Guest Post by Anne Gentle Meeting business goals with emergent social software, this is Enterprise 2.0. As a technical writer, do you doubt that Enterprise 2.0 can happen where you work? Consider this. Even the most influential and gate-keeping newspapers now allow comments alongside their strictly styled, investigated, and copy-edited content. A browser sidebar from Google called Sidewiki enables annotation on any page on the entire web. Traditional ...

“You’re position in the company is of little value,” he said indifferently neither in attempt to injure or blame but merely in the tone of stating a situational fact as he’d say to another man, ‘you'll always be worthless you can't help it. It's in your blood.’  Or to be more scientific, your conditioned that way. The role of Technical Communicator, Product Content Creator, Usability Specialists, etc. haven’t always been the fastest path ...

According to a recent Edison Research study 51% of active Twitter users follow companies, brands or products on social networks.  That means they are most likely following your brand and your product. That means they are discussing how, why, when and where they use your product and service.  And you’re not there?  Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users with 300,000 signing up every day.  180 million unique visitors use the site every ...

Every major brand is struggling to launch a community site around their company’s products. Maybe it’s an indirect community that you hope brings traffic and future sales, or maybe it’s a community about your product that has been designed to increase sales. But unless you are a very big brand with a passionate following (e.g. Apple) these communities are difficult and expensive to build.  Not impossible, but it’s hard work. Yet companies ...