Rey and BB-8 are trying to find their way, too, in 2016.
While I’ve reviewed what’s happened in 2015 in my recent posts, it’s time for me to look ahead, and see what I need to plan for this year.
I admit that last year, I had big plans. I knew that I wanted to sample some new conferences so that I could have some new experiences and meet new people. I also knew that I wanted to try to launch my own consulting company. Additionally, I knew I needed to learn something new to enhance my skills. I achieved all these goals on some level, so that’s good. However, it’s more difficult this year. If last year was a transitional year, this seems to be more of a transitional year than before. Last year, I had some direction on what I wanted–and needed–to do. This year, I really don’t know where to go, and that’s problematic.
While I earned a mini-MBA in digital marketing last year, I don’t feel strong enough to take on a content marketing job. I could certainly try, but most of the job listings need someone with a stronger marketing background than a digital background. While I understand marketing concepts, my experience fails me on that front. I’m open to taking more coursework in something to enhance my job seeking opportunities, but…in what? Two avenues that I’ve considered is learning more about Agile/Scrum, and the other is looking at getting a certificate in localization practices. I think both would be beneficial, and are things that I’m interested in, but I don’t know how much they would actually help me in the job market where I’m at. I’ve thought about getting some coursework in project management–which is what originally brought me into the IT world almost 20 years ago. Project Management has morphed quite a bit since that time. I’ve also thought about learning more about either WordPress or AEM development, which I think would be good, but I’m not sure where to find the right education for that, or know if I’m up to it, since I’m not really a developer. I’m not sure if any of these are the right direction, either.
I launched my company, but I’ve hardly gotten it off the ground. Part of the problem is that I know I need to focus on what I’m best at, and figure out what I can offer that other consultants can’t. I’m not sure what that is quite yet. I think I have a lot to offer, but honing into what makes me special, unique, and valuable to a client is much harder to define, especially when you are trying to figure it out about yourself. I also need to figure out how to find clients–that’s important, too! If I can get that off the ground more, I’d love that. I’m open to any part-time or full-time projects–even being the sub-contractor for someone else. I’m very open to remote possibilities. I don’t know where the opportunities lie. I know they are out there, but I don’t know how to tap into it.
I’d like to continue trying out new conferences, and perhaps go back to some that I’ve already attended in the past. I’m already set to attend the STC Summit this year, as I’ll be a workshop speaker. I’ll also be attending the STC-PMC Conduit conference–for the first time strictly as an attendee, and not a speaker! But other conferences? A lot of it has to do with time and money. Money is something I don’t have a lot of, and time–well, I don’t know what my time is going to look like a few months from now, let alone later this year. Perhaps I’ll go to the IEEE ProComm which will be in Austin, Texas in the Fall. I’m not sure yet. I thought about going to the Big Design conference in Quito, Ecuador (I heard it’s going to be great, and an opportunity for me to visit cousins-in-law at the same time), but it’s very close to the STC Summit, so I don’t know if I can swing two conferences so close to each other time-wise or financially.
I think the biggest issue, as you can sense here, is that I feel direction-less. It’s almost a dilemma between having too many choices and not enough choices. It’s one of those times that I wish I was a kid again, and someone could see through the clouds better than I could, and help point me in the right direction. But alas, I don’t have such a luxury. I have to figure this out for myself.
You can see that I have ideas, and I’m open to suggestions, but there are too many unknown factors this year that prevent me from committing to anything right now. I don’t know what direction my career is going in right now. Last year was the year that I thought I would turn things around and start in a new direction, and it would be a clear path. I think I had some good ideas last year–and they were, and I could try to continue with them, but I’m not sure how to do that.
So where do I go from this point? As I said, I’m certainly open to suggestions or leads. I have a concept in my head of where I want to go, what I want to do, but I don’t know how to get there. There are no Google Maps to take me there. If you have felt like you didn’t have any direction in your career before proceeding towards next steps, what did you to break out of that rut?
Include your comments below, as I’d really like to hear about some ideas that might benefit me, but could also help others who are facing the same dilemma as I am.
General Leia says, “Don’t worry, kid. You’ll figure it out. The Force is strong with you, Padawan.”
This is not to say I’m not optimistic about this year. I will say that over the past several years, I’m glad that I’ve built a great support network professionally around me who can certainly lift me when I’m down, and I’m grateful for that. Also, who’s to say that I have to set out any goals right now? When I decided to lose weight and get healthy, I didn’t make the plan in January, but rather in May or June of that year. Who’s to say that I won’t have this figured out a little better in a few months? Time will tell, but for now, I’m hoping the Force will provide me with some direction….
Florence and The Machine think that TechCommGeekMom’s Top of the Pops 2015 is smashing. (Source: telegraph.co.uk)
I always find it interesting to see what stories people end up gravitating to each year on TechCommGeekMom, and along with other year-end summaries, I like to figure out what were the most popular blog posts for a given year. Sometimes, it’s something that’s archived from an earlier year. That’s good, because I try to write or post things that will have long-term relevance as often as possible. However, I’m usually interested in what was written THIS year that came out to be the most popular of all original information posted that wasn’t an archived post or a curated topic posted.
What’s interesting to observe from a statistical perspective is that the top three almost tied for first place–#1 has one more view than the next two, which are tied.
I’m also pleased to see that most of my most popular posts this year were ones that came from the heart, based on personal experiences or observations. I’ve often argued that social media is a medium in which people discussed things and could more closely relate to each other because there is the ability to have more personal experiences and have the opportunity to connect and respond. The fact that many of these top blog posts relating to my job woes, trying to provide DIY training for myself, and trying to take positive steps towards the continual advancing of my career are relatable topics–that I’m not the only one going through these feelings and experiences. I almost always try to open up conversations with my blogs–for better or worse–and the reflection of the top original posts for 2015 reflect that.
The last one I listed was something personal that I wanted to include. This showed a big part of my weight loss and self-improvement journey I’m on right now. I’m still on that journey, having made a bold move in the last few weeks (something that I may write about soon, but not yet). I was glad to see that truly personal topics matters, and that even when relating it to something in technical communications, people responded positively towards it. My weight loss journey is a deeply personal one, and something that I don’t have to share, but I do, simply because I think all of us can relate to a non-tech comm struggle like that easily.
What will 2016 bring? Stay tuned…plans, resolutions, and predictions coming soon!
As a follow-up to my blog post from a while back comparing weight loss to a content strategy, I thought I’d provide you with an analytical progress report of sorts.
Yes, this is really me.
I had posted this set of photos about a week ago on social media, and didn’t share it here! The foundation of my weight loss strategy has been sound, but there have been bumps along the way. I found that I couldn’t always follow a “waterfall” process because of holidays, stress, weather (can’t get outside to do my walking in cold weather with my asthma), work–lots of things that have gotten in the way. So, I had to employ an Agile plan of sorts. Eat less when I couldn’t exercise, still eat those brownies but account for them in my food tracking, and just walk at the mall when I had an opportunity. So, my plan slowed down, but the proof here is that it didn’t stop–the process continued. Even after several trips to various fast food restaurants and chocolate treats, I account for it, and get right back on track.
I am still far from done losing weight. I’ve lost about 56 pounds so far, and it’s been about 10 months in the making to get where I am now. I still have about 30 more pounds to go, and it gets harder as I continue. There are some things that will get easier to do during this summer that will help, like warmer weather to get outside to walk and bike more, and more fresh fruits and veggies to eat for variety (less calories), and hot weather makes it easier for me to want to drink those 8 glasses of water each day. But the process continues, and these photos of “before” and “after” (yes, these are me–nothing has been altered in Photoshop except brightness in the second one so you could see it is actually me) are my analytical report for now.
I thought I’d provide everyone with an update to show that as long as you have a sound foundation and can be agile as you move along, it can get done, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. It just has to be well-organized, and have room to make mistakes and recover quickly from those mistakes.
I’d also like to thank those who have supported me so far. There are several technical communicators I know who are in the same battle, and have been a great source of inspiration and support–crowdsourcing at its best!
Professor McGonagall shows the simplicity of transformation when talking about digital marketing. Get it right, Potter!
I’ve finally finished the last module of the Rutgers online course on digital marketing! In some respects, it feels like I just got started, but in other respects, it feel like I’ve been doing this a LONG time, and I’ll be happy when my test and capstone project have been turned in so I can get my weekends back again! 😉
This last module was taught by Mike Moran, who also taught the second module about SEO. The topic of this last module was five ideas to transform your digital marketing.
Mike started this module with a pep talk to the class by validating that the class would probably feel overwhelmed by the flurry of content that’s been thrown at us through all these modules so far (uh, yah, you think so?) and how transitioning from learning to actually doing will be scary (no, Mike, it’s TERRIFYING!!). But Mike reassured us that we have learned plenty that we should be able to employ these new tools to be effective, and the best way to truly learn is to DO some of these actions to gain some confidence. (Well, I’m gonna try, no matter how terrified I am about all this!)
To prove his point, he said that it’s usually the CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) and CIOs (Chief Information Officers) who usually have the shortest tenures as C-Level executives at an average of four years because they can get overwhelmed with this stuff, too! They both have digital marketing in common! So it’s okay to feel overwhelmed, but you shouldn’t run away from it, but rather face it head on! Mike said nobody’s an expert in digital marketing–not even any of the instructors from this whole course! (You could’ve had me fooled!) Things change so often that the instructors can’t keep up either, and so even they can be nervous about this stuff, too. “You will never learn enough to be comfortable. If you are looking for comfortable, then this is the wrong profession for you!” said Mike. (Sounds like a tech comm statement!) You can feel nervous and still do this! If you are doing this right, you will make mistakes, but the trick will be learning from them. Mike encouraged us that we are up to this, because this is not the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life. (Good point, dude.) Make sure you share your fears so you don’t feel so alone. (Dude, have you read this blog?)
After this pep talk, Mike made a segueway into the five ideas that would transform digital marketing.
1) Big data is the biggest change in marketing
The world has changed from traditional media to social media in the last twenty years, and the contributors have grown exponentially, while the response time has shrunk from days to minutes. It happened because of Moore’s law–transistor density doubles every two years, and costs plummet even more sharply. This has resulted in drastic changes in everything that technology touches, including marketing. So, theoretically in 5 years, today’s $500 iPad will cost $50–but that’s not what’s going to happen. We’ll have wearables that will be taking over.
Mike defines Big Data with the 4 “V”s:
Volume – The obvious large amount of the data
Velocity – It’s up to the minute because it changes every minute
Variety – It drives the IT people nuts because you keep needing something new
Veracity – Nothing else matters if you can’t trust its accuracy
He then outlined that Google knows a lot about us, namely who we are, what we are interested in, what we buy, and who are friends are. Amazon knows a lot about us, too, when we are on its site, such as where we came from, which ads we’ve seen, which products we have already looked at, and it knows our previous purchases. Mike then extended it to what marketers know when we are at the mall. Soon enough, there will be face recognition which will tell us gender, age, ethnicity, and maybe identity. Some of this is already in play with the use of free wifi in a store can happen because marketers can recognize your phone in that store.
It’s not just about how marketers are using technology with your phone. It can also be how consumers find out information about the products they buy. For example, in the near future, there can be RFID tags on a milk carton. An RFID tag can be on the milk jug when the cow is milked, then a new RFID tag is created when the milk is placed in the carton, then the dairy ships the carton to the store, and the consumer can see facts about the cow and its shipment to decide whether to buy the milk based on freshness, antibiotics use, and how the milk was cared for during shipment.
Mike continued by saying that Big Data is changing the market. He pointed out that according to IBM, 98% of the data in existence was created in the last two years. We think of that as e-mail, photos, and social media, but with omnipresent security cameras and sensors on almost every item in the supply chain, it’s not hard to conceive of the notion that in five years, 98% of the world’s data would have been created within the last two MONTHS. (Holy Big Brother!)
In the end, it’s still marketing! Mike said that you need to target your audience, understand what they care about, and connect with your message, because if you do, you improve your image and drive sales. The difference is how you do it! Digital marketing is actually good, because you can see the results of things instantly in such things as Google Ads and yank them quickly if they don’t work in a matter of hours instead of a much longer period of time like risky traditional marketing. The risk is much lower, and the ability to test more to find the right thing is much easier.
2) Your marketing must attract your market
Your target markets are ruled by the business that sees your ads, and you won’t even know how it happened. Attracting business is mostly about opting in. Mobile works the same way–coupons can be sent to people who are nearby searching for you, or who checks in, or becomes the Mayor on Foursquare. To target your message, digital marketing rewards pull over push, as Mike put it. More often, markets find you or you give your customer permission to search, download apps, opt-in for emails, subscribe to your blog, or follow you on Twitter to provide customers with a means to find you. Mobile makes the experience more interactive, because your customer might look at a review online before purchasing, or might write a review shortly after purchase. Because of these kinds of interaction, you need to be part of the conversation because things are so transparent now, and you need to be making sure that you are engaged and listening to what customers say. You can start to understand what customers want through digital marketing because digital marketing is direct marketing–you can see what your customers do when they interact with your marketing message and website. The customers vote with the click of a mouse or tap of their finger on a mobile device! Web marketing is the biggest opportunity of direct marketing you could have if you use your analytics tools. Websites are to sell stuff!
So, how can you drive demand for your products? Increase your conversion rate, increase your traffic, or better yet, both! Brand awareness is not the decisive factor here, it’s SALES, so sales needs to be the focus.
You need to decide your conversions–would they be through online sales, making store, partner, or dealer location information available, making it easy for customers to make phone calls, create affiliate links, or allow customers to download a whitepaper, or even something as straightforward and simple as filling out a contact form?
To track offline conversions to the web is most easily done by contacting the customer. Mike advised that if the customer switches channels, it’s good to draw the customer back by doing things like offering a special phone number, providing a coupon that can be printed to present at the retailer, or make the product specifications available to print out and bring to the dealer.
Website visitors come to websites to learn (research products and services), shop (compare offerings and prices), buy (check out and purchase), get (check order status), and use (get technical and customer support) through the buyer journey. But you can look at this same journey path to measure value. Examples of this would be helping the customer find the right product during the learning stage, seeing how many customers that view a product actually put it in their cart during the shop stage, see how many actually check out during the buy stage, and the multiply the difference by your average revenue to see what the actually impact on revenue is. Each stage is a micro-conversion. You have to decide what your buyer’s journey is going to be and how you are going to adapt it for that journey. Some sites lead to offline activity, so you need to account for that.
3) Your marketing message must be welcomed
Mike asked, “How do you connect with your message?” His answer was that relevant content will be passed along by search engines, linked by other websites, and passed along by your customers in social media and mobile. It’s really that simple! You need to concentrate on creating high quality, truly informational content, because if you do, you will become influential. Influence marketing is a matter of identifying the most persuasive ideas, and getting your customers to, as Mike put it, “sing your song.” An example would be authors asking certain people to review their books to help promote it, like asking Oprah to feature it in her book club. Campaigns alone are costly with huge swings, but if you have a fan base, then with both campaigns and engagement, your consumer interest will go up.
To measure influence, you can look at a Klout score, but you look at how many people they influence and what they are influential about. If they don’t appeal to a group that you are targeting, then you don’t want to work with that person. Influencers have relationships with each other. Some players have a lot to say, but no influence, and others are quieter, but influence many. Mike calls targeting that influencer the “D-list approach”. He says to use the long tail for blogger outreach because A-listers are hard to reach who get dozens of pitches every day. Your pitch might not break through, but it would with a D-lister.
4) You must respond to your customers
To connect with your message, you must change your message in reponse to what your customers say (tweets, likes, comments, blogs, product ratings) and do (search, purchases, page views). If you’re unresponsive, customers will burn you publicly with the customer reviews. Your solution is to accept comments and trackbacks on your blogs, allow your products to be rated and reviewed, and staff your efforts with enough people to respond. Not taking these steps gives off the impression that the company doesn’t care, and any negative commentary must be true–this is anti-influential!
By responding to customers, you can change your products, your content, your prices, your policies, your experience, and then change them again as needed to help increase your conversions. It’s a great feedback loop! Part of that is testing, and seeing how customers respond, and then adjusting accordingly, like doing A/B testing on your website. The more you test, the more you can find what works and will create greater conversions. By doing all these things, you’ll be surprised at how smart you will look! Mike made the profound statement of, “The reason you’re not confident about how to start is because you think it’s on YOU to know what to do. What I’m saying is that if you set up the feedback loop, it isn’t on you, it’s on the feedback loop.” This relieves much of the pressure that you have to come up with the perfect idea.
One of the things that makes it hard is the speed expected to expedite things. The slower approach is typically the “waterfall” approach, in which requirements and structure is documented meticulously to get to the end, but it’s too slow because by the time you get to the end, the requirements have changed. Mike made the analogy that “waterfall” is like baking, because you know what you want up front, precise measurements and preparation are needed, and nothing is done until the end. It’s not as easy to do. In contrast, the Agile process is, Mike contends, is like making soup–you can experiment as you go, you can see what’s working and what doesn’t by adding ingredients as you go along, but it’s at its best at the end. This is more flexible and faster. So, marketing and IT should be soup–something you can change as you go along. (I guess the expression of “No soup for you!” doesn’t apply here!) Mike’s message was not to do everything at once. Start small, do a little at a time, like make only one YouTube video and see how it goes rather than decide to plan out and produce 10 videos at once that could flop. See how the first one goes, and adjust accordingly.
5) Marketing ain’t just for marketers anymore.
Customers don’t want to hear from marketers, so you need to get help. Customers aren’t looking for copy anymore, but rather for information from the experts in your company that can solve their problem, and that might not be you. Marketers must teach people–namely those experts–how to operate in public. There will never be a blogging department, and the PR team must teach the rest of the company to do PR through social media. You can teach them what you know, let them do their thing, and mentor them when necessary. There will always be some element of risk involved in getting others involved, but there is risk even without getting others involved. Your job is to help set parameters to minimize the risk of errors as much as possible. These experts are a big asset and to use their expertise is free! It’s all about internal marketing as much as it is about external marketing.
Another overlooked segment is reverse mentoring–there are lots of people who understand traditional marketing but don’t understand how to use the digital tools, yet younger people understand those digital and social media tools, and would benefit from learning more about traditional marketing. Traditional marketers should take advantage of learning from the digital literacy of the younger ones to start learning how to take better advantage of these tools. In fact, mutual mentoring is even better!
Another obstacle to tackle is how to persuade your colleagues into joining into this digital marketing mentality. Part of that will involve more of that internal marketing that you need to do as you do with your other company colleagues. One way is to work on getting the message to come from the top down, meaning an executive puts forth the idea of what needs to be done, but this can be difficult to implement consistently. The alternative is to get department heads to get together to find a common ground to implement actions, but that generally doesn’t work well either. The solution is that you have to admit that some business units are more important than others, and work with those. Mike gave the example of the Security Council of the United Nations enforcing rules on various countries, and targeting specific groups as needed. Using a scorecard to motivate teamwork and publicizing the results internally of how these things are implemented can be helpful in getting that cooperation, as it’s tangible and driven by data. You can slowly change organizational behavior by changing the rules, setting benchmarks, reviewing business unit scorecards, demand improvement, and repeat the process again with a new agenda or raising the standards of the one you are working on.
According to Mike, if these five ideas are implemented immediately, and things are put in place to start making it happen, you are much more likely to succeed. Take it one step at a time, but you need to act, or you won’t benefit from all the new information attained in this course. (Yes, all 10 modules!) You can’t run away from digital marketing, so it’s to our benefit to move forward with all this information and succeed!
Amazingly enough, this five-step summary was a good way to end things. Mike showed that digital marketing is not magic. (Now you get the Harry Potter image reference above?) It brought together all the main elements of all the rest of the modules together in a comprehensive way to implement them. Heck, I started using these steps immediately with some people I work with both inside and outside of my job, so I guess this course helped.
BUT WAIT–THAT’S IT! I GOT THROUGH ALL 10 MODULES!
I still have to take the final exam, as well as create and submit my capstone project, so I will be working on those for the next two weeks or so. Wish me luck, because my grade will depend on those! I’ll report on those as I complete them!
So what do you think? Do you think these five steps are the key, or is there more to consider? Comment below.
As I’m going backwards in my Adobe Day reviews, the second presentation of the day was by Joe Gollner. Joe is another prolific speaker in the world of technical communications, but I really hadn’t even heard him do a presentation before. I had seen him in last year’s Adobe Day at Lavacon on the panel discussion, but he was one of many voices in that discussion, so it was hard to determine what his presentations would be like. I was pleased to find that his talk was as top caliber as the other presenters (which was no surprise, really).
Joe’s presentation was about the changing role of the technical communicator within the integrated product lifecycle. He started the talk by asking the question of how do we deploy content to help with other aspects of business, and reach out to customers? His answer was that we need to adapt our conclusions. Joe mentioned Peter Drucker‘s book, The Practice of Management from 1954, in which Drucker spoke of the drive towards specialized components with variety as the order of the day at that time. Drucker understood in 1954 that the global economy would require standardized parts with flexible and dynamic assembly. The global economy calls for continuous process improvement that is maximized, automated, and makes dynamically tailored products. Joe emphasized that there’s no escape from the need to standardize and automate content.
In today’s market, portability and processability is key. Using XML to distribute content is central to the way business is conducted. It’s influential in technical interoperability, electronic data exchanges, social media integration, responsible web design, internet commerce, and supply chain automation. Thomas Friedman‘s book, The World is Flat, specifically focused on the levelling effects of XML. XML enabled supply chain automation, so it drove the ability to massively distribute manufacturing and distribution of products.
XML changed the way world works. XML is not a secret! To prove his point, Joe posted the following slide:
Around those spokes, any business will go through the activities of governance, acquisition, delivery, and operation. We need to understand this applies to consumer products, complex systems, or data systems/big data. No trade-offs are allowed! Efficiency is measured as quality, cost, and speed. What this means for knowledge workers is that specialization is in order, and it does pose challenges in how we communicate. There are new and more challenging communication problems to be solved. Not only do we need to make technology understandable to users, but we need to make technology understandable at all in the first place.
Many companies need to understand for themselves what their own products do so they understand what they truly are. But many companies use the “silo” model of creating content, and the problem with the silo model is that it’s old, tired and broken, and can’t keep up with modern issues. Joe showed us this chart:
Joe pointed out that the details in this chart show that sometimes content “silos” and customer experience don’t align correctly. What can we, as content professionals, do to help fix this?
Joe Gollner taking notes during Val Swisher’s talk.
Joe cited a case study that was done using Massively Integrated Systems (MSI), a market leading software company. It compared Agile versus Lean practices of MSI. Agile success led to general failure, because if Agile was embraced, then the company embarked on aggressive innovation, thus it ran straight into the complexity of their own product and of their customers’ environments . The company developed specialist departments, but these types of teams find it harder to communicate with each other. The groups didn’t understand each other’s language, goals, constraints, and approaches, and it showed. The roots of the Lean process were in Training within Industry (TWI), a World War II initiative to mobilize US industry. It was all about communication during Cold War engineering that were powered by these practices, but it dissipated in the 1980s. The Lean process worked better.
Joe’s conclusion was that current practices aren’t sustainable. Content is placed in the center of the integrated product lifecycle (see spoke diagram above). Content is potential information, and is needed for effective information, processes, and products. There are many specializations to choose from as technical communication specialists. Joe asked the question, “Is adaption an option?” His response was a definitive NO. He believes that competitive pressures make reintegrating the product lifecycle mandatory. He gave the example of his daughter becoming a “cyberian” rather than a librarian, and she has a new job title of “meta-dor” due to this quickly changing world. Technical communicators will make themselves a visible part of the solution.
While I found Joe’s presentation informative, I actually have to disagree slightly with what he’s saying about becoming a specialist. Because I’ve been in the job market fairly recently (and might be again soon due to my contract ending), I feel that while you can have a main specialty in tech comm, it’s better to be a multi-specialist. Joe had spoken about how the “silo” groups couldn’t speak each others’ language, and that’s because of specialization. By being a multi-specialist, this allows a technical communicator to be multi-lingual, in a manner of speaking. Because I understand the nature of social media, content management, user interface design, and technical writing, I can fit into any of those positions as needed. Even in my current job as a “web publisher”, having those multiple “languages” and abilities served me well beyond knowing only content management. Understanding the other “languages” of those specialties–provided more technical communicators are also multi-specialists–will help to bring about that standardization of language needed between the groups. Perhaps it’s a more diplomatic or ambassadorial viewpoint on my part.
Still, I do agree with him that there is a need for standardization of language that needs to come about, and XML can be an important part of making that happen for better customer experience.
(Joe, if you are reading this, please feel free to correct or comment on my notes here in the comments below.)
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