Alan Brandon

Sure all the cool kids are doing it but is collaborative, social, conversational product documentation really the best way to meet your customers’ needs? Despite the buzz, Web 2.0-based documentation can act as a roadblock to getting your content to your readers.

Ellis Pratt at Cherryleaf has a good summary of some of the problems experienced by organizations that had made the move to wiki-based documentation:

Users were struggling to find information they wanted.

The wiki-based user community platform was incomplete, out-of-date and incorrect in places.

The content was the most viewed content of all the literature her company produced, but no-one wanted to take responsibility to manage the content.

The Documentation team did not “own” the community content, but whenever there was an issue, they were asked to fix it.

Users saw it as official information, but the organisation saw it as unofficial information.

[Management] didn’t want to spend the team’s precious time editing user content at the expense of writing new official content.

They had a continual battle with content spam.

It was hard to migrate content between the formal and informal documentation sets.

Some of these issues can be addressed organizationally, and others must be addresed by infrastructure. Many of the features of traditional publishing that we have come to take for granted (namely, predictable, repeatable navigation) have been crippled or lost in the movement to adopt “good enough” publishing tools and strategies.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article for Gizmag about Kodak’s new ultra-compact HD camcorder called the Zi8. It’s a neat little shooter for sure, but I was also struck by how crowded the market for these pocket-size video recorders is getting. Besides Kodak there’s Pure Digital (who pretty much started the genre with its Flip), Samsung, DigiLife, and Creative Labs among others. Not to mention the increasing quality of the video capabilities of cell phones and iPods.

Casual videos are everywhere, and their use in technical communications is exploding. You don’t have to look far (YouTube) to find examples of unboxing and how-to videos for nearly any time of product. Some of these videos are professionally produced by a product’s manufacturer. Others are created by fans or other third parties.

As video production continues to get cheaper, and as the quality of cheap video continues to get better, look for more technical communication to be delivered this way.

Structured content is not just for technical writing anymore. Marketers are beginning to take advantage of new tools that use XML to reign in the explosion of content and communications channels. The upside is that content can be reused and republished easily and quickly. The “downside” is that organization must change their processes — and get more organized.

“Write once, publish many” has been the promise of structured information technologies since long before anybody  heard of content management systems or XML. Organizations have looked to standards such as SGML, DITA, and now XML to manage their content and reduce waste in their publication processes. For years technical publications groups have been wrestling with complex standards and clunky tools in an attempt to implement structured content.

In her article XML and Marketing Materials at The Dynamic Publisher, Ann Rockley, President of The Rockley Group, does a great job making the case for using XML and a unified content strategy to produce and publish marketing materials (emphasis added):

• Product marketing determines all … the messaging, branding, and core information is identified in the beginning. Common content between the different models is identified for reuse.
• A master document is written following an agreed upon structure that will guarantee consistency. Content is modularized; each piece of content, such as features and benefits, is written as individual chunks of information, and the chunks are created in a single document, just as they would have been written previously. “Under the covers” the content is saved as individual components.
• Content is written with best practices Web guidelines in mind. Well written Web-based content makes great paper-based content. …
• Based on business rules, content is automatically pushed out to each of the outputs: brochure, Web, letter, press release, and packaging and automatically formatted for each use.

Writing content using a system such as Rockley describes is actually easier than writing unstructured content. For most organizations, it is the transition fromthe “old way” to a new, structured system that causes the most pain. But by planning the content in advance and writing it in an organized manner, organizations can actually reduce lead time and avoid duplication of effort.

There are a number of areas where return on investment is realized:

• Being in control of your content means you reduce the cost of time spent manually tracking, fact checking, and reviewing content.
• Writing once and reusing or adapting common content means that your authors can do more value-added work. Reuse savings often start at 25% and go up from there.
• You achieve faster time-to-market across multiple channels, increased marketing agility, and more consistent, relevant, and accurate messaging across channels.
• Content that is written once and used many times only has to be translated once. If you translate into four or more languages, ROI is frequently 60-70% of existing translation costs.
• You achieve more effective sales enablement through quick adaptation of content for specific sales needs, ensuring that your sales force has all the information they need, when they need it, and in the form they need it in.

The second part of Rockley’s article is coming up and I plan to review that here as well.

There’s a nice writeup by Sonia Simone on the Copyblogger about the recent Horizon Realty PR fiasco.  Quick summary: Horizon Realty Group, a Chicago real estate company, sued one of its tenants for libel because she posted on Twitter that Horizon “didn’t care” about the mold in her apartment. The tenant only had about 20 followers on Twitter, but the heavy-handed actions of the company soon made it to trending topics on Twitter. This means the issue was reaching hundreds of thousands of readers.

The key line of the Copyblogger piece is:

You don’t get to bury your story on page 47. There is no more page 47. Every story is somebody’s page 1.

Organizations must stay current with the latest communications channels if they want to control their message and influence their story.

Wikipedia will soon add video to their online encyclopedia. That’s pretty cool, but what’s even more impressive is that they will eventually be adding web tools to allow Wikipedia users to edit the video online.

From an article on Technology Review:

The project also includes developing Web tools to create smooth methods for transferring and editing videos. When a Wikipedia editor finds relevant snippets, he will be able to preview them, and set the “in” and “out” points, without having to worry about file conversions.

The convergence of words, pictures, sound, and video is getting closer to “seamless”. With in-browser tools becoming more widespread (photo editing tools in Flickr, for example) the breadth of media available for techincal communicators is greater than ever before. I know this will benefit information users and consumers in the end (as soon as tech “writers” figure out how to take advantage of the new tools).

via 2moro docs.