How far do you spread the message?

Yesterday afternoon I spent some time posting sample art from an upcoming comics project on my personal blog as well as in a publicly accessible Facebook photo-album, and making sure I mentioned it on Twitter.

Part way through the exercise my wife asked me "Why are you doing that. Shouldn't the publishers be doing it?" On the face of it it seemed like a fair question, but experience has quickly taught me that publishers with hundreds of books to promote can only focus on a select few, and you can't count on yours being one of them. The more marketing you do for yourself the more advance interest you can build and, hopefully, the greater the sales.

Switch to this morning at the WebWorks office, and after reviewing some figures I sent an email to one online distributor of software asking them to remove our product listing from their website.

The two events didn't seem related, but over lunch today I began to think about it.

Last night my underlying philosophy was that "the more marketing the better." The more online exposure I could get for my upcoming project the more awareness it would build for both the project and myself as a writer. So more is good? - Yes

This morning, when I looked at the product listing online at the site in question I saw that the product and company descriptions were years out of date. They obviously had no real understanding of our market, or what business issues our product helped solve, never mind its actual features and functionality. When I looked back at the records I found that they were one of a large group of on-line software distributors who had been signed up "en-mass" several years ago. The philosophy had been the same as mine the previous night "the more web presence the better." So more is good? - In this case - No.

So many distributors had been signed up that no-one was (or could practically for our size of company) manage them all and keep track of how we, and our products, were being represented. The ones that produced steady strong results got noticed and managed. The ones that only produced occasional sales didn't. The result is that those neglected listings were soon sending the wrong messages.

So what's the connection? Having a philosophy of spreading your message far and wide over the Web can be a great one. In today's Web2.0 world viral marketing is one of the strongest marketing tools available. BUT.. you can should only spread the message to places that you can manage. If the message gets inconsistent and diluted it doesn't take long to become worthless.

Story Quotes

A couple of great quotes about the power of stories in business that I came across today.

"Good leaders are good authors of stories that include everyone else."
- Gerhard Gschwandtner - SellingPower.com

"Stories give us context, and context helps everyone understand."
"Stories wield special power because they can be translated into something visual. When we hear a story we see it too, and the visual image becomes something that sticks in our memories long after the words have fled."
- Harry Beckwith & Christine Clifford - You Inc.: The Art Of Selling Yourself.

Now Twittering..

Just a quick note to let you know that if you feel so inclined you can know follow my random thoughts on a variety of subjects via TWITTER at http://twitter.com/gothamajp

Emotional Warning Light

I’ve long been an advocate of the advantages of using a controlled authoring vocabulary in producing technical documentation. The concept of one word = one meaning is central to this concept and is the underpinning of standards such as Simplified Technical English (STE).

In short ambiguity can lead to mistakes, or in extreme cases even cause fatalities. But one thing I hadn’t thought about before is that as well as considering the literal meanings of the words and phrases used, we should also consider the emotional and psychological impact.

It was an article by veteran racer and motoring journalist Denise McCluggage in a recent (16 June 2008) AutoWeek magazine that opened my eyes on this subject.

Denise’s article discussed the impact of the “CHECK ENGINE” warning light common in most vehicles today.



By all the rules and principles of controlled authoring that’s a perfect valid warning statement. Clear, concise, using simple words with well defined meanings.

But as Denise points out it has the potential for two distinctly different emotional impacts.

For a typical car guy (like me) the response to the “CHECK ENGINE” warning may be “rats I need to take the car in to the dealers at some point, where they will do some minor adjustment and charge me an arm and a leg for it.” After a few go-arounds when the car doesn’t do anything untoward they may even ignore the warning altogether.

But for a female driver the response to the “CHECK ENGINE” light may be concern that the engine, the thing that makes the car go, is about to fail and leave her stranded at the side of the road. Her reaction maybe that that warning could lead to something that will put her in a potential life-threatening situation.

As Denise goes on to point out the “CHECK ENGINE” light really means that “something might be amiss with the emission system and you should really have it looked at next time you are in the shop for routine maintenance.”

So the choice of words is not as good as I first thought it was. Maybe it should read “Emission Controls Service Due.”

In short this article made me realize that as well as making sure we use the right vocabulary we should also be taking just as much notice of technical context and audience psychology.

Preparing technical communication is not just about passing on knowledge, its also about the emotion with which the message is received.

Business and Storytelling

Anyone whose spoken to me for more than a few minutes will quickly find out that my passion is story telling. In fact I believe that ALL business communication, be it in sales, marketing, technical publications, white papers, reports, even simple emails, is simply different forms of telling stories.

Sitting on my desk next to me is a book with the great title Whoever Tells The Best Story Wins. I'll be honest I wasn't too impressed by the actual content - but I keep it on my desk so that every day I see that title.

Today doing some business plan research I was looking for examples of the ultimate in business story telling - The Elevator Speech.

What's an Elevator Speech - the idea is that if you are riding in an elevator and someone asks "What does your company do?" - you can answer before the elevator ride is over. In other words you can tell your business story in less than thirty seconds.

That research lead me to the video below.

The video has some good pointers on composing a good Elevator Speech - but what really caught my attention was the idea of a CEO using the job title "Chief Storyteller." - That's a job title I think we should all adopt, at least in spirit if not in practice.

Why Technical Publishing Shouldn't Be Art..

“Writing is a solitary occupation. Publication is a group exercise,” so stated novelist Madeline Robbins in her February 25, 2008 blog entry on the DeepGenre web site. And she’s correct. The work may start with the author, but to get it from the author to the end reader means it also has to go through an editor, copy editor, book designer, typesetter, printer, sales and marketing team, distributor, book buyer, and, eventually, a retail store.

It’s a model that the book market developed centuries ago and still works today. Although it could be argued that the Web and print-on-demand are altering the delivery mechanisms slightly, the same basic process still applies. The book trade is based on the fact that the artistic elements, the creation of the content, and the design of the book are small parts of the overall process, and that the publishing process is a business that only flourishes through being scalable and repeatable.

Yet the more I write books and the more I become involved in the book business the more I am struck by the differences between it and what has been my “day job” for over twenty years, technical publications.

Over the years, I’ve been trained and worked as a writer, editor, document designer, coder, formatting expert, content management specialist, and workflow designer. I’ve used software tools that applied to every one of those disciplines. And here’s the point: often at the same time.

Click here to read my full article on "Why Technical Publishing Shouldn't Be Art" at Techcom Manager

SaaS Publishing

A couple of weeks ago I attended a software industry business conference in Atlanta. The hottest topic under discussion was the shift from traditionally licensed, on the desktop, software to Software as a Service, or SaaS.

The SaaS model replaces desktop processing with the work being done by remote servers located “out there” in data centers and accessed via the internet. For those of us who’ve been around the IT industry long enough this is nothing new. It’s reminiscent of the old mainframe / dumb terminal model. The biggest difference is that now the processing power is the responsibility of the software vendor and instead of a dedicated network access is now, theoretically, from anywhere at anytime.

The poster child for SaaS is Salesforce.com, and the seems ideally suited to enterprise wide business systems. But isn’t publishing also an enterprise wide activity (even of 90% of enterprises don’t recognize it as such). Is there a role for a SaaS solution on publishing?

In some ways we already have them, blogs (like this one) and wikis are SaaS models where all the processing, storage and delivery is done via a web server with no specialist editing software on the host machine.

With both blogs and wikis gaining wider adoption in the Corporate Publishing world, will more traditional editing, content management and publishing tools be far behind?

STE at the STC

The presentation on Simplfied Technical English at the Austin area STC meeting last week appeared to be well recieved. As well as generating discussion, both at the meeting itself, and at the dinner afterwards, I also received several follow up calls and emails over the days following.

Mary Conner if iMIS, who was in the audience, blogged about the event, and for those interested you can check out my presentation slides below.

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Four Candles - Just What is Simplified Technical English?

On the evening of February 5th I'll be presenting the following at the Austin area STC meeting:

Four Candles - Just What is Simplified Technical English?

You may have heard of Simplified Technical English as a way of writing your Technical Publications in order to reduce translation costs, but it applying the concepts of STE can bring benefits to all your technical writing whether they are translated or not. This presentation will cover the story behind the development of STE, plus introduce its basic concepts and explain how you can start applying them and improve the quality of your technical documentation immediately.

So why is this talk titled "Four Candles" ? This may give you a clue..

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So that's why my bookcases are so full...

I earn my daily crust in the world of digital publishing. Given the opportunity I will happily talk about all the advantages and cool stuff you can do with digital content. (like post this to multiple blogs using a single editing tool.) In fact I tend to think that today we are living in the "promised world" that I've been looking forward to in my twenty plus years of being in Corporate Publishing - the technology has at last caught up to the potential. But that's possibly a subject for a whole other post.

Yet when I wear my other hat as a freelance writer it's mainly for print publications. Give me a spare half-hour and you will likely find me hanging out in a traditional bookstore. In fact just last night I was sat in the coffee shop area of my local Barnes & Noble, working away with pen and note pad on a pitch for a graphic novel, while just a few feet away on a nearby shelf sat several copies of the book containing my recent James Bond feature.

I just can't get enough of print. I still read literally hundreds of print magazines a year and average over a book a week. But why, when I spend a large proportion of my life expounding the virtues of digital publishing does ink on paper have such a hold?

Today a print copy of the latest Seybold Report landed on my desk and my eyes immediately drifted to an article entitled "Is Print Sexy?" by Laruel Brunner. In the article Brunner eloquently managed to sum up the appeal of print. Here's a few choice extracts that I think best sum up my own views.

We trust print's permanence and we rely on print to document our world truthfully and to accurately enshrine our most precious values and ideas of the world around us. We believe, rightly or not, that it provides our foundation for fact. It's how we preserve and revere our collective experience and perceptions .......print is uniquely physical. Like all media it expresses concepts, ideas and information, but it stimulates response using more subtle, tactile techniques. We have a singularly intimate and physical relationship with print, because it appeals to virtually all of our senses. The look of a magazine, the smell of a new book.. all stimulate us visually and sensually. We love the look, smell and feel of print and of course its practicality. Print is portable and robust, it's accessible and easy to use...A shelf full of books is a collection of old friends who will never disappoint us and who remind us of who we were and of worlds long gone, showing us how we have become who we are....All of life is about stimulation and response, and print is all about life.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

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