The perils of early adoption
It finally happened. A part of your production pipeline has failed too many times, and everyone is in agreement: you need a hero.
Content pitfalls
Breaking down content silos: expectation vs. reality
You’re probably hearing it more and more: silos are bad for your business. They discourage collaboration, lead to duplication and inconsistency, and prevent you from delivering a unified content experience to your customers. But what really happens when you try to break them down?
Risky business: The challenge of content silos
At Information Development World, I delivered a keynote on the challenges of content silos. The silo problem emerged as a major theme of the conference.
Content strategy failure in ten easy steps (premium)
Here’s how to ensure content strategy failure in ten easy steps. Follow these steps to guarantee that your project disintegrates in spectacular fashion. The top three are:
- Pick your tools first.
- Don’t talk to stakeholders.
- Make bad assumptions.
Content strategy mistake: replicating old formatting with new tools
When remodeling your kitchen, would you replace 1980s almond melamine cabinets with the same thing? Probably not. (I certainly wouldn’t!) Then why make the content strategy mistake of using new tools to re-create the old formatting in your content?
Webcast: The many facets of content strategy
In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe discusses the future of content strategy.
The purpose of content strategy is to support your organization’s business goals. Content strategists need to understand how content across the organization—marketing, technical, and more—contributes to the overall business success.
Keys to content strategy: consultants
Are you thinking about engaging a content strategy consultant? Here are some thoughts on successful content strategy consulting relationships.
Ten mistakes for content strategists to avoid
As content strategy spreads far and wide, we are making old mistakes in new ways. Here are ten mistakes that content strategists need to avoid.
Webcast: Ending the Cold War between techcomm and marcom
In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe discusses various strategic initiatives that require coordination between marcom and techcomm and addresses how to begin to thaw out the relationship.
Cheap writers can be expensive
Given the choice between an inexpensive writer with a limited skill set and a professional technical communicator, which should you choose?
When content strategy fails, RoadRunner edition
Our home Internet connection is usually reliable, but today I come home to what I think must be an outage. No Internet on any of our Wifi networks.
Let go of your silo
In reality, collaborative authoring is little more than a euphemism for the idea that “anyone can write.”
That’s Tom Johnson’s take on collaborative authoring in his latest blog post. The writer in me sympathizes deeply because the “anyone can write” attitude is a direct challenge to the careers of professional writers.
The “Meh” Strategy
Amidst all this discussion of content strategy, one common approach has been neglected. There’s little discussion of the no-strategy content strategy, even though this approach is probably the market leader.
Spinning tech comm improvements into marcomm strategies
This morning, I was among the many who received an email from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. He was responding to criticisms that Netflix “lacked respect and humility in the way [the company] announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes.”
Top 10 signs that documentation is craptacular
“Content is an asset worthy of being managed,” says Scott Abel. I agree that good content is an asset. Bad content is a liability. It’s time to talk about the shameful underbelly of technical communication.
Failure to communicate: fatal to projects (and political parties)
Over the weekend, I was catching up with a friend I hadn’t seen since the mid-term elections here in the US. While hashing out what the election results meant, my friend said that he felt that history would be kinder to the accomplishments of Congress than the electorate was.
Webcast: Knowledge integration: The future of technical communication
Scriptorium hosts Tristan Bishop of Symantec as he muses on technical communicators’ evolving roles.
