2013 Top 100 Influencers in #Techcomm

April 4th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | Featured Post, Let's Talk Techcomm, Most Influential, Tech Comm

It’s time once again for the annual MindTouch list of top influencers in techcomm, customer service, customer experience, and knowledge management! As in years past, our goal is to give back to the community based on tools we use to make our business better. We used the nifty Twitter search and reporting service Little Bird to compile lists of the 100 most engaged and connected people in each of the four categories.

Our lists go beyond the influencers you might already know and direct you to the ones you should know. Little Bird calls these influencers the most emergent — they may not be on your radar screen yet, but they will be soon.

We’ll announce the top 100 influencers in customer service, customer experience, and knowledge management in the next few days but let’s get started right now with the top influencers in #techcomm. Here’s the first 25:

Now go check out the full list of the top 100 influencers in #techcomm. Because we want to make your life easier, we’ve also compiled a Twitter list so you can follow all of these amazing folks with one click.

Are you on our influencer list? Congratulations, here’s your badge! You’ve earned it for your work in pushing the edges of your field. You’re an innovator who’s elevating and promoting your field. Thank you. Grab the code below and display your badge with pride. You’re in excellent company.

You can use this snippet to add your badge to your website or blog:

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Check back to find out who made the list of top 100 influencers in content strategy, customer experience, and knowledge management, or follow us on Twitter to find out right away when we post the next list.

LavaCon 2012 Corey Ganser: What Makes a Superhero? Doing What Others Can’t and/or Won’t

October 16th, 2012 | Michael Stewart | Conferences, content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Product Help, Tech Comm

The following is an overview of MindTouch Customer Experience Manager, Corey Ganser’s highly attended presentation this year at LavaCon 2012.

“Today I’m going to cover What Makes a Superhero? Doing What Others Can’t and/or Won’t. I’ll explain more about this as we get into the presentation, but before I get started, here is a little overview of me. I’m the Customer Experience Manager at MindTouch. As a Customer Experience Manager, I’m responsible for working with every department within MindTouch to ensure we provide a consistent and positive experience for all of our customers. Note that when I say customers, it extends beyond our actual customers that pay us money, but also incorporates prospects or people that are interested in evaluating our software.

The Customer Experience initiative provides a holistic approach to providing an excellent experience for customers to ultimately affect initiatives dictated at an executive level.

Working with customers of MindTouch, I see this initiative consistently and I’ve been able to extract elements of the organization that exist before they move towards a unified customer experience.

The first thing that is evident is that there is a division among departments that make it hard for the customer to receive a consistent message or experience. Not only does this affect the customer though, it also affects the employees within the organization and is primarily rooted in a dispersion of content for the customer.

We see the Support department has a knowledge base, the Technical Writing team maintains the formal documentation/User Manuals, Product can have a separate in product help that isn’t pulled from any of the above resources. Marketing and Sales too have a separate repository of information that they use to entice prospects join the sales pipeline.

This division leads to a lot of duplicated effort that causes confusion within the company.

This confusion is easily transmitted to the customer and in turn, they take on the confusion and have a hard time getting a positive experience. The Support team should be leveraging the documentation that the Technical Writing team is putting together and the Technical Writing team should be able to leverage the SME in support to help seed their content. And for those of you that think PDF is an acceptable delivery method for your support team to leverage, it isn’t. Your support team isn’t going to send a PDF to a customer and say: “download this PDF, scroll down to page 56 and then look at paragraph 3 and that is your answer.” What an awful way to receive help.

Product, Marketing, and Sales should be leveraging the work coming out of Technical Writing and Support combined to enhance the experience for the users. Product can incorporate this into the product. Marketing and Sales can tie in this documentation into their tools to share with prospects. Ultimately if the prospect doesn’t find information that helps them make an informed decision about what to buy, they aren’t going to choose your company as their vendor.

Let’s take a look at some of MindTouch customers that are doing this currently.

Case Study #1: coolOrange

• The Need:
a)    Integration with Support Ticketing
b)    Easy to use interface for authoring
c)    Ability to create templates for consistency of knowledge capture
d) A system that wouldn’t require management and upgrading by coolOrange

• Solution:
a) MindTouch as a central repository for content with integration into Zendesk

• Benefits:
a) Decreased costs for creation of docs, increased quality of support, and improved communication all around
b) 17% drop in support tickets

Case Study #2: Zuora

• The Need:
a)    Increase collaboration among SMEs
b)    Support Ticketing Integration
c)    Make documentation more accessible to users
d) Increase analytics around documentation to identify trends and usage

• Solution Implemented:
a) MindTouch at the center of content
b) Integration with Zendesk

• Benefits:
a) Opening up documentation to SMEs resulted in 200 new articles over the course of a couple of months.
b) Zuora’s customers increased usage of self-help.
c) Sales leads are generating from documentation

Case Study #3: SuccessFactors

• The Need:
a) Looking for a central location for documentation
b) Chat Integration
c) Easy to manage documentation repository
d) Integration with SAP Service OnDemand
e) Ability to extend documentation into the product
f) Personalize the customer’s experience with help from SSO

• Solution:
a)    MindTouch as their main support portal
b)    SnapEngage for chat
c)    Service OnDemand for help desk
d)    SSO integration with MindTouch and pass- through to chat and helpdesk

• Benefits:
a) Central location for customers to access self-help with a personalized experience

Ultimately what each one of these companies is doing is creating an authoritative source for content: everyone (prospects, customers, and employees) has access to the single source of truth as opposed to multiple answers to the same question

As you review your plan to move ahead with a solution like MindTouch, make sure you don’t just choose a solution that is right for you only now. I like to relate this to Mr./Mrs. Right vs. Mr./Mrs. Right now. If you choose Mr./Mrs. Right Now, you’ll most likely overlook a lot of critical requirements that will unfortunately surface later on in the relationship. This truth can be said about a documentation solution. Write down a list of the direction you want to go with your content. This includes covering:

Creation – Web authoring and making it easy to create content.
Publishing – Don’t go through 10 steps to publish your documentation when it should only be 3-5.
Consumption – Identify how your customers want to access your content and make sure you can support that delivery method.
Contribution – don’t be afraid to open the doors to your community to solicit feedback from them. They have been using your product for a long time and will have some great knowledge that should be captured.”

Corey then led a discussion around these following questions which serve to guide any approach to improving product help and customer engagement.

To learn how MindTouch can can help you get the most out of your product documentation and help click here

3 Ways to Optimize Your Content Strategy

July 23rd, 2012 | Barb Mosher | Content in Context, content strategy, Tech Comm

Gerry McGovern says we shouldn’t talk about content strategy, because it’s not the content that should be the primary focus but the task a user is trying to do. The content, he says, supports the task, so we need to frame it in that context.

I like how he looks at it and I do agree that we should focus our work on understanding the reasons why a user comes to a website and what tasks they are trying to achieve. But I also understand that within that task identification evolves a solid content strategy. And I understand that a solid content strategy must include how we are going to reach out across social media and search to get people to find us and come to our site to complete their task.

Krista LaRiviere, of GShiftLabs calls this an optimized content strategy, which she defines as follows:

Optimized Content Marketing is the art of understanding exactly what your prospects and customers need to know and deliberately producing optimized content based on keyword phrases that are driving organic search traffic and conversions. Then delivering that optimized content to them in a relevant and compelling way to grow your business by socializing the content through your organization’s social networks.”

So how can you write optimized content? Here are three suggestions:

1. Analyze the content that people are reading & keywords people are searching on and clean/write more content to meet those needs

This is not a new idea. It’s been around for a while now, but many organizations are still living with the “write it and forget it” mindset. Content needs to be fresh and continually updated. But not all of it. Some of it is crap and needs to be treated as such (crumpled up and thrown in the proverbial garbage can).

So how do you know what’s working, what needs to be better and what’s missing altogether? Analyze your website traffic stats. What are people looking at now, how much time are they spending on that page? What are they searching for? What pages are sending them away?

If you are focused on the task(s) a user comes to your website to do, then your content needs to be written in such a way as to help them achieve that task. The more (and better) content you write that focuses on key areas visited and key search terms, the better chance you have of helping that user achieve their goal.

If you have implemented any social features, like Tweet This, Like This, Comments, etc.. you can also use that information to help you understand what content is most helpful to people. Build more of that. Or improve the stuff that’s not if it’s critical to the task at hand.

2. Track trending topics/keywords in Google for your product/service and make sure you are including them in your content.

Not only should be you analyzing the traffic and social popularity on your own website, but you should also be tracking on the web overall. Google Trends is great for identifying popular keywords and phrases on the web right now. If you track the terms you think are popular, you’ll get a good feel if you are right. You can also track terms used by competitors and through Google search overall.

If a competitor is constantly coming before you in the Google Search results, find out why. Work to understand what they might be doing better to make them more popular in search. But before you make changes to your own content to reflect the popularity of a competitor, decide if it’s the right thing to do based on the tasks your visitors might be trying to achieve. Maybe you’ve been focused in the wrong area all along and need to refine your content.

3. Incorporate Google+ into your sharing options

Easy enough to understand that Google Search would pay close attention to content being recognized via the +1 button. And although there has been much discussion about whether it’s fair or not, the reality is Google+ is becoming an important place to be. So while you are ensuring that you have that Tweet This Button and Like This Button (Facebook), make sure you also have that Google+ button available.

You might also want to spend some time in your Google+ account discussing the content the you have written and also searching out what others have written on the same topic to see how well their content is received.

Closing Comments

These are just three ways to improve your content and get it into the hands of the people who need it. The key is that the content must support a task a user is trying to do, and it needs to be fresh and relevant, not just stacked with keywords. If a person comes to your website and is able to complete their task successfully, your work is done right.

Three Dimensions of Context You Probably Haven’t Thought About

April 30th, 2012 | Amanda Cross | Content in Context, Guest Blogger, Let's Talk Techcomm, Tech Comm

Contextual help isn’t new. The notion of giving a user a snippet of information related specifically to the thing they’re looking at has been around for a long time. It was 1987 when IBM introduced the Common User Access standard, which defined standards for computer program user interfaces. That standard included a specification that contextual help be accessed using the F1 key, which many programs were already doing before the standard was even introduced.

Back then the definition of “context” was limited to “the place where the user is in the program.” For example, if the user is on the Name field and presses F1, the Name field contextual help appears. Some users might see a translated version of the help, if they were using a translated version of the UI, but by and large the field you were on was the only thing that determined which piece of field help you saw.

But these days, the name of the game is social integration. Have you noticed how many programs let you log in with your social credentials? That’s convenient for you, the user, but it also lets those programs have access to the information in your social media presence. That might sound a little scary, but if users are willing to give your system the access to information about then, there’s no excuse for that software not to leverage what it knows to create an exceptional help experience.

When my writers weren’t sure of what to write in the contextual help system, I’d tell them to think about what they’d say to the user if they were sitting right there, running into trouble at that spot. Of course, if each software license came with a friendly, patient person sitting next to you, ready to guide you over stumbling blocks, you’d expect that person to get to know you and use that knowledge to target the message.

As technology gets access to more and more of this kind of knowledge, suddenly which field you are on does not need to be the only deciding factor in which piece of help the system shows you. This knowledge of the user becomes a dimension of context, helping to pinpoint exactly the right piece of content for this one, special person.

Here are three potential dimensions of context that you might want to consider as you go forward designing an excellent user assistance experience:

Dimension #1 – Experience Level

Whenever I’m thinking about a piece of information about a user as a dimension of context, I ask myself two questions about it. The first is:

How does this user attribute affect how I would help them?

So, in this case, if you were sitting down next to a person, how would their level of experience affect how you’d help them?

Probably a brand new user would need some more background information than a person who already had the hang of the application, but that’s about it. I would not, for example, expect to see a different piece of help for someone who has been using your product for one year versus someone who had been using it for two years. You’re either new or you’re not.

The second question is:

How can we capture this information?

It doesn’t do much good to prepare a separate piece of field help for a first-time user if your software can’t tell who your first time users are. Identifying first time users is pretty easy for online applications where users log in since you can just count the number of log-ins. It’s more complicated for desktop applications, since people can share the application and you can’t tell if the person using it today is the same person who’s been using it all month or someone completely new.

But that’s not a reason to give up. You can still create that first time user experience and show it the first time the application is opened, plus make it available to launch again.

Dimension #2 – Job Role

If you’re document enterprise software that people are using to do their jobs, does the job role affect what you would tell the user in the contextual user assistance?

I can imagine a piece of business software where front-line users need to know the nuts-and-bolts of using the feature effectively, but a manager needs to do reviews, while a developer needs to automate processes. The help for the same field for these three different job roles would be different:

Front-line user – What to put in this field
Manager – How the value in this field affects the rest of the workflow
Developer – How to access the value in this field via the API

So now that we’ve determined that there could be different content based on job role, we need to ask whether we can capture this attribute. In business software, it is not uncommon to have system permissions based on job roles. If that is the case in your product, you could leverage those permission settings to determine which help a person sees.

Dimension #3 – Industry

If your product is used by people in a finite number of discrete industries, would the user’s industry affect what you would say to them?

Let’s take as an example a payroll software package that is used primarily by accounting firms and corporate human resources departments. For the same field, you might take some accounting jargon for granted in the field help when talking to the accounting firm, but define the accounting terms a little more for the human resources user.

So, yes, in this case, the industry would affect how you tell the story of the software. But how can we know what industry a user is in? That’s a tricky one because there’s so much variation in how industries are defined: the same company might be identified in different industries by different people. So, why not go straight to the source and ask the user? You could set up a profile page where the user could indicate their own industry.

The Interplay of Context Dimensions

I’ve been calling these user attributes “dimensions of context” because they don’t just control the selection of content on their own, but actually work together. For example, how would the contextual help you write for a manager who is a first-time user in HR differ from the help you would write for an experienced manager in HR? And how would that differ from a developer first-time user at an accounting firm? To make matters more complicated, you might not have a different answer for every combination of user attributes.

What to hear more?

Traditionally in technical communication we have had to write for the least-common-demoninator user. This change in paradigm to a personalized user assistance experience means great things for the field of technical communication:

By writing a separate experience for each user, the burden on each user to find relevant information is less, making for happier customers.
This approach requires deep knowledge of the users and the subject matter plus advanced tools, which are special skills you bring to the table, not commodities.
Creating highly integrated, highly contextual content brings you more tightly into the development process, giving you the opportunity to demonstrate greater worth to your company.

The data management and content strategy needed to support this kind of solution can get kind of complicated, though. It demands changes to your tools, processes, and general thought process about providing user assistance. There aren’t a lot of best practices already in place to guide you.

Even so, I predict that this sort of customized interaction will become a requirement of technical communications departments going forward.

Amanda Cross is a guest writer for MindTouch Magazine, she has over 10 years designing cutting edge technical information processes and is the owner of Crosswise Consulting.

For Technical Writers, The Future Looks Bright

April 3rd, 2012 | Michael Stewart | Jobs, Tech Comm

Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its ‘Jobs Outlook’ for technical writers and let’s just say – it looks bright.

Job growth for technical writers is expected to outpace the national average

Due to predicted growth in the high tech and electronics industries the value of technical communication skills will no doubt rise. In fact, The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the demand for technical communicators will grow 4% faster than demand for media and communication workers.

“Employment of technical writers is expected to grow 17 percent from 2010 to 2020, about as fast as the average for all occupations.

Employment growth will be driven by the continuing expansion of scientific and technical products and by growth in Web-based product support.

Growth and change in the high-technology and electronics industries will result in a greater need for those who can write instruction manuals and communicate information clearly to users.

Professional, scientific, and technical services firms will continue to grow rapidly and should be a good source of new jobs even as the occupation finds acceptance in a broader range of industries, including data processing, hosting, and related services.”

See the complete report at :http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Media-and-Communication/Technical-writers.htm#tab-1

Increase Web Site Traffic with Qualified Buyers. How? Product Documentation, of Course.

March 22nd, 2012 | Allison Dickherber | content strategy, Tech Comm

It should come as no surprise that buyers of your products are using search engines to learn more about your products. They may be researching your space to make a purchasing decision or trying to figure out how to better use a competing product. You can actually use your product help to drive prospective buyers to your site. Indeed, search engines reward you for publishing product, technical and help content by increasing your search engine rankings.

If you’re only providing your help center as a service to existing customers, then you’re not getting the full benefit out of what could be your most important marketing tool for lead generation. So, how effectively are you using your product documentation in your marketing efforts?

3 Secrets to a Healthy Customer Relationship: Give, Take and Share

March 13th, 2012 | Allison Dickherber | CCMS, content strategy, Customer, ESP/SMA, Tech Comm

Every day at MindTouch we see companies come through our doors who find themselves with unhappy customers, low renewals and high support costs.

We’ve deduced the source of these problems to stem from poor relationship management. A relationship is a two-way street where the parties involved are happiest when all benefit. In the end, a social product help system resolves the relationship issues these companies experience and we want to share with you the secret to a healthy customer relationship: Give, Take, Share.

1.) Give:

What should you give your customers? In a customer relationship, what you ‘give’ can either be extremely influential in pushing renewals, or completely useless. The key is to give the customer what they want- not what you think they want.

To begin, put a support platform in place that will facilitate your ‘giving’ goals. An online social help site is an excellent way to ensure your customers get the information and attention they want. It’s crucial that your online support site include a comprehensive knowledgebase that stores every technical document and media item that could possibly relate to your product. This process is much easier and painless when you get a knowledgebase with in-context WYSIWYG editing, collaborative authoring, versioning, permissions, staging and development of draft/approval workflow.

Just because you have all your content in one place does not mean you’ve given your customers something they want. It is crucial to organize your content into rational hierarchies with every document linking to related content. There should be no dead ends or dead links. This knowledge base must be dynamic and easily navigable otherwise you give the customer an unusable mess that will only result in more frustration, anger and fallout. Once you’ve done your best to give users the tools you think they need, you must keep tabs on what they’re ‘taking’ in order to understand if you have actually given them what they want.

2.) Take:

When users come onto a support platform, their goal is to ‘take.’ They might have never thought of their support usage in this way, but essentially their goals are to go onto the site, find answers to their questions and take away the knowledge to apply to their product usage. In this sense, ‘take’ is a wonderful thing because it means the user has found information they consider valuable enough to ingest.

There are ways to measure the ‘take’ on your social help site. In-site analytics provide an immediate and accurate report of customer interaction with your content. You can also use search analytics to view which articles are most frequently clicked on from a set of search terms and update your documentation accordingly.

PDFs: Artifact of a Digital Dark Age

March 7th, 2012 | Michael Stewart | content strategy, Customer, Tech Comm

As ubiquitous as the Adobe reader is today, the PDF is nonetheless about to enter a period of steep decline. Within a period of a few years PDFs will be as archaic as the cave paintings at Lascaux… and for many of the same reasons.

But chief among them: They don’t transmit information very well.

The world of product help is rapidly changing. The advent of social commerce and rapid digital interaction is creating a renaissance of sorts in the realms of consumer support, product help and documentation. The European renaissance spanned three centuries, however this renaissance is developing much, much faster and the cost of not embracing the values of social commerce as a criterion for product help grows every day that they’re ignored.

The Customer Success Renaissance

PDF documents, like the cave paintings of ancient humans, were useful to inform their contemporary audiences about the circumstances of much simpler times. However, today’s world is vastly more complex and fast-paced than it was at the advent of the PDF in the 1990s. Products are much more complex as well, and consumers have increasingly higher requirements and expectations than they did even just a few years ago.

Today, we communicate predominately in a rapidly expanding digital world built around sharing and social interaction. As a result of this huge cultural and technological phenomenon, the way people expect to interact in their commercial lives is rapidly changing as well, and PDF product documents can no longer serve modern consumer expectations for quick, easy and relevant answers to their product help inquiries. Furthermore, it’s become apparent that consumers prefer to be supported in a social environment that reinforces their engagement with companies, their people and other users as not merely helpful resources but

3 Strategies for Centralizing Tech Comm

February 27th, 2012 | Amanda Cross | Guest Blogger, Let's Talk Techcomm, Tech Comm

Unless you work for a technical communications boutique that specializes in providing technical information solutions to other companies, there’s a decent chance that your boss’s boss doesn’t really understand what you do.

Being helpful makes people want to include you I think that tech writers in most companies are kind of like the IT guy at the dentist’s office: the rest of the folks are smart and capable, but their expertise doesn’t even overlap. The dentists and dental hygienists think IT is probably necessary, but they’re content to just trust the IT guy to take care of it so long as nothing goes wrong.

Some technical writers like it this way. When people are willing to just let you take care of things, they just take your word for what needs to be done and don’t bug you. Plus, there’s the more nefarious notion that keeping your job and job skills a secret gives you job security because no one else will know how to do what you do.

But that only works for as long as people think that what you produce is necessary, which isn’t going to be as long if they don’t understand your contribution. Besides, when people don’t understand what you do, they can’t imagine new and creative ways to utilize your skills. If you can’t capture your boss’s boss’s imagination with all the cool things you have to offer the organization, then opportunities for exciting new projects can be few and far between.

I say it’s better for your career and esteem not to hoard your tech comm knowledge. Instead, you should share your knowledge freely so that people can have a deeper appreciation for why what you do is so difficult and special and ultimately beneficial to everyone. Here are some methods I use to try to make people around me understand the product documentation effort:

#1 – Internal marketing

Well this one’s obvious: if you want people to know what you do, tell them. We are, after all, professional communicators. This ought to be right up our alley.

Speaking for myself, I try to use lots of interesting channels to make people aware of what’s going on in the Doc team. Read more…

3 Skills You Need to be the Master of Your Domain Knowledge

February 16th, 2012 | Amanda Cross | CCMS, Content in Context, Guest Blogger, Tech Comm

Many people want to be good writers. It is a central skill because so much of our communication is done through written channels. Everything from technical documents to emails to tweets requires writing.

Unfortunately, some regard writing as an almost mystical process where inspiration flows from your soul onto the paper where it emerges whole, perfect, and sacred. Thinking about writing this way is convenient, because then your crappy writing is the muse’s fault. But it’s more effective to realize that good writing is rarely beautiful at first. Writing is more like making a sculpture out of clay: you start with a big pile of mucky dirt (the first draft) that you have to mash all around (in a text editor) to get it to look like what you want it to look like.

Like the sculptor, the writer must master the tools—-in this case, words. But mastering words is more abstract than mastering sculpting tools, leading some people to think that mastering words must be an in-born talent that can’t be otherwise learned.

Effective use of words can be learned, though, if the aspiring writer is dedicated, disciplined, and willing to make a whole lot of ugly sculptures en route to making a beautiful one. The fact that you created many unrecognizable blobs when learning the medium might not be romantic, but it doesn’t detract from the artfulness of your eventual works of art.

Skill #1: reducing word count

You know the goal of good technical communication is to make the user successful with your product, and your higher-ups probably know that too. But “making the user successful” is hard to measure, and execs like numbers, so chances are, they’re going to be impressed by your page count. Read more…