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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?
Well, we can now let the cat out of the bag. Google released Knol yesterday. Knol is guaranteed to generate lots of discussion in the blogosphere and press, especially among fans and detractors of Wikipedia. It is not really the same kind of animal as Wikipedia however, and we'll talk more about in another post, but it is something you will want to check out.
Udi Manber, was planning to announce Knol's release in his keynote at Gilbane San Francisco last month, but unfortunately, it wasn't quite ready. Fortunately, we had a back-up plan and Udi instead gave an excellent and audience-pleasing presentation on search quality.
Attention: technical writers! In the spotlight next week: the availability of authoring assistance technologies that bring a living, breathing corporate Style Guide into content creation environments. Creating team-authored product support content with consistency and globalization in mind has come a long way. More on that over on the Globalization blog.
Join me on April 9th to discuss the value of translation-oriented authoring with technology provider across Systems, language services provider Argo Translation, Inc., globalization consultant Richard Sikes, and QuadGraphics, a customer reaping the benefits of authoring assistance technology in a FrameMaker environment.
The deadline for proposals for panel participation or presentations for:
Gilbane San Francisco 2008 at the Westin Market Hotel, San Francisco, June 17 - 19, 2008 is January 15.
Visit http://gilbanesf.com/ to see the topic areas we are focusing and then see how to submit a proposal.
If you've never been to one of our events and want see what we have been covering in our conference programs you can view the programs from Gilbane Boston 2007 and Gilbane San Francisco 2007.
If you have additional questions about speaking, send them to speaking@gilbane.com.
Activity for our 4th Gilbane Boston conference at the Westin Copley November 27 -29 is ramping up quickly. The conference schedule and session descriptions have been posted. The early list of exhibitors and sponsors is also available. And, online registration is open. We'll be updating the site on a regular basis from now on, usually daily, so bookmark the pages that interest you to keep up-to-date.
On Wednesday, June 13 at 1:00 EST, Senior Analyst Bill Trippe will be doing a Webinar with Medtronic and the XMetal folks at JustSystems.
While documentation is a necessary deliverable for all companies, its value and contribution to bottom-line business results is often underestimated and overlooked. For Medtronic, one of the world's most innovative medical device manufacturers, documentation is much more than a checkbox on a product release timeline - it is a direct link to customer satisfaction and patient well-being. Medtronic's Rob Kimm will discuss Medtronic's approach to delivering a better customer experience while also ensuring compliance with regulations that impact technical documentation.
Prior to using DITA, Medtronic had a decentralized, heterogeneous environment that slowed production and resulted in redundant workflows. Seven project deliverables were developed in 5 different tools, and the mutually-exclusive tools allowed for little to no ability to achieve true reuse of common content. They now can reuse common content across deliverable types, which has led to great efficiency, accuracy, and consistency.
To register for the Webinar, please visit here.
As our readers know, we are long-time advocates of open-document formats. Over the past couple of years, we have written a great deal about DITA and formats like ODF, but we also have a lot of experience and interest in DocBook and vertical DTDs such as J2008 for the automotive industry and the various DOD standards. We are clearly reaching a point where interoperability among these standards has become an issue. Organizations are more diverse, more likely to be sharing content between operating groups and with other organizations, and more likely to be sourcing content from a variety of partners, customers, and suppliers. Needless to say, not all of these sources of content will be using the same XML vocabulary; indeed, even two organizations using DITA, for example, will likely have specialized DITA differently.
With this need for interoperability in mind, OASIS has announced a new discussion list, regarding a possible new OASIS Document Standards Interoperability Technical Committee (TC). Details on the list, including how to subscribe, can be found here.
Although I have been out of the technical writing trenches for some time now, I enjoy staying in touch with my techdoc buddies and keeping up with the hot issues. One I remember well is the challenges in the early 90's of single-sourcing documentation for print, electronic, and context-sensitive online help delivery.
Apparently it's still hot, despite the release of RoboHelp6 from Adobe, a tool I remember quite well. This is the first product update Adobe has released since the company bought Macromedia over a year ago. Product reviewers generally agree that Adobe beat the estimated delivery date by months, although there is some confusion over dueling version numbers according to my friend Char James-Tanny over at helpstuff.com. Still, an early release is a good sign in terms of a company's current and future commitment to a product.
On the other hand, product reviewers also seem to agree that "XML does not seem to be a priority." Hmmm. That certainly does not bode well for champions of single-sourcing for multi-channel publishing (although the new version automates hyperlinked PDF creation.) Even more interesting are the passionate responses to an unfavorable monkeyPi product review, including an extremely detailed rebuttal from Rick Stone, Adobe's Community Expert for the product (although he's not an employee...)
Without claiming to have reviewed the product, what I find most interesting is Adobe's focus on source and version control, team collaboration and workflow, and the usage tracking capabilities of RoboHelp Server6. Adobe describes this latter feature as the ability to identify frequently-viewed content, view usage statistics, and uncover search trends.
As we've discussed in numerous posts, relevant content and customer experience are intrinsically related, whether the project is Web site design, localization efforts, or yes, even online help development. (Part 2 of our series on this subject, Small Content Changes, Big Impact takes place on Thursday February 1st.) Assuming RoboHelp Server6 provides the insight into the online help user experience it claims, its value to techdoc departments striving for more "upstream impact" in their organization could be quite significant.
The recording from our December 13th webinar, "How Sun takes Brands and Solutions to the Global Marketplace" is now available here.
Many thanks to Kristen Harris, .Sun Content Management Engineering Manager, for an excellent discussion of Sun Microsystems' Starlight Platform for content and translation management. The companion case study is available here.
Our informal poll during the webinar on the most significant business drivers for providing localized content to customers yielded some interesting results:
Brand management and presence in emerging markets (examples given were India and China) were primary drivers for the audience. It's not surprising to see emerging markets in the number 2 position since the U.S. market is essentially saturated for many industries. It's also validating to note brand management in the number 1 position. Much of our webinar discussion focused the value of content within the global customer experience. Clearly, that's not a "foreign concept" for companies focused on improving multinational revenue profiles. The significance of consistent and contextual content was front and center for this audience, as it should be.
Now available! "Beyond Search: What to do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn't Work, by Stephen Arnold
