Over the last few years, I’ve read several books (and more than a handful of articles) on the subject of social media, social networking, and crowdsourcing. All of them were interesting, but something was always missing. It was interesting to read about how pharmaceutical companies and t-shirt makers were working with the crowd, but in the back of my head, a voice was saying what about the tech comm world? While I could have mapped out something, I really wanted to read examples or case studies about how technical communicators were applying the concepts of social media to their work.

When I heard that Anne Gentle was writing a book on this topic, my interest was more than a little piqued. I know Anne and I know how passionate she is about this subject. And she isn’t just someone doing research and interviewing others. Anne’s been living with social documentation for years, and she knows of what she writes.

Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation doesn’t disappoint. Anne’s passion for the subject comes through on the pages. The book is both a great introduction to social media and how it applies to documentation, and it contains a lot of information and advice that you can apply to your work.

Anne draws not only on her own experiences in this area, but also offers a number of real-life examples. These examples come from such diverse sources as companies like BMC and Sun and projects like FLOSS Manuals. They all have different approaches, but the goals and methods are pretty much the same.

The correct starting point

Early on in Conversation and Community, one statement struck me and stuck with me as a key point:

As a writer, you need to understand your user’s entry points

For me, that’s the key to developing a useful social documentation strategy. And it’s a theme that Anne develops later in the book. Once you know what your readers are looking for — background information on a wiki, release notes from a Twitter feed, how-to information in blog posts — then you can really start building your social media strategy and rolling it out.

The message I got was that targeting your social documentation to the way in which customers are using it, or want to use it, is one of the most important factors for success.

Getting buy in

Buy in. Two words, five letters. But potentially scary ones. Anne isolates a major problem: how to introduce social media to the powers that sign your cheques and, more importantly, to your customers. Both groups may wary or ignorant of social media, but with the proper education you have a good chance of winning them over.

Something that Anne advises is to conduct your initial efforts under the radar of management. That way, you can try out a variety of social media tools and techniques, and refine your ideas and methods. When you later approach management, you’ll have a coherent strategy and not a vaguely-defined idea.

It’s definitely not a matter of your team building something and people flocking to it. That might happen, but you really need to take a long(er) game approach. Build in increments, nurture what’s being created, encourage the participants, and before you know it you’ll have a community.

What about community?

The concept of community that I had in my head got twisted into a new direction. For some reason, the definition of community that got lodged in my brain was people external to the documentation team and the organization for which it works. Silly, literal-minded me. It should have been obvious that the community also include people within your organization — developers, project managers, other SMEs, even internal users of the software.

Like external users, internal ones can be valuable sources of not only information but also documentation. Tips, hints, tricks, tutorials. And in some cases, as Anne points out, people don’t realize that they’re creating documentation even though they actually are.

When reading the passages on why people in a user community contribute documentation, I thought the words sounded very familiar. Then I remembered that Anne told both Aaron and myself something similar when we chatted last year.

There are barriers to people taking an active part in any community. Less than 10% will contribute to community documentation. Cultivating that 10% is critical, and making it worthwhile for them to keep contributing is key. There’s no magic formula for that, and you’ll have to come up with strategies for doing that. Which could include, for example, incentives and rewards. Online reputation might be enough, but if you can you might want to go further than that — small cash incentives, merchandise, or awards.

How about conversation?

Conversation takes place on a few levels. First, within your team. As Anne points out early on in the book you need to identify the key people on the documentation team who are willing and able to take on the task of developing social documentation. Let’s be honest: not everyone is.

Next up, audience analysis. Do your customers want or need social documentation? If so, in what format? Wiki, RSS, blogs? By doing that analysis, which involves actually talking to customers, you can get an idea of where you want or need to go. It’s tech writing 101, but an important step that’s sometimes overlooked.

Anne also offers a good reminder that conversation is communication, and communication is an essential element in creating and maintaining a community. Online, communication usually means writing. And you’ll have to take a more informal, more relaxed tone. One that’s probably very different from the way in which you usually write. Even if you’re doing podcasts and screencasts, clear and informal writing is essential. A script or set of clearly-defined talking points make things podcasts and screencasts tighter and more effective, and help them flow smoothly.

You can’t have a strong, vibrant community without interaction and discussion. That could mean responding to comments in a blog or posting to a forum. To be effective on your end, and to have a strong and consistent voice, some kind of style guidelines are essential. They don’t need to be rigid (like the ones Aaron and I encountered at The Company That Shall Not Be Named), but those guidelines should offer a framework that promotes consistency.

Drawing people in

Give the people what they want. It’s not only the title of an album by The Kinks. It’s something that’s essential for anyone rolling out social documentation. Your audience analysis should give you an idea of what your customers want in this area. In the chapter of the book on wikis, Anne states that you shouldn’t give customers a wiki if they don’t want one.

As far as content goes, you need be able to talk with customers about the things that they want to hear. Anne discusses her initial efforts at blogging for a former employer. She did a series of post for the blog about her efforts to learn ITIL. Those posts only appeared internally, but no doubt more than a few people in that company who read those posts could relate to Anne’s experiences. That sort of content draws people in and keeps them coming back for more.

With cutomer-facing content, you also need to think about incorporating user-generated content into your documentation. That could be forum posts, user-created screencasts, and the like. By doing that, the people creating that content will feel a stronger bond to the community and will be encouraged to keep contributing.

But remember that licensing is important, too. Anne suggests using a Creative Commons license for any community documentation. A number of firms, like Splunk, do and it works for them. And Anne does practice what she preaches: Conversation and Community is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.

Content, commitment, and community over technology

I’m not sure whether it was intentional or not, but one idea that I picked up on in the book is that the technology of social media really takes a back seat to the:

• Content that’s being created and curated
• Strength of your (and your employer’s) commitment to the idea of social documentation
• Enthusiasm of the community that’s being built around the content

Each of those factors is dependent on the others. It’s a lot like the equilateral triangle from a Disney-produced health film I saw in junior high school: if one side of the triangle collapses, the other two sides follow suit. Keeping everything in balance is a tough act, but it can definitely be worth the effort.

Criticisms of the book

Not many. The subject matter is difficult to fully capture and distill in a short book. On top of that, social media overall is a moving target — things change quickly, better practices are developed, new techniques and technologies arrive on the scene. Anne does a wonderful job of isolating the ideas and techniques that technical communicators need, but all of that will definitely be reshaped quickly. I can see an update coming within the next 12 months. Or sooner.

Some people will complain that there’s no explicit here are the x steps you need to follow to successfully implement these ideas in the book. There’s a good reason for that: a one-size-fits-all solution doesn’t exist. With this book, Anne has planted a solid set of guideposts to show you the way. But it’s up to you to adapt the concepts to the organizations in which you work. That’s definitely not easy, and you’ll undoubtedly have to mash up what Anne writes about in order to get where you want to go with a social documentation strategy.

Summing up

Conversation and Community is a (relatively) short and engrossing read. Sometimes, it was hard to put down — there was so much useful information packed into its 200+ pages. In a posting on Twitter, I said that this book is a killer read. I stand by that statement.

To be honest, the only chapter that I didn’t read fully was chapter 2: “Concepts and Tools of the Social Web” as I was already familiar with those concepts and tools. That said, Anne offers an excellent overview of the relevant concepts and tools. Read that chapter if you’re new to the social media world.

I joke with Anne that she has to stop making me think. In this case, though, I’m glad she did. Our wacky profession is changing rapidly. If you’re not ready for that change, it’s going to happy slap you. Conversation and Community is an excellent guide to rolling with those changes, and for staying ahead of them.

Related posts:

1. Using your community
2. A short review of Writing in the Open: Using Wikis to Create Documentation
3. Have you joined the Content Wrangler community on Ning.com?