A new and important trend is emerging amongst the best of the documentation and eLearning sites.  Both Adobe and HP are delivering in product contextual ads based on user search queries.  While Google has been doing this for some time, they don’t control corporate ads on corporate search sites. 

It’s important because technical documentation has always been seen as a necessary cost of doing business.  With contextual product ads, companies like Adobe and HP can recoup some of their documentation expense by delivering relevant ads when a user performs a search. 

   Adobe Community Help Search Results

HP Contextual Search Results

In the future, you’ll see more cross selling ads and promotional ads in search.  The tools exist today to deliver a similar experience for your company.  Most require customization and a general sense of what people are searching on. 

Relevant, focused ads make sense especially when the user is looking to do due diligence on a product.  If I am satisfied with your documentation on an issue I am having, then it’s OK to show me how to buy the solution.  That works for most people.  

Thought I’d share this amazing idea centered around offline “LIKE”.  The concept involves placing RFID bands around people’s wrists and using them to LIKE activities in the real world.  Similar to how it’s done online, the technology instantly creates a LIKE moment on a user’s Facebook page.   Brilliant.  Hope to see this technology go mainstream in 2 or 3 years.

What do you think?

I recently concluded a very detailed study of the most influential technical documentation sites of 2010 to determine what made them influential.  What I discovered transcended documentation to include all product and service related content.

Today there are companies that using content in strategic ways that are not being discussed for competitive reasons.  These companies understand the concept of social proof and how it impacts buying decisions about their products and services.  In fact they architect content to maximize the social proof impact.

I highlight a number of corporate examples in the presentation below. And as a result of this study, I’ve created a new social content framework that you can use to help guide you.  The presentation was developed to be both educational and visual so please sit back and enjoy.

As an end user, I’ve worked with a lot of software and most of the software user assistance is far from great.  Yep, I said it.  And it’s true, Mostly.  I realize this article isn’t going to gain me any more friends.  I’m okay with it.   But before you pass final judgment, please read on.  I’m trying to help.

Why are most of the software user assistance help systems so bad?  It’s not because the individuals designing it are incompetent (quite the contrary), it’s the lack of real time feedback from end users.

Take the Microsoft Clippit Office Assistant which was included in Microsoft Office 97 and 2003.  The program was widely criticized by users as disruptive and annoying.  In fact, Smithsonian Magazine called Clippy “one of the worst software design blunders in the annals of computing”.

For me, Clippy proactively offered letter-writing help regardless of how many times I clicked “Just type the letter without help.” It was not listening to my feedback.

Worse, the constant Clippy tips just weren’t helpful.  Not helpful because its computer brain had no way of determining how to deal with me.  And therein lies the problem.

True artificial intelligence doesn’t exist today and may never be able to replicate a human social experience.  I say never because unless the artificial intelligence occupies a human body, it can’t properly experience the emotions, intuitiveness and feeling that a human body experiences when connected to its brain.

So why do we constantly try to use computers to do a human’s job?  I’d argue we shouldn’t.  Instead, new curation tools are emerging that allow software help assistance to become more intelligent over time.  Curation tools operated by humans that keep track of whether users believe the help assistance to be helpful or not.  Plus analytical tools that clearly highlight help search phrases and whether they properly solved a user’s issue.

So what am I talking about?

Let me start with an example.  Let us propose that you’re in charge of user assistance for a new software product.  You’ve developed what you believe to be a fantastic help experience. You’ve covered most of the use cases.  Or so you believe.

The problem is that you don’t really know if the user assistance is good or not.  You don’t know because you’re not getting real time feedback from the end user.  Even if you cover all of the major use cases, you’re not going to cover the 1 + 1 use cases.  What are those?  I’ll give you an another example.

I use Microsoft Outlook a lot.  But I use it in my own context.  I use Outlook for creating email and I also use it as a low budget CRM system.  I use the email + Contacts in Outlook to create a CRM Marketing tool that works fairly well.  Yet, the people that designed the help in Outlook didn’t anticipate my use case.  I know because when I do a search in the help files nothing shows up.

I bet Microsoft doesn’t know that I am searching for it either.  And what little information they give me is not relevant, but do they know that?  Probably not.  How could they?  They don’t ask.  Clippy isn’t around to help either.

It gets more interesting when 1 + 1 = Word and Excel. There’s zero possibility Microsoft is anticipating all of the use cases in that scenario.  Maybe a few high level use cases but that’s as far as they’re going to take it.  But they’re missing out on critical information that they could be capitalizing on.  And they’re one of the best in the business at user assistance.

Analytics, User Rating & Feedback, Curation

So what do I mean by missing out on critical information? What if user assistance  influenced R&D and Sales? Imagine if your users gave you real time feedback on whether your tutorials, guides or procedures were helpful.  Imagine if you could quickly discover what assistance users were searching on and not finding.  Imagine if you knew what user assistance content was being accessed the most or the least.

The tools are available today.  Tools that ask the user whether a tutorial was helpful and if not a lightbox pops up and asks them why not.  The information is collected and given back to your team in the form of a report or dashboard.

Tools that watch all of the searches for help and report the findings to you in the form of reports. Armed with missing search information, you can build additional user assistance content that helps the user experience.  Moreover, if a search term is being used more than you anticipated, then building additional content may be necessary.     Curating content becomes important as well.  User assistance content that is viewed by users as helpful should be promoted.  Content that is viewed as unhelpful should be reworked or archived.

Now your R&D department can identify areas for innovation (based on searches or direct feedback) and your sales team can identify cross selling opportunities (you do need to track who is using the software for this to work – we use Marketo).  Moreover, I suspect you may identify some additional training revenue opportunities if a user just doesn’t “get it” and needs help.

So, here’s my final point. At a high level there are tremendous amounts of information that you’re not tracking today.  And that’s why your user assistance is not as good as it could be.  You may be great at what you do, but you can’t anticipate how the crowd is using your software.  Sorry, but it’s a fact.

ThinkPassenger’s red velvet rope approach is unique in the industry.  It requires corporations to shed the megaphone approach to customer messaging and to connect with their customers  one on one.  They make it exclusive, fun and rewarding to both company and participant.

It’s typically full service, private and very exclusive.  Think “privileged”.  It begins with private invitations that are extended to the corporation’s customers.  After accepting the invite, ThinkPassenger white gloves the community’s experience from beginning to end.

A Closer Look at ThinkPassenger

ThinkPassenger started in the music industry where they kept track of fans for popular bands.  They’d then email fans if their band was in town for a gig.  If proved successful, so they decided to do it for larger brands.  The first was Disney’s ABC.

Insights, Innovation and Advocacy

“Our world is much more online, social and intimate with customer dialogue,” said Steve Howe, CEO of ThinkPassenger.  “We start with three pillars that make up the foundation of every community.”

• • Insights – build communities that seek to understand what their client’s customers like and how they feel about competitors.
  • Innovation – Crowd sourced R&D.  Ask the community for product improvement ideas, ideas for completely new products and respond to the corporation’s ideas for new products.
  • Advocacy – Build customer champions that are more likely to purchase in the future and refer the company’s products to their social networks.

Why ThinkPassenger over Jive or Lithium?

Companies should use ThinkPassenger if they need 3rd party objectivity, have never built or run a brand community before or want proven community building methodologies.  As many in the Fortune 1000 understand, building a community from scratch is tough.  Most fail because of the lack of interest or the content is not engaging enough.

You may also want a private community if

• You don’t want your community research to become public.
• You want a one-on-one relationship with your customers without outside disruptions.
• You want to build relationships with an exclusive group of customers.

When asked why ThinkPassenger is chosen over their competitors: “We win through our client services and strategic direction help.  We’ve developed best in class methodologies that no one has replicated.  We also give solid advice for community building based on our own experience,” said Emily Gates, Vice President of Community Services.

But, if you’re confident in your company’s ability to run and manage a community or if your community is asking for a place to meet online, then use Jive, Lithium or another self service community platform.

My Impressions of ThinkPassenger

The company reminds me of a company I used to compete with called FreeMarkets (purchased by Ariba for $500m). They developed a full service approach to strategic sourcing while A.T. Kearney used a DIY solution.  FreeMarkets typically beat Kearney (due to their full service offering) when the client was new to strategic sourcing while Kearney ended up with the business after the client was well trained on FreeMarkets technology.

The problem with A.T. Kearney’s approach is that FreeMarkets received the bulk of the revenue from their full service offering while A.T. Kearney received the crumbs.  There’s a direct analogy to the community business model here.  But I don’t see ThinkPassenger taking advantage of it.

ThinkPassenger should borrow the FreeMarkets playbook and start evangelizing the advantages of full service while tactfully knocking down the DIY providers.  Do it publicly and do it relentlessly.  Currently however, I see very little in the way of differentiated messaging.  Yet given where we are in the community adoption cycle, ThinkPassenger should be the marquee name in the space.  But today they are not.

They also need to build their brand vision.  They need to get analysts, customers and prospects to think of them first when starting a customer or employee community for the first time.  Leave them with the understanding that ThinkPassenger is the go to company for those organizations that lack the expertise to build world class communities.

FreeMarkets built a mission control center in the middle of their headquarters to handle their full service engagements.   It was impressive.  So impressive that it turned out to be there number one sales tool.  Clients were flown in to view live events, analysts were given carte blanche access, and prospects were shown the control center to get more comfortable with FreeMarkets business practices.  It was also the number one reason cited for using FreeMarkets instead of A.T, Kearney.  It became part of their brand image.

ThinkPassenger needs to do something similar.  They are a superior solution for inexperienced companies (which is the majority of them) yet they haven’t taken advantage of it yet.

What the CXO needs to know

ThinkPassenger has the better model for companies new to community building or for those companies not equipped to properly extract the greatest value from a customer or employee oriented community.  Their SaaS model will also help you bypass IT.

If your organization is looking to explore customer or employee communities and you’re in the Fortune 1000, your better off choosing ThinkPassenger.  Their white glove service reduces the risk you’ll face when proposing the idea to your executive team.  Leverage and learn from their experience before you set up your own community.

They’ll also give you the opportunities to understand, analyze and make sense out of the vast social data created in the community to develop richer customer profiles and deeper relationships with community members.  Trying to do this with an inexperienced team is too risky.  Let ThinkPassenger assume the risk while educating your team on their vast experience.

MindTouch has been busy preparing for the launch of a revolutionary new product so I have been updating this site less.  That will change soon.  If you notice however, I’ve moved to WordPress to take advantage of a number of features that were missing on the blogger platform.

A few updates to report.

I somehow won the AIIM Enterprise 2.0 RFP award thanks to all who voted.  I’ve also been selected to be one of the Keynotes for LavaCon San Diego September 29th – October 2.

Our presentation at Boston’s Enterprise 2.0 was a huge success.  We actually had a standing room only situation for the presentation and discussion on Innovation Solutions.  A big thanks to MetLife, Adobe and Axa Insurance for participating.  Thanks also to Aaron Fulkerson for stepping in for me at the last minute to fill in for me (my daughter was born the same week).

Alright, a selfish request.  Please <sheepish smile> vote for me at Enterprise 2.0 in Santa Clara.  I believe the sessions I’ve proposed will be both educational and entertaining without sounding like a vendor pitch.  You know me and you know my work.  You will leave the presentation more educated than you entered.  That I promise.

OK, here are the sessions:

1. Best Practices – Building Communities Around Your Strategic Content
2. Using Game Theory and Enterprise 2.0 Concepts to Destroy the Competition
3. Your Strategic Documentation: Weapons of Mass Attraction
4. Sites Like YouTube, SlideShare, Facebook are Stealing Your Traffic and Revenue – Learn how to fight back

Thanks in advance for your votes.

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 technical communication may not have enabled readers to talk about the content or talk to each other alongside the content, but the times (and The Times) are changing.

You Are Here

Across the software industry today, writers are proving their worth by aligning with business values such as education, training, customer support, presales, marketing, or development. We seek our fit into the overall content strategy in any organization. Some of us are the content strategy advocates in our organization. But social media is sometimes a public relations role, or a marketing role, even though our content has a place on the external website and could be strategically integrated into the overall website. Social software can be overwhelming and a time sink without knowing how to narrow down the choices. Without a strategy, it seems like a hit or miss proposition. Make a map from business goals to social software to get there.

Where is There?

Enabling content creation or content curation through social software is no simple undertaking, nor is it the right fit for every organization. Depending on the business goals and key performance indicators for your success, you can discover where “there” is. For customer support content, responsiveness is important as well as customer satisfaction. For education and training, the amount of time a user spends with a learning product, or how often they share it with others can indicate success. Only you know where “there” is for your success factors. Certain qualities for your content will help you achieve nearly any business goal, such as those in the following list.

Searchable

Searchable content can be listed when searching with major search engines and is available on the Internet. Google’s home page is the first page users go to prior to finding the answer to their question from your content. Also, once a user is in your content collection, search within a smaller set of content may be critical to their success. Searching is easy, finding is hard. Make finding as easy as possible.

Shareable

Due to the economy on the social web where reciprocity and reputation are highly valued, and the currency is attention paid in links and time spent on a site, shareable content means that users can participate in the exchange of links for motivation or payment.

Sociable

Sociable content is interactive, conversational, engaging, and increases a sense of community or belonging when participating on a site. Sociable content works well when customer loyalty or lead generation is important.

Syndicated

Syndication means that a user can subscribe to content updates that are important to him or her. Syndicated content puts the user in control of how much information they receive and how they use it, whether it’s on a mobile device such as a smart phone or in their email inbox. Syndication can work well in a development or support environment when notification about the latest updates is crucial to the business.

Getting There

To find our place in Enterprise 2.0, technical communicators should understand that social media and collaboration is a part of our job to provide a content offering from their company. By approaching the enormous potential of the social web with Enterprise 2.0 in mind, we can make it manageable and avoid time sinks. Getting to know customers through the social web is a good first step. We can also participate with customers on the social web as appropriate. Finally, building a community or platform that enables content sharing and collaboration is the ultimate reach and influence builder for your content. Content that is shareable, sociable, searchable, and syndicated can go far and wide on the social web, helping customers meet their goals, and companies reach theirs.

About the Author: Anne Gentle is the author of the book Conversation and Community, The Social Web for Documentation. She also writes a blog JustWriteClick about Technical Communicators.

“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 to the executive suite.  In fact, those that seek those levels of Management typically divert into other roles.  That’s because Technical Communication roles are not seen as strategic.

Perception is that they don’t contribute to revenue or cut costs.  Most executives don’t even realize the importance of documentation.  It’s just not what they think about when they consider the strategic aspects of a go to market plan.  Sorry, it’s true.

“Here is the raw, unvarnished truth: If you want to make a life as a technical writer, you must sustain yourself by your enjoyment of writing, because you cannot get any satisfaction from your work any other way. For you there will not be the kinds of rewards that others can expect. Raises, promotions, company perks of some kind – forget them. You won’t see them. Technical writing will always pay significantly less than engineering or a type of work that is more central to the company’s business.” Tom Johnson’s I’d Rather Be Writing (Guest Post by Keith Hood)

So is Keith right? No.  At least not anymore.  There are now many ways to break the paper ceiling.  There’s more opportunity and chance for career enhancements then ever before.  It’s right before you.

(click here for the large version)

Because of the Enterprise 2.0 tools and solutions available, you now have the ability to turn your product/service documentation into large communities, sources of revenue, a cost reduction tool and centers of learning.  There are companies doing it today.  This is not pie in the sky stuff.

In fact, as you begin to learn more about this recent phenomenon made possible by Enterprise 2.0 tools, you’ll see more potential than you ever thought possible for your future.

Your job is to learn more about it.  Learn how other companies are using these new tools and learn how companies are turning to their product documentation to jump start their communities instead of starting from scratch.

Are you going to climb ladders or allow your career to slide into obscurity?  Do you want to be seen as incredibly strategic to your organization or just another replaceable pawn?

I know what I’d want.

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 month.  It’s a giant laboratory and meeting place and it’s likely your product is being discussed.  I’ll bet if you did a Twitter Search right now, you’ll find someone talking about your product, company or something you product solves.  Try it.

The point is that if you’re participating, you’re learning more about how your products and services are being used.  You become more effective as a Technical Communicator because you’re discovering more about your customers.  You’re also able to socially curate the best of Twitter in order to learn more about your industry, competitors or problems your product solves.

Here are the questions to ask yourself or your Technical Communicator

1. Out of the 55 million tweets per day, how many are about your product/service or about something your product solves?
2. If 180 million unique visitors use Twitter every month, why aren’t we asking them questions about our product to learn more about how we solve their problems?
3. Why aren’t we building a following on Twitter so that we can ask our followers to help us with market research?
4. Why aren’t we monitoring consumer sentiment about our product or service so that we can take action to rectify or improve negative situations?
5. Since there are ongoing conversations about our product/service, why aren’t we participating in them to build good will?
6. Since we can segment and target users on Twitter, why don’t we convey information about our product directly to customers and prospective customers?
7. Why don’t we provide valuable links to reports, videos, whitepapers about our product to Twitter users?
8. Why aren’t we asking Twitter followers to help improve our product documentation?
9. Why aren’t you following and networking with other Technical Communicators to learn more about trends, strategies and best practices?
10. Did you know that there are many organizations that provide drip learning through daily tweets about their product or service?  Follower counts increase as a result.

As we enter into this social, Enterprise 2.0 world of business, it’s becoming more and more about customer service. What we do after that is secondary.  The fact that you can publically reply to tweets about your products or what your products solves is incredible.

You’ve never had that kind of reach before as a Technical Communicator.  Word of mouth is the game now.  Word of mouth is how it used to be, and is now that on steroids.

So how do i get started? Read Anne Gentle’s article on the subject.  Also see Amit Agarwal’s use case on Dell.

Any objections to using Twitter as Technical Communicators seems trite.  The medium has proved itself.   That some still believe technical communication can still be done with Microsoft Word and a static webpage  is illusory and quite anachronistic.

But as obvious as that may seem to some of us, there are still quite a few people that believe the field of technical communication is still about one-way communication with our customers.  No sharing, no feedback, no curation.

Which leaves us with one more big question.  Why are Technical Communicators not embracing new Web 2.0 technologies like Twitter?

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 are starting to build communities around their product/service documentation.  Yep, something every company has but never views as strategic.

They aren’t starting from scratch.  There is already web traffic from their current customers on the product documentation page seeking resolutions to their issues with your product.  So the foundation is in place, it’s just been moved topsy-turvy into the corporate attic as an afterthought.

But that’s a mistake.  There are major benefits to socializing your product documentation.  I’ve listed the major ones by department in the infographic below:

Companies like Autodesk get it.  They understand that shipping 15 DVD’s full of product documentation for a single product won’t work.  Nor is it strategic.  They’d rather host the certified documentation online and let the community build out the rest by enabling them to add tutorials, how to guides, articles and comments on how to improve existing documentation.

They also understand that social documentation benefits the rest of the organization.

5 Reasons Social Documentation Benefits the Corporate Departments

#1 The Sales department understands that social product documentation will drive sales opportunities because they can track every digital footprint on their documentation site.  If a customer that bought product X is looking at product Y’s documentation, then Sales sees a cross selling opportunity and can choose to act on it.

#2 The Marketing Department realizes that building a community around their product documentation is easier and less expensive.  They make it easy for their community to evangelize their product to their peers by having them post content on their site and share with their buddies.  It works.  As an important bonus, all of the rich community contributed content shows up in Google search.  Which means lead generation.

#3 The Research and Development teams are finding that simply observing the interaction with their online documentation is giving them ideas as to how to improve the product or to create new ones.  They are also able to view community questions and answers, conduct surveys and form ad hoc focus groups to gain valuable insights.  This wasn’t possible in an Enterprise 1.0 world.  It is now.

#4 The Customer Support Department is reducing costs and headcount by enabling the community to help the community.  Some are even offering free support from community contributed documentation but charge for company support.  But it all starts with product documentation.  Documentation with a community wrapper that continues to build and evolve over time.

#5 Technical Communicators are the house documentation Directors.  They author and curate community content.  They help socialize the community and act as corporate cheerleaders to their most enthusiastic community contributors.  They have the tools to monitor article effectiveness, poor search results, and product documentation health so they can take immediate action to better the effectiveness of the content.  Their role moves from trivial to exceedingly strategic.

What the CEO Needs to Know

I’ve been there.  It’s about building incredible, ground breaking, innovative new products.  It’s about creating the next iPhone that sells itself and is so easy to use that your customers don’t require a product manual.  How many of us actually get there? What’s your Plan B?

Has any CEO ever started a discussion about a new product or services with: “How will we document the product in order to maximize sales, build community and reduce costs through community driven support?”  My guess is no.

But you should.  There’s tremendous hidden value in content you’ve already created.  Just look at how 3rd party sites like YouTube, GetSatisfaction, Epinions, and Amazon.com are utilizing and building traffic to their sites by discussing your products.  WHY!?!

Because those sites make it easy for them to contribute user driven content and you don’t.  You don’t because you’re fearful of the consequences.  Yet discussions about your product are occurring regardless. And on higher traffic – higher page rank sites which make them show up higher in the search results.  So you’ve lost control of the message anyway.

Best to enable user generated content on your site and curate the rest from the web.

Then you regain product authority.   Are your current community efforts doing that?