Content Management: June 2007 Archives

Your day in the sun may finally be dawning.

While preparing for an upcoming webinar on technical publications in global markets, we reviewed the content/globalizaton management topics that we've covered recently in white papers, case studies, and other webinars. An emerging--and insistent--theme is the role that product support content plays in the nearly universal drive for positive customer experience.

This signals an important shift in the value proposition for investment in content technologies for
technical documentation. One that should warm the hearts of techpubs pros everywhere.

Historically, companies have spent money on technical publishing technology in order to realize operational benefits--more automation, content reuse, lower headcount, and so on. The value proposition was inward-facing. Now, however, value is increasingly derived from outside the operations of the organization. High-quality technical content impacts customer satisfaction, drives new revenue in new markets, enhances product usability, and reinforces brand. The value prop is now outward-facing. And these dimensions of ROI can pour a whole lotta sunshine in the corner offices of worldwide organizations.

In addition to the July 11 webinar with Idiom and EMC, check out these Gilbane artifacts for evidence of the value shift in technical publishing.

From the Autodesk case study:

Regarded as a strategic and essential company asset, product documentation is a significant component of the company’s customer-centric information supply chain. With over 60 percent of revenue derived from outside the United States, Autodesk’s vision for content globalization is paramount to continued market leadership.

See also the Sun Microsystems case study and recorded webinars with Medtronic and Astoria.

With Web 2.0, companies can have increasingly extensive dialogues with their customers. Customers can also talk about the company and its products among themselves, whether the company likes the discussions or not. A growing number of solutions is available for blog monitoring and analysis from companies like Nielsen Buzzmetrics and Umbria.

It will be interesting to see how these solutions will handle the language issue. As social networks will provide new types of business intelligence (see this PC World article for some examples and tips from Umbria) companies need to be able to monitor blogs and discussions in several languages, and then bring the information and insights to their employees and partners in several countries. This will need a lot of automated multilingual searches and translations, as the amount of blogs and conversations to follow is huge.

Or perhaps I am wrong; perhaps English will take over, and companies only need to monitor blogs and discussions in English. Hmm... I would, however, place my bets on solutions that can also monitor Spanish, Chinese, German, etc., discussions. Actually, if I was entering a new geographical market, I would certainly want to monitor the discussions in the language of that market.