1. Get ready for Swivel-
Seat Communications:
Connie Giordano
Executive Editor
TechWhirl / INKtopia
Tips and Advice on
Integrated Content
Development in the Age
of Mobile, Lean and
CXM
2. Connie Giordano
One-half of INKtopia Limited, publishers
of TechWhirl
Dual role as Executive Editor of TechWhirl, and
consultant/content services provider via
INKtopia
Masters, Organizational Communication, Queens
University
25 years in technical and marketing
communications
Cross-functional experience in knowledge
management, process design, and business
analysis
Expertise in editing, journalism and tech comm
industries
@CPGiordano
connie@inktopia.net
www.linkedin.com/in/conniegiordano
3. Communications at a Crossroads
Content is a business asset, but not everyone charged with
creating content is suited to the task.
Content is important, but are the content creators?
Size matters, small to medium-size business lack the
budget and the staff to separate content creation duties.
Titles don’t matter nearly as much as we think.
We have started viewing content creation through different
lenses, while being pressured to maximize reuse.
Universal truths and continuing questions
4. Swivel Seat Communications
Swivel seat support in IT infrastructure and
operations support frameworks.
Continuously move between roles and functions to
address the needs, problems, issues of internal or
external customers.
“Nimble,” “Agile,” “Disruptive,” and “Customer-
centric” organizations probably already swivel to
some degree.
6. Swiveling in Multiple Dimensions
Between creation, production,
and delivery of content
Between marketing, sales,
support, tech pubs, operations,
finance, HR ….
Between internal development
and customer-facing roles
Between strategy and tactics
Between planning and
implementation
7. Culture & Convergence
Organizational culture
drives how content is
managed, and how to
change the process.
If you think marketers
are encroaching on
the traditional
territory of tech
writers… you’re right
Will you be assimilated?
Jim Burns’ (Avitage) encourages marketers to
adopt a continuous content publishing process.
8. Strategy, Planning and Tactics
Check out Brain Traffic’s
Content Quad
A useful way to think
about how to get from
business goals and brand
strategy to actual content
assets.
Even though it’s a quad, it
applies the same
principles as the content
triangle we cover on
TechWhirl.
9. Continually Evolving Expertise
Subject matter experts = content masters
Keeping up with the Joneses, and the Klingons,
and the universe
in general requires
curiosity, and more
than a little time.
Research and
interviewing skills
are critical
10. Tip #1: Inventory, Audit, & Introduce
Boldly go into those
repositories and see what’s
there.
Find out what leadership’s
priorities are, and inventory
the content to understand
what you have, and what
condition it’s in.
Start networking with others who create content for
the firm.
11. Tip #2: If You Lack the Budget, Go Low-
Tech
When you can’t get the
latest and greatest, make
do with manual or nearly
manual processes.
Understand the
processes-as they are
now.
Make the tools you have
do what you want them
to do.
12. Tip #3: Get Proactive
Don’t wait to be asked
Don’t get offended by “Make it pretty.” Make it
pretty and useful.
See something that’s broken? Offer to fix it.
See something that’s useful? Offer to share it.
Meet your colleagues, virtually or in person, and
learn what makes them tick
13. Tip #4: Go for Practical & Iterative
Planning
Create a strategy for a project,
before going enterprise wide.
Build processes within your team
before attempting cross-functional
efforts.
Plan a major project in phases,
and manage each phase as its own
effort.
Document the good and the bad,
and use it to get better.
Ask around for information on
how other teams in the firm have
done it.
14. Tip #5: Keep Learning … everything
Webinars, tutorials, white papers abound.
Sign up for certificate programs
Consider a post-graduate degree
Join some forums where you’re not an expert.
What other functions and
roles should you understand
in order to produce better,
more consistent content?
What interests you?
Now see what’s out there to
help you learn everything:
16. A Recap
Communication functions are converging, and practitioners
need to master tech writing, change management,
support, marketing, corporate communications and more.
Future success depends on swiveling between roles and
tasks with ease and effectiveness, even when you lack
budget, resources, or particular expertise.
Tips
1. Inventory, audit and introduce
2. If you lack the budget, go low-tech
3. Get pro-active
4. Go practical and iterative with your planning
5. Keep learning … everything
17. Resources
TechWhirl
The discussion list
The website
The template library
Tools worth checking out:
Trello
Teamworks PM
Google Analytics
Slack
Professional Associations
STC
IABC
ASTD
UXPA
Articles:
The Help Desk Evolution: 3 Trends
Affecting IT Support
Why Content Creation Isn’t
Everyone’s Job
Users’ Advocate: Is our Technical
Content UX? Yes!
Connie Giordano
connie@inktopia.net
@cpgiordano
www.linkedin.com/in/conniegiordano/en
@techwritertoday
Editor's Notes
Cross a lot of territory in my experience, makes me uniquely position to talk about this idea of swivel seat communications.
As we get started this afternoon, feel free to introduce yourself via the chat tool, ask me questions or challenge my ideas. I want to make this time together as useful as possible for you.
We’ve been hearing about crossroads and critical junctures for quite a while now. What used to define a “typical tech writer” and what defines one, if there is a typical tech writer, today is quite different. We’ve moved to the age of content.
John Jantzch writes the blog Duct Tape Marketing, and believes that today, “content creation is everyone’s job.” At the same time,
Jim Burns of Avitage writes that “The new reality is: the traditional, project oriented, creative craftsman approach to content, cannot meet new, digital content and marketing requirements.” In addition to recognizing the reality most of us deal with, Note the use of AND between digital content and marketing.
Technical writing may have made it into the US Occupational Outlook Handbook, but writers tend to be paid a whole lot less than engineers, developers or programmers. Requisitions for experience Contract technical writers at larger firms where I’m located tend to be in $35-45 per hour range. Developers with the same years’ experience tend to get $50 – 75 per hour.
Robert Half survey of over 400 customer support professionals reports the following as the Top five support skills:
Customer-service mindset; passion for supporting customers (88 percent)
Desire to continue learning about technologies and trends (80 percent)
Social intelligence; understanding human connection in a digital world (75 percent)
Proactive approach to solving problems; creating efficiencies (71 percent)
Greater collaboration with staff inside and outside the technical support center (71 percent)
Does this sound familiar to you? Most of the great technical communicators I know have been honing these skills for years.
What kind of content are you tasked with writing? How much of it falls within the traditional “tech comm” purview?
This crossroads should cause us to think about our roles, not solely in terms of what we do, but also in terms of the value it provides to the organization and the impact it has on all of its the stakeholders
My notion of swivel seat communications comes primarily from my experience. I started out in marketing and PR, moved to technical writing during the dot.com boom, and expanded into many different areas (I’ve written everything from extended warranty language, to CEO speeches) as the result of business necessity or my own tendency to become easily bored. It’s based on my belief that if you’re good at this communications thing, and are open to all the possibilities that present themselves, you get to do all kinds of really interesting things.
In addition to TechWhirl (where in the early 2000’s I argued regularly that “it’s all marketing”), I perform change management, content management, and communications duties for a network infrastructure organization supporting one of the country’s largest banks. Many of the managers in this group deal with swivel seat support, providing troubleshooting, incident and problem management using both vendor-provided systems and internally managed systems. Hence when responding to a need for support they have to swivel between two systems. Not efficient, but very critical to timely resolution.
Swiveling, “turning on a dime”, no matter what you call it, being nimble, agile, and able to multi-task is a central feature in today’s information/content roles. We need to be ready to respond to customer and business needs with what we do best, well-written, relevant content that’s fit for purpose and for use. And we have to be ready to do that whether the audience is end users, investors, employees, or regulators.
First, I want to talk a bit about some of the factors and trends that have led to the need to swivel, and then I’ll go over my top five tips to swivel, if not gracefully, then at least effectively.
Here’s a fairly widely accepted view of the content lifecycle. Traditionally we’ve been asked to take care of the create, publish and sometimes evaluate stages. Folks who view themselves as “just a writer” have usually been content to focus on create, a little manage, and some publish thrown in for good measure. With the advent of the customer experience management phenomenon, mobile technology, and other digitalization trends, sometimes we take all of these roles, sometimes we don’t. The fact is all stages of the lifecycle happen, whether we control them or not.
And in some organizations, the stages of the lifecycle happen, without order or planning. Somebody may save the content, but the rest of the team may not know where or in what format. Evaluation consists of whether the PHB took a look at it and signed off. We’ve all been in organizations where content evolves organically, without rhyme, reason or coherent planning. Retrieving takes time and patience because you need to look through all the share drives and figure out what to copy and paste. And we’ve all been in organizations where we’re not exactly encouraged to take charge, be proactive, or think holistically.
It does appear that more and more companies at least pay lip service to the ideas and concepts behind content management. Getting a good CMS or CCMS isn’t as far-fetched as it used to be. Customer experience has a lot to do with that, as the way customers research and make decisions on the products they buy has changed a lot.
As Neal Kaplan wrote in his most recent Users’ Advocate column on TechWhirl: “more and more people are doing extensive research before they buy. A positive user experience can turn a sales prospect into a user, and a user into an advocate. The documentation we write is a critical part of that user experience. The words, pictures, and videos we create are as much a part of the product as the code or components used to build it.”
The components of that documentation, that technical content, require as much skill to manage through their lifecycle as the products they cover. And the full content lifecycle requires a range of skills and technology, as well as the ability to swivel between tasks, roles, and even mindsets.
I consider it serendipitous that I can head in a lot of directions when it’s time to go for a new gig. Perhaps it’s just enough knowledge to be dangerous, but so far it’s been the ability to extend skills beyond one niche and demonstrate how they can apply in another. I like being able to offer my experience in writing policy documents, and my ability to organize SharePoint more or less effectively, to the leadership who may have originally hired me to create online help. Generally they take me up on it.
The ability to write clearly, and coherently … isn’t limited to tech writers or the copywriters in the ad agency, but it is not as common as we would like, and speed even less so. When you get asked to “make it look pretty,” sometimes it’s opportunity to make it read better, carry a message, or answer a question. The folks in HR don’t deliberately write badly, and the sales team needs and even wants coaching to understand how to turn features into benefits. The finance gurus have their own special language, and often need help to be understood by anyone else.
Jumping on that opportunity to research, ask questions and suggest other improvements is the opportunity to swivel in a new direction.
A number of leaders in our profession, such as Joe Gollner, have distinguished between content creators and content engineers. It’s a valuable distinction, especially when consider how you want move in your career. The tools and technology of content production are often complex and need as much concentrated focus to master as the ability to create great content, generally most of us lean more towards one or the other. At the same time, SMB’s don’t usually have the luxury of distinguishing between them, so you end up mastering enough of each to get the job done.
In much the same manner, being a content strategist versus a content developer requires some mental swiveling as well. Putting the plan together to reach the goals exercises some different muscles than writing the web copy or the new user tutorial, and yet many of us can and regularly do both.
If you work in a firm where innovation is encouraged or proactive recommendations are rewarded with implementation, please tell us where you work and how to apply… they’re still a very rare commodity.
More likely you work somewhere, where it’s remotely possible to get someone to listen to your ideas, if they don’t cost money, or require headcount. The business case for content management, in an enterprise sense, takes a lot of time and effort to make. Often the smaller the company, the easier it is to step up and take on a role that doesn’t always associate with technical communicators.
Sometimes it seems as though we as a profession have been talking about practices such as Jim Burns’ continuous content publishing process, for a really long time. But it’s only gaining traction now, as the marketing folks step up to own it. Convergence has begun, and in many organizations, marketing owns it. So what’s a technical communicator to do? For me it’s understanding and welcoming how the inter-relationships between product design, marketing and sales, and documentation and support can and should work.
Let’s start with the basics of strategy, planning and tactics. Because we need to swivel here too.
Brain Traffic’s Content Quad is a really useful approach to developing a content strategy. But it’s also a good way to think about how it requires the ability to swivel. Melissa Rach described the quadrants:
Content-focused components 1) Substance—What kind of content do we need (topics, types, sources, etc.), and what messages does content need to communicate to our audience? 2) Structure—How is content prioritized, organized, formatted, and displayed? (Structure can include communication planning, IA, metadata, data modeling, linking strategies, etc.)
People-focused components 3) Workflow—What processes, tools, and human resources are required for content initiatives to launch successfully and maintain ongoing quality? 4) Governance—How are key decisions about content and content strategy made? How are changes initiated and communicated?
At the center is the core strategy, and core content strategy needs to flow from your overall business and brand strategies. And swiveling between strategy and the tasks involve in implementing it is critical, especially in environments where the difference between them is not always recognized.
Successfully swiveling between communications roles relies on something that most of us are already very good at… continuous learning. Our desire to understand how things work, and why they work the way they do is actually quite useful across an organization.
But stuff changes. I am amazed by the fact the iPhone has existed for less than a decade. Technology is ubiquitous, and evolving at a rapid rate. Society’s understanding and knowledge of the fundamentals of physics, and biology is growing pretty darn rapidly as well. As technical communicators, or may information masters, we have to evolve and grow our expertise across a number of subject areas. We do that by asking questions, running ever-more exotic Google queries, reading, watching, observing, and collecting data in ways that can be processed and preserved. We debate on TechWhirl, attend conferences and Summits, take tests, join forums and shadow masters at work. In other words we evolve, so we can swivel between planning, creating, and producing content that matters.
How do you get better at swiveling, and keep the career options continuously open and attractive? I’ve got a list… good content creators and producers ALWAYS have a list.
To understand how many directions you need to swivel, sometimes you need to start at the very beginning.
So tip #1 involves figuring out what you have, who’s got dibs on it and what to do with it.
Every organization has repositories, from the old P&P manuals sitting on the shelf in a closet, to network share drives, to SharePoint, to state of the art CCMS. Go find out what’s there. You don’t need to read everything from cover to cover, but you need to search, open and skim enough to help build a sense of what treasure (or trash) you’re sitting on. You’ll start to see patterns, identify power structures, and understand how current messaging has evolved. Not many organizations actually have sophisticated systems for managing creation, production, and retention. Often 1 or 2, rarely do they manage all stages of the lifecycle in an automated way.
Does your company produce an annual business plan, various strategy documents, or publicly available annual reports? Your leadership’s priorities are discoverable. You may need to request a meeting or send an email to confirm your understanding, and meeting that leadership certainly can’t hurt. Time to perfect the arts of the innocent/nonchalant and the complimentary questions. “I saw some references to… what are your thoughts about how we should implement?” I really liked that blog post you did on …. Can you answer a couple of questions for me?”
Look at the properties on those Word documents and PowerPoint decks. Somebody wrote them, somebody built the templates. If they’re still there, find a way to introduce yourself, invite them for a cup of coffee, and start creating alliances and picking brains. These are NOT the enemies, they are potentially valuable allies. Offer to do some small favors, proofread something that’s pretty important, create a repository for them, or send them a link to something useful that directly pertains to their role.
Gradually you can start understanding the political terrain, and figuring out what kind of improvements you can recommend with some realistic chance of getting to the starting line. Or you figure out that it’s not worth beating your head against a wall and move on.
Again, you need to inventory what you have, audit it to discover patterns, messages and trends, and introduce yourself to those who have a claim on it.
Tip #2 Embrace low tech options.
As much as we would like the latest content authoring software or a fully loaded CCMS, reality doesn’t typically lend itself to wish granting. Budgets are slim, and even when they think content is important, they would rather not spend dollars on new, unproven stuff that actually requires learning something new.
But you can do better with what you have. It’s time to take the blinders off and make the tools you have work for you. Long ago, before BMC bought Remedy, I worked in a support organization that constantly threw stuff over the wall. Email notices about outages, requests to make decks look pretty, somebody who could write SLAs. I used the tool I had, Remedy, and created new request types to help my team track the work they were being asked to do. And started collecting some useful metrics around how long it took to create, and review, content.
I’m not an Excel expert, but I can make it do some things that help me track what I know is important to me. Be not afraid of Excel, or anything else in MS Office. They may not be the best tools available, but they are available at no extra cost. You can do some fine graphics in PowerPoint, run some neat queries via Excel, and actually reuse content for stuff like boilerplate copyright info with Word galleries.
Not sure how to do a particular kind of content creation? Get yourself some templates. TechWhirl has a bunch, usually in Word or Excel, that can get a new team started on the basics, and put some structure around the processes you need to implement.
Google is your friend. Look up what you think you need to have, and see what kind of freebies are out there.
Tip #3 is tough, because it requires a commitment to get of the very comfortable ruts we all live in. If you want to show your value (not the value of tech comm, but of your content team to the organization), you have to get proactive.
Don’t wait to be asked. I let my managers know when I have bandwidth for an extra task, and I start conversations about what’s happening in the company, and what other skills sets I might have to help out.
Don’t get offended by “Make it pretty.” Make it pretty and useful. I used to get so mad at that (and still do truth be told). Now when that request comes down the channels, I take the opportunity to ask some questions and see if they’re open to suggestions and other improvements. Not arrogance, just helpfulness
See something that’s broken? Offer to fix it. I’ve been know to go to a senior leader and point out that a web page has broken links or an old logo, or obsolete information. But never point it out without offering to help if their resources are constrained. Never point out a problem to an exec without a specific solution to offer.
See something that’s useful? Offer to share it. People love to get compliments. Paying attention to something they say, or a piece that they write, and asking permission to share that valuable tip with others is just plain good business sense. And if you come across something you know they’d be interested in, send them a link with a friendly note.
Meet your colleagues, virtually or in person, and learn what makes them tick. Even if you telecommute, you can’t sit in your cave and not interact with people. It puts you at the top of the list when it comes time to plan some layoffs. It also makes work boring and frustrating. People are interesting, they do cool stuff, and they all have areas of expertise. Participate in those silly ice breakers, be friendly in your emails, ask them some open-ended questions. When the time is right, you’ll have someone you can brainstorm an idea with, to champion a project, or to introduce you to key leaders. And keeping a tickler file also comes in handy when the content well is running dry.
Content planning and delivery across an enterprise doesn’t have to be a mashup of unrelated blogs, unused training materials, and a FAQ that bears no resemblance to what customers actually ask. However you can’t integrate your efforts, or do an enterprise content refresh all at once. Sometimes it takes small steps to get to the larger goal.
So Tip #4 is all about the practical.
Start small, especially when you lack the enterprise experience. Develop a fully loaded content strategy and plan around a project, and then work the plan, documenting the results, and evaluating what to change the next time around. Study agile processes to learn about what might make your own projects more nimble and successful.
Think about your tasks in terms of how they fit the overall content lifecycle to begin to design and implement new processes that cross the functional lines.
When you have the big project—maybe a new major release, you can often break out the content portion into phases that can be managed interdependently. Requirements gathering (or use cases) drive future content, such as user instructions and training, and you can begin to work on ways to integrate content across phases, and across functions, by staying aware of what’s happening in each area.
Don’t leave lessons learned til after the launch. Create an issues list, track how you responded, what worked and what didn’t.
Use those networking skills to find out what other teams are working on content-impacting projects and get some insight on what works and what doesn’t from their perspective.
We tend to be insatiably curious, and these days, we have a lot of choices on ways to satisfy our curiosity. So my final tip is to keep learning, because you never know when something will click.
Do not shy away from understanding the other teams in your company. It’s helpful to understand some concepts in finance or payroll to give you insight on creating a business case, or communicating bad news. If you can make sense of legalese, you can understand the impact the product warranties are going to have on customer satisfaction. If you know a little bit about product development, you can figure out new ways to produce content that adds to the customer experience.
Go learn something completely new. I have a sister who’s a finance administrator by profession. She also figure skates, plays on a curling team, and paints award-winning water colors. I use her as my role model for staying interested in everything. Because you never know when creating an infographic on curling’s financial contribution to the sports world will come in handy. In the course of a week she does some serious swiveling, and gets to enjoy all the benefits.
Create a content strategy: think content hubs
Create the messaging framework, what message to which personas at what point on the journey)
Create the content plan (goals, objectives, RACI, timeline, metrics, supplemented by marcomm, doc plans, training, plans, as needed), and
Here’s what we use at INKtopia and TechWhirl:
TechWhirl template library is a great starting place for both planning and content templates
Trello is an agile-based editorial calendar tool
Teamworks PM manages projects without the MS Project hassle
Google Analytics get started on understanding who accesses your content, what they’re looking for and more
Slack – great little collaboration tool that groups discussions, stores files and integrates with other tools.
