The Spring 2010 edition of the ISTC’s quarterly journal, Communicator, has a special supplement (sponsored by Adobe) on The role of social media in technical communication.
While acknowledging that social media can be used for frivolous time wasting, the four articles in the special supplement look at the professional and business uses for social media, and in particular at the advantages the use of social media can bring to technical communications professionals. The contributors are Noz Urbina of Mekon, Gordon McLean from Sword Ciboodle, and RJ Jaquez of Adobe. I have the privilege of being the fourth contributor.
You can read all the supplement articles in this 12-page PDF (2.6 MB). [Note: This copy of the supplement has been optimised for accessibility (25th March 2010)] The rest of Communicator is also well worth reading, but it’s not available on-line, so if you’d like to read it you need to join the ISTC. (If you’re a tech writer working in the UK, you should join the ISTC anyway.)
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David Farbey, Technical Writer
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Congratulations on this supplement, the first of its kind. Well done. As you probably could guess, I believe social media has many practical applications for technical communicators, so it’s great to see this type of educational material getting broader attention and a targeted audience. Thanks for sharing!
Er, could you correct it’s to its? Geez. This commenting stuff is so hard to control.
Thanks Ann, I appreciate your comments.
Excellent piece. Particularly insightful for me… First line in the first page, “…a technical communicator compared social media’s significance to his profession as being as useful as a pogo stick or a skateboard.”
I recently answered a similar comment posted on my blog about why anybody should have a Twitter account.
Folks, hate to be the bearer of what so many consider bad news, but this isn’t a passing fad… social media is an important emerging trend in our field that isn’t just connecting us directly to customers, it’s connecting us to how they’re using the products we’re documenting.
About a year ago, I received the distilled results to a survey conducted who-knows-how-long-ago. I began following up the most vocal responders for more information about their concerns. Not one person spoke to me or replied to the emails that had not been marked System Failure.
Too much time had elapsed.
One of the software products I am documenting will soon be released. During the beta, we made extensive use of various social media – in fact, we connected the product interface directly to various networks including a user forum, our support site, a blog and a form for collecting user feedback. An RSS feed across the top of the GUI displays the latest blog entries to entice users to click through to the blog site.
The feedback collected using this technique has been nothing short of outstanding. We get it raw…nothing is distilled down to a few Likert scale responses. We can see when users are frustrated or merely confused. We are able to correct minor mistakes immediately and for larger ones, can deliver updates to the beta community when available.
But perhaps the most significant trends in our beta were the things we did not think of. Requests to combine two, three or more features to accomplish a broad goal – best practices that would have been postponed until the service pack release can now be addressed immediately.
As David wrote, “…only by observing users and by probing for more understanding in the context of their work will you get the information that will surprise you…”
In this economy, no budget I know of has the line item for tech comm field trips. Social media is making it happen in real time, at very little cost.
Is it scary and daunting? Sure. Get online and do your research. Embrace the technology, give it a test drive. Link to the supplement and read it, particularly Noz Urbina’s facts about social media. If you’re a technical communicator and your audience is on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, shouldn’t you be, too?
Just sitting down to read this (thanks for making it available). Had to copy and paste the introduction into a Word doc first. Who decided to make the background RED with a white font?
Hi Gina,
You’re not the first person to comment that the PDF of the supplement has accessibility issues. I’ve passed the comments on to Adobe, who sponsored the supplement and came up with the design elements.
Nevertheless, I hope you find the articles useful.
David,
I really enjoyed reading the articles — especially yours. I’m working with two other technical writers at our company to pilot a Confluence wiki as a user community with a user docs wiki, forum, and blog (see my blog post at http://ginafromtampa.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/getting-ready-to-launch-our-user-community-with-the-confluence-wiki-blogs-and-user-forums/).
You are so on the mark about the “silo effect” which we’re working to overcome. Thanks so much for providing this excellent resource.
Anyone can subscribe to ‘Communicator’. Contact the ISTC office: istc@istc.org.uk.
“Every issue of ‘Communicator’ is worth reading” is something I hear frequently at conferences around the world where free copies have been sent.
But joining the ISTC is always a good idea, especially if you are in the UK or Europe.
Thank you for making this supplement available. It’s ironic that some technical communicators shy away from social media. Perhaps it’s a generation gap? If these technical communicators were under 25, there would be no question that they would adopt social media.
Very nice article, David! All of you provided interesting and meaningful perspectives. Regarding Jason’s question about social media adoption among generations, I personally see many people of all ages using social media. I have a lot of Facebook connections from my high school and college days, and I have been out of high school and college for a LONG time.
Hallo David
Just letting you know that I’ve added your blog post as a reference in the slides of my recent AODC presentation on engaging readers in the documentation. I’ve posted the slides and a summary on my blog:
http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/aodc-2010-day-2-engaging-your-readers-in-the-documentation/
Just a few days ago I gave a related presentation at the Atlassian Summit conference. I referred to your blog post in that talk too. The slides and video will be posted sometime soon on the Atlassian web site. I’ll blog about it when that happens, so that you can take a look if you’re interested.
Congratulations to you and the other contributors on a great supplement to the ISTC Communicator.
Cheers
Sarah