DocTrain: Social Media 101/Now Everyone's a Technical Writer
posted by Sarah
Darren Barefoot, "recovering technical writer"
Capulet Communications

User-generated content is not new...Shakespeare's Globe Theatre was reconstructed based on a sketch made by a random Dutch person who attended a play at a contemporary theater and drew a sketch.

Most of human history is "few-to-few" communication. Humans sitting around the camp fire and grunting.

Then came broadcast media: "few-to-many" communications.

But now, we have "balkanization" and "diversification." The model is now "many-to-many" communication.

(I have a very similar discussion in our Web 2.0 white paper. Link below.)

Free and cheap tools (blogging software, cheap digital cameras) have made "many-to-many" communication possible. This is sometimes called the "rise of the creative class." People are shifting from being consumers to creators.

Seven concepts that differentiate social media:

• conversation...two-way communication rather than a broadcast model
  
• collaboration...obvious example is Wikipedia
  
• sharing...micro-broadcasting, perhaps just to family and friends
• scope...column inches and 42-minute hours on television are gone. Tools are easy, distribution is easy; don't need to be constrained by traditional approaches.
  
• Community...we are constructing affinity groups, which can be "thin-sliced." Can gather together in ways that were never possible before because geography is eliminated as a constraint.
• Transparency and authenticity...blogging and social media tend to encourage these. However, both of these are perhaps problematic. Examples: LonelyGirl and FakeSteveJobs. Perhaps these are less critical than before?
  

Social media components (the usual):

• Facebook
• RSS
• Brightkite
• Twitter
• FriendFeed
• Video Streaming
• StumbleUpon
• Blogs
• virtual Worlds
• Social Bookmarking
• Flickr
• Ning
• Mashups
• and more

Who make social media? "the people formerly known as the audience"

Why do people blog?

• Talk to friends and family
• keep personal history
• emote
• experiment with technology
• practice writing
• make change
• follow trend
• and more

Corporate blogging is a tiny slice of social media.

Great video on Wikis in Plain English

More examples of social media being used for technical documentation tasks.

Very interesting presentation, with quite a bit of intersection with our Web 2.0 white paper (PDF, 1.7 MB). (Sorry to keep linking to it, but this is clearly the current hot topic.)

Labels: doctrainwest08, web 2.0

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