All posts by Aaron Fulkerson

Quick! Win “AUSTIN” Interactive Conference Pass, $50 Amazon GC or Tshirts

January 31st, 2012 | | Community News, Customer, Updates
MindTouch_vertical

Aaron FulkersonThe famous geekapalooza conference “AUSTIN” Interactive is on the horizon and I have an extra ticket I want to give away. Additionally, I have $50 Amazon Gift Cards and boxes full of MindTouch tshirts I’d like to dole out as well. For the lucky winner of the “AUSTIN” Interactive Conference pass, priced at about $1,000, I’ll even up the ante by buying you a beverage of your choosing in Austin as I’ll be in attendance with some other MindTouchers.

You’re probably asking yourself right now: how do I win? It’s easy and I don’t want it to take more than 5-10 minuntes. Just follow these three easy steps:
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Introducing Amanda Cross, a Tech Comm Industry Leader

January 17th, 2012 | | Let's Talk Techcomm

I’m excited to announce that MindTouch is being honored with a regular guest blog series here at the MindTouch blog titled “Let’s Talk Tech Comm.” Amanda Cross, the Documentation Manager at ExactTarget, will be writing a regular column bringing to us her wealth of experience and an admirable depth of knowledge in the space. She has twelve years of experience in technical communications, holds a BA in Technical Communications from Purdue University and an MBA from the Kelley School at Indiana University.

I met Amanda last year and she is my kind of person, which is to say that she is intensely passionate about her field and the end user. Also, I’ve been amazed by how bleeding edge her team is at ExactTarget in delivering automation and social interactions across their product documentation.

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A Giving Approach to Sales and Marketing

January 10th, 2012 | | Editorial

Ashby Fulkerson running at Balboa ParkSales and marketing should create value in and of itself for the person being sold. I grew up a salesman and a product guy. I love creating and building products. I launched my first product when I was nine years old and the first thing I learned was that it didn’t really matter how good your product is–you still have to “sell” if you want people to use what you created. Even at  nine years old I saw no point in a product that no one used. However, being as fervently anti-establishment as I was growing up (and through my twenties), I could not be that wanker sales guy. This notion has stayed with me and I’ve always believed that the right way to market and sell is not by manipulations, but rather by caring enough to understand your buyer and giving something of value at every exchange.
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Scott Abel: 2011 Internet Influencer #Techcomm #eBook #CustServ #ContentStrategy

January 6th, 2012 | | content strategy

Throughout 2011 I had the privilege of working with Scott Abel off and on. We spoke at some of the same conferences. I helped him get access to some of our amazing customers for use in articles he’s written that are redefining the field and strategic importance of techcomm. Also, his regular webinar series is superlative. His writing is regularly featured as cover stories in online and print journals in and outside the field of Technical Communications. He has done a monumental amount of work to advance the field of Technical Communications and helped in defining the field of Content Strategy. Moreover, he’s been busying unifying the fields of Customer Support / Success and Technical Communications. Also, he’s been busy helping to create a new future for the eBook.

Scott Abel

Scott is an energetic innovator and promoter of the techcomm space and he has benefited everyone in the field. Thanks Scott. Your contributions are so profound I felt it’s appropriate to highlight you separately from the 400 Most Influential List.

Here is your badge Scott:

By the way, you actually ranked in the top 5. I’m sure the 400th most influential thanks you for being honored separately. :-)

The 400 Most Influential in #Techcomm and #ContentStrategy

January 6th, 2012 | | Most Influential

Twitter discussion about #techcomm

The MindTouch Leaders of #techcomm and #contentStrategy list is live! You can learn more about:

Now, you can view the entire list of the top 400 leaders. This list is also available in a single Twitter list here: twitter.com/MindTouch/techcomm-2011-influencers. Now, onto the leaders…
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2011 #Techcomm Top Influencers

January 5th, 2012 | | content strategy

Last year MindTouch compiled a list of the most influential techcomm bloggers. This year I am pleased to present an even more robust list.

This year we’re providing:

  1. Top Listeners
  2. Most Influential (a variety of factors impact this, but the primary driver is being followed by topic insiders)
  3. Most Emergent (fastest growing in influence)
  4. Most Followed (on Twitter)
  5. Oldest (on Twitter)
  6. Most Frequent Tweeters

We also complied a Twitter List of the top 400 Twitter-ers and posted this for all to follow and enjoy. You can subscribe to this Twitter list here: twitter.com/MindTouch/techcomm-2011-influencers. The Twitter list is in no particular order, but you will find the top 10 lists below and tomorrow we will publish the entire list of top 400 sorted based on their influence.

The Process

Previously, our team spent literally weeks pouring over a variety of data sources including, but not limited to, Klout, Google Pagerank, Technorati Authority and Twitter. This year we had the benefit of a phenomenal social media analysis tool that hasn’t launched yet (contact me if you want early access). You can read more about this process in our preliminary post.

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2011 Leaders in #Techcomm, Back By Popular Demand

January 3rd, 2012 | | Uncategorized

I think this is the first time I’ve ever written or verbalized “back by popular demand” without even a hint of sarcasm. Yes, we’re bringing back our list of #techcomm influencers because many, many of you have asked us and thousands of you have Googled your way to MindTouch.com looking for the updated list.

In 2010, MindTouch produced a list of the most influential techcomm bloggers. Our team spent literally weeks pouring over a variety of sources including, but not limited to, Klout, Google Pagerank, Technorati Authority and Twitter. We were compiling the list for our own benefit, but we thought it would be a good idea to share with the entire community and we did so.

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Elegant Support Integration: Creating Context Rich Environments

December 22nd, 2011 | | Uncategorized
MindTouch can plug into any support ticketing system. Within support ticketing environment agents receive real-time search results from MindTouch that are relevant to the article their viewing. Then agents can drag and drop relevant articles and click send to immediately respond to inbound support requests. Thanks to MindTouch dynamically organizing related articles the agents aren’t just “throwing fish” at the customer, but rather are teaching them to fish because the customer can discover related articles, tutorials, references and maybe even videos that will help them develop their skills.

Furthermore, support agents can also publish to MindTouch in a click and MindTouch organizes the content into the appropriate knowledge base, maps meta-content into our tags and auto-organizes the articles across all content so users can discover this new knowledgebase article via the related pages section available on each MindTouch page.

However, I heard an interesting customer story today that I wanted to share. Sure, we can integrate MindTouch into support ticketing to prevent context switching, but what about if the agent is browsing MindTouch? Here’s the user story:

As a support agent I want to see a button in MindTouch that allows me to click-to-copy the URL and abstract of an article in MindTouch to my clipboard so that I can easily and quickly paste and share with my customers the correct article with context.

Great idea! In fact, we plan to implement for this customer such that only members of the support user group in MindTouch see this button so as to prevent visual clutter in the UI of MindTouch.

I should probably mention that our customers, after deploying MindTouch, see double digit percentage increases in customer satisfaction, dramatic drops in mean time to response and because the end user is shown “how to fish” big drops in support costs. :-)

Forbes.com: User Manual 2.$

December 19th, 2011 | | content strategy

forbesWay back in August, 2010 I wrote an article for Forbes titled “The Evolution of User Manuals” about the strategic value of technical, help and product content. This article has since been referenced by a variety of third parties. In the last few weeks I’ve had several people reach out to me mentioning that the article is difficult to read because some of the styles at Forbes.com are broken. A lot has evolved over the last year+. Here at MindTouch we have hundreds of new data points in the form of ecstatic customers that have proven the benefits of technical, product and help content in increasing customer satisfaction, site traffic, lead generation and in lowering support costs with self-service support and lowered mean times to resolution. Given the popularity of the article I feel it’s appropriate for this article to become my first “re-run”. I always regretted the title not being “User Manual 2.$”. So, I’m applying a little revisionist history to the title, but otherwise it’s re-printed below verbatim.

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Happy Thanksgiving

November 24th, 2011 | | Uncategorized

I just sent an email to MindTouch users. In the event you didn’t receive it or it was caught by your spam filter, I’m reposting it here at the MindTouch blog. As I wrote in my email, sincerely thank you for being a MindTouch user. You give all of us at MindTouch purpose and meaning.
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