Who’s Responsible for Providing Your Authoritative Content?

March 25th, 2013 | | content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post
anonymous

Recently, we took a look at the how and why of authoritative content. Now that you’re convinced of its importance, lets talk about how who’s responsible for providing the high-quality content you need to best serve your customers. (Hint: It takes more people than you think.)

There’s no single magic bullet, master wordsmith, or staff role that provides you with all the content you could ever need, because authoritative content comes from many different places and all of them are important. In the same way that all roads lead to Rome, all content streams eventually lead back to your company’s doorstep.

Let’s take a look at the most common places smart businesses should mine for authoritative content:

Product documentation – This one is a no-brainer. You must have excellent online product documentation and it must be easily accessible the minute your customer needs it. This doesn’t mean you can slap a 42-page PDF on your site and hope for the best. It means, at the bare minimum, your content must be easily searchable, factually accurate, and continuously updated. Ideally, it is also created proactively before customers go looking for answers and also teaches users how to become their own product experts.

Marketing – The marketing department knows what customers in your space are looking for and what pre-purchase answers they want. Pick the brains of your marketing team to learn what authoritative content demonstrates that you’re a thought leader in your industry with the product and customer experience strategy to back it up.

Sales – As we’ve previously noted, the sales team can do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to helping your customers become their own product experts which, lets face it, should be the end goal of your product support. Sales knows what common barriers to entry potential customers face and can help you design content that will pre-emptively (there’s that word again) address common pain points or overcome implementation issues.

Tech support - These people are in the trenches every day with your product so put their knowledge to good use. Make it effortless for agents to share existing documentation with one another and with customers. Streamline processes that put immediate answers into the hands (or on the computer screens) of the people who need them.  A content system that supports ticketing integration means support agents can simply drag and drop relevant articles, then click send. Users get the best possible solution and know where to return to self-serve.

Customers — Do not underestimate the power of your users to provide smart answers to questions that may never have occurred to you. They are the perfect group to collect odd, quirky, or unique user scenarios that you couldn’t possibly test for in pre-production. Sure, there may be only six customers in the universe who need your product to be cross-compatible with hardware made in 1972. However, if one of them figures out how to make it work and the other five customers find that information on your site, you’ll forever be the hero of a handful of devoted users. Wikis and user forums give customers a place to help each other noodle around issues without involving your escalation team in solving every obscure problem customers encounter.

Content strategist – It may make sense for some businesses to hire a content strategist to oversee all the cogs and wheels that go into creating exceptional authoritative content. If you’re maximizing all the resources at your disposal, from tech support to marketing and sales, you need someone — or several someone’s, depending on the size of your company — to make sure there’s a single unified voice delivering your content. If you’re not sure how to put together an effective content strategy, here’s a good place to start.

You know authoritative content is necessary but putting it together doesn’t have to be frightening. You already have the resources you need at your fingertips, it just needs to be collected from various silos around the company. It takes a village to raise good content so start talking to your neighbors.

Image: irrezolut

Grab Your Promo Code for 50% Off LavaCon’s Strategy Workshop Registration Fee

March 20th, 2013 | | Community News, Conferences, content strategy
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Organizers of the annual LavaCon Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies have put together a three-day content strategy workshop and we’ve got the scoop on how to attend for half-off the registration fee.

The hands-on workshop, “How to Create and Execute a Unified Content Marketing and Multichannel Publishing Strategy”  will be held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-25, 2013. LavaCon’s Executive Director, Jack Molisani, says,

It is not uncommon to have content marketing and product documentation initiatives in simultaneous production. Rarely, however, do Marketing and Tech Pubs coordinate their content strategies. Without a unified content strategy, companies waste valuable resources, create an inconsistent user experience, and let new revenue opportunities slip away.

Sessions will be facilitated by industry leaders from Red Hat, Adobe, IBM, MindTouch, and more. The workshop drills down into how to create a strategy, how to build the right ecosystem to house and deliver content, and how to execute your grand plan within your business environment.

By the time you leave, you’ll have a roadmap in hand to hit the ground running but if you need additional guidance, workshop attendees may purchase a monthly phone consultation package with any of the workshop’s presenters. That’s a great way to get personalized, one-on-one assistance to hammer out strategy details or implementation issues when you take what you’ve learned back to the office.

Schedule, session, and facilitator details are available online [PDF]. Register before March 23rd to grab the standard rate of $1,450 and get 50 percent off with promo code mindtouch50. We have a limited number of codes and they’re first come, first served so register now.

In order to receive the discount, attendees must register at the New Orleans Riverfront Hotel with a special group rate of $189 per night. Rooms at that rate are available as early as Saturday, April 20th so come to town a couple of days early and make a vacation out of it.

Next month’s workshop is being held ahead of the big event this fall in Portland, OR. LavaCon got its start in Hawaii in 2002 — lava, get it? The original intent of the conference was to help companies design technical communications projects but has grown to cover emerging concepts surrounding content strategy, mobile devices, social media, and more.

Registration for LavaCon is now open and session speakers are expected to be announced soon. In the meantime, check out session slides from previous LavaCon conferences.

Image: Bernat

What an Oreo can Teach You About Content Strategy

February 4th, 2013 | | Content in Context, content strategy, Featured Post
oreo-2

There’s already so much to read about the importance of developing good content strategy that writing another post about it seems like walking into an echo-chamber. We keep bringing it up, though, because it’s the number one thing you must do right now if you want to provide the best customer experience you’re capable of offering.

Content strategy is not only about good documentation, smart product placement, a busy blog, or an engaging Twitter account. It’s about all those things. Are you agile enough across multi-channel customer support avenues to respond quickly when surprises crop up in your industry?

Whether you watched Super Bowl XLVII or not, you’ve no doubt heard about the two biggest one-off stories of the night. The Superdome power failure and the fascinatingly delightful response by the people behind the scenes at Oreo.

Minutes after the blackout, 360i, the marketing firm behind the cookie company’s incredibly successful social media campaign, tweeted this gem. Here’s how they pulled it together so quickly:

“We had a mission control set up at our office with the brand and 360i, and when the blackout happened, the team looked at it as an opportunity,” agency president Sarah Hofstetter told BuzzFeed. “Because the brand team was there, it was easy to get approvals and get it up in minutes.”

Well, played, 360i. Well played.

Is your content that adaptable? Do you have you what you need in place to respond to unpredictable situations during your industry’s version of The Big Game? If not, you need to be proactively thinking about how your product documentation and authoritative content can be called up at a moment’s notice, before people need it.

You may never have the chance to unexpectedly solidify your place in an industry in front of millions people but that’s no reason you shouldn’t make sure your content strategy isn’t every bit as pulled together as Oreo’s. The foundation of your strategy should be rooted in product documentation, followed by well-crafted authoritative content. Then you’ll be in a perfect position to respond rapidly to whatever opportunity presents itself.

A smart content strategy doesn’t rely solely on keeping a robust set of FAQs and blog links at the ready, then stuffing it into a digital drawer on your website. No, it also requires foresight, planning, and consideration about how you’ll use your content in unexpected ways. Do a little high-level thinking, give people authority to pull the trigger quickly when opportunities crop up, and even plan out some what-if scenarios. In short, once you have the content, don’t be afraid to use it!

Image: mihoda

3 Ways to Optimize Your Content Strategy

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

The First Law of Customer Happiness: Every Interaction Creates a Personal Reaction

March 20th, 2012 | | Editorial, Product Help
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The digital age has broadened individual access to the world. Today, through social networking and community platforms, people can not only see, hear and read information from every corner of the globe, they can speak to the world. This has given rise to the next great historical age we live in today. We’ve emerged from an era dominated by ‘super-powers’ and now live an age of super empowerment. The impact this has had on business has been profound to say the least.

Today, innovation and growth depends upon interactions rooted in modern digital social contexts yet personalized and focused on the individual. The rapid expansion of the digital age, and the resulting empowerment of individual access to information and the ability to quickly gain a wide audience has rendered experiences strictly designed for all as unsatisfactory to most.

Of course, it’s impossible to create a customer success infra-structure for every individual you sell to; that method would simply be impractical. However, you can build into your customer success modalities instances which recognize the individual and engages them on a personal level. For instance, when establishing a product help or support site, there are considerations that should be addressed that would serve to create a positive personal reaction and a great experience for the user.

Read more…

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

February 16th, 2012 | | CCMS, Content in Context, Guest Blogger, Tech Comm
Amanda Cross 150x150

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…

Tech Salaries Rising: It’s Time to Harness Data & Share Knowledge

February 9th, 2012 | | Content in Context, Guest Blogger
Barb Mosher

A recent salary survey by Dice.com says that senior tech salaries are on the rise. There are a few things we can learn from this change in direction, and it’s not only that good tech people deserve more money.

Harnessing Data…

The Dice Salary survey was conducted online with 8,325 employed technology professionals between September 19 and November 21, 2011. The results showed an average 2% increase in annual wages over 2010 (from $79,384 to $81,327). Bonuses looked even better jumping up 8%.

The salary stats speak volumes about the importance of harnessing data properly for businesses and finding intelligent ways to both understand and use it.

It is our technical people that both create and support the systems that capture big data, and use the tools that analyze it. And it’s big data that many are saying is the key to developing truly great customer experiences. Darren Guaranccia agrees with this saying:“ Today’s analytics compress their collected data into summary statistics to save space. Big data is the promise of retaining this beautifully detailed data, and helping us plumb its depths to better engage and interact with our customers, even in real-time.” Read more…

Content in Context: Support & Sell Without the Sales/Marketing Pitch

January 26th, 2012 | | Content in Context, content strategy, Guest Blogger
bmosher3

When it comes to customer support for products and services, most organizations look to support processes such as online communities, help documentation, customer forums, etc.. But are these tools being used to their best advantage? The truth is, in most cases, they aren’t.

Moving Support into Sales & Marketing

We often take for granted the content used in support processes. Take help documentation as a prime example. It’s probably one of the most hated jobs in the organization, creating help documentation. Nobody reads it, it’s impossible to keep up to date as patches, bug fixes and major updates are completed. It’s shoved in static help documentation files, and placed on CDs, DVDs or in hard to reach places on the website. Is it ever read by a customer? Do they find it useful?

Tech writers and organizations should be happy to know that it doesn’t have to be this way. Read more…

A Conversation with Corey Ganser: TechWhirl Interview at LavaCon

January 23rd, 2012 | | Awards and Press, Community News, Conferences

One of our own, Corey Ganser, presented “Who Cares about Your Content?” at LavaCon this year. An interview with Corey was recently published on TechWhirl. In it, he stresses the steps content strategists and technical communicators must take in order to prove their worth and get the recognition they deserve.  Here’s an excerpt from Corey’s TechWhirl interview: “Building the Business Case for Technical Communicators by Leveraging Talent, Skills and Passion”

Use Analytic Data of Content to Prove your Worth

Demonstrating value is crucial in the field of technical documentation. Corey suggests Tech communicators push project managers to include a content plan alongside their technology plan, financial plan, and product development plan… Backed by the data, “technical communicators can sit at the big table with the managers,” Corey says, and prove themselves as valuable resources for the company. As a result, a technical communicator can quantify the value of wearing multiple hats, and demonstrate how that their time, money, and energy are effectively being spent to benefit the company’s bottom line.

Corey continued by recommending that technical communicators prove their value to the company in various aspects. “People need to re-define their contribution to a company as a technical communicator. For example [technical communicators] often get caught up with buzzwords and instead need to think strategically as a content strategist about how users can interact with the company who produces the product.”

Documentation Should Help, Not Function as an Afterthought

In our interview, Corey focused on how documentation is often perceived as an afterthought. Read more…

Content in Context: Content is the Tie that Binds Us

January 19th, 2012 | | Content in Context, content strategy, Guest Blogger

It’s time for a little quiz. I’m going to run 5 terms by you quickly, you have to tell me what they mean. Ready?

  1. “customer experience”
  2. “social business”
  3. “content is king”
  4. “customer is king”
  5. “the squeaky wheel gets the grease”

How did you do? Not so great I bet. If you are a business trying to sell your product or service, you probably don’t really care about all these terms marketers are throwing around. You just want to know how to give your customers and prospects the information they need to make the decision to buy from you and/or be happy in the decision they did make to buy from you.

We seem to finally be settling into a world where the customer has most of the power. What this means is that you can have all the fancy websites and marketing brochures you want, but if you aren’t thinking about what your customers need to make decisions, then you’re wasting a tidy sum. And these decisions, by the way, should be in your favor — that’s kind of important.

More Information Than You Know

The online world has become a place where people can quickly find information. But it’s not the only place they look. So you need to be sure you are consistent in your approach to providing that information. Content is the tie that binds all your marketing and support channels together. But it’s about more than great content. You have to offer that content in the right context.

Read more…

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