Recently, I’ve been exploring the need for writing procedures in real-time, focusing on Twitter in particular. This is the fourth post in the series. In my last post, I was asked by Larry Kunz in a comment for thoughts on situations in which one might write procedures in Twitter. Five come to mind; I’ve described them below.
Update: This post was recently included as a Holy Kaw item on Alltop.com.
Note 1/13/17: This post was originally written in 2010. I’m leaving some content as is, because it provides a historical view in some regards.
Push Information
The beauty of Twitter is that you can quickly disseminate information to a large, targeted audience. Initially, it would, of course, be followers of the feed in question. Retweeting then magnifies that distribution, possibly exponentially. In classic online docs (help, websites, knowledgebases, and the like), we wait for users to come to us. By using Twitter, we can go to them.
This puts an entirely different spin on the whole question of doc development. When planning a content strategy, consider this: what might you want to hand-deliver to your users vs. requiring them to come to you to find?
Quick Fixes
Let’s say, for example, that you have a procedure regarding a fix that’s needed immediately. If one user has a question about it and asks a question on a Twitter support feed, you can be sure that there are many that have the same question. So if a person retweets a procedure, it could possibly travel far. If there’s a negative comment (e.g., something along the lines of “this app doesn’t work, it’s awful”) it might compel a company to get out a fix or explanation, or a quick procedure to quell disruptions.
Example: late last year there were there hacking attacks that affected WordPress sites that hadn’t been upgraded to the newest version. Site managers that had not yet upgraded needed to act immediately to fend off an attack on their sites. News came through Twitter. It was retweeted everywhere. That’s how I found out about it. In such a case, you could write a quick procedure about the upgrade requirements as well as other information. Who knows how far a procedure might travel? I think that tweets pointed people to blogs and sites that had procedures or information about how to address the situation – which in itself is another excellent example.
WordPress is updated frequently. There are docs and blog posts in existence that describe how to upgrade to the latest version. It doesn’t matter what version; the same basic procedures apply to any upgrade. (That’s the beauty of WordPress. There’s so much information out there, and the open-source community is so helpful and collaborative. It’s wonderful.)
If you have an app that has regular updates (as WordPress does), or just has an impending release, why not have something written beforehand that you could point to when necessary? When I ran my Twitter procedure experiment on 12/29/09, Larry Kunz (@larry_kunz) made this suggestion:
“Also, and I know this is a lot harder than it sounds: anticipate the situation, and have responses pre-written, ready to go.”
This is exactly the type of situation that fits Larry’s suggestion. Anything that occurs on at least a periodic basis (such as app updates) should have some docs already written somewhere. Plus, said docs should be written in a generic fashion that would be applicable to any upgrade situation (content management in action) – not just one in particular. You can always address particulars, but have some clean generic docs ready at all times.
Product Launches and New Features
If a company has an app revision or new feature and wants to get the news out, a related procedure in Twitter might support marketing efforts. (As in, here’s our new feature; here’s how to use it.) It also never hurts a company to promote visibility of their products, keeping the company in mind. Pointing out features that would help users and save them time is always a good idea.
Real-Time
People are growing accustomed to getting information right now. They may not have the patience to look through online docs to find it. I cannot emphasize real-time considerations enough. There’s also always the possibility that one of your tweets will be picked up and distributed immediately once it hits the airwaves.
Either put a quick procedure in Twitter, or put in one tweet that links to the appropriate location in online docs or some other location, such as a SharePoint portal. Help your users. Answer their questions before they know they need them. Fix their problems. Monitor support questions and get something out there once in a while. Why not put a short FAQ in your support feed, particularly if it’s asked regularly?
After all, excellent customer service is always a good idea. Given that tech writers must perpetually sell their worth to a company, it sure can’t hurt to help customers.
Go Where Your Users Are
If users are scanning Twitter regularly or using Facebook, that’s where some of your docs should be. If they’re reading your blogs, think about adding procedures there. You can embed Twitter feeds in multiple platforms. Also, in Facebook, people can leave comments for each tweet that becomes a status item in Facebook.
Remember: social media is a primary mode of communication these days. Start using it, if you’re not already. If nothing else, mentions of detailed docs and links to them can easily be integrated into these locations.
If your users are all at Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and the like much of the time, why not go there? If not, you may find yourself standing at an empty storefront.
Julio Vazquez says
This is great. I like the immediacy of getting the information to the users this way, especially for new problems or fixes. The only thing that I need to wrap my head around is balancing the need for immediacy with the need for permanency. I guess you can solve that by tagging each tweet such that you can easily search and collect it later to make it part of your permanent (or static, if you will) documentation, whether that be in a blog or somewhere else. While meeting or anticipating the user’s need is good (if you anticipate then you already have it written and you’re just editing it for the feed), you also need to keep in mind those who miss that feed and publish again in a more permanent venue.
Of course, I’ve been known to be wrong. 😀
Julie Norris says
Thanks for the comments, Julio. Your thoughts about tagging echo those that Larry made about hashtags the other day. So, I’d say that the votes are in. Tagging tweets is a must. Which leads me to two thoughts:
– If it’s a procedure with multiple tweets, is it necessary to tag each tweet? Or perhaps tag only the title tweet to minimize clutter and get users to the first one? My vote would be the latter. Although, there may be hashtags throughout a tweet. It would depend on the content.
– Determining which tags to use may take some up-front planning. It’s one more consideration in determining a taxonomy and controlled vocabulary for your docs. It needs to tie in with your company and app terms, industry terms, doc database design, xml and xsl files – everything, basically. I’d start looking at shrinking terms if possible for anything new. If your doc structure is pretty well set, I suppose you could map terms somehow with an if…then statement of some sort. That’s the beauty of xsl, after all: include a bit of programming in amidst the html.
Balancing the need for immediacy vs. permanency will flush itself out, I suppose. The drivers will be both content and situation. It’s not an either/or situation. Much of the time, I believe that it will likely require both. I think we’ll just be learning as we go. That’s why I think it may be worthwhile to start trying it to see what happens – what works, what doesn’t. Where information ends up. Who sees it. What is said about it. Everything. We won’t know until we start working with this. I think it’s fun. It’s totally new.
Ivan Walsh says
Hi Julie,
Some great ideas here.
One of the attractions of Twitter (and real-time information flow) is that you get feedback much more quickly.
Compare this to a book you print, send out, and maybe, maybe, maybe… get some feedback – but, usually not.
The use of ‘Twitter’ inside organizations is something lm looking to explore this year.
How can we use it to share/exchange information almost instantly to correct, refine and deliver better products?
Of course, just as I write this I thought – isn’t that what Google Wave’s for?
Hmmm, need to think this through…
Bye
Ivan
Julie Norris says
Thanks for your thoughts on this, Ivan. These are some apps I found out about just in the past week: Yammer (think Twitter for the enterprise; thanks to @bkenny13 for that), Teambox (looks cool to me and I’m going to definitely check it out), Quora, and Aardvark. I need to look at all of them. Plus Google Wave, of course. The game has definitely changed.
I think that your note about using real-time information to deliver better products is spot-on. Collaboration, with users in particular, is becoming the new rule of the day. From my short little real-time writing experiment, I can tell you that it’s wild. On a large scale, it would be challenging to manage. That’s why I think it’s good to start working with it right away.
Sarah Maddox says
Hallo Julie
This is great stuff. I’ve read your other posts on using Twitter too. It’s something we’ve been experimenting with in various ways. We’ve used Twitter to publish our release notes, in much the same way as you’ve used it for procedures. So each feature in a new release will become a single tweet, with a hash tag to link them all together. If someone searches for the tag, they get all the items in a series. Voila, the release notes! Of course, we publish the release notes document in a more formal format too. (In our case, that’s our documentation wiki.)
Your point about “going where your users are” is the one that rings true to me. Using Twitter is a great way of engaging the readers in the documentation. They feel involved and empowered to make their own comments and contributions. That’s social documentation.
Are you on Twitter yourself? I did a Twitter search and found quite a few Julie Norrises, but I’m not sure which one is you. 🙂
Cheers, Sarah
Julie Norris says
Hi Sarah –
Thanks for your thoughts on this topic. Using Twitter for release notes is a great idea. Where do you put them: on a main company feed, or do you have a separate one for docs or tech support (don’t answer if it’s proprietary!)?
It sure looks more and more to me that hashtags are a basic requirement for any tech doc tweet. Your experience is a prime example. Now you’ve got me thinking about them more. It’s just one more thing to add to the list for planning doc setup. IMO, content management is becoming increasingly important; one needs to manage information down to the smallest detail – even hashtags.
My Twitter feed goes along with this blog. It’s http://twitter.com/2moroDocs. Thanks for asking! I use it primarily for sharing tech information. I view Twitter as an indispensible tool. For me, it’s a time-saving way to keep up with IT trends. It’s replaced my morning paper, so to speak. I now start the day quickly perusing the different topics and read what people have found to share, and to just keep up periodically through the day. So I think that putting doc-related info in tweets just makes sense these days.
Sarah Maddox says
Hallo Julie
We tweet the release notes on the main company Twitter account. We’ve thought about having a separate one for the documentation tweets, but that just makes life more complicated for our customers, with too many feeds to follow. If we were tweeting more often, though, it may make sense to have a separate account.
Thanks for the Twitter link! I’m following it now.
Cheers
Sarah
David Barnes says
Hi, I’m your next door neighor on techwriting.alltop.com 😀
I recommend using a service like http://post.ly or its big brother http://www.posterous.com to send longer messages in real time to Twitter.
It would send the title of your message to Twitter, along with a link, immediately. The full text of the instructions appear on the posterous site. People can easily retweet the title and link, but you can continue to edit and improve the full length message on Posterous.
Very easy to use. I haven’t explained it very well — try it out! (I use it for my blog, and all of my posts automatically and immediately appear on Twitter too.)
Edward Philipp says
What good ideas. I got here because of http://twitterhandbook.com/blog/go-where-your-users-are/ and the expansion from your shortened article is appreciated.
Being in the TeleSeminar field there are a limited number of FAQs so the answers are also limited and also very useful when available in real time as you suggest.