Social Media experts, such as David Armano, of Dachis Corp, are proposing new business measures for assessing the effectiveness of social media marketing. Armano is proposing five key measurement factors:
Attention: how many people are clicking on your site, blogs or tweets?
Engagement: how much interaction there is between the community and you?
Authority: your influence in the community and on the Web?
Virality: how your information spreads by digital word of mouth?
Health: the strength of the community and your online presence?
So can technical documentation be “re-framed” to meet these criteria? If so, will its value to the business become clearer?
I would suggest the most Documentation Managers would see these measurement factors playing to the strengths of technical documentation.
It wouldn’t take a great deal of effort to incorporate these factors into a documentation strategy. Be doing this, the efforts of the Technical Publications department would assist in maximising an organisation’s Social Web marketing efforts.
As a side effect, it could also move technical publications towards the centre of many modern organisations’ core activities.
In future, the real world is set to combine with the virtual at BMW Service. BMW Augmented Reality creates this bridge and extends the real world by adding virtual information. BMW Service is planning to use this technology as a means to assist BMW Service staff in their highly demanding technical work.
Times have changed. In fact, less and less often do consumers even seek out content by actually going to a given site.
To paraphrase Jeff Jarvis, if something is important, it will find me, be it via newsletter, Facebook, Twitter or a shared link in an email…
The context - Facebook, Twitter, email - in which people are introduced to media and consume it is becoming more important than the content itself. Content is no longer king, context is…
This is why you need both lots of content and a diversity of it.
Karbasfrooshan is talking about videos, but will the same be said about user assistance?
Today, we assume users will seek out Help and other forms of technical documentation, but will that change? Will technical communicators need to disseminate their content via an increasing number of channels?
This is an edited version of a transatlantic interview we carried out with Sarah O’Keefe, CEO of our US partner Scriptorium Inc., on DITA. We discussed a range of topics relating to DITA, but these clips focus on the business case for DITA - why and when it makes sense to move to this standard for producing documentation.
If you need assistance in assessing the value of DITA to your business or in implementing DITA, then Cherryleaf (in Europe) and Scriptorium (in the USA) can help you.
Dr Atul Gawande is currently in London, touring the radio stations to promote his book “The Checklist Manifesto“. Dr Gawande is a surgeon in Boston Mass., who has been looking at how to deal with complexity in surgery and elsewhere.
He has discovered that complex systems work, mostly through people using checklists. Furthermore, no matter how expert you were, well-designed checklists could improve outcomes. So, with some assistance from Boeing, he developed a 90 second checklist (download it here) that reduced surgical deaths and complications in eight hospitals around the world by more than 30%.
In the book, he shows how low-cost checklists actually work, why some make matters worse and why others make matters better.
According to The Guardian, Dr Gawande argues that the right kind of checklist liberates rather than stifles professional intuition. A concise sumary of what might go wrong, and what to do if it does, galvanises groups of professionals into tighter teams. Indeed, one of the key factors, included in the checklist, was to introduce everyone in surgical team to each other: it leads to people having the confidence to speak up.
Checklists have long been regarded as beneath the level of serious consideration by methodologists and others interested in the logic of the disciplines. But they are more sophisticated than they appear–and are perhaps the key methodology of those disciplines that really treat theory and practice as equals, e.g., surgery, engineering, neural and public economics, program and product evaluation.
Scriptorium Inc has uploaded the “Beyond Documentation” Webinar Ellis delivered back in August 2009. In this session he looked at the future of technical writing and likely changes to the ways in which user assistance is delivered.
We asked:
Are we moving beyond documents?
If so, what does this mean for technical communicators?
In 2008, we first raised the potential of using augmented reality in technical documentation. We used instructions on repairing an engine as an example:
Fast forward to today, and you can now see a video from the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University demonstrating a prototype of such a system:
Yet another sign that quick reference cards are back in fashion:
Plans to be set out in the Families Green Paper will propose better advice and information for couples and address the balance between work and childcare by considering ways to make public services more “family friendly”.
Under the Green Paper, new fathers will be given a manual to help them adjust to the role.
The “dads’ guide”, put together by the Fatherhood Institute, will include an explanation of breastfeeding and tips on how to support their partner. (Source: BBC News)
The ‘Dads’ Guide To…’ cards are A6 sized quick reference cards printed on both sides with important messages for dads and male carers about their child’s development and how they can get more involved in their child’s life and learning.
Sadly, one question asked by many new fathers remains still unanswered: where do you take the baby’s batteries out?
Intellect’s SaaS group has published recently a paper called “The business case for Software as a Service“. The paper lays out the technical and cost benefits of SaaS, together with checklists covering selection criteria, legal considerations and comparisons of SaaS applications to traditional in-house systems.
Cherryleaf made some minor contributions to this paper - so minor we didn’t think they merited our listing as contributors to this paper (a mistake in hindsight).
The report states, SaaS applications are generally easy to use and don’t require a great deal of training and online Help. So why is this?
In part, it’s because:
1. SaaS applications are newlydeveloped applications. This means the developers have been able to build upon the recent developments in usability, when they’ve developed the application.
2. SaaS products typically deal with familiar business tasks, such as finance and sales prospecting. Where a SaaS application does try to explain new concepts or tasks (viz. Google Wave), users can still find they struggle to use the application.
3. SaaS applications can be fixed quickly and are usually subject to continuous improvement. Pilot programmes can be much smaller and quicker to conduct. SaaS applications can be measured and tested more easily, using Web Analytics.
I first worked with Cherryleaf when I was with Zetex Semiconductors. We had a requirement for authoring/editorial support on some of our technical publications. Ellis initially made sure he fully understood our specific requirements and profile of the person we were looking for, then supplied us a selection of carefully vetted resumes.
This saved us valuable time in selecting a shortlist of candidates. Ellis has also been an excellent source of help and advice on subsequent occasions. I wouldn't hesitate in recommending the valuable services Ellis and Cherryleaf provide.
Cherryleaf helps you explain technical information in an easy to understand way.
Depending on your situation, we can help you through our writing projects, recruitment, consultancy and training services.
Fast forward to today, and you can now see a video from the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University demonstrating a prototype of such a system:
