September 2008 Archives

The Content Management Professionals Association (CM Pros) will once again be holding their annual Fall Summit in conjunction with Gilbane Boston in December. There are details over on our Events blog which I won't duplicate here, or even better, go right to the source at http://summit.cmprofessionals.org/. If you are a member we hope to see you, and if you are not you can find out about joining on the CM Pros site at http://cmprofessionals.org/

I am happy to announce that Karl Kadie has joined us officially as a Senior Analyst. Karl has actually been working with with Leonor and Mary in the Content Globalization Practice for 6 months as a Contributing Analyst, and was a co-author of our recently released report Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Organizations Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain. Karl has been a great addition to the team, and will continue to focus on content globalization.

Karl's bio can be found at http://gilbane.com/consultant_bios.html#kkadie, and his email address is: kkadie@gilbane.com and his phone extension is
210.

Welcome Karl!

Social media has crept into all sorts of enterprise applications, and is certainly an important component of all of the areas we cover, including content management, enterprise search, multilingual applications, and authoring and publishing. So rather than discussing social media in isolation, we're going to focus more on covering social media in context, which means in whichever of our blogs (or conference sessions) it makes sense. You can use our site search to find discussion about social media from Geoff and our other analysts and contributors.

Check out Fred's entry posted on our main blog earlier today on "Integrating Traditional Documentation with Social Media"

The design brief is simple: integrate the outgoing supply chain that takes corporate product or service documentation out to users with the social media that may arise to address those same products or services. The benefits are also clear: leverage user experience, interest, and advice to everyone's advantage.

After that, it gets confusing.

Corporate structures are brand-directed and very controlled, while social media is uncontrollable, individualistic (if not anti-brand), and hyperbolic. That's why we love it, but how could a corporation trust it with their babies?

What does integration mean in this context? If you hire someone to help with social media, you may lose the integrity of independence. If the social media is independent and you endorse it, do you taint it? It's likely to change rapidly, so how can you keep your position up to date? If you just react to it, how is that different than focus groups? I'll argue that integration means, somehow, placing social media into an iteration loop in the documentation supply chain.

The scariest scenario is bringing independent outsiders to your breast and having them blast your new release. On the other hand, they'll do that anyway, so the question is how quickly you'll respond, and how? Who said "Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer?"

But let's draw a distinction between unaffiliated commentators and those who are working in companies that are your customers. The former are always going to be less controllable, while the latter will likely cooperate with a cross-company integration. Just as an enlightened company will look to incorporate social media into its communications strategy, its customers will be exploring social media for its user-centric focus as a means of improving its own business practices.

Let's assume that when social media is being practiced by independent outsiders, it will be a matter of chance whether their behavior is consistent with a corporation's goals. When it works because all of the stars have aligned, as has happened at moments for Apple, Google, and even IBM and Microsoft, then it can be great. At other times, it may be ugly. Perhaps it's just too early to draw those people too close.

But when the audience is composed of social media practitioners at client companies, then the field is open to all forms of social media: blog, wiki, twitter, IM, and other practices. For example, it's easy to imagine deploying a documentation set via a wiki that issuing and client companies can both update, perhaps with a dedicated editor at the source company to keep brand, message, and metaphors consistent. That leaves the challenge of how that material gets integrated back into the supply chain so that it can feed the next release...

These are early thoughts, and tools such as wikis are low-hanging fruit. How will the less document-centric media be integrated? What new forms of relationship will develop around these practices? How can this be extended to independent outsiders?

The Gilbane Boston 2008 program is now available, and registration is open. As usual we have had a tough time choosing from among all the possible panelists and presenters. Some speakers have not been notified yet, so we will not publish speaker names for another week or so.

The main conference site is http://gilbaneboston.com. Here are the most popular links:

* Conference schedule
* Conference session descriptions
* Workshop descriptions
* Early Sponsors
* Registration

You can also subscribe to our events and announcements blog to make sure you get all the conference updates.

BTW, we will be using gilbaneboston08 for tagging purposes.