Musings and learning about technical communications issues from your TechCommGeekMom–a geeky mom who is into tech comm…since 2012.
Author: TechCommGeekMom
Danielle M. Villegas is a technical communicator who currently employed at Cox Automotive, Inc., and freelances as her own technical communications consultancy, Dair Communications. She has worked at the International Refugee Committee, MetLife, Novo Nordisk, BASF North America, Merck, and Deloitte, with a background in content strategy, web content management, social media, project management, e-learning, and client services. Danielle is best known in the technical communications world for her blog, TechCommGeekMom.com, which has continued to flourish since it was launched during her graduate studies at NJIT in 2012. She has presented webinars and seminars for Adobe, the Society for Technical Communication (STC), the IEEE ProComm, TCUK (ISTC) and at Drexel University’s eLearning Conference. She has written articles for the STC Intercom, STC Notebook, the Content Rules blog, and The Content Wrangler as well. She was very active in the STC, as a former chapter president for the STC-Philadelphia Metro Chapter, serving and chairing on several STC Board committees, and most recently was the STC Board Vice-President before the organization closed.. You can learn more about Danielle on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/daniellemvillegas, on Twitter @techcommgeekmom, or through her blog.
All content is the owner's opinions, and does not reflect those of her employers past or present.
Now, if I only could eat this to celebrate, but I’m on a diet. 😦
Can you believe it?
TechCommGeekMom is celebrating another birthday–it’s 3 years old now!
I guess this means it’s not a little baby blog anymore. And by the numbers, it’s definitely grown. Last calendar year, this blog had over 10,000 hits! I’m hoping to do more than that this year, naturally. Based on the stats I’ve seen so far this year, I’m off to a good start!
The blog has also evolved. While it started out concentrating on m-learning and e-learning (and I still try to talk about that when I can), it has shifted more towards where my other interests in tech comm lie, and where my career has shifted me thus far, namely in content strategy. Even more recently, as content strategy evolves and has encouraged me in this direction, I’m starting to include more on digital marketing as it relates to content marketing. And in between, I’ve included articles about technology and education, better ways of writing, thinking about globalization and localization issues, and a whole lot more. I know I have over 900 posts on here between content curated and original posts, and it’s not stopping yet!
Thanks to all who read and support TechCommGeekMom. I still look at this blog as a work in progress, and I always look forward to getting feedback and conversations going on here. That was the whole intent of this blog–to incite conversation and to help share information that can educate my fellow technical communicators! (I think it’s working!) So, thanks again for visiting from time to time, and keep coming back for more! I’m hoping to do new things and continue to grow this blog as time goes on!
LISTEN–I told you that you were a pudding brain to begin with, and this just proves it. And don’t give me a hug.
When I started the next unit on personalized digital experiences, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. In short, my initial guess that it had to do with the tech comm mantra of “know your audience” was right, but that’s an over-generalization of the whole thing. While this was most likely an overview and simplification of the actual process as it relates to marketing, I could just feel my head explode and all that was left was my original pudding brain state.
Tim Peter of Tim Peter & Associates was the instructor of this particular module. His company concentrates on providing that personal experience to all users. I think the primary focus of the module was about finding all the different ways that a marketing could make digital experiences personalized with caveats on how to make sure that it didn’t get “creepy” (which was the “technical” term used throughout the module over marketers overstepping their bounds 😉 ).
There were a few points that I picked up in the course that I felt were important to note. First, Tim pointed out that digital experiences are not “personalized” as much as “persona-lized”. In other words, because there are way too many individual differences for each person to be targeted, groups are identified instead of individuals, which makes sense. So, personalization is really about coming up with different persona groups to target. I could relate to this because it sounds like “know your audience” and many of the basic premises of content strategy. The practice of creating personas was familiar to me, too, because I remember working on that as an exercise in my content management and information architecture classes at NJIT.
Ultimately, the goal of the marketer is to answer the customer’s questions of, “Am I going to be satisfied with your product or service?” and “Why should I buy from you?”. It makes sense.
Tim made the next statement, which really made a big impact on me, which was namely that content is king, context is queen, but the crown jewels are DATA. The rest of the course pushed forward on that notion, namely, how to gather anonymous data without crossing the creepy factor that overpersonalizes the collection of data.
He explained there are two main ways to do it through content targeting. The first way is through explicit data, which is getting data directly from the customer by asking, such as asking for a name, e-mail address, how did you find us, and other questions in which the customer will answer outright by filling in a form or some sort. The second way is through implicit data, which is what you can infer about the customer based on their actions and/or behaviors. This is where those anonymous “cookies” that you have in your browser come into play. As a result of gather data through these means, you can then customize different messages of different sizes to different audiences at different times.
To make this work the most effectively, there were five calls to action to follow in order to help prioritize marketing objectives and make it clear, namely:
Size matters – Follow Fitt’s law, which says that bigger ads get more responses.
Placement
Use verbiage that are calls to action like “Act now!”
Style – pay attention to how you use links, links in text, and/or buttons
Color – use color wisely. For example, you wouldn’t use red on a medical site.
In the end, it’s all about identifying your ideal customer based on all the data gathered, and making sure that the content and messages that are being presented meet the needs of your customers to ensure customer satisfaction.
I think the course was definitely one of the harder ones, especially after the “reprieve” of having a few weeks with topics like social media, mobile, and content marketing that I had more familiarity with. I got through the quiz for this one okay, but I can say that I did learn something extra about the complexities of creating a personalized digital experience. All I can say is that is sure seems rather complicated, that’s for sure! My head is still spinning, and as I said earlier, I’m sure we barely scratched the surface. I’m sure marketers would’ve had an easier time understanding some of these data gathering points better than this content strategist. I never had to dig that deep!
I’m now just past the halfway point in the course now, so hopefully the rest will be smooth sailing. The next module will be about User Experience (UX) and marketing. Having studied user experience and done some of that professionally, I’m hoping that this next module won’t be too complicated, but I’m sure I’ll be shown plenty of things that I don’t know in relation to marketing.
Welcome to the STC-PMC’s first video podcast! The video below was a Skype interview of one of our long time STC-PMC members, Adriane Hunt. Adriane is the Director of Mainframe Technical Communicati…
This is a video podcast that I conducted for the STC-PMC website. This was not only a first for the STC-PMC, but it was a first for me as well! Not too bad for a Skype connection, an app for recording Skype calls, some PowerPoint, and iMovie on an iPad to put it all together. 😉
Adriane and I had a great time making it. We hope you like it, too!
I found out today that there are still things to do, so my contract is being extended just a little bit so that loose ends can be tidied up. It looks like my contract will be going through the end of June. And that’s fine by me. I will still take my long, overdue vacation to Ireland and the UK in May, but then I’ll just have a few weeks to sort out those last bits. I’ve been informed that there would be little chance of extending beyond June.
And this time, I’m actually okay with it. I originally thought, when I was initially told that I would not be renewed for a full year, that six months would’ve been okay. It would coincide with the end of the school year, and I could take the summer off to see if I could start getting my own business together, or at least job search more diligently. So the initial period of only a quarter was a shock. This time, I’m really okay with it. Hey, I thought I was going to be told that my April end date was going to definitely be “it”, so I’ll take what I can get. I’m taking this news much better, and feel a little more secure in my role for now. It’ll give me some time to truly plan, work on myself, and figure out what my next step will be. Spring, this year, will bring in some new life and renewal, methinks.
“We have a sound content marketing strategy! PR, marketing, IT, the social media team, and the content strategy team all pitched in! It’s gonna work!” says Don Draper.
Almost exactly a year ago, I returned from a conference that changed a lot about the way I think about content. It was the 2014 Intelligent Content Conference (ICC2014). My brain soaked in a lot of information, and new friends and networking connections were made during that trip. (Good times!)
One major point–which is also a big focus of this year’s 2015 Intelligent Content Conference–was that content marketing was the next big focus item. Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) gave a keynote that compelled content strategists at the ICC2014 for us to consider embracing marketers and work together toward tearing down the silos so that we could share skillsets to create better content to promote goods and services. In other words, we should all be shifting towards being content marketers. It made sense, but it was overwhelming for me.
Fast forward to a year later, and here I am now, taking my digital marketing coursework, and this week’s module was about content marketing. Ooh boy. Here we go. The very reason that I’m taking this coursework in the first place–to have a deeper understanding of digital marketing, what content marketing is, and how I can try to fit into it my skill set going forward.
The instructor for this module was Greg Jarboe, a well-known YouTube guru and president of SEO-PR, a content marketing agency which has worked with several well-known brands. While I hadn’t seen Mr. Jarboe present before, his name rings a bell, and I don’t know why. Hmm.
Anyway, Mr. Jarboe’s lecture was enlightening, enjoyable, and took some of my anxieties away. While content marketing is still a little overwhelming because of the scale of all of it, I came away with six main points that I’d heard before in content strategy, but hit home for me for content marketing.
1) Content needs to be relevant and have value for the end user. This seems obvious, but it’s generally overlooked.
2) Storytelling works. People are drawn in by stories, not jingles or catch-phrases. This is how blogging for a company actually can have some big benefits. (Yay!)
3) Tear down the silos by working with other departments, such as marketing, IT, public relations, etc. Gee, I’ve definitely heard that multiple times in last two years on the content strategy side!
4) A structured, documented content strategy is necessary to build for success. Like we content strategists didn’t already know this one!
5) Measurable metrics for ROI based on outcomes, like website traffic is up, sales, sales leads, customer retention, higher conversion rates, etc. The first thing that came to my mind was good ol’ Mark Lewis with XML Metrics as a start. Mr. Jarboe took this a step further from a marketing perspective. An easy way to do this is to track what you do! Measure URL hits against results using special URLs from the Google URL generator. For example, create a special URL for a promotion, and measure number of clicks to that special URL against sales results during that time period. (Makes sense!)
6) Brand recognition is not the goal anymore; generating leads and sales is. This makes sense too. I’ve learned from marketing this blog that once you knew my “brand” of TechCommGeekMom, then it’s been up to me to keep you coming back. While my “product” at this point it sharing information that I think is relevant in the tech comm world at large, I want you to keep coming back and sharing your experiences and interests with me as well.
So there you have it. I think from a content strategist’s point of view, these are easy to understand and remember. The trick is, going back to point #3, is that it’s good to have more than one perspective working on content marketing. By combining the different “superpowers” from various groups, a great content marketing strategy can result. I think if I can keep these basics in mind, I might just have a chance at finding a content marketing position if the opportunity arises.
Do you think I’m leaving any basics out? Let me know in the comments.
Next module up is called, “Personalized Digital Experiences”. Again, this is another topic that I know I’ve heard before several times in content strategy, so it’ll be interesting to hear how digital marketing approaches the same topic.
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