If you are, then I have a question for you. What do you think is the goal of a B2B content marketer and how do you measure success?The way many B2B startups think of content marketing: create great content -> share it maniacally across social media -> readers will click -> they will read and love it -> they will then download the software trial / sign up for a demo (over to Sales from here). In which case, the metrics you are judged on are: clicks, visits, demo leads, conversions.The right way,
This is written by the guy who "discovered" me–Parth Mukherjee, who now works for Jifflenow, but is formerly of Adobe. Much of what is here is based on Parth’s experiences, but I can say that it definitely backs the information that I was given by the other digital marketing experts I learned from during my digital marketing class. This is short, but it’s a good reality check.
Trey Robinson, a LinkedIn connection, posted this fabulous Barry Feldman article that was featured in Social Media today. I’ve read a few of Barry’s articles before, and this concept of creating the customer comfort zone is something that he obviously knows how to do very well himself. This is something that I’m constantly aspiring to be able to do. I think I have created the comfort zone, but I think there are cleaner, crisper, clearer ways to do it, and it looks like our pal Barry has outlined for us how to approach that in this article.
Take a look. This is important not only in marketing, but in creating any kind of content, really. If an end user is looking through a manual of a complicated product, don’t they want to know that by reading the instructions, they are in good hands and that they will be able to accomplish their task easily with the help of those instructions? Of course. It’s the responsibility of any writer to do that. Again, all these tips can take you far no matter how you are approaching the content.
Do you have any additional tips to add? Include them in the comments below.
Mark Schaefer has written another insightful article about the impact of technology on blogs. Say it ain’t so, Mark! While huge strides are being made with natural language processing, and as Mark says in the article, there are always new tools that come out to help us with improving our writing, hopefully machines won’t completely replace actual writers over time. There is something about the human element that makes it all personal. After all, I don’t think a machine can talk about personal experiences the same way that a human can, now can it?
Princess Leia is thinking, “Geez, I hope these guys understand how to update my laptop.”
Last week, my son celebrated his 14th birthday. He only wanted one present to mark the occasion, namely a gaming computer. Now, this is something that he’s been pining for months now. Originally, he wanted something in the $3000 range. Um, no. I wouldn’t even spend that much on myself, if I had the funds or the need. He only uses his computer for entertainment, whereas his dad and I use ours for both entertainment and business. Over the months, we told him that he had to get the price significantly down on the parts for the gaming machine he wanted to build, and eventually he figured out that he didn’t need the Bugatti (one of the fastest street cars out there) version of a machine, but a Ford Mustang level of speed was fine. Thanks to Ed Marsh of ContentContent, we found a place called MicroCenter that sold parts so that my son could build his new computer, and the sales guy helped us not only find all the parts, but also helped us find parts that were better and cheaper than some of the parts my son had chosen. As a result, before tax, my son’s new system cost $8 less than his budget. He was pleased.
RedSpeed15 (his own moniker) looking over the goods before assembly.
My son and husband spent the weekend building the machine, and setting up the system. It’s still not perfect, as some of the components won’t work until he can upgrade his OS to Windows 10 next month, but it’s still an improvement over the machine he had. He’s thrilled with his new machine at this point. My husband and I felt that there were some good lessons learned with this birthday gift, which was that he learned to work within a budget, he learned teamwork as he built it with his dad’s help, he learned some patience (not much–he was anxious about it for a few months) in receiving it, and he gained some confidence that he actually knew what he was talking about when he’d talk to the sales guy. Perhaps this it the start to some career skills that will serve him later (he’s only in 8th grade right now).
Coincidentally, I got a new laptop myself. Unlike my son, I spent more money on it because I do use mine for business purposes quite heavily. Since I’m trying to move data from a Windows 7 machine to a Windows 8.1 machine…well, the transition hasn’t been so smooth. I’m doing it little bit by little bit. The Windows Easy Transfer was not cooperating in any way, no matter how I tried. Some things have ended up working out more easily, like having the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription to download programs to the new computer. Other ones…not so much. I’m still moving my own documents and content over as well, and there will need to be some tweaking done as well. It gives me a chance to clean up some of the data on my old computer so as not to mess up the new one too much.
During the process, I kept thinking, “Gee, what would someone who doesn’t have a lot of know-how about these systems do this process, if it’s like this for me?” Between my husband and I, who aren’t hardware/software experts, we still have a better clue than most people on how different software and systems work on a Windows computer, at least. Between us, we’ve been in the IT business in one form or another for 35+ years, so you’d think that we’d have some idea of how this stuff works.
This all lead to me thinking about the technical abilities of my family. My paternal grandfather, who lacked a formal education, was someone who should have been an electrical engineer based on his work and hobbies. He was a natural at that stuff. My brother inherited that mind too, as he is an architect. I was the other “tech” in the family. My father in law is a mechanical engineer, and my husband’s undergraduate degree is in mechanical engineering, even though he is a computer and web developer now. So I supposed it was inevitable that it would be part of my son’s genetic code (get it, code?). 😉
Luke, use your technical abilities for your technical communications. I mean, USE THE FORCE!
I started thinking about it more deeply in terms of how this technical ability has helped my own career, and how it has related to technical writing and technical communication. After all, “technical” is the big modifier when describing these professions. How many of us are actually “technical” in what we do? We probably need to better define “technical” first. Do we mean that we understand the finer details or writing or related work (like web design, etc.) that we can be more “technical” than the average person? Or do we mean that we understand and work with technical content, which requires a higher level of knowledge on less than average topics? In my mind, it’s both. You could be one or the other easily, but probably the best technical communicators are a bit of both.
Don’t listen to Vader and become a Sith!
Is this something we take for granted? Perhaps we do. That’s something that we should change, and I think there’s been a movement within the technical communications field to embrace that. We have a special set of skills that many people don’t have. Many can write, and many can be technical, but not many can be both. You have been gifted with “The Force”, so to speak, so it’s your responsibility to use it for good like a Jedi Knight, and not turn to the Dark Side.
Apple Inc. is assembling a high-speed network and upgrading how it builds data centers, a push to be more competitive with Amazon.com Inc., Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in cloud services, people familiar with the plans said. Up to now, Apple has relied mostly on traditional network providers and technology suppliers to support consumer services such as iTunes for music and movies, iCloud for storing photos and other content and the Siri voice-activated assistant. Apple will stick with most of
Seeing that Apple is always talking about the user experience with its devices, it only make sense that creating a (hopefully) reliable high-speed network with enhanced cloud services would be next. It’ll be interesting to see how each of the big companies like Google, Comcast, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple all vie for that top networking/cloud spot.
TechCommGeekMom 
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