All posts by MDP

I Stole This Presentation, Now You Don’t Have To

March 10th, 2011 | | content strategy

Last night, MindTouch was invited to speak at the San Diego chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. Luckily, I out-maneuvered Mark Fidelman for the speaking slot (hint: in rock-paper-scissors – Mark always goes scissors). To add insult to injury, I also stole a presentation that Mark had done to share with the group. I am just the worst kind of person.

The topic for the night? How social knowledge bases are helping content strategists and customer support reps become the next corporate rock stars – a subject that MindTouch is extremely passionate about. Dinner for 28 was followed by my (Mark’s) presentation and a very lively discussion about how MindTouch is creating exceptional product help experiences for companies like Autodesk, Intuit, RightScale and ExactTarget.

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Does Your Product-Help Content Have an IQ? How Would You Know?

February 3rd, 2011 | | Conferences, content strategy, Enterprise 2.0, Video
The Intelligent Content Conference is coming up in a couple weeks (shameless plug: MindTouch is both sponsoring and presenting), so the timing of the question is appropriate:  Would you consider your product help docs “intelligent”?

The Datacard Group: Another Happy MindTouch Customer

October 15th, 2010 | | content strategy, Customer, Enterprise 2.0

One of the awesome parts of my job is talking to our repeat customers. Customer loyalty is critical to any company’s growth, and something that MindTouch is lucky enough to enjoy, thanks to our innovative products and amazing customer service. This week I got a chance to catch up with the Datacard Group, a $400 million company based in Minnetonka, Minnesota.

5084200079_357abd0538_o[1] Like MindTouch, DataCard considers collaboration a critical part of their business. Datacard collaborates with their customers to create secure financial card programs and government ID initiatives.  A globally distributed company, the Datacard Group has been a MindTouch customer for quite a while. In fact, the first MindTouch product they deployed was the MindTouch DekiBox, a hardware appliance we sold very early on in our company’s history. Today, they use our virtual machine installation, a low-touch, high performance software virtual appliance.

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Enterprise Technology Buyers: Checklist 2.0

October 12th, 2010 | | content strategy, Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise technology buyers are some of the most educated buyer types in the marketplace today. I don’t necessarily mean well-educated in terms of schooling, but more so in terms of how much they educate themselves when researching the technology they’re asked to buy on behalf of their company.

When I look at our sales wins here at MindTouch, I check out the individual opportunity records to see what our prospects “consumed” from MindTouch on their way to becoming a customer. 2 years ago, downloading a trial version of the product and reading a case study might have been good enough to move forward with a purchase – today, that’s barely the tip of the iceberg.

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IDF = DITA – PITA

September 30th, 2010 | | content strategy, Updates

Note: If the headline above doesn’t make sense to you – congratulations, you’ve never had to deal with DITA, which means developing content for the web probably isn’t your thing. Keep reading anyway, it’s pretty good writing.

The keystone of both MindTouch Technical Communications Suite and the MindTouch Social Documentation Solution is the Intelligent Documentation Framework (IDF). IDF was born out of the need to give technical communicators an easier way to assemble, reference and re-use their content. For readers, IDF provides an automated easy-to-use navigation that we’re so used to experiencing online. IDF is a technology/methodology hybrid, designed to deliver the fastest route to content authoring as well as the most efficient path to content discovery.

Sound familiar, TechComms? These are the same concepts that DITA set out to accomplish. However, a funny thing happened on the way to the future. DITA became a viable standard. But it also got really hard to use and follow. Ok, maybe it’s not funny, but it’s true. So true, in fact, many technical communicators are looking to alternatives. I won’t name names, but a very well known technical communicator (hint: that person is on this list) once said “I’d love a tool that allowed me to do DITA, without it being DITA”.

The Present: Knock knock.

The Future: Who’s there?

The Present: IDF.

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Another Successful MindTouch Launch

September 26th, 2010 | | Awards and Press, Community News, content strategy, Enterprise 2.0, Newsletter, Press Release, Updates

This past week, MindTouch announced the newest addition of our product portfolio – the Social Documentation Solution (SDS). SDS is an integrated set of easy to deploy, easy to use, and highly engaging tools for successfully launching a turnkey documentation community in minutes.

We already know that strategic content can be used to create high traffic online properties, which drive revenue and contribute to better customer service and lowered support costs. SDS is targeting the innovative companies that want to take their content to the next level, by creating highly engaged communities around their online documentation.

Technical documentation has become a strategic tool for marketing teams, community managers, user assistance teams, and product evangelists. SDS was designed with these use cases in mind.

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MindTouch and LavaCon Name Top 25 Most Influential Content Strategists

September 16th, 2010 | | Awards and Press, Community News, Conferences, content strategy, Press Release

Oct 1 – Updated! This post has been updated to now include the entire 25 Most Influential Content Strategists.   The announcement was made today on-stage at LavaCon.  Congratulations to Joe Pulizzi of Junta42, who was named The Most Influential Content Strategist. Keep reading to learn why we put this list together and how we arrived at the Top 25.

At the upcoming LavaCon 2.0: The Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies, our very own Mark Fidelman (follow Mark here on Twitter for the latest news and commentary on content strategy and technical communication) will be delivering the keynote address “Why Content Strategists are the Next Corporate Rock Stars.” In the keynote, Mark will discuss the incredible value content strategists will bring to the enterprise in the coming years as skills such as content delivery, discovery and curation become required to rise above the market clutter—the very same principles that MindTouch 2010, the Killer App for Strategic Content, was designed to support.

In keeping with the theme, we set out to identify the leading content strategists in the industry today—the Rock Stars that are continually pushing the content strategy conversation forward.  We evaluated hundreds of members of this community and created a measurement that took into account a wide range of metrics including, but not limited to internet presence, work on standards bodies, influence and community engagement and participation.

Today in conjunction with the team at LavaCon, we’re announcing a portion of the entire Top 25 list.  You can find the full list and presentation below.   Who did we miss?  Use the comments section below to let us know what you think!

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