It may seem counter-intuitive, but we believe technical authors shouldn’t fear the trend towards user generated content. Let me explain why:
1. It could get you the attention of your CEO. October’s Harvard Business Review highlights an article called “The Contribution Revolution: Letting Volunteers Build Your Business” by Intuit CEO Scott Cook. User contribution is now something that is being discussed in the boardroom. Organisations are considering whether and how to engage their user community.
2. It should demonstrate more clearly the relationship between customer engagement, customer retention and how user assistance can contribute to these.
3. As the importance of user assistance grows within the organisation so, hopefully, will the importance of good user documentation – something that requires a professional writer.
4. It provides technical authors with a better understanding of their audience – what issues are important to them, the terminology they use.
There are important provisos. You need to have a sufficiently large enough user base to get users to contribute and to benefit from “the network effect”. You can’t expect technology to solve all the problems – information architecture and clear writing will remain as important as ever.
What do you think? You can comment here.
Totally agree.
Most software products are sufficiently complex that there is no way we writers could cover it all, without user generated content we’d be stuck!
OK, not that bad, but I know that certain of my blog posts have helped others (personal blog) with a particular iTunes problem. Perfect example.
Nice post – but none of this is new. Writers in all fields have been incorporating user generated content and feedback for centuries.
I’ve been in this business for over twenty years now, and I’ve seen examples of it almost since day one. I started out in the aerospace industry, where we even had an acronym for it – COC – Customer Originated Change.
Last year I gave a presentation on this whole concept at the STC Conference and got a standing room only crowd. It’s a presentation I’ve been asked to give several times since – and I must admit I’m still shocked that it seems to be such a radical idea to so many people in the Tech Doc profession.