

Implementation

Taxonomy becomes folksonomy

After only a few minutes people started voting for their genres. The table attracted attention and the sign worked.

I had left out my pen on the table, and without meaning to be, my taxonomy suddenly became an Amazon.com-like taxonomy/folksonomy. People actually added the genres “reggae”, “electro latino”, “indie rock” and “world music”, before I took the pen away to avoid overload.

^{Data collection begins}

What blew my mind was not that they voted, but how enthusiastically they engaged with the process. They LOVED it. Several were actually taking pictures of the system and themselves using it (presumably for Facebook purposes).

The users, sorry, the guests engaged so completely with the like system that it took on a life of its own – it went viral! People started to “like” themselves and each other – on the head:

Metrics

So within an hour I had metrics from which I could make strategic decisions about how to present my content assets. This data would also guide future spending on new content acquisition.

Conclusion, Results and Take-Aways

So, most important, did taxonomy-driven crowd-sourcing rock the house? This video condenses my view down to 80 seconds:

My point of view throughout the event condensed to 80 seconds.

In short: business goal achieved. The police visit was acceptable tactical losses….

I even had two solicitations for new projects – an opening of a lounge bar downtown and a wedding.

The Moral of the Story

The real point of this post is to demonstrate that content concepts work best when they are natural to us. People today have internalised the ideas of social voting and ranking ("likes") and crowd sourcing. Still, this probably would have worked 20 years ago, because these concepts are intuitively democratic and social.

In part two I look at how taxonomy is natural reflections of our basic models of thought and memory, but for now I’ll just say:

Good content concepts seamlessly integrate with user instincts and behaviours, they don't jar them.

Many technologies have achieved success by removing barriers to entry - they make technology more like working without technology. Wii, Xbox Kinect; Bluetooth earpieces; swipe, pinch and shake on your mobile phone; are all trying to make interfaces disappear and just work with your body and natural instincts.

Augmented reality; wearable tech and more will follow this trend in years to come to make sure that technology gets more and more seamlessly integrated into our lives to the point where we don't know it's there. For me this party was the content equivalent.

In Part 2 we’ll look at some wider conclusions and Content Strategy implications of this little story that lead us to the nature of our brains, Spotify, Pandora, and the Almighty Taxonomists: Amazon.com.

Part 2: How DJing A House Party Taught Me How My Brain Works

Lessons and Big-a** failures
- People don’t like what they ask for
- Structure and control feedback channels
- Planning for reuse is fun and effective
- Proven again: the best tech is humanist
- Taxonomic metadata is innately human
- Amazon.com: always leading the taxonomy pack
- PS – For Those Whole Like Sound Tech …

Check it out.

Have You Done Real-World CS?

Has anyone else applied their work concepts to daily life? I’d love to hear other stories.

2013-06-06 Update: PS – Music-Linked Taxonomy

Just for fun, here’s my taxonomy again with linked song examples of each!

To Tech or Not to Tech, That is the Question [NF1]

2013-05-25T11:51:00.001+02:00

Should a content strategist know code? How much geek cred is good for your career? When is it too much? People have a love-hate relationship with technology even in our industry. Here’s my thoughts on how technical a Content Strategist should be. Some of you may be surprised.

This post was born of a Google Forums Content Strategy discussion (and similar on LinkedIn and Google+) addressing these concepts and sort of got away from me. Now it’s blog-length and I think an interesting topic. I struggle with the borderlands between technical and strategic regularly. I’m especially aware of it in the run up to Content Agility for example as it’s somewhere where Content Strategists, Technical Communicators and Structured CCMS people all get together. Some think it’s a tech fest because there’s any mention of XML and DITA; others see a separate Content Strategy track and think it’s not for them if they are technical authors. It’s all content, and these worlds are blurring more every day as content delivery becomes more complex and users demand a more seamless experience.

You don’t need to really know much tech at all to follow this post.

Disclaimer

I used to code in my early 20s. I haven't written anything in many years and have no real intention of doing so. This post says why. BUT if you were looking for work and having 'php' on your resume got you the job, I have nothing but respect for that. I'm talking big picture, long-term career-growth here, trying to look from a perspective external to our community. In a perfect world, more knowledge would always be better.

Not all content tech is equal

I think there's an important distinction between types of "technologies" that are relevant to CS work.

I feel the two big groups are:

Programming languages – used to make computer programs
Mark-up languages – used to mark up content so that computer programs can make better use of it.

The distinction I always make is: Mark-up enables; Programs do. (Jump to the Post-Script if you want/need further explanation).

Mark-up is a CS core skill

I think that a CS person needs to understand how their content can be better and more powerfully manipulated by programming languages, if they properly enable the process with mark-up. I don't think a CS needs to be able to create the programmatic code themselves. You can get a programmer and explain to them what you want and why, and they will build it. Explain the 'why' properly and they'll complain far less when realising the 'how'. For example, if you can understand enough about XSLT to explain why it's better than Java, that will make your life much easier even if you're never going to write a line of either.

Programming can be dangerous to your career

I think it's debatably important not to get into development because of the socio-political backlash in a typical project environment. Programming is 'dirty knowledge'. As I made the transition early in my career from techie to content strategist, I was vividly aware of this idea. If managers and strategic folk got the sense I was too hands on in my knowledge of 'techie stuff', then my cred as a strategic person influencing organisational direction went down. I was taught that understanding it is ok, doing is not.

In this harsh light, regardless of what we say inside our community, those that employ us (if not directly then a level above or so) will often consider programming to be commoditized geek-stuff with a glass ceiling above those who partake. This lack of interest/respect means that to keep your emphasis on the strategic side, it's my belief that it behooves you to keep programming at arm's length. We can do it opportunistically, or as a sort of bonus when it adds expected value: "Hey, I saved everyone a load of trouble with ____ and just threw together a macro/stylesheet." Doing it as part of core deliverables makes you a developer of sorts, and could even get you with critical-path programming deliverables on a project plan if you’re not careful. This is hard to balance against the main CS work as you’ll be one coder among others, but probably one of few, if not the only CS person.

In conclusion, understanding mark-up is vital to understanding what can be done with your content if properly tagged and architected. Making programming part of our brand I think confuses the strategic part of content strategy for others. Many of whom don't understand the minutiae of what we do and our value-add in the first place.

My possibly jaded - and not-intended to offend anyone who (quite rightly) takes well-deserved pride in their hard-earned techie skills - two cents.

Post Script – Tech disambiguation

For your interest, here is my explanation of the difference between mark-up and programming languages. We of course treated these in far greater depth in our book.

Mark-up languages (HTML, XML, DITA, SGML, SVG, RDF....) are descriptive and semantic metadata that are bound intimately to content. Mark-up languages exist to mark-up content. I think that the CS'er must understand mark-up languages. Not just HTML, but the fundamentals that underpin HTML which come from it's SGML/XML roots. That is structure and semantics. They need to understand what the implications are of using mark-up to separate content and presentation (to this day it flabbergasts me how low the penetration of that concept is). You aren't really 'coding' in my definition, even though you're adding 'codes' like <p class="bodyText"> to your content.
Programming languages (C#, javascript, java, xslt, SQL...) are for manipulating data - might be content, but not always. These are real coding languages and you need vastly different tools and, I think, different skills to master them. Real manipulation, coding, debugging and app development and general magic happens here.

A marked-up file (HTML, DITA, XML) does nothing. It just sits there in its DB or file system until an app picks it up and process it in some way.

Note: I left out CSS as a pure presentation language. I think it's a very useful, nice-to-have but not a core skill.

PPS: Come to Content Agility 2013!

Content Strategy Book Launched [NF0]

2013-02-08T20:53:00.001+01:00

I am delighted to finally announce the publishing of my book – with my co-author Rahel Anne Bailie: Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand and benefits.

It has been two intense years of working a more than full time job and authoring in every moment I could scrape together. Some may have noticed we renamed it from the pre-launch name to simply “Content Strategy”.

We’re much happier with the new title as it addresses content strategy in its full breadth and so is really the most appropriate.

Reviews and Excerpts

*UPDATES – Feb 2013*

We sold out of books at the Intelligent Content 2013 conference! Should have brought more stock!

In other news, two great new reviews for the book by prominent figures in our industry:

“Book Review: Content Strategy by Bailie and Urbina” – James Mathewson, Editor in Chief, ibm.com & Global Search Strategy Lead, IBM
“Bailie and Urbina ‘knock it out of the park’ with their new book” – Kevin Nichols, Content Strategy Practice Owner, Sapient

Past Reviews and Excerpts

Making the business case for content strategy – Excerpt on the Firehead Blog
Review: Content Strategy – Larry Kunz, Project Manager and Information Architect, SDI
Book Review – Bas Evers, (before the re-naming of the book)

Thanks to all who supported me and were involved on the journey. I hope my blog readers choose to pick up a copy and tell me your thoughts!

Have I missed a review? Let me know in the comments!

As you can see on the site, copies are available from:

DITA and The Return of the Editorial Process [NF2]

2012-09-11T21:07:00.001+02:00

Guest Post by Keith Schengili-Roberts

A note from Noz:

Hi-di-ho, Readerinos!
With the holiday season and some intense projects I’ve not posted in quite a while. In a way I’m still not, in that today’s post comes from my new colleague and peer in the DITA community Keith Schengili-Roberts. I did an interview post prior to the Congility conference on Keith’s well received ditawriter.com blog, and I asked Keith to reciprocate. The resulting post below was actually inspired by one of our discussions while working together on some recent client work.

Enjoy!

PS – Here’s a reminder of what “NF2” means, if you needed one.

-----------------------------

It used to be that editors were much more common in the technical writing business. I have been around long enough to remember people who had “Technical Editor” as their formal job title. Over the years economic and production pressures have forced firms to hire more writers instead of editors. This often results with little or no oversight of existing content, furthering the pressures to silo writers and their content. Content was created, reviewed, and delivered, and rarely looked at again unless a customer raised an issue against a specific piece of content.

When asked, one of the aspects of DITA that most technical writers will agree is important to them is the ability to reuse content. Not just their own, but content that was developed by other writers. Whenever a piece of content is reused, it saves the writer that found it from having to re-write that piece of content. At the same time, the organisation benefits by saving cost, and the user benefits, because reused content makes for more consistent deliverables. I have noticed over the years that one of the other inadvertent bonuses of this approach is that topics that are looked at most – when being evaluated for reuse – become “edited topics” and are improved in the process of reuse. In DITA environments, I am seeing the return of the editorial process as technical writers review and inevitably revise content written by their peers.

Legacy Conversion Can Equal a First Edit Pass to Old Content

While working as an Information Architect I remember running across a classic case of this sort, where a writer had been doing the same manual for years, and took the approach of adding new material he received from the software developer SMEs piece-meal to the existing content. What must have at one time have been a decent manual had become a hodge-podge of barely-comprehensible content, with varying punctuation styles, and different terms (and spellings!) for the same items; inconsistency was the norm rather than the exception. Any editor glancing at this material would have immediately taken out their red pen and set to work (and in fact a section from this original work became a standard editing test for technical writer candidates looking for a job with the organisation).

Since things were so siloed nobody on the writing team had the opportunity to review this work, the hapless end-users had to decipher this deliverable as best they could. In moving this content to DITA the material finally had the chance to be thoroughly edited. Terms were made consistent and the content was cleaned up. Simply converting this legacy content to proper, topic-oriented and info-typed DITA ensured that it would be edited and made consistent, and its content ready to be effectively reused in other end-user content.

^{Image licensing - http://bit.ly/QL7K0Y}

Reused Content Becomes Improved Content

I have seen evidence of content being edited and refined over time, so it becomes more clear and consistent as more eyes are brought to bear on the original versions. I remember another occasion where I was reviewing some end-user content, and I twigged that what I was reading seemed awfully familiar. The CCMS we were using allowed me to locate the topic and discover where else it was being used. It turned out that it was a concept topic that I had originally written for a highly-technical electrical engineering document. I could tell that it had been changed, but ultimately for the better, so that it could work effectively in two very different deliverables intended for two distinct audiences.

As a consultant I am now seeing similar situations at other organisations. It seems to be a natural outcome of the topic writing process when handled within a CCMS with decent search capabilities. This type of behaviour should definitely be encouraged, not only because it is good for the content (and its readers) but because it is good for the writers in several ways.

I find that the better writers on a team are natural editors as well, and allowing them to sink their teeth into someone else’s content means that they get to learn more about that content (and other products/projects) and it also opens up the lines of communication within the team, as would-be-editors ask the original writers about their content, helping to de-silo both the writer and the editor.

^{Get it? Reuse means looking at content with a fine-toothed comb…}

Possible Pitfalls to Be Avoided

When managers see this type of behaviour it needs to be encouraged, but definitely guided. One of the obvious pitfalls when writers-cum-editors run rampant is that they revise material so that it fits their deliverable’s needs but not that of the original deliverable. As long as all of the writers are reminded of DITA best practices – that they need to check content dependencies and to talk to the original writer of the topic when changes go beyond mere grammar corrections/typos – this ought to solve this potential issue before it starts.

The other potential issue that can arise is that a writer may think they are being singled out by a peer and cause friction. There are few writers – myself included – who do not react with some shock when the red pen cuts deeply into their work. In this situation it is good to be able to point to an existing style guide (both for DITA mark-up and for writing generally) so that writer and editor know where they stand.

While many organisations will find it hard to create (or in some cases, reinstate) the technical editor role, having the editorial function emerge in the writing team is a natural outcome when you have good technical writers who are creating topics using a CMS. The best deliverables are those that have had several sets of critical eyes looking at them, and good editing makes for better writers overall.

It’s a win-win-win situation for the writers themselves, the readers of the content, and ultimately for the organisation.

-----------------------------

A note from Noz:

To formalise and drive forward the effect that Keith is discussing here, I have even gone so far as formally recommending to clients that they hire dedicated authors to coach and monitor writers. Which is the best way forward depends on the organisation and context, but the impact of reuse on editorial process is a positive trend in all cases.

To learn more about Keith, do check out his blog on ditawriter.com.

Why Can’t Content Professionals Communicate? [NF0]

2012-06-01T09:12:00.001+02:00

It is ironic, as we’re all professional communicators of types, that we suffer so at the hands of our own labelling and terminology.

We are all responsible for creating, curating and disseminating content to support an overall strategy, yet we hold onto vertical, department, or (heaven forbid) technology and tool-specific communities as if our lives depended on it.

This isn’t a message just for web marketing folk or technical communicators, it’s for all content professionals.

Content Strategy is something that crosses departments and verticals and channels, because the business strategy isn’t divided up by department. You don’t have the product team saying “We’re going to develop for the home user” and the marketing team saying “We’re going to market into the B2B space!”.

Tech Comms is sometimes under product, sometimes under marketing. Either way, they can’t be off on their own writing help or manuals thinking “So… we’ve defined our users as all being nurses who speak English as a second language”.

We have to align content across agreed audience profiles and speak to them in a cohesive, brand-enhancing way.

You would never want a web marketing team to say “We’re going to approach the under-25s with a hip and conversational messaging architecture” and the print team to say “We’re going after the over 40s with a professional and academic tone”. Or, if you do, that’s bad business strategy.

To do content strategically, we have to talk to each other across the currently-held boundaries.

Images of Content Strategy

I’ve heard Content Strategy described in a breath-taking variety of ways (it’s almost as bad as ‘structured content’ or ‘XML’).

When Ann Rockley began using it in the first editions of “A Unified Content Strategy” (Second Edition features a case study by me by the way, so check me out with my bad self…) it was a holistic term, crossing silos and formats. The term didn’t really take hold of the popular imagination for a decade or so (real innovation takes time to bed in), and it first took hold in the web marketing world, so it looked like this:

Since then, we’ve been hearing more of an a collaborative message between the core externally-facing communications team, which I think looks like this (which is not too bad frankly!):

Finally, and most inspiring to me, truly ‘holistic’ content strategy doesn’t limit itself to departments or points in the content and customer lifecycle. For example it doesn’t just look at external marketing messaging architecture and copy, but market-requirements documents and product strategy documentation which is internal. Similarly, it isn’t about ‘technical communications’ in the sense of external docs, but any technical content on intranets, engineering specifications and so on inside the development process of product content:

I know few organisations will ever be this sophisticated, but it’s a nice idea… isn’t it?

Even if we get it, the customers don’t…

The message I get from most professionals is that this is a harsh business reality. Their customers are only ready for the most basic and superficial interpretations of content strategy. I think that that’s partly true and as professionals we have to try to educate the market while not going out of business talking about “beyond mobile” publishing with clients that resolutely can’t get their heads out of printed pages.

So although it feels like it took us years and years to get this far in the practioners communities, it’s going to be years more that we’re explaining it to the rest of industry to have the concept of content strategy – looking at a content as an asset that can help achieve strategic goals - sink in.

Please, someone disagree with me…!

PS - If you are a technical communicator, please check out David Farbey’s latest post on exactly this. It’s no small thanks to David’s post that I was inspired to write this.

PPS – I know I often allude to my crushing project schedule, but right now is really bad. I shouldn’t even be blogging right now frankly but I couldn’t resist… so sorry if this was at all a garbled mess. I think I need a content strategy and process for my blog… :)

Mobile is Just the Beginning – Part 3 [NF2]

2012-03-21T18:41:00.001+01:00

Recap up to Part 3: Mobile is not “the new format for which we must be designing content strategies and content”. Mobile is actually various formats* that need tackling. Taking a short list of key ones we have:

HTML
Kindle
eBook
multimedia eBook
PDF
ePub

We should approach mobile delivery solutions such that they are stepping-stones to scalable, maintainable, multi-platform content strategies.

The thesis of this three-part article is that we need to stop eating up articles debating “App or Mobile website: which is best for your customers?” and invest in getting ready for the real scary answer: you need to be ready for both, and many more formats, contexts and applications too.

*Thanks to Rahel Anne Bailie for pointing out that eye-opening link!

What you can do

Here is a list of high level content steps required (not in any order, and clearly only a starting guide) to tackle mobile “properly” (as I’ve defined it so far):

Modularise: Design content that's clearly info-typed in a modular way. A module is allows flexible recombination. High level types like ‘Article’, ‘User Guide’ ‘Report’, ‘Review’ and ‘Announcement’ are not granular enough to be split up and re-assembled. To tell new stories from existing assets, you need your assets to be sufficiently small components. We call this ‘monolithic’

I really like the way the Wall Street Journal page that Rachel Lovinger pointed me to that links small components about other movies into the main story flow (down right hand column “Films Mentioned In This Article”). The main story isn’t designed to be broken up in this case, but the side components are great examples of content that would slot into various other stories sites, or even print articles nicely.

Also, think about the difference in reusability between a single, discrete FAQ or How-To vs procedural information that’s mixed up with some concepts and reference data in the flow of a larger deliverable. You can’t extract it cleanly, so how can you reuse it?
Enrich: Metadata is not optional anymore. To be able to sort, filter, and rebuild things with the help of automation, we need to look at making taxonomies, folksonomies, and structural metadata all work together.

This is several blogs on its own, so for now, just know you need to know about it.
Stop building into one format and converting: There are some print folks today who are still looking for a piece of software who allows them to take content that was created, laid out and conceived completely for print, press a button, and get a good mobile experience out of it. It can’t happen. It’s asking the question, "How can I hammer the square peg of my paradigm into the round hole of the market requirements? Must need a bigger hammer..."

We need to design format-agnostic content as early as possible in the content lifecycle (I and many others recommend XML formats for this). Content is not deliverables. Deliverables encapsulate content for one context, time and format.
Build a standard process for re-casting content into new “stories” (See part 2 for “stories”): Some XML helps you describe modules and maybe break content apart, but doesn't help you stitch stuff together with new relationships, new metadata/keywords, or new hierarchies for the diverse new scenarios. It's this standardising of both in a format-agnostic way that really makes it usable.

Whatever way you mark up your content, you will need a standardised, agreed way that you can define the stories, not just add metadata to individual modules. Why? Because even if you’ve made content format-independent, if you only structure the modules and not whole navigation models and flows between modules – whole stories - then you’ve just locked yourself deeply into your current management tool.

These stories are the way your content relates and interconnects is critical to it. Otherwise it’s just a ‘pile’ not a website or a publication. That metadata is the intelligence that makes the content consumable. If a big chunk of your content’s intelligence and structure is only described in the software that manages it (the CMS), not inside the content itself, changing software would mean extensive rebuilding of your content to just make it work like it did before and make any sense to anyone.

Realise that change is change: XML and structure aren't magic. There are complications and issues and ways to screw it up like anything else. Again, Rahel Anne Bailie talks about this a lot, and she and I are on the same wave-length: if users are still avoiding learning how to use Word styles or not thinking about content in a strategic, structured and process-oriented way, then XML will be harder to wrap their heads around.

To thrive in an environment with this must change happening, we need to not fight to maintain the status quo but meet the challenge head-on. We must find out how we can learn, partner, beg, borrow or steal the necessary capabilities to deliver solutions.

The Marketing Content Conundrum

A lot in the web content marketing world (a lot of content strategists) are concerned that single sourcing and structure are hard or even don’t work for marketing content. I’ll wrap this up with a bit specifically for them as my techcomms readers will no doubt have been hearing about structure, reuse and XML for a good while by now.

I do agree that marketing overall is the hardest nut to crack. Everything else, including sales proposals or enterprise content, deals with more hard facts.

Marketing is the most "nuanced" of the content areas, but it's not impossible. The low-hanging fruit is the things that are small, structured, and/or repeatable - catalogues, brochures, small hand-outs and data-driven ads, emailers. I'd need some more specific examples to talk about the relative difficulty of each scenario, but the idea is that because some aspects of marcomm are still very difficult doesn't mean that marketing generally should ignore the trends.

The 'facts' areas of marketing are the easier ones to tackle. Feature lists, product overviews, offer conditions and details, disclaimers and media are the things that can get most easily reused into myriad deliverables. However, that's already lots!

Single sourcing is realistic, but a strategy for reuse needs to be tailored to the business context. It's just one more facet of your overall content strategy.

I’ve mentioned Ann Rockley a lot, probably because I’m in the middle of reading the Second Edition of the MEC, but also because she has had one of the most diverse backgrounds in structural publishing in the market including marketing solutions. She listed problems in this area as:

- Marketing sees marketing content as creative, but structure as restrictive. Structure appears to be a technical scary thing. Structure doesn’t have to be restrictive. I love what one of my clients said “Structure sets you free!” (Noz note: I’ve been saying that exact quote for years too. So true! You’re free with structure to focus on the content, with the machinery around it taken care of for you)

- Everyone is blinded by format. Everyone is so focused on how the content will “look” on the Web or on the page and there is a strong belief that content written for one format does not work well for another format. Not so, well written content designed to be modular works well in any format.

- Many see conversion as the answer to their problems. Conversion doesn’t work because the paradigm for print is different from web which is different from mobile. It should be content first, channel/device second.

Single sourcing, structure and reuse are applicable in all industries and as mobile kicks more of us into action, the skills and tools required will only become cheaper and easier to source. Content professionals and contents strategist today need to get plugged in and linked up.

Learn More – Go To Events

For more on this, networking and conferences are great. For example:

Lisa Moore from Writebyte is already organising a CS Meet-up in the UK at Adobe’s offices:

Our topic on the night will pick up on one of the main themes to emerge from [the] CS Applied conference: namely, how do we, as content strategists, help organisations plan for useful, usable content in a multichannel world?

We're going to talk about separating content from presentation, get a crash course in authoring and publishing standards (don't worry, until quite recently, I thought DITA was Marilyn Manson's ex-wife ;), and discuss the finer points of content structure.

Check out the EU CS Google Group for more.

We’re also regularly doing webinars and live events over at Congility.com trying to bridge the technical communication and web content strategy worlds.

Please do let me know in the comments where and how you’re seeing the format explosion impact your content strategies!

Mobile is Just the Beginning – Part 2 [NF1]

2012-03-21T11:56:00.001+01:00

Continuing on from my previous post about the state of multiplatform content strategy, here are some reasons building “for mobile” can actually hurt your content’s long-term usefulness and some notes on how you can tell if you’re headed for trouble, and ideas on how we need to think differently in a multi-platform age.

Part 3 will look at more concrete actions to take and areas to consider when jumping to mobile content.

But before taking any action, my meta-message for the series is for us to start seeing mobile not as a new format to move your content to, but to consider mobile as the motivator – the opportunity in fact – to move your content out of the format churn and into format-neutral territory.

Why Building Content “For Mobile” is Dangerous

As discussed in Part 1, mobile is a series of new presentation formats. ePub, HTML5, the Kindle .mobi format, and the other mobile formats are all designed to describe to devices and applications how to display content. The standards are built specifically for presentation, and specific platforms issues, not around designing the content for user’s actual needs and desires across formats and platforms.

If you build content strategies for format-based processes, you’ll always be playing catch-up as new formats come out. This concept applies equally to web publishing, technical communications, traditional publishing. All have content that can get “locked-in”. The trap has many tell-tale signs, of which I’ve selected a tiny set of examples:

You’ve got your print deliverable but it’s awful online or on small mobile format screens
You’ve got your iPhone app but don’t have all your content ready to go in it
You keep having to pay for expensive ‘Content migration’ initiatives and spend ages prioritising what gets converted and what doesn’t.
You changed management platforms and now the content has all been flattened and disconnected – not even worth trying to move it…
And so on…

Telling New Stories

When content is locked in a single format or inflexible structure, it is very hard to break it apart and leverage it to tell new ‘stories’ for multiple contexts on multiple formats. New formats are everywhere. New stories could be a condensed how-to manual, a brochure, a microsite, a campaign, a ‘expert’s guide’ (that cuts out lots of fat that newbies need) and so on. New ‘contexts’ might be:

I’m learning about a product… while on the bus to work (User
We’re announcing a product in multiple geographies simultaneously (Brand)
We’re / I’m evaluating a product for purchase (Could be User’s private consumer research in B2C, could be Corporate due diligence for B2B)
I’m using a product right now (User or staff that works for the Brand)
I’m answering questions about a product (Brand Staff, 3rd Party Partners/Trainers/Retailers, maybe even certain Users who are community experts/evangelists)

Each might require different arrangements or subsets of core content, or different relationships or ‘paths’ through the content. How do you prepare your content to be ready to accurately appear in all these different ways, optimised for the device and context?

Slide from CSA Presentation: We can write for one flow, but if properly structured, different arrangements, navigation and deliverables should be able to be created easily, if not 100% automatically.

If your content isn’t modular, you can only tag whole content objects (articles, posts, manuals, service bulletins), say for example relating them to a ‘high tech’ or an ‘iPad 3’ category, that’s great for making links between objects in category, but not very useful for helping you build a new deliverables from reusable bits inside those objects.

Sometimes a whole object is too big to be reused effectively. Sometimes you just want the company slogan, or a product overview, or a feature list, or one procedure among several on a “page”, and so on to tell a new story with it somewhere else, for someone else, on some other device.

CaaS: Content As a Service

To be able to move fluidly across formats we need to design content not with a deliverables mentality, but a service mentality. Like Cloud Computing is computing services shared across a network or grid, like a utility grid, Content as a Service (CaaS) is a paradigm shift where reusable content assets are available to different applications that in turn deliver the actual consumables from wherever they are to wherever they need to be.

Confused yet?

In blog form this is hard to get across, but it is not that it is that complicated, it’s that it’s simply different than the way we work today. The technologies and methods have been in place for years, but we needed a certain series of events to bring us to today:

The printing press (seriously) to make mass publishing possible
The (social) web to make mass publishing available to the masses
Mobile to hit the masses on the web and drive them to go multi-platform

Once all three happened, we now have a critical mass of content, managed by a critical mass of people to make the situation, well… critical.

The reassuring bit is that none of us have all the answers. I can’t code a mobile app to save my life, or layout a page in InDesign. We must work together. This is a message that me, Kristina Halvorson, Rahel Anne Bailie, Ann Rockley, Karen McGrane and more have all be quoting specifically. Don’t be concerned if you can’t create, much less implement, an entire multi-platform content strategy by yourself. Start pairing up with those who can, and let’s learn from each other.

We’ve still been covering conceptual material. In Part 3 we'll look at specific recommended tactics for approaching mobile-ready, multi-platform content strategy.

PS - Slides from CSA here: http://slidesha.re/resuable

Mobile is Just the Beginning – Part 1 [NF0]

2012-03-21T09:41:00.001+01:00

I recently led three conference sessions in one week. They were for two communities trying to move off two different types of “pages”.

I did two sessions at Publishing Expo (generally very print-page oriented crowd) organised by Mekon, and then on the Friday at Content Strategy Applied (a very web-page oriented crowd) in the track headed up by Rahel Anne Bailie and hosted by the great folk at eBay and RLYL.

It was a fascinating opportunity to compare and contrast the mentalities regarding publishing, and mobile of course was high on the topic list.

The ‘guts’ of this 3 part post are in Part 2 and Part 3, which detail the issue and how to approach resolving it, but I think Part 1 is important scene-setting.

Web enters Print’s Victim Support Group

By the Content Strategy Applied session at the end of the week, I was very comfortable dropping into my session the comment: Web's lull is over.

The process of communication enjoyed a 550+ year lull where we enjoyed unchallenged, single-format paradigm: the printed page. Technology moves faster now, and the desktop-web-focused paradigm is now shifting with the introduction of mobile after only 10-ish years of real dominance.

But we online publishers must now adapt exactly as print publishers before us did and, as they did, accept that a paradigm-shift, not format-change, is happening. Interestingly, many print-oriented folk are still adapting to web, which shows just how long paradigm shifts can take.

Lily-pad Hopping: What’s the New Master Format?

My belief is that we have to be careful to not seek the new 'dominant' format. I have heard some folks talking about mobile being the new thing (as if an iPad, Kindle, and blackberry were somehow just one thing). Something along the lines of "We must now design our content for mobile and adapt back to desktop (and it goes without saying that print can take a hike)," but there's not a lot of detail supplied after that.

Mobile as we know it today is just the tip of the iceberg. On the CS Google Group, Ann Rockley chimed in on this topic, fresh off her new release of the seminal Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, she said:

The scary thing right now is that we are having a lot of device wars. Everyone is jockeying for ultimate supremacy. In some ways this is good because we get a lot of innovation, but in a lot of ways it is bad because we can’t just do one thing and expect it to work everywhere.

In my sessions I talked about all the various technology companies out there tripping over themselves trying to provide new, better, cheaper ways to interact with content. Smart phones and tablets that seemed like science fiction in 2000 don’t even raise an eyebrow today. It’s the responsibility of the contents strategist to think strategically for the brand. That is, not for the course of a project lifecycle, but the life of the content and the brand. We need to think long-term and act short term to prepare.

My favourite examples of the potential to come are the http://eink.com/rugged.html video where we see the same screen technology that is used in the Kindle get folded, hit, submerged, burnt, and more, and still keep on ticking (take that Timex), and Corning’s Day Made of Glass:

In short – content is REALLY going to become king.

When access becomes this ubiquitous, we’ll be designing content for a vast number of scenarios and contexts we’re not even thinking of today.

If we keep trying to find the new format or tool that is going to magic away our issues, we’re jumping to a lily-pad, waiting until it sinks under us and then desperately trying to time our jump to the next one. Jump too early and you splash down in the water, jump too late and you sink and drown by simple inaction.

Side-Step the Format War

We must design for maximum agility (intelligence, nimble-ness, reusability, adaptability, etc) in the content itself so we can tackle X number of formats.

This was the warning that the XML/structure folks were giving 20 years ago. XML folks said. "We'll be ready for whatever may come if we bite this bullet today." It's those folks who transitioned their content AND their people a decade or more ago who are most ready to take on new formats now.

They analysed their content models, built mark-up based, platform-agnostic ways of structuring and storing it, and proved their content was future-proofed, as promised.

Now web needs to bite that same bullet. Our customers don't want PDFs or websites or mobile apps, they want them all.

It’s not so bad

You may be suitably concerned by now, but it’s not all fire and brimstone. Content folks should know that mark-up is the easiest bit. You learn some tags. Boom. Done. Most of us have a reasonable grip on HTML and many get CSS, even if we can't code CSS ourselves. It’s the other parts that are difficult and need collaborative, multi-disciplinary approaches

Writing reusable, info-typed modules and thinking format-free is harder than the mark-up. New editorial processes and managing things against a taxonomy is harder. Information modelling to decide how and when to use what tags is harder.

All content folks of various specialisms need to adapt to new format-neutral processes. There's challenges but by no means impossibilities. The world move from pen to typewriters to computers. In the 70s, executives couldn't type, and there was such a thing as a 'typing pool'. Now typing is not a specialist skill. People learned. They'll learn this too. The worms, however, will go to the early birds.

So What Do We Do?

The following parts of this post will discuss some more specific techniques and things to think about when going mobile-ready:

Tech Comm 2.0 - Article Thoughts [NF0]

2012-03-20T17:42:00.001+01:00

I just read (devoured) the new article by two ragingly clever and engaging personalities in the Content World: Jack Molisani and Scott Abel. The article was entitled: Tech Comm 2.0: Reinventing our Relevance in the 2000s.

The central thesis is that Technical Communicators have to rethink and re-market themselves in the wake of overwhelming market changes if they want to thrive and survive.

The advice for is Tech Communicators / Tech Writers to stop envisioning themselves in these terms (you’re not valuable because you write words good n’ stuff) and expand their footprint into “professionals who solve business problems”.

Or as they put it:

To be successful, technical communication professionals must present themselves in a way that clearly describes the value they bring to organizations.

I think the article was good. In fact, it reminds me very much of my own personal term war, not against the word “Writer”, but the word “document”. I find “documentation” to be a passive and retrospective act. It seems by definition to not be part of product development, but something that simply reflects – documents – the facts of the product in a text-based form. That’s all sorts a’ awful.

Scott and Jack even singled out my favourite pet hate, documents that say things like “Enter your name in the name field”.

Communication Spectrum

So although I’m sympathetic to the cause, my only criticism is that finishing it I felt the TC community was given instruction and impetus to act, and a helpful and reassuring catalogue of the tools with which to take action, but what they’re supposed to do wasn’t quite clear.

In the "TC as a profession" section there was a list of jobs that are typical in product companies. Everything from Product Manager, Business Analyst and Product Architects to Marketers, Sales Reps and Tech Support. All of which used skills that were listed as being similar to core technical communicator skills.

In the "Lather, rinse, repeat" section, it almost seemed to me TCs should pick from the list of the jobs whichever they feel like and go be one of those instead of being TCs/TWs. I know Scott and Jack and, as said, they’re both very clever. I don’t think they’re saying TCs should go be Sales Reps or Dev engineers per se (but if you have those skills why not), so some differentiation and clarification at the end would have been good.

The reason I’m blogging this particular article is put in my support, but also to highlight the difference between “most” (always dangerous to generalise") Tech Writers and the people who staff these other jobs. The difference is that most tech writers are strongest in written communication. Tech Writers who can deliver strong live presentations, engaging training or a compelling sales pitch are more rare.

There’s a sort of skills spectrum between live, real-time and persuasive communications and supporting, asynchronous communication – some of us are really good live but can’t write, some are great on paper, but PowerPoint and a microphone are our worst enemies. I think this distinction got left out of the article.

My own two cents here are that if you are a writer branching out, it’s good to try to establish where you are on that communication spectrum, and match yourself to the specialism that works best. If you’re good with words, but need to rehearse and be well prepared to deliver them orally, you can probably do great video voice-overs or tutorial scripts or even write training material, but delivering training material or handling angry customers on tech support lines is probably not for you.

I’m only adding some detail to the main message: know thyself. That’s not limit thyself, but put your efforts into something that’s leveraging your core strengths. The idea that technical communicators need to specialise and market themselves differently is, for me, a no brainer.

If you haven’t already, read the article right now.

Footnote: Doc-to-Help

The first page of the article is a full-page ad for Doc-to-Help’s “multiplatform” solution. I find the ad placement incredibly ironic. I'm assuming that was the publisher's decision (as opposed to the author’s or ComponentOne’s).

Scott and Jack are breaking it down as to why TCs need to think outside the box, get ready for really new scenarios and ways of operating, and Doc-to-Help are essentially saying, "Screw it! Just do the same ol' junk in Word and we'll automagic it into future-proof multi-channel content for you! TADA! Put your heads firmly back in the sand reassured by the wonders of software tools!"

It’s a whole other blog as to all the reasons that that approach and way of thinking are wrong, wrong and also very very wrong. It is the Tech Comms equivalent of traditional publishers who think that saving a magazine as PDF is effectively preparing their content for mobile delivery.

The article mentions XML in the first few lines and gives the example case-study of iFixit.com, another XML-based platform. What is core to XML and multi-platform deliver is modularity. ComponentOne (the irony just won’t stop) are encouraging you to keep going with linear, ‘book—style’ documentation, and just pressing a button and making them into mobile deliverables.

Your documents are never “one component”, they’re a rich combination of different entities that are of interest to different users in different contexts at different times… I don’t want to go into it here, but read some of the books on the reading list, especially those by Ann Rockley, and you’ll learn why this approach has no future.

The future is not in multi-platform tools, it’s in multi-platform thinking. More on that in my recent presentation at Content Strategy Applied in London.

Speaking at Publishing Expo 2012 [NF0]

2012-01-04T15:34:00.001+01:00

For those considering the Publishing Expo Conference Feb 28-29 – I’ll be there with some favourite Congility speakers. We’re still accepting last-minute submissions for remaining speaking slots too.

Presentations should be educational, conceptual or "thought-leading" oriented presentations, i.e., not a commercial sales pitch.

They can sent by email to georgina.johnson@mekon.com.

Here’s a bit of background on the event:

Publishing Expo 2012 – Content Agility Theatre

The Content Agility Theatre is back at Publishing Expo 2012. It will focus on core challenges facing the modern publisher in today’s user-led publishing landscape, and educate and inform visitors on the processes, strategies and technologies required to overcome them.

Content Agility means making information agile, portable and reusable – abilities made ever more critical by eBooks, ePub 3.0, mobile web.

These tools are faster and more powerful than anything we’ve had before, but how do you leverage them without increasing complexity and risk?

The Theatre will feature key presentations from internationally recognised consultants, thought-leaders, and content strategists. They work with organisations the world over, helping them make relevant, excellent content available in the context and format of the consumer’s choosing.

Publishing Expo 2012 – CA Theatre Featured speakers:

Rahel Anne Bailie, Senior Consultant and Content Strategist, Intentional Design, will discuss making e-Pubs relevant to the audience as well as the business.
Noz Urbina, Senior Consultant and Content Strategist, Mekon Ltd., will discuss updating your content strategy for a community-driven world.
Brett Freeman, Content Publishing Specialist, Aptara, will address publishing content to digital platforms.
Anne Caborn, Co-founder and Content Development Specialist, CDA, will take you through governing digital content to achieve agility while avoiding risk.

http://publishing-expo.co.uk/content-agility-theatre

Musings On Choosing a CMS: Feature Overload [NF0]

2011-12-08T12:34:00.003+01:00

Missing the point completely...

I’m working with a major client choosing a CMS.

In this particular choice, it’s a multi-year, multi-million dollar choice.

If all goes well, it will eventually be a system that touches from at least 1000, to many thousands of staff.

Their demanding business context has quickly filtered the market from literally thousands to only a handful of systems. We’re now down to two major vendors. The first of these vendors is demonstrating their extremely powerful system.

Problem: it’s too powerful, and too customisable.

Spoiled for Choice

The system is positively bristling with functions, but as a result, it looks unusable. By the end of this week we’ll have spent 4 straight days digging through this thing. As the product selection team, we’re looking at as many aspects as humanly possible before the selection process itself stops being cost effective.
What’s happening is that with too many ways to do something and too many options, the whole thing seems daunting. If you’ve not used a CMS before, or used only lightweight or simplistic ones (you know who you are, Vendors!) then a big customisable beastie can start to look like something you’d dread putting your users in front of, then having to train on and support.

Metrics vs Feelings [NF1]*

As scientific and unbiased as we try to make software decisions, there’s a very real and human component. And it’s an important one. When I talk about brand I talk a lot about the brand “experience”.

The whole “holistic content strategy” thing is about looking at all aspects of how content affects the experience of the brand. It’s crucial to whether we’ll move from one phase of a relationship to another.
For this project we’ve defined 31 high-level use cases which between them have nearly 350 specific points of evaluation. Each evaluation point is then given a score and weighting multiplier, resulting in lots of juicy math and pretty pie-charts to make everyone feel confident and rest easy.

But do you go with the system that’s better on paper, or the one that feels like you could live with it?

Take Aways

What I’d like to put forward here is two musings from my experience with buying CMSs:

Not Just a Pretty Face

Don’t dismiss UI discussions as a software ‘beauty pageant’. UI discussions are important. Bad UI in your internal systems is damaging to performance in the same way as bad design of the content you’re managing in it. The message gets lost, and you’re slowed, if not prevented, from realising your goals.
The fact that staff can be “told” to do their jobs but users can’t be “told” to engage with your content has some effect, but don’t rely on this factor. This is especially true for those looking at buying XML/DITA-capable CMSs.

It’s Not About You

That said, remember that this is technology we’re talking about. Configuration options can be overwhelming, but especially with big systems, they’re there for a reason.

You want something that can grow with your business. As the stakeholders in the system decision it’s your responsibility to understand how the system could look different to different user roles in your organisation.
The fact you’ve got to sit through ALL those options, doesn’t mean they do. You’ve got to sit through 20 examples of how the interface could look, but they’ll only get one or two. As with all decisions in business, we must step outside of our emotional reactions and think on behalf of others.

Use the Math

The Use Cases and formal points of evaluation are your sanity check. As much as I think that people should weigh subjective user experience into the decision matrix, it is one – albeit important – factor among many.
Develop your use cases well, validate them with your users, then make your vendors go through them, ideally, with your content.

Investing in your use cases is vital. Then you’ve got to brief the vendors to make sure they walk through them properly. It’s easy to squander huge amounts of time, and eventually not be comparing apples to apples in the flow of canned demos.

If you don’t structure your evaluation, you’re only left with “I liked that one better, and I’m pretty sure they ticked all our boxes”. That’s not a reason to invest in any key system, and not a defensible position if anyone asks in 6 months time what you did with all that budget.

Any one else have CMS selection tips they can share?

* This is an NF (Nerd Factor) Rating

Nerd Factor 4, Mr Sulu: Revising My Posting Metadata

2011-12-01T12:19:00.001+01:00

Hello Readerinos,

I love to talk brand, and customer experience and ROI impact until I’m blue in the face. I also get lots of people asking me about some seriously hardcore stuff, and work on some of the world’s largest and meanest content munching machines.

As a result, I’ve gotten myself blog readers at both ends of the content strategy technical interest spectrum.

I need to help readers find the stuff that’s going to add value to them, and pass over (for now) the stuff replete with language and acronyms that to everyone else is gibberish.

Presenting the Nerd Factor Ratings System

Photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NERD.png

So, from now on, I’m going to try rank and tag the technie-ness of my posts from 0 (General) to 4 (Gandalf the White Ninja of Content Coding). So watch for [NF0],[NF2], etc. tags in blog and section titles.

This extra metadata should help you find the content that’s appropriate for your interests.

I hope my readers take the opportunity to push themselves a bit, but I also want you to spare your time for the posts that are going to help you in your work!

Now that I’ve got the levels, I’ll try to make sure I’m blogging at each one with some regularity.

Enjoy!

Here’s some examples of questions I might answer or things I might talk about in each level:

General Audience Stuff [NF0]

Content affects the customer experience!
Brand management and content management are kindred fields!
Here's some tips on selling content value to managers.
It’s about knowledge, communication, collaboration and money.

Somewhat Nerdy Stuff [NF1]

Here's some tips on building a content inventory.
Look what I found out by analysing the SEO of this content.
Change management and process factors to think about before integrating CMSs between departments.
How does terminology management affect content reuse and readability?

Definitively Nerdy Stuff [NF2]

What metrics should I report on in an XML system to prove to management we're performing?
How should I evaluate a DITA CMS before buying one?

Very Nerdy Stuff [NF3]

What’s new in DITA 1.2? What is editor support like?
Here’s a new webinar on DITA 1.2 keys!
What’s the best way the set up my DITA metadata and folder taxonomy for organising my @conref targets?

About as Nerdy as I Ever Get [NF4]

When should I use @conkeyref and when should I use @ttr conditions?
Is it ANT scripts or XSLTs that you need to customise to get your DOT output ready for processing to XSL:FO/PDF and CHM deliverables?

2 New Webinars: Socially Enabled Help, DITA 1.2

2011-11-28T12:17:00.001+01:00

Some new webinars coming at you! Both delivered in partnership DCL and their DCL Learning Series.

Upcoming next week and beyond, I’ve got some DITA 1.2

DITA 1.2 Interactive Tutorial: Three Part Online Mini-Series

Register/Learn more »

On-demand you’ve got:

Socially Enabling Documentation in the Cloud

“Social” isn’t limited to WIKIs, Forums, Facebook, and Twitter.

More and more organisations are looking at how community content can complement (and in some cases replace) their formal product content. Also, many are noticing how much overlap there is with social content platforms and their own intranets, internal business collaboration and knowledge sharing platforms.

For most, putting documentation fully in the hands of the users – even internal subject matter experts – isn’t an option, 1or is simply not desirable. Also, creating yet another silo of social content isn’t helpful for users trying to find answers.

So, how can community and formally created content play nicely together?

On this session see best practice concepts and case study examples demonstrating:

The pitfalls of poorly implemented social functions
How the DITA platform can form the core of a socially-enabled documentation platform
The key social features that organisations are implementing – and the back-end processes required to prevent chaos
How internal SME and external customer communities can be leveraged for maximum benefit to both
The impact on: editorial process, metrics and measurement, version management, content models, workflow, and metadata strategies

View Online »

Content Strategy Day @ Tekom / TCWorld Oct 19, 2011

2011-10-10T17:25:00.001+02:00

Hello!

In a big rush but just wanted to let everyone know about the Content Strategy Day at TCWorld in Germany next week.

Led by Scott Abel, TheContentWrangler, this should be a great event within a great event!

Here are two links to more complete and tantalising blog posts:

Interview with the Michael Fritz, Executive Director of tekom:

http://bit.ly/tcw11cs

An overview of Content Strategy day by Scott Abel:

http://bit.ly/tcw11cs2

Content Strategy Day Speakers and Topics

Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler – Introduction to Content Strategy: Why do we need a content strategy, anyway?
Joe Gollner, Gnostyx Research – An Introduction to Intelligent Content Strategies
Ann Rockley, The Rockley Group – eBooks 101: Developing a unified digital content strategy for eBooks and apps
Aaron Fulkerson, MindTouch – Thinking differently about customer support content: Designing a Help 2.0 strategy
Rahel Anne Bailie, Intentional Design and Geoffrey Roberts, Nokia – Adventures in Localization: The oft forgotten stepchild of content strategy
B. Noz Urbina, Mekon – Content Strategy is a many-splendored thing: Breaking down technical communication silos

Hope to see you there!

Socially Enabled Documentation in the Cloud: Dangerous, Benefits, Getting There

2011-10-06T18:02:00.001+02:00

Hiddly-ho, Readerinos!

FYI - I'll be doing a webinar on one of my favourite topics Oct 12th: Social enablement of technical communications.

Socially Enabled Content…?

Social Enablement…? Socially Enabled Technical Communication?

What on earth is that? Glad you asked!

“Social” isn’t limited to WIKIs, Forums, Facebook, and Twitter, and "Communities" doesn't just mean external customers, they're you and your colleagues as well.

Social enablement basically means taking traditional content, and complementing (not necessarily replacing) it with community-driven social functionality like:

user contributions and conversations
community activity monitoring
tagging
ranking and metrics

All for the good of the users and the enterprise. And in the Cloud, and using DITA XML, so that it's easy to roll out and access from smartphones, tablets, PCs and (gasp!) print.

I'll be going over some of the content strategy pitfalls, issues, and gotchas as well as walking through an example where we're prototyping social features in what was, 18 months ago, a traditional unstructured manufacturing tech docs environment

Hope we see you there!

Noz

Mobile Content Busts Industry Silos

2011-09-24T12:38:00.002+02:00

For me CS Forum made the penny drop for the “Why now?” question.

We’ve been harping on about the importance of product information and separating content from format for years. Why is everyone listening all of a sudden? Methinks it’s mobile.

When the web and CD-roms hit the documentation community we suddenly had a second format to which all our content just had to go.

Print content was not good enough anymore. Content needed to be single-source, multiple output. Heads and tears rolled aplenty. It was an agonizing and painful lesson that some companies are still grappling with today, some two decades later.

Since then we’ve had a whole generation of professionals who grew up fully on the web, considering the browser and the personal computer to be the way to access information. A new monotheism for content. Progress was over and nothing could ever be cooler than accessing content on your computer, it was just matter of refining how.

Until mobile.

Thank you Apple for the iPhone

As much as I am not a fan of Apple or their products, they have lots of things for which I respect them. High on the list is that they seriously took mobile devices mainstream. There’s a whole ecosystem of Android based devices (currently whipping their asses – burn!) specifically because Apple took smart phones from “nerd toy” territory to “normal phone”. Then they had the brainwave to say: “Tablets aren’t skinny crippled laptops, they’re big (crippled) phones!”

Now we all know how to use tablets, even if we’ve never picked one up.

We Are Not Alone

Mobile internet access is overtaking desktop-based access as our primary way of getting information (http://bit.ly/mobvsdesk).

Mobile and its nasty combination of “little website” and “web app” modalities has given the web community a running kick to the tenders, just like the internet gave us way back when.

Suddenly, single source, multiple output and separation of form and content look really interesting.

Information Beats Persuasion: CS Forum 2011 Afterthoughts

2011-09-24T01:27:00.001+02:00

I spoke at CS Forum earlier this month on Content Strategy.

My presentation title (suck as it did) was "B2B Content Strategy: How to create company- and customer-focused content". Terrible. But still, people seemed to see through that and show up.

Here's my feelings on, and inspired by, the event:

I liked CS Forum a lot. Like, a lot. It was definitely eye opening!

People Are Getting Enable vs. Persuade

My most epic of blog of all time addressed the landmark case of Enable vs. Persuade, aka MarComm vs TechComm. Summarising 3000+ words into much fewer:

Focus first on helping people do what they want, and they’ll do what you want.

Check this post from just today on the CS Google Group by Ian Waugh entitled, “Product 'support' content as marketing/sales”:

“Wonder if you can help me? I've heard and read a couple of things recently about the benefits of providing support content like a PDF manual as part of a product description page in an ecommerce site, and the effect that it can have on sales.

I agree with this intuitively, I know I have bought products after looking at the user manual before purchase.
Guess it fits in with the whole "information beats persuasion" kind of approach.”

"Information beats persuasion" Wow. So, 3000+ words down to 3. Good ratio.

For me reading emails like this is like being handed water after running a marathon that lasted 11 years.

Now, there are many more people than I’d have imagined in the web content strategy community who are thinking about this stuff. They’re considering the overlap and touch-points between web/marketing content strategy and, for lack of a better description the "format agnostic" and “product content-centric” content strategy on which I focus.

If they weren't thinking about it before CS Forum, they were thinking about it after.

Killer Keynotes

Both of the first keynote talks - Gerry McGovern and Karen McGrane - were dead on. They talked about task orientation, technical information and its role in the (modern, online) sales cycle. My favourite quote of the conference was Gerry's:

"The content that use to come after the sale, is now driving the sale".

Karen even specifically did us a shout-out by name:

"The Techcomm folks have been doing this stuff [that we in the rest of the CS world need to do] for years. We need to engage with them."

She talked about a "Content API" which was like a CMS which can content to any format you want, even ones that have not been invented yet, and allow mash-ups of content to any device easily and quickly.
I realised that that was not a normal thing at this event. This was a conference where CMSs publish to one format/channel: the web. The extra fancy super-duper ones will do multi-language and serve up your mobile site.

The stuff our customers bang on us for, was a bridge way too far. Stuf like:

Generating content that goes to offline-capable mobile apps
Delivering dynamically to user-driven, nicely formatted print-ready PDF
Serving up content as a service to multiple internal and external websites

Just today I have a conf call about a customer who wants to move to publishing knowledge base content from one repository (authored by various flavours of support and service engineer) and standard content (written by technical authors and trainers) from another repository inside their product itself.
The products have sometimes PCs attached, and sometimes they have data screens (like the data dashboard console in newer cars). Why not get some real, dynamic content in there? Embedded, integrated, social content.

Content Drives the Customer Experience

People are starting to realise that when you buy a TV for $800, you go online first - a lot - and when you do so, being told that it's "elegantly designed" and "sleek" is not compelling. Being told it's got a USB port that can open those movies oh-so-legally downloaded is.

You may not know what your TV being 100 megahertz or 50 megahertz means, but if you asked anyone (and you probably did) then you at least have a feeling of whether it’s a good thing or not.

When it’s time to shop, it’s facts and product, not concepts or “brand messages” that you are seeking. Brand messages aren’t dead, but everyone has to add “We’re here to enable you, not seduce you” to their core messages.

To quote a wise friend:

“Content drives the customer experience”.

To read more about how the web has had some fundamental flaws in how it evaluated itself, I suggest reading more on Gerry’s blog.

So after my CS Forum experience, I repeat my call for collaboration to web CSs, UX people, and IAs. We’re here to help and learn from each other. You do things we don’t, and vice versa. Let’s chat and build some content applications that drive customer experiences.

Has anyone other in the web community be thrust into a web project that’s pushed you out of your comfort zone? “After sales” material mixing in with your copy? Apps? Print? If so:

How did it go?
How did you handle keeping that all in sync with other deliverables?
How did workflows, process and roles have to change vs. what you’re used to?
How did management envision all this and what drove the new approach?

I’m been hearing experiences from the other side of the fence and I’m looking forward to more stories!

Making Socially Enabled User Assistance Better– “Help” vs. ”HEEELP!”

2011-07-20T11:23:00.011+02:00

Someone posted to the Content Strategy Google Group asking about Help content. I didn’t have a lot of time so I pinged over my fav article going on Help these days: Scott Abel’s The Future of Technical Communication Is Socially Enabled: Understanding the Help 2.0 Revolution.

Then I did a runner…

Since, Dana Chisnell then challenged me:

Why are you providing help? Any time you have a separate system for the help, you're in trouble. Embedding the assistance in the UI and surfacing it when the user needs it will work much, much better.

Which is of course, preaching to the choir. I couldn't be more in agreement.

Socially enabled help almost immediately begets socially enabled embedded help. It's only logical, and it’s not even my idea, it’s already happening.

Smart companies generally (regardless of social enablement) are bringing user assistance (the posh word for Help these days) into the UX and the UI, not making it retrospective.

On demand is good, but you want to assist users before they ‘demand’ it. In other words: Help should help, not wait until the user needs 'HEEELLP!' (Tweet that, I dares ya!)

The Problem With The World Today

Today the user assistance UX story is:

“What's that? I can't figure out this UI! Now my User Experience is broken and I hate this company! HEEELP!

It should be:

'What's that?'

Helpful bit of content appears to the rescue!

'Oh. Ok. Now back to what I was doing'

I’m sure Scott’s probably got this in mind too as our brain children go to the same school of thought. It’s nice. Lovely play areas and recess is 9 times a day. And they serve the kids wine…

What you need to do

Anyway! If it wasn’t explicit enough, I’ll provide some detail (in my own words, so I don’t want anyone to think I’m speaking for Scott without permission). Here’s Noz’s official to-do list for the Help World:

Help needs to be socially enabled (Scott’s already broke it down for you)
Help content needs to be brought into devices and UIs (hardware, software, website - whatever!) so that those with content skills work in harmonious partnership with those that have UI, UX and development skills.
The application assistance architecture should be socially extensible so that the social components of help integrate nicely with the brand-generated components

Here’s some examples of companies that have it part right:

Adobe Photoshop Help Offline

Right-click and view/open in a new window to enlarge.

If you’re offline, hit F1 in PS and you go to a html-based help file (html, running offline from a folder on your computer). Note the PDF link on top right!

Defaultpagesayswhat? Community help! In other words, to REALLY get the full experience, go online and join the party, silly!

Adobe Photoshop Help Online

Turn ye ol’ Net back on and Adobe takes you straight to a website that looks exactly the same, but new features abound!

Feedback
Options to search through help for other applications
Still available as PDF!
Community intro link available (blue, bottom left)
Commenting
Comments RSS feed (subscribe to this piece of content!)
And so on… explore it yourself for fun.

Right-click and view/open in a new window to enlarge.

Good, but could be better.

Let’s compare with one of my favourite apps, Ableton Live:

Ableton Live Context Ultra-sensitive Help

Right-click and view/open in a new window to enlarge.

In Ableton, help is in panes within the UI. Once you’re experienced user, you hide them both away and only bring them back as needed.

Big stuff like tutorials, walkthroughs, set-up instructions, is on the right in the main help pane (F1).
Bottom left we have a little hide-able pane that constantly pops helpful information and short-cuts for ANYTHING I hover my mouse over (the 'Live Device Browser' in this case). That is to say, new users just leave that baby open, and you instantly know what every UI item works, and the short-cut for triggering it:

Compare this to user's alternative workflow:

'What's this? How do I use it?'

Learns how to use it is somehow. By looking it up? Probably not...
Starts getting into productive work...

'Showing and hiding this thing is annoying....
Hmmm...maybe there's a short-cut...?
Do I want to stop what I'm doing and look it up?
No.
Actually, yes... this is annoying...I'll go look it up!'

...and how mad are they going to be if it turns out there is no short-cut after all?

The Promised Land

Of course, we should bring the two together, so that the web snazzies of Adobe’s help appear in the UI like Ableton. In time dear friends, but fear not, that is where we’re heading!

Agree? Disagree? Let me have it in the socially-enabled comments!

UPDATE!

Dana pointed out I forgot to mention mobile devices and hit me with this great soundbite:

"...we should all be thinking about what will work on the tiny screen that will scale up, not the other way around."

I also forgot to mention:

Great help doesn't mean UI/UX designers can all start leaving work at 3pm! The idea is to avoid needing to get help in the first place, no matter how nicely it's delivered.
Those implementing DITA or any other Component CMS platform should be thinking about how this social content gets round-tripped back into source so that the brand-sourced content, service desk knowledge-bases, intranets, and the product itself are all improved by leveraging the crowd's contributions.

Time Go Bye Bye, DITA Training, Largest DITA Project Ever

2011-07-19T09:18:00.002+02:00

Wow...

Time has just... gone!

It seems like last week I was delivering my opening address, somewhat exhausted, at Congility 2011.

The event wasn't even over and we were letting people know about the DITA Training courses on offer at Congility South. Not to mention my having to prepare the course itself.

A heartbeat after I was whisked away to begin work on what is one of the largest DITA Content Management projects of my career, and the biggest Content Technology Audit (CTA, similar to a Content Strategy Audit but systems-focussed) I've ever done. They have 1000 (one THOUSAND) dedicated technical authors worldwide with 10,000 (you heard me) engineers looking to contribute natively into DITA topics. They said full roll-out numbers might be 30,000 users globally. If we opt to go for direct Engineer contributions, they will have more DITA authors than most companies have staff!

Oh, and they're working off the file system - no CMS support.

DITA Gone Wild

It's been a fascinating example of DITA pushed to the limits. They products are set up in a 'platform>product' way where specific products are built off the platforms, so there is extensive reuse. But:

They various builds of the software run in parallel, meaning there's reuse from platforms but also any number of parallel builds of the software
The need to keep maintaining all the various versions - current, plus 2 versions back
They have to reuse extensively into training materials
There's hardware too...
Oh... and just for fun, it's full of client-specific stuff

They're handling this all with extensive branching and merging, and more conditions than I've ever seen. They're conditionalising content by:

Version - because of all the branching and parallel development, different versions are considered different products
Audience - Including the employees, the public, and customers
Outputclass: e.g., chm and pdf
Platform - what base platform is the product derived from

Single lines like 'The XYZ product can boil a chicken in 5 minutes if you press the "boil" button' might be conditionalised to the point where it can say:

The XYZ23 product can boil, or broil a chicken in 5-10 minutes if you press the "cook" button
The XYZ27 product can cook a chicken in 15 minutes automatically
The ABC123 product can boil a turkey in 20 minutes if you press the "boil" button
The 321CBA product can nuke a turkey, squab or chicken if you press the "Angry birds" button

And so on, and so on and so on aaand so on...

Imagine working on the sentences while looking at a document module (DITA Topic) where all that is being expressed simultaneously. and then sharing modules like that that were created by other people for use in your documents. Without a database...

What is amazing is how well they're managing. I have amazing respect for what they've already accomplished. Now they've asked for help to go from managing to optimising and really tuning for the customer's interests.

I'll let you know how we get on.

Overall I'm really enthused by seeing such a huge DITA project be a success, and now, having the opportunity to help take it to the next level. Lame, but that gives me the warm and squishies inside.

Geek corner

For the nerds out there, I'm seeing now just how interesting DITA Keys and Conkeyref are to the scalability of reuse, especially combined with Conditions. I'm upping the focus on them significantly at Congility South.

Also, I've finally got a little workshop together on Context-sensitive help in DITA. I had a real developer build me an actual application that I can use to demonstrate the concepts and make new context sensitive help on the fly for various formats from DITA source

Now I just need to work out how to use it to teach conditions as well... and make it call a website instead of a local help file...

When Content Strategies Collide Pt 6: Conclusion, Unification

2011-05-14T11:56:00.004+02:00

(Reposting this after it was deleted by Blogger’s maintenance update)

I’ve harped about Marketing vs. Technical Communication Content Strategy in this wacky World of Content for a while now. The thesis in short is that we can and must integrate content strategy across these divisions for the sake of competitiveness and customer experience in the modern global market.

Now here’s the wrap-up and what I think we should really be doing about it. Your comments have indicated that there are some glowing exceptions to the trend of separation, but that others feel the challenge is hopeless.

My final thoughts below, but here’s some links to the other posts:

Conclusion

Content Strategy is at the centre of debate right now, not only because it’s a buzzy term, but because it brings together content together with the bigger picture issues of planning and accountability. It links in with the overarching business goals that will take content to its rightful place as a strategic asset in any organisation.

Content Strategy unification, integration and sharing of standards. Is it hopeless? No. Difficult? Yes.
Companies don’t get far in a globalising marketplace when we don’t even make strategic efforts to do things because they’re "hard". We should be reassured more by our similarities than bothered by our differences.

Our customers will benefit most when we federate into a United Nations of Content, with common governance, standards, and practices which are tailored, as needed, for the business context.

We have much common ground to build on. In discussing this post with Scott Abel he articulated quite nicely that content professionals share a baseline of skill-sets like:

analytical and structural thinking
empathy for the user and usability sensibilities
the ability to express oneself in words.

Everyone in this world of communications and content rallies behind (or should?) certain battles cries:

Content is king
Content is a strategic (critical) business asset
Consistency helps us and helps customers understand and engage with us
Business needs first, technology second

Joe Gollner wrote on this blog recently and defined content quite nicely: that which goes in a container. This is most apt. If you’ve been following this series you know I am organising Congility 2011. The "unwritten theme" is recognising that all content professionals are, in the end, concerned with how to best move those containers around amongst different formats, audiences and channels to best serve our customers and business goals. When it can, you can say your content has agility.

Once you are integrated and agile, we can break down silos in delivery as well as silos in the business, and that is really when the customer and therefore the revenue stream will see some effect.

Giving the Customer What They Want

The wisdom that content is king is second (in my mind) to the older wisdom: the customer’s always right.

We’re designing customer experiences; not web pages, not manuals, not help files.
It’s about the customers and what they want to do, how they want to do it; not your content nor what you want them to do. They (may) want to buy your product, if you show them properly why they should. Especially true in the B2B space – putting meat behind the sizzle of communication is vital to engaging the modern mind.

Users want answers to their product and technical questions fast and easily in the format that’s most convenient for them. Not just support post-sales questions, but presales curiosities and decision-making questions. Persuasion loses its effect if it is not backed up with enablement.

I’ll dust off this same “The Oatmeal” cartoon from a previous post:

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/sell_generation

It talks about how to sell to the new generation (but I don’t think that is generation just in age, this applies to the new generation of consumers). He pulls out three keywords; we must be:

Sincere
Helpful
Knowledgeable

How are you really going to be helpful and knowledgeable without closing the communications loop?

Final thoughts for Web Content folk:

You are less persuasive when you spend too much time focussed on persuading.
When you’re selling technology products, the stuff that might bore you – like tables, specs, details, trouble-shooting, how-tos, and so forth – is often make or break to your customers.
There are all sorts of skills and technologies already developed for technical content that do the things you want to do like control language, metadata style, presentation, and structure across multiple formats. Some may already be in your company. Go learn about them!
There is a lot of process management experience and integration experience in the more forward thinking TechComms world. Each organisation moves at its own speed. Think of every organisation as being somewhere on a "Content Maturity Model" and check out the DITA Maturity Model, or JoAnn Hackos’ Information Process Maturity Model as examples looking at how a large business can develop its content smarts.

Final thoughts for TCs:

No matter how good your information is, if it’s still “the documentation”, then you will struggle to get it considered as a first port of call for users in trouble. Diversify your delivery methods to engage people across different media and models.
You have so much more to offer the business than you may realise. Your skills are applicable to many business critical operations on both sides of the sales / pre-sales cycle. You know how to deal with ugly, complex content. Teach your colleagues and they will thank you.
Social media a) has already impacted your career and your customer’s preferred way of ingesting information b) is your pipeline to the user feedback you’ve been denied all these years c) is more trusted than you are by an order of magnitude – you can’t beat ‘em. Join ‘em.
Search has changed everything.

Your turn

I’m really interested in hearing the from “the exceptions” – people in the collaborative, integrated, standardised teams out there. There’s been a few comments from those in shining star organisations, and some saying it’s hopeless and that the populations of these worlds could never produce ‘viable offspring’.

Can we do it? What are the half-measures in your opinion that get us at least on the road from point A to B? Where does technology fit into all this?

See also:

When Content Strategies Collide Pt 5: Is Communication Mired in the Past?

2011-04-27T19:13:00.001+02:00

My biggest, and possibly most controversial, post to-date continues with responding to and extending the question – is TechComms mired in the past?

Yes. But we’re not alone. Those of us in MarComms are at the beginning of a new dawn too. If we’re in the the past, what does the future hold? I take a little look at some cutting edge thinking…
Typewriter image used under Creative Commons License

See also:

Is TechComms mired in the past? Hell Yeah.

In Pt 2 of this series, we talked about Julie Norris’ mildly infamous comment about TechComms being mired in the past, and the voracious sh**storm that hit her after, causing her to erase the whole debacle from her blog (sadly).

The only quote I managed to save from Julie’s blog was:

“In any case, by “mired in the past” I mean a mindset that’s opposed to change, or trying new things. It’s not something new. I’ve seen it with every advance that’s come along in this industry, with every new method I’ve tried to help move along. I’m burned out with trying to explain to people the benefits of whatever is new, up-and-coming, or important to watch at the time.””

Hear, hear, Julie. There are loads of us behind you. Thought-leaders, consultants, leading bloggers and TechComms practitioners have felt the frustration of trying to move their peers in the TC community forward.

I was on a call with Ann Rockley moments after reading the firestorm about Julie’s original post, so I raised the issues with her. We’re both agreed that it’s always been this way since we started in Technical Communications – back when it was called ‘Technical Documentation’.

Ann noted that herself, Scott Abel, Rahel Bailie, and myself are all people who have, in her words, “Let but not left” – bridging the gap between the “world of TC” and the wider content community. TechComms is not to be left behind if you’re really promoting an integrated approach to content and customer experience.

---------------------------

UPDATE (18:19 18/05/2011):

Julie has commented on this post and part 2 to point out an error. Because I was not able to access her blog directly, I was left with the misinterpretation that she had in fact ‘left’ TechComms for pastures new. The truth was that was refocusing her blog away from TechComms, but she is today and will continue to be a Technical Communications practitioner. I have left the rest of the blog as was, because the key point is the reaction that the mere idea caused. At Julie’s request I have included this point of fact that she has not ‘left’ at all. Any words not quoted directly from her blog were my interpretation based on Tom Johnson’s post and the contents are not to be attributed to Julie herself.

---------------------------

Scott pointed out a word of wisdom to me: “TechComms professionals should consider how having real-time analytics and unique IDs on every piece of content they create affects their process and measurements.” Seeing how content is used, shared, and consumed can help optimise and prioritise content and tasks. Why was this procedure shared or “favourited” fifty times, and this one twice?

What does that say about the content, or even the product and its design?

^{For more, see: http://lessworkmoreflow.blogspot.com/2011/01/social-media-and-super-role-of.html}

If you don’t have public facing documentation, what about socially enabling the intranet or secure customer extranet so that key clients, or your hundreds of support, services and engineering colleagues can give you feedback after the content goes live? Imagine. Well, we have the technology! These are the same SMEs who are always ignoring your requests for feedback and reviews before content release. Post-launch is not too late to fix things in the socially enabled web world.

But, TechComms aren’t the only group of Communications and Content folks mired in the past. We all are. If we’re only on the edge of major change with a clearly visible future, then we are all, ipso facto, living the past.

Is MarComms Mired in the Past? Hell Yeah.

But I’d say less so.

The web is fast and fickle.

Web-oriented, and Marketing-oriented folks are ok with that. They’re ready to adopt whatever’s hot, leave behind what is not, and are generally vision-oriented, not detail oriented. In the Archipelago of Internet Marketing*, they quite enjoy the fluid flux and flow of web work and the instant gratification of metrics and analytics. It’s all a bit more easy-going on Ze Islands! Basically, they are committed to brand and see it as their responsibility to root out all threats to its global domination. If that includes support and technical content, so be it.

^{*See the first post in the series.}

That said, there’s definitively lots of ‘mired in the past’ thinking. Often an Internet Marketing consultant comes in, maybe with their freshly minted Content Strategist passport, and is asked to look at a business problem. This involves the audiences, the workflows and of course the content. What are we giving these people? Too often we’ll consider these issues with a marketing or brand bias, because of our backgrounds.

Content can get neglected, or it’s assumed that needed content can come from the ‘usual’ content sources. Content that comes from deeper in the organisation (for example, technical content) is the harder content to get, and therefore the easiest content to neglect.

If the content the people want is coming from technical communicators, then we have to find a way to deliver that isn’t shoving up a forum and a bunch of hard-to-index, hard-to-share PDFs on the site and calling it a ‘Knowledge and Support Centre’.

I am still hearing a lot of agencies and consultants on the web-focussed side saying “My customer just wants to launch a website. They don’t want me complicating their lives”. Why should they change when the market is not asking for change? How can you know how much more effective you can be if you don’t have other companies to benchmark yourself against?

Each consultant or software vendor is being engaged by one contact, with his or her own agenda, for his or her own department within the enterprise. Those individuals or teams are not pushing for integration the way they should be.

The true work of Content Strategy – as a field – is not done until that market mentality changes, and organisations are asking for unified, integrated content experiences for their customers.

A Glimpse at the Future

So, what does it look like when marketing and technical mentalities collaborate? Here’s just one example (I’d like to see more in the comments from all of you).

Firefox has overtaken Internet Explorer as the world’s leading Internet Browser. Look at the help content on their Sumo (Support Mozilla) site. It’s something any communicator could love. It’s engaging, aesthetic, re-enforces brand values and is tuned for the audience.

Note the stark contrast with a traditional manual or online help layout and feel.
Take this example of their help text (from the first link “How to set the home page”):

“Setting your home page in Firefox is easy. Can't decide on just one page? No problem. Firefox lets you set a group of websites as your home page.”

Friendly, chatty, and although it’s direct and to the point, has some “unnecessary” words like “Can’t decide on just one page?” that are there to connect to the user. This combination of community forum, support, and technical documentation into a single platform has enabled technical content to be tracked and measured en masse, but also by the individual author on their specific contributions. This is truly the best of all worlds.

All this content is volunteer generated. Content professionals spend so long talking about how we should speak to users, this is an example of the users showing us exactly how they want to be spoken to.

Part of what motivated this revolution in approach was: “Firefox quickly went from an early-adopters’ browser for the tech savvy (not because Firefox was hard to use, but because early adopters tend to have an affinity with technology) to a mainstream browser used by everyone.” They weren’t appealing to geeks anymore, and had to take on some slick marketing-esque techniques to make things work for the mainstream.

This line from their “Scope” topic discussing Sumo sums up the connection between content of this type, and revenue nicely:

“Firefox is one of the rare and probably the only open source project of this magnitude that has a business model. More Firefox users = More money for Firefox.”

They’ve embraced social technical content, with an aim to improve experience and revenues, and they have the metrics to prove it was a success.

To some extent, this is like gamification - i.e. rewarding positive acts with "points", levels and social recognition among peers.

Firefox are of course piping their support out through Twitter and Facebook as well.

^{For more see: http://blog.mozilla.com/sumo/2009/03/30/the-road-to-sumo-in-retrospect/}

People today (ask everyone you know who doesn’t know you’re a tech author) want to type a few words into a web page and be gratified ASAP. But, can every product be supported by online social platforms, or Twitter and Facebook specifically? No. Heck, some products still need printed manuals, because that’s the nature of their business context. Every communicator needs to explore how some new interaction models apply to their users and context, and assess if they’re still delivering the best possible communication service.

Do all products even need “technical content”? No. I’ve never read a manual for a piece of clothing, or a hotel package, but some of the websites that sold them to me might need some good guidance information to make the usable. Technical Communications aren’t just the failure of good design. Don’t think of them as a recourse, but as an asset.

In the next and final chapter, we wrap up and I solicit those exceptions that prove the rule*.

*Don’t you just love that expression? So delightfully nonsensical…

See also:

When Content Strategies Collide Pt 4: Enabling vs. Persuasive Content

2011-04-21T09:18:00.000+02:00

Part 4 of my post comparing Marketing Content Strategy vs. Technical Communication Content Strategy. A love letter to the community and a petition that yes, we can all just get along… even if we have several valid and deeply rooted differences.

We’ve started with the World of Content: the virtual geographic landscape where content flows like water through various channels and lines, digital and otherwise. Then the customer – the one who suffers our divide, and then looked at the nature of what separates us.

Now going into the cultural differences and ‘geographic’ differences between marketing and technical content strategy.

Cultural Divide

Supporting vs. Leading, Proven and Familiar vs. New and Sexy…

As far as I’m concerned, the most powerful thing that divides the content world is simple: “persuasive” vs. “enabling” content. Everything from the most technical – technical data specifications – to the most persuasive – ad copy, is all content that touches the customer. So you have:

Persuasive – Content that leads the customer to your goals – the usual goal is that they buy stuff, or, promote your brand so that their peers buy stuff. When planning and creating this content there’s lots of talk of brand messages, engaging with the brand, calls to action, conversion rates, and so on. It’s front-line web pages, mailer content, ad copy, brochure copy, and the like.
Enabling – Content that supports the customer in their goals. Here we’ve got manuals, tech specs, help, forums, self-serve support materials.

^{I also discuss this on a podcast on Idwratherbewriting.com}

Again, when these two content areas aren’t in synch, you get negatively impacted customer experience. No one in the World of Content wants the content consumers to have a bad experience.

Rahel put it very well on her blog:

I would argue that, despite the perception that websites consist of marketing content, for many sites, the marketing content is only the top layer – the icing on the cake, and what supports that top layer is a substantial amount of technical content – the cake itself.

^{Image: Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Note: Nerd that I am, I took 45 minutes to choose this cake. I like it because the icing layer also shares content with the cake layers below, just more pretty and glossy-like. : D}

That technical content is often far more valuable to the corporate or product brand than the persuasive content. In doing user research for one client in particular, a manufacturer of power generators and inverters, I saw how guys used their site. Consistently, they would bypass all of the marketing material and go right for the specs. (Of course, before the site revamp, a lot of the specs were missing or buried in a PDF in some obscure area of the site…)”

Andrew Bredenkamp, CEO of acrolinx – a product that has been very successful in major TechComms organisations helping people control their language, keep to a corporate terminology base and monitor style and writing, was recently blogging about how all these things apply to web marketing’s baby: SEO.

…what was most interesting talking to people in the Marketing space, and especially SEO, was how familiar the issues were to me. I kept hearing words like “shared vocabulary”, “establishing brand voice and style”, and *everyone* was talking about keywords and keyword research.

So, same tools, same drivers, different application and different content professionals benefiting. Web marketing folks: think about it. You might have already bought something in your organisation that helps you automatically police style and word usage on your website, or many other things you’re looking to do but don’t know how.

Generally, there’s divisive attitudes about new technologies and content channels. For example, XML and DITA are often considered scary, “techie” and complex by the web marketing world, whereas Social Media is often, unfortunately, considered frivolous and irrelevant by the TechComms world.

^{Related article on social media and TechComms available here.}

Geography

MarComms and TechComms generally exist on different branches of the org chart and generally, in the product life cycle. Marketing kicks into gear mostly late, when there’s something they can start to make noise about. TechComms wants to be integrated as early as possible into the product development cycle. To have the content ready for launch, they need lots of warning and lead time.

I’m going to stretch my analogy a bit here and include some real geography and another continental crash: the one of east meets west. The western world is hotly debating what will happen when Asia “hits”, and global competition ratchets up several notches.

For MarComms, we all keep getting reminded that the west will need to compete on service and brand, as price and even product quality can be duplicated more easily. TechComms is an asset here. By integrating processes with the other organisations, you have:

Keyword rich information (it’s all about the product and related ideas)
Content that many customers really, really want
Content that helps do things like seed forums and that can sit side-by-side with user generated content
A differentiator that supports your after sales experience, and therefore customer experience and brand

If TechComms provides you content that solves users’ problems, and other users can see that, share it, and help their friends solve their problems, then you’re cultivating happier customers.

For TechComms, globalisation REALLY matters

I live in Spain. I buy far more products than I used to that are made in countries where English isn’t the native language. As globalisation increases, I’m going to get even more clunky and/or badly translated manuals under my nose than before (the current crop are often hilarious). As a result, my inclination to bother even opening them to check if that particular company delivers good content is going to get smaller and smaller.

We’ve been begrudgingly discussing the comment “No one wants to read the manual” for years. Add the content of a new, non-native English, non-EU economy’s to the landscape. Now they REALLY don’t want to! At least not in its traditional manual/help format.

Is it safe to assume all content created abroad will be poor? Absolutely not, but with the number of companies scrambling to get involved, the chances of content being left behind are high.

Do any of you have any experience with trying to bridge the timezones and language barriers with content? I’d be interested in hearing anecdotes and approaches. Happy to compare notes.

Next post we’ll go into the question: Is TechComms mired in the past? Is MarComms? And we’ll look at what the future could look like.

When Content Strategies Collide Pt 3: War. Huh! What is it Good For?

2011-04-16T18:12:00.001+02:00

This is Part 3 “When Content Strategies Collide – MarComms vs. TechComms”.
Today we’ll look at how the gap between communications departments (specifically Technical and Marketing) persists despite the damage to customer experience.

See also:

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Like many neighbouring nations, we get very excited about our little differences instead of focussing on our big picture commonalities. In my mind, the usual suspects that separate people are:

Language
Culture
Geography

Let’s take a look at these areas and the impact they have on the people we’re all in the end working for: the customer aka, the content consumer.

Language: We’re All “Content Professionals”

Whatever it says on your business card – your passport in the world of content – we have many words we share. We all talk about:

Consistency of…
- Language
- Style
- Structure
- user-orientation
- taxonomy / metadata
Localisation
Customer-specific content and understanding what the customer wants or needs
Content management
Content audits
and now of course, Content Strategy.

Where we differ is in some of the details. MarComs and Tech Comm are the way that the organisation communicates with the outside world. The only other “Communications” group is “Business Communications” Take this list of words and see how many terms hit home with you:

Brand Values / Brand Management	XML	Information Architecture
Social Media	DITA	CX
Socially Enabled	CCMS	Personas
SEO	CMS	UX
Single Sourcing	Context Sensitive	Monetised
Syndicated	Reusable	Modular
Messaging	Style guide	Structural Templates
Analytics / Metrics	ROI	Content Modelling

I read Kristina Halvorson’s “Content Strategy for the Web” and in the margins of each page put little markers about whether the statements and language were applicable and understandable off the web and outside the marketing team. My markers indicated three things: “Yes (this idea is applicable off the web)”, “No”, “Maybe”, and “Not usually, but it should be!”

There were lots of each category, but the “No” items were in the vast minority, i.e., most content best practices don’t differ between channels. Let’s take an example which any content professional can immediately understand (or should):

“If your CMS metadata is inconsistent or poorly managed, your content’s going to pile up, and information will be buried. You’ll also end up creating redundant content, waste money on inefficient workflow, and generally rack up unnecessary content-related expenses and headaches.”

And then a bit that would leave other content professionals making a sort of slanty grimace:

“During the analysis phases, you collected all of your messages – the pieces of information you want the user to learn or the user wants to see. In the content strategy phases, you make recommendations about how the messages all work together to form useful, usable, enjoyable web content.”

So, we share some words, but not all, and those we do, we don’t always mean the same things by them. “Messages”, “Messaging”, “Messaging hierarchy” are all pretty marketing-specific for those in other departments. When defined as “the pieces of information you want the user to learn or the user wants to see”, then it’s more relatable. It’s not that different.

People outside the web team get shocked and offended by quotes like:

“The content strategist may collaborate closely with a web editor or web writer to oversee the creation, revision, and approval of all required content. In the absence of a web editor or writer, the content strategist may also be called upon to create all necessary content.”

... “All”?

Come again?

Naturally anyone in the Land of Tech Comm would be hurt and dismayed to hear that “all” content on the website, which probably includes tens of thousands of their words in HTML Help, How-To, FAQ, Release Note, and downloadable PDF form, and more, was being so totally left out of Content Strategy thinking.

I think it’s obvious, however, that Kristina, or any leading web content strategist saying something like this is talking about the new and website-specific words, probably in the context of only the web project in question. There are loads of words which only exist on the web and serve to gel together, relate, enhance, and support all the other content created by other sources that needs to go public via online channels.

So… chill.

In Part 4 we’ll go on to discuss the Cultural divide – the different way that MarComms and TechComms tick.

See also:

When Content Strategies Collide Pt 2: Customer Impact

2011-04-11T15:15:00.001+02:00

In my last post, I left off with my description of the two major continents in the World of Content:

“The Archipelago of Internet Marketing”
“The Land of TechComms (and a bit of Training)”

Here’s some links to all the posts if you haven't read them:

Today there’s a gap between them, but the two continents are starting to collide and create some topographical ruffles in the process. Here we look a bit more at some names and faces from the populations and why this is an issue for the enterprise.
This was all born of my thinking when coming up with the theme for the Congility 2011 Conference in the UK this May.

The Lay of the Land And The Cloud

Wherever you picture yourself on this Communications landscape, the word wide web flows around and between us all like water. As they say, “location, location, location”. Everyone – inside and outside any organisation – can see the web and (theoretically) find the information on it.
On the web you can even package up bits of content and ship them stuck to other bits (related items, banner ads, pop-ups), to make them even more “findable”. Now in the age of social media, every single man, woman, and especially child is throwing their work into the growth of web’s wealth of information and the findability of that information.
This creates a friction along the coast as the Archipelago of Internet Marketing and Land of TechComms start to merge, pushed on, inexorably, by the underlying market forces.
Take for example some other posts from both sides of Web Content / Technical Content fence:
Kristina Havlorson’s posted “Why I Wrote Content Strategy FOR THE WEB” recently regarding her book and why the title and examples therein focussed on the web. On that post she’s provided further contextual links, and calls it a source of “serious frustration”. In the end, I’d say she’s not as webby as you might think, and she and her book are not to be dismissed by any content professional.
Kristina links her post to one by Rahel Bailie. Several conversations with Rahel and Rahel’s blogs regarding Content Strategy were further dominos leading up to this article.
There was also some feather ruffling in the blogosphere (see 18:19 18/05/2011 Update below for new information and correction on this) caused by notable blogger and Content Professional Julie Norris announcing she was leaving technical communications and transitioning into something more in the UX and social-media related fields (Here’s a post where TechComms blogger Tom Johnson then reacted to that). Almost as an aside in her announcement she was leaving TechComms, she dropped, grenade-like, the comment that TechComms was ‘mired in the past’.
Bam!
I, unfortunately, can’t quote directly or even link to it because the original post, its update notes, and even a follow-up post, have all been (tragically) removed from Julie’s blog. The evidence can be now most easily found via Tom Johnson’s blog “Technical Communication Stuck in the Past?”

So – we can see the wrinkles forming the landscape already. Let’s hope that like when real tectonic plates crash, it forces the horizon skyward, and everyone’s game will be raised. But why is this happening, and possibly more importantly, what is impact?

---------------------------

UPDATE (18:19 18/05/2011):

Julie has commented on this post and part 5 to point out an error. Because I was not able to access her blog directly, I was left with the misinterpretation that she had in fact ‘left’ TechComms for pastures new. The truth was that was refocusing her blog away from TechComms, but she is today and will continue to be a Technical Communications practitioner. I have left the rest of the blog as was, because the key point is the reaction that the mere idea caused. At Julie’s request I have included this point of fact that she has NOT ‘left’ at all. Any words not quoted directly from her blog were my interpretation based on Tom Johnson’s post and the contents are not to be attributed to Julie herself.

---------------------------

The Point of Impact – The Customer’s Doorstep

I’m very interested in the rift* between those in the content industry who are generally taking a holistic approach, integrating across the borders, and those who keep to their ‘nationalities’.
^{* For more on TechComms rift see Sarah O’Keefe’s blog on 2011 predictions: http://www.scriptorium.com/2011/01/2011-predictions-for-technical-communication/}
This second rift is more important because of the victims: the customers. Oh please, won’t someone think of the customers! My most popular blog post to date was all about how fragmentation and division inside the organisation create fragmentation in our content and our communications. The result: customer experience suffers.

^{Every business is busy, busy, busy, especially successful ones. BUT, when you’re too busy working harder to work smarter, the customer is the one who waits in frustration while you try to get your act together.}
^{http://www.flickr.com/photos/failpost/3758092256/}
I recently had calls with three companies (in one week!) who had:

unified their writing style, structural and metadata guidelines
implemented a content management system
set up standards and collaboration across business units
moved to a modular XML-based standard (DITA, for their technical content)

And by doing so had realised all sorts of great benefits. What were we talking about on the call? The fact that in the end, what they had done was set up a very efficient, collaborative silo of technical content that was isolated from the rest of the content in training, engineering, presales and marketing. Terminology, Language, Labelling/Taxonomy, Metadata, even things as important as product names, were not supported with the solutions implemented.
Many of the software vendors and even many consultants and experts only make this worse. Each of these organisations had Web CMS systems in place, but they weren’t integrated neither in process nor in software. Software vendors know that trying to bridge a departmental gap is only going to complicate and therefore lengthen their sales cycle. That ain’t gonna happen. So they “give the people what they want”.
However, it’s the customers who have navigate through all our output, regardless of source department, so the more rifts there are in our thinking and processes the more rifts they’ll have to traverse to get what they want. That’s annoying!
Today, the customer wants us to integrate. They want us to work together to deliver the value-added, clear, CONCISE*, factual information about products and services. Most marketers already know that today the more you appear to be trying to sell, the less affective, but haven’t got a plan yet as to how they’re realistically going to keep product information fresh, available and digestible.
Check out The (ever-brilliant) Oatmeal:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/sell_generation
There you have it.
In Part 3 we deep-dive into why we can’t get along. Why does the rift persist?
_{*Unlike my blog posts…}

See also: