MEGAComm 2011: Take Aways
On Sunday I attended the MEGAComm conference for technical and marketing writers. It was great to meet up with old TW buddies, attendees and presenters from past conferences.
Lunch was delicious - a smorgasbord of salads, hot dishes and conversation. It was fascinating to share the lunch hour with David Sommer, Director of Strategic Operations at Net Translators. We had an engrossing conversation about the challenges of ensuring the quality of thousands of simultaneous translation projects while managing a globally dispersed network of translators.
The keynote speaker, Jeff Pulver, gave an entertaining and thought-provoking talk about social networks. It is he who is directly responsible for me joining Twitter (yes, you can now follow me on Twitter: @ykarp.) The crux of Jeff's talk was that it is highly beneficial to join a social network. If you get involved in a community by having something useful and meaningful to share, you may find that opportunities present themselves to communicate with like minded people - opportunities that you may otherwise never have.
The other lectures I attended included Simplified Technical English (STE), Information Experience Design, E-Mail Marketing Tips (just for the fun of it), and Implementing Single-Sourcing: How Not to Do It.
One of the things that struck me about the conference was that in every single session I attended, the following phrase was uttered at least once: Know your audience (or put otherwise: Know your user.)
STE: People in different professions, with varying levels of expertise and of diverse cultures can interpret a word or a sentence completely differently. You have to know who you are writing to so that when you develop your STE vocabulary the terminology is absolutely unambiguous for the end-user.
Information Experience Design: It is critical that you know who your user is so that the UI that you build is inductive (as opposed to deductive), so that the text on the UI is appropriate for the type of user, and so that the content is aimed at the appropriate level of expertise. One method of achieving this is to create personas.
E-Mail Marketing Tips: Use the A/B strategy for e-mail marketing campaigns: Divide the e-mail recipient list into two groups. The first group receives e-mail A and the second group receives e-mail B. Both e-mails are very similar, except for a crucial point. Track how many responses/website hits/sales/inquiries you receive from group A and how many from group B. This will help you define what your subscribers want to see in the e-mail and what drives them to react to it. Targeting marketing e-mails to subscriber needs helps to drive sales.
Implementing Single-Sourcing: It is impossible to choose a single-sourcing tool if you don't understand the requirements of the people who are going to use it.
"Know your audience" is the most basic and fundamental rule of technical writing and it remains the backbone of good documentation. It is a simple, but absolutely crucial concept emphasized time and again, even at professional conferences attended by veteran technical writers.
Comments are most welcome!
Follow on Twitter: @ykarp
Subscribe to Y. Karp? Why Not! or follow on Facebook (see the side-bar).
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Lunch was delicious - a smorgasbord of salads, hot dishes and conversation. It was fascinating to share the lunch hour with David Sommer, Director of Strategic Operations at Net Translators. We had an engrossing conversation about the challenges of ensuring the quality of thousands of simultaneous translation projects while managing a globally dispersed network of translators.
The keynote speaker, Jeff Pulver, gave an entertaining and thought-provoking talk about social networks. It is he who is directly responsible for me joining Twitter (yes, you can now follow me on Twitter: @ykarp.) The crux of Jeff's talk was that it is highly beneficial to join a social network. If you get involved in a community by having something useful and meaningful to share, you may find that opportunities present themselves to communicate with like minded people - opportunities that you may otherwise never have.
The other lectures I attended included Simplified Technical English (STE), Information Experience Design, E-Mail Marketing Tips (just for the fun of it), and Implementing Single-Sourcing: How Not to Do It.
One of the things that struck me about the conference was that in every single session I attended, the following phrase was uttered at least once: Know your audience (or put otherwise: Know your user.)
STE: People in different professions, with varying levels of expertise and of diverse cultures can interpret a word or a sentence completely differently. You have to know who you are writing to so that when you develop your STE vocabulary the terminology is absolutely unambiguous for the end-user.
Information Experience Design: It is critical that you know who your user is so that the UI that you build is inductive (as opposed to deductive), so that the text on the UI is appropriate for the type of user, and so that the content is aimed at the appropriate level of expertise. One method of achieving this is to create personas.
E-Mail Marketing Tips: Use the A/B strategy for e-mail marketing campaigns: Divide the e-mail recipient list into two groups. The first group receives e-mail A and the second group receives e-mail B. Both e-mails are very similar, except for a crucial point. Track how many responses/website hits/sales/inquiries you receive from group A and how many from group B. This will help you define what your subscribers want to see in the e-mail and what drives them to react to it. Targeting marketing e-mails to subscriber needs helps to drive sales.
Implementing Single-Sourcing: It is impossible to choose a single-sourcing tool if you don't understand the requirements of the people who are going to use it.
"Know your audience" is the most basic and fundamental rule of technical writing and it remains the backbone of good documentation. It is a simple, but absolutely crucial concept emphasized time and again, even at professional conferences attended by veteran technical writers.
Comments are most welcome!
Follow on Twitter: @ykarp
Subscribe to Y. Karp? Why Not! or follow on Facebook (see the side-bar).
Add this blog to your RSS feed reader
Thanks for a great summary of the day and for taking the time to write it. It was indeed a great day and we are already taking the many new lessons we learned into the future as we begin planning MEGAComm 2012! We'd love to hear your thoughts on what you'd like to see presented!
ReplyDeletePaula
Paula Stern
CEO, WritePoint Ltd.
Techshoret List Owner/Moderator