Showing posts with label rss. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rss. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

New trends in technical communications

I am inspired by the In Plain English videos produced by Common Craft that have recently appeared on the web. The videos embody the power of effective technical communication: know your audience and communicate using a style and language to match that audience. The success of the videos says that they have accomplished this feat. The In Plain English podcasts remind me of the For Dummies guides in their approach to communicating key information in an easy to follow format. Great job guys!

Wikis in Plain English:


RSS in Plain English:


Social networking in Plain English:


I know it's a lot, but thought they were worth showing. In fact, right now I am using info from a For Dummies guide to create a video. My guess is this will be an important way to transfer knowledge in the years to come.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

ROI and reusable content

A great deal of focus in my business is spent proving the value reusable, topic-based information will have on a company's bottom line. The emerging changes in online marketing, the current need to appear ubiquitous in the market, and the challenge of simultaneously shipping products to numerous locations (with accompanying documentation) can seem insurmountable.

Fortunately, current advancements in information technology are making content delivery and management affordable for all types of businesses. Ranging from free (open source) to very cost-efficient, the combination of these technologies with 'chunkable' data allow companies to quickly produce and maintain accurate information in their desired output.

Consider the enormous changes TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and advertising have recently experienced with money moving from traditional forms of media to the Web. These marketing channels have always been scrupulously measured to determine their ROI, yet now industry is struggling to determine the performance of web marketing. There are companies who offer tools (Google analytics, Webanlaytics Demystified, Webtrends, etc.) to measure the performance of video, webpages, banner ads, rss feeds and the like, but this is not yet a practice that is clearly understood by most companies. For example, there are not many companies who are able to test the number of pauses, stops or replays on video output and measure that with the number of customers who actually buy a product. RSS feeds and the amount of people who sign up is another performance indicator that needs to be measured. Can you tell how many pdf downloads from your website actually translate into a sale? There are numerous web analytic models to explore. It is inevitable that cross-channel data needs to be measured, but few are there yet.

Delivering information about your product or service in multiple channels is a crucial step to determine the way your customers prefer receiving information about you. How easy is it to manage current and new data at the company? Can changes to content be made to a single source and then delivered across different channels such as websites, pdf output, training guides, and e-Learning scripts? Our goal at knowledgework is to provide information about your product or service that can be rapidly transmitted in your desired output.