Don’t Overlook the Obvious with Wikis

Being in the business of explaining technical things, it’s easy to skip the obvious and jump to the difficult stuff. After all, since we can make educated guesses of what people will struggle with; why not jump to explaining that content? However, doing so can be a trap. Recently this happened to me in my internal team documentation efforts.

A while back, I blogged on my experiences with wikis. In addition to my outside experience, I finally figured out a way in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 to setup a team wiki. We have to do some manual creation of navigation but overall it meets our needs for internal team knowledge management.

When I “launched” the wiki in a brief demo to the team, it went pretty well. And for the most part people have figured out where it is. However, time passed and I forgot one key thing. People needed to know how to use the wiki. It’s not that the wiki is all that difficult or complex but it’s still a process unfamiliar to people. I completely overlooked the obvious.

Now, I have a page set up with answers to the following common questions:

• How do I use the wiki?
• How do I add a new page?
• How do I edit a page?
• How do I add a picture?
• How do I search for information?
• How do I edit the navigation?

Sure, I may be someone who loves technology and will play with it until I figure out what’s going on but not all users are the same. I think it’s a valuable lesson for social media, technology, and software. It’s easy to assume that users can figure out the basic processes and workflows but then when you do that you create easy stumbling blocks that might discourage people from using your new tool. I’m glad I went back to do my how to guide. It’s not thorough or complete but it’s a start. Next up is a wiki page on how to blog. I really want to get my team more involved in blogging since I’ve heard what valuable things they have to say and would love for them to share it with you all too.

Have you ever overlooked something obvious in your social media or technology efforts?

Social Media - It's Not About the Tools

A while back, I worked on a grant with a colleague and friend Brian (who’s now an amazing interaction designer and information architect in the DC area), and I fondly remember even then having some great conversations about tools. He really inspired me to look beyond the tools and think more about interaction and outcome for why you use a tool. The focus on the why is an important piece of my workflow today. Yes, I explain to people how to use tools. Yes, I work at a software and services company. But no, we don’t do this for the love of creating geeky things. We have to see you, the user, at the end of the process. Our clients provide our motivation on a daily basis. So we have to ask ourselves:

• Beyond the computer, what task or process are you trying to accomplish? And why?
• How can we make your life easier? Or in other words, if you were more efficient at your every day workflow tasks, what would you be doing with your extra time?
• What’s on your dream list of things you wish you could do?
• How do you plan to make the world a better place? What’s your mission?

Thinking about these important questions (and more) is how we prioritize our to do lists. I feel the same way when I promote social media. Sure, a lot of times it can be fun just to play with social media and technology tools. After all, I am the girl drooling over the new Blackberry Storm that hasn’t even been released yet. I’m not sure all that it can do but I still want one. I figure I’ll learn as I go along but that’s not how I always operate. When it comes to business it’s not my time and money it’s someone else’s. I’m sure that’s the way it is for you. You don’t work at your organization just for your pleasure, you want to serve others and make the world a better place.

What does this mean for you? Don’t stress about how to use every social media tool. You don’t even have to have your hands in everything available. Yes, it’s important to try different tools because one might be a better fit for your organization than another. The most important thing you can do when you attempt to use social media is to stop thinking about the tool (and what it can or cannot do).

Instead, focus on what you need to accomplish. Focus on who you need to help and why? Write down what you want to be able to do without even thinking about which tool you will need. For example, “I want to be able to share stories with our volunteers and donors about how we feed the area needy. And it’d be really cool if we found more volunteers and donors because of it.”  Then, when you identify your goal you can examine the social media tools and pick out which one will be most effective and easiest for you to implement. Then, social media doesn’t have to be so intimidating and you can focus on what really matters.

Content Reuse is Super (and not just for technical writers)

In my day-to-day world as a technical writer (no, I’m not paid to be a blogger) we often think about how to reuse the content we write. Whether it’s content that’s similar from program to program or whether we’re thinking about different output (publishing) options, we think about how to make the most out of everything we write.

I remember when I started in the field the buzz word was “single sourcing.” How do you write from a single source and generate many different outputs. Who wants to write the same thing over and over again in different programs? When you do that the quality and consistency suffers not to mention the time suck of repeating efforts.

These days people talk a lot about DITA or modular documentation, but once you get past the terms, what you have is a concern over efficiency of time.

Don’t we all have that same concern whether we’re writing documentation, marketing material, corporate communications, or organizational newsletters? I think it’s a valuable lesson we all need to learn no matter what medium or profession we’re writing in. When you take the time to construct a message for a newsletter, don’t try to reinvent the wheel when you need to add content to your organization’s website, facebook page, or blog. Instead of taking a message you wrote for one and rewrite it every time you need to publish something new, write it the first time for content reuse. Not only can it save you, the writer time, but it can help your readers because then they don’t have to re-understand a topic every time they read something new from you. Also, if you ever need to translate, reusing content can save you major moola $$$.

Here are some recommendations:

1. Before you write, think ahead to all the places the content can be used. Knowing the format limitations of each medium can help you decide how to write in the first place.
2. Write in a program that makes publishing content to different mediums easier. While Microsoft Word can be easy to use, it can also enter a lot of style “junk” so when you copy and paste, things come over you’d rather leave behind. We use Adobe Structured FrameMaker because it makes it easy to quickly pull chunks of information from one section for reuse somewhere else (plus a lot more technical reasons). However, many great programs are available and even some open source programs work just as well. Do a little research into your organization’s needs and financial limitations and I’m sure you’ll find a suitable application.
3. Style. Yes, it really is important to think about the grammar and stylistic choices of your writing. When you establish a consistent organizational style, it’s easier to maintain content quality across all your mediums. We have a Blackbaud Corporate Style as well as a documentation style. But we’re not perfect; it’s something we work on all the time.
4. Don’t be too specific. Yes, it can be bad to be too detailed. If you want to use an article from the newsletter for the blog, don’t mention anything about the newsletter in the article.  Kinda obvious but there are other subtle details that might give you away. When you write in a more general tone, you create opportunities. For example, craft a story about your organization that is a great standalone piece. When it’s strong on its own, you can easily share that story on your website, brochure, blog, presentation to the board, and more!
5. Slow down. Seems crazy to slow down but when you spend more time on one really great message, it’s easier to repurpose it. It really is possible to write less and end up with more.

Social Media Magic

Participating in social media can perform magic. How? It can magically take all your time and make it disappear! You started working on a short blog post. It’s only a couple paragraphs long. You write and re-write. Read it aloud to yourself. Change some words. Research some information on Google. Add a link for more information. You even insert an image to make the post more attractive to potential readers.

You’re feeling pretty good about your blog post. Well, until you look at the time. What?! Wait a minute, what happened? How is it hours later? Did Michael J. Fox take you back to the future? No, you just learned a valuable lesson in social media. Often the simplest of actions takes the most time.

Why? When you have a limited amount of time and space to capture your audience and bring them into your organization’s efforts every piece of social media communication becomes valuable and worthy of your time. Even for me, writing a blog takes up more time than I’d like and I’m supposed to be a professional writer. Words are not just words.

When you participate in social media, your every move needs time and thought. The details really do matter because there aren’t as many to observe. Most social media efforts take place in tiny bite sized information dispersed in several forms meant to drive your audience to your website, to your events, and ultimately to the bank to support your mission.

So how do you balance the demands on your time? If you’re like me you go through valleys and mountains of social media activity. You also are more patient with yourself and don’t expect to master all social media mediums instantaneously. Add efforts on a site-by-site basis. For a month or two, start your blog. Tweak how it looks until it presents the image of your organization you’re hoping for. Play with the links and the type of information you are providing. And, start writing posts. Think realistically about how often you can and should write. Minimum of one post a week is good. I’ve fallen victim to this one. If you don’t post often enough you lose readers, too often and people will skim over your information too much. When you’re blogging on a regular basis and feel comfortable with the demands then start expanding. Promote your blog on other sites. And maybe consider what other efforts you want to explore. Perhaps it’s time to promote the blog and your organization’s website on Facebook. Perhaps you want to twitter your posts and timely information. Either way, don’t take leaps, take small measured hops. I’ll take quality over quantity any day.

Paring Down the Tweets

A week later and my experiment with paring down the number of people I follow has worked wonders (so far). I’m back to following people without as much anxiety and I can keep up without dedicating my every working moment to watching the stream of collective thought dumps.

Talk much?

My excessive tweeters somewhat followed the same people Joe Meehan mentioned in his comment:

"But as I've discovered, the excessive tweets I've experienced fall into two categories:  One - from news orgs I follow (USA Today, LA Times Busines section, CNN Breaking News). A bit much at times - but it's news (at least to someone).

The other category is people who tweet their every action/thought/response to others. If I have to scroll though a full web page of tweets by the same person, it's the virtual equal to the guy at the party who doesn't know when to end a conversation.”

My addition to his two is a third category of people I felt I should follow but wasn’t learning anything particularly valuable from. Don’t we all have these people we keep around because someone else thought they were important yet you’re not really sure what to do with them once you start listening?

I still find tweets from people (I value and want to listen to) with links to relevant information particularly useful. In fact, now that I can find and read them much more quickly I’m able to follow their thoughts and links much more easily.

Who went and who stayed?

I don’t want to divulge too many specifics but here’s in general who I dropped.

1. Technical communication people in my field who weren’t contributing valuable information, tweeted too much, or weren’t tweeting at all.
2. People I find vaguely interesting because they have a huge following on Twitter but in general I don’t really care what they have to say on a day-to-day basis.
3. Large organizations I have no personal ties to and the government feeds I initially liked but had no use for after the general intrigue wore off.

I kept many people. In fact, I’m still following 82 people/orgs. Who and why?

1. I’m still following people I work with. I find it important to know what’s going on at work and we can feed each other great content (and sometimes funny fluff too).
2. I follow select technical communication people who I respect and can continue to develop a networking relationship.
3. Friends. You can’t drop your friends! Even if I use twitter mainly for work related items, I still find it comforting to see funny or meaningful things from non-work people.
4. Local organizations and organizations I have ties to. I kept the local news, local nonprofits, and even Clemson football feed (although the way they are playing, I might have to drop them than think about the season).

Going Forward

I still find it difficult on busy days to follow the thread of information thoughts floating on twitter. However, following only the people that can meaningfully contribute to my day makes it much easier. And I plan to hope, as Chad commented in my last post, that Twitter figures out the social filtering. I would have liked to follow many of the people and organizations I dropped, just not on a daily basis.

So my recommendation to those out there considering to tweet and considering who to follow, sometimes it’s okay to join the fray and make some mistakes. But, as you go along, watch the trends of what you like to see and what you don’t. And most importantly, don’t twitter everything!

Tweet Overload

It’s no secret I love twitter. It’s short, to the point, and often provides more valuable information than I can find anywhere else. But lately, my heart hasn’t been into it. In search of an answer to my recent woes, I stumbled onto the cause. The problem?

Too many twitter friends...

I know, you’re thinking how can that be possible? You can never have enough? Well it’s true, you can reach a limit where too many tweets causes you to lose interest. My twitter overload number was only a mere 144 people. I wish twitter had categories so I could separate my friends, co-workers, colleagues, and “other cool" people. Then I could check the twitter stream for each category. Until that happens I think I’m going to have to do the dreaded thing.

I’m going to have to drop the number of people I follow. There really is no other option because I don’t want to completely stop following people but as it is I don’t have the time to keep up. Even if I use twhirl I can’t keep up because it always interrupts my train of thought when I’m working.

So lesson learned, don’t expect social media use to be easy or always work the way you want. Moderation is essential. I suppose we always knew that all along but you want to believe you can be different.

***sigh*** I guess it’s time for me to make the tough choices.