When you travel, do people ask you for directions and address you as if you live in the area? I’ve had that happen a few times, and friends and colleagues have shared similar experiences.
You may not stand out as an obvious tourist on your travels. But does the content you distribute fit in as well across different environs?
Technical Writing is only about what software you know! Is that why every where I read any type of document, web page, or article it is FULL of misspellings, incorrect punctuation, and horrible formatting?!!
That’s what started a thread on LinkedIn that encapsulates long-running debates on the skill sets technical writers need. (The thread was removed from LinkedIn sometime after Friday, unfortunately.)
Design and automation are often positioned as mutually exclusive–you have to choose one or the other. But in fact, it’s possible to deliver content in an automated workflow that uses a stellar design. To succeed, you need a designer who can work with styles, templates, and other building blocks instead of ad hoc formatting.
More content across more devices requires scalability–and that means more automation. A strategic approach to content needs to incorporate both design and automation as constraints and find the right balance between the two.
“My team is looking into how we can use <incumbent tool> to handle our new content requirements.”
That’s what I heard from a manager during a recent phone call about a company’s expanding content needs. The tools-focused response made me cringe.
Product development, content development, and localization processes are too often viewed as a waterfall process.
This is not at all accurate.
In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe discusses how content silos make it difficult to deliver a consistent, excellent customer experience. After all the hard work that goes into landing a customer, too many organizations destroy the customer’s initial goodwill with mediocre installation instructions and terrible customer support.
Do you have a unified customer experience? Do you know what your various content creators are producing? Join us for this thought-provoking webcast.
This premium post is a recap of a presentation delivered by Sarah O’Keefe at Localization World Berlin on June 4, 2015. It describes how and why to align localization strategy to the customer journey.
The new buzzword in marketing is the customer journey. What does this mean for localization?
Does your house have good bones? Ugly paint, terrible carpet, and dated appliances are all fixable. But if a room is too small, a door is in the wrong place, or the rooms don’t match your requirements (need a downstairs master bedroom?), then you have a serious problem.
Content can also have good bones. Or not.
General Stanley McChrystal offers sage leadership advice you can apply to your content strategy.
Here are your marching orders:
Keeping a content strategy implementation moving forward is important, but it isn’t always easy. You may have to deal with an extremely slow-moving project or unexpected delay. You may even have to put a project completely on hold. Here are some common obstacles that get in the way of progress, and some ways you can work to overcome them.
The recent slate of announcements for candidacy in the 2016 US presidential election got me thinking—how do campaigns relate to content?
What’s the best way to minimize conflict when developing and implementing a new content strategy?
You’ve probably heard the announcement countless times: “Please locate the nearest emergency exit.” Chances are you ignore these exits most of the time, but you feel safer knowing they’re there. You wouldn’t go to a restaurant or movie theater or travel on public transportation that didn’t have an emergency exit—so why would you develop a content strategy without one?
In a recent blog post, Alan Pringle brought up the the importance of having an exit strategy, and I wanted to expand on that idea. Without a plan for what to do if your implementation doesn’t go as expected, your company could face tremendous costs—in terms of both time and money—trying to move on to a system that works.
Implementing a content strategy often involves overcoming significant technological and cultural challenges, but some of these challenges are so scary, so heinous, that they earn a place among the undead because they Just. Won’t. Die!
In this webcast, which debuted at Lavacon 2014, Bill Swallow takes a look at these nightmare-inducing monsters—from unrelenting copy-and-paste zombies to life-draining, change-avoiding vampires—and shows you what can be done to keep your content strategy implementation from turning into a fright fest.
It finally happened. A part of your production pipeline has failed too many times, and everyone is in agreement: you need a hero.
I used Uber and lived to tell the tale. And I found a lesson for content strategy in my rides to and from the airport in San Francisco.
Having the budget to buy new technology isn’t the same as having a content strategy. Case in point: the US government has spent billions on electronic medical record (EMR) systems that can’t communicate with each other.
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?
“What CCMS should we buy?”
It’s a common question with no easy answer. This article provides a roadmap for CCMS evaluation and selection.
First, a few definitions. A CCMS (component content management system) is different from a CMS (content management system). You need a CCMS to manage chunks of information, such as reusable warnings, topics, or other small bits of information that are then assembled into larger documents. A CMS is for managing the results, like white papers, user manuals, and other documents.
These days, I generally avoid fast food, but it’s hard to pass up good French fries every now and then. Look beyond those yummy fries, and you can learn some valuable lessons that apply to content strategy.
Content strategy is taking hold across numerous organizations. Bad content is riskier and riskier because of the transparency and accountability in today’s social media–driven world.
But now, we have a new problem: a talent deficit in content strategy.
We hear a lot about the learning curve for structured authoring, but what does that really mean?
Yes, you need another “best of 2014” list to round out the year. Without further ado, here are Scriptorium’s top 2014 blog posts on content strategy, DITA, and localization.
