Archived Seminar Review: Strategies for the Social Web for Documentation.

Introduction:

The STC website has about 90 archived seminars, webinars, and presentations. Access to all this material is included in your dues. They are mostly over an hour long, and cover a range of topics. As a public service to STC members, I decided to watch and review them all. One at a time.

Review Number 2: Strategies for the Social Web for Documentation.

In this presentation, Anne Gentle (author of Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation) explored possible intersections between technical communication and social media, or the social web as she calls it. Anne explained how she thinks technical documentation could change and improve through more direct user interaction. She also tried to put to rest the idea that user generated content will one day put us all out of a job.

Did the speaker make it clear what the opportunity that she is trying to address is?

Yes. She put this opportunity as "documentation as conversation". Anne suggested that increasingly, users interact with content on the web with the expectation that they can easily comment on and share it. Anne sees the analytic tools and avenues for user interaction that are available as an exciting opportunity to provide more relevant and timely content to users.

Did she identify a real opportunity?

With analytic software increasingly in reach of just about anyone, and the integration of social media into more and more web sites, it is easy to imagine a more interactive approach to documentation. Anne made a clear case that using the social web, technical communicators can harness information about ,and contributions from users to meet business goals.

Did she explain the parts of the opportunity as she sees it?

Anne broke her approach to the social web as it applies to technical communication into three steps.

1. Listen first. 
2. Find your role. 
3. Align content placement with business goals.

The listening stage of her process is about finding out who your users are, how they come to find your content, how they use it, and what their expectations are.

Finding your role is about interacting naturally and appropriately based on what you'd discovered in the previous step. Anne defined role in the context of your community of users.

Aligning content placement with business goals requires you to make sure your efforts to engage your users in the social web actually works to help you meet your business ends. You're not using the social web at work just for fun, you are using it to improve your company's position in the market.

Did she have useful suggestions on how to meet the opportunity?

Anne had suggestions for each stage of the process.
Her suggested listening tools were Google Alerts, Technorati, and Delicious. Anne gave some examples of Google Alerts she has set up to see how people use her name in searches. She uses Technorati to see how her name and works are being talked about in the blogosphere and other social media, and Delicious to track who is bookmarking her and what else they're bookmarking. Anne also suggests using Forrester's Social Technographics tool to find out about the people visiting your site.

I personally think that of all these tools, Google Alerts is likely to be the least skewed for most people. If you think about it, some products are far more suited to being blogged about, and socially bookmarked. Software products, for example, are likely to have a user base that is more technically proficient, and thus more likely to blog and social bookmark, than the users of something like a refrigerator. The Social Technographics tool is very rough, and depends on knowing in advance the age, location, and gender of your users.

Anne also suggested, as part of the listening phase, that you look for existing communities around your product, and trying to interface with them if possible. 

Before continuing to the next step in her process about finding your role, Anne took a surprising detour through persona building using Linkedin and Indeed.com. It was a surprising change of tack because it there wasn't a clear segue, even if persona building is an interesting and useful exercise. She suggests finding people who list your product on Linkedin, and using their profiles to build a couple of user personas.

The next step in Anne's process is finding your role in the social web around your product. She identified three roles:

1. Reporter/Observer: Report your findings, aggregate info, curate user generated content.
2. Enabler/Sharer: Enable conversation and sharing, syndicate content.
3. Collaborator/Instigator: Take a more active role in discussion.

Her discussion of these three roles didn't clearly delineate them, though she had some good tips.  The first two roles were more clearly defined than the third.

I especially appreciated her warning to find out your company policy on social media interactions so that you don't get yourself fired.

Anne had tool suggestions for the enabler/sharer role and the collaborator/instigator role. For conversation enablement she recommended js echo toolkit, and Intense Debate, which can be used to enable comments on any content. Anne was upfront that some comments will be negative, so any enabler/sharer should prepare in advance to deal with negativity. For sharing, she suggested tweetmeme (no longer developed), addthis, and RSS syndication.

When discussing the collaborator/instigator role, Anne included a brief discussion of the agile methodology that felt out of place in the talk. She also shared some anecdotes that don't clearly relate to the role, even if they did illustrate the power and dangers of the social web. To illustrate the potential usefulness of a CRM that includes the social web, she told the story of an influential blogger receiving poor service, and the unfortunate publicity consequences for the service provider.

With the third step in the process, aligning your content with business goals, Anne provided a useful reminder that companies develop documentation for different reasons. Some companies consider documentation a form of advertising, while some see documentation as a way of reducing support costs for a product. Make sure that participation in the social web around your product is aligned with the reason that your company hired you to provide documentation in the first place. You shouldn't do it "just because". If your listening phase showed you where you might apply some social web tools, and you were able to find a role that is in line with company policy and business goals, then you are in a good place to participate. Otherwise, don't bother.

Anne also gave us a clear idea when to say "enough is enough, this isn't working" and bail out on the social web. If nobody cares, the demographics and technographics don't line up, or the business alignment with the social web isn't right, just give up.

Anne summarized by saying "don't be intimidated by the social web, we can do it". She says that technical communicators are uniquely placed to take part in a conversation with our users, as we are language and keyword subject matter experts. This, I agree with.

Was the talk interesting?

Yes. It was interested to hear from someone who has thought a lot about how the innovations of the social web can be harnessed to produce better documentation.

Was the talk helpful? For who? Why?

Yes, potentially. It seemed especially helpful for people who had read Anne's book, or those who otherwise had some ideas about how a direct conversation with users might improve their documentation. She talked about specific tools that could be used to follow her strategy, so the talk was also useful for people wondering how to get started with the social web.

You can find more about Anne Gentle at her blog and website, Just Write Click.