Technical communication as a brand – The CEO and the technical communicator

Since I wrote the post on Technical communication as a brand, we’ve been working on an idea we had for promoting the profession. The end result is another story, another free graphic novel you can download, called The CEO and the technical communicator. It’s published under a Creative Commons licence, so anyone can forward it on, as long as they… Read more »

Technical communication as a brand

One of the tea break discussions at the Congility conference I spoke at last month was over the need to improve the awareness of technical communicators and technical communication as a profession. I suggested the profession would benefit from having (and promoting) a simple positioning statement that explains the profession as if it were a brand. This… Read more »

Reputation Management – Can user documentation help quash rumours?

In the ‘Whispers’ episode of BBC Radio Four’s Digital Human programme, Aleks Krotoski explores how rumours spread both online and in the physical world. As an example, she looked at how two people were able to spread a rumour that a tiger was running loose in London during the 2011 riots. Hope untrue!! RT @Twiggy_Garcia: #LondonRiots… Read more »

Assessing the potential savings from single sourcing

One of the main benefits from single sourcing is the ability to reuse existing content. Different departments can avoid duplicating work, which means they can save time and money. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to quantify these savings before you move to an authoring or content management system that enables you to single source. Analysing… Read more »

Changing times in technical communication

We’ve been on the road in recent days and weeks, visiting different documentation teams, and we’ve found there are distinct signs of change. In previous years, most documentation managers have effectively been saying to us their organisations weren’t really clear about the value of documentation. As the Technical Publications team usually amounts to less than… Read more »