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A cautious toe in the water
Tuesday, September 09, 2008 — posted by Sarah
[Updated to add link to Gilbane Group, which I accidentally left out. -Sarah]Over at the Gilbane Group blog, Fred Dalrymple writes about social media, aka Web 2.0, aka user-generated content:
Integration [with technical documentation] means, somehow, placing social media into an iteration loop in the documentation supply chain.He believes that a prudent first step could be to work with customers:
For example, it's easy to imagine deploying a documentation set via a wiki that issuing and client companies can both update, perhaps with a dedicated editor at the source company to keep brand, message, and metaphors consistent. That leaves the challenge of how that material gets integrated back into the supply chain so that it can feed the next release...It sounds totally reasonable. But the general focus of the post is on controlling branding and message. And I believe that the general implication of Web 2.0 and many-to-many publishing is that corporations are going to lose the ability to control the conversation.
These are early thoughts, and tools such as wikis are low-hanging fruit. How will the less document-centric media be integrated? What new forms of relationship will develop around these practices? How can this be extended to independent outsiders?
Dalrymple says:
Let's assume that when social media is being practiced by independent outsiders, it will be a matter of chance whether their behavior is consistent with a corporation's goals.This misses the larger point. If the end users want the corporation to have different goals from what the corporation actually has, the corporation will need to respond! The answer is not to control, direct, and manipulate social media so that it conforms with the preferred brand messaging. The answer is to recognize that the corporation's goals need to change.
For example...let's say that a company releases a new operating system. Let's call it, oh, "Vista." And perhaps the company's goal is to sell this "Vista" to the entire world. But users respond by heaping scorn on the new release, demanding downgrades the previous operation system, and, most drastically, switching to other operating systems.
The problem is not those mean, angry bloggers writing rude things about the product. The problem is with the product.
If the social media world is telling you things that are not compatible with your brand and product positioning, it means that you have a problem with the brand and the product -- not with the users.
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