I’ll admit it: I’m not huge on social media, particularly where they intersect with technical communication. I’ll clarify that statement. I use Twitter, I have this blog, and I have a LinkedIn profile. But I don’t use Facebook, Digg, or anything else. I’ve only recently investigated using a wiki for a support site with one of the projects I work on.

I think a major reason that I haven’t gotten excited about using social media in tech comm is that no one has shown me or explained to me specific techniques that I can use and how they can be effective. No one has provided me a list of criteria I can use to determine whether a particular project would benefit from a social media strategy as far as user assistance goes. If there’s something like that out there and you know about it, please point me to it.

I’m interested in having things like a weekly tip blog. Part of the trouble that we have in our organization is that the technologies that social media usually run on—such as PHP and MySQL—aren’t supported by our infrastructure group at this point. This makes a long-term strategy difficult because people change positions, so an application service engineer who volunteers to support your wiki at the beginning may not be around to do so in a year.

I see the concept of social media in tech comm as involving two parts.

1. User-Provided Content

Many tech writers are probably averse to this part of social media in tech comm, or at least many were when this idea emerged. We fear the threat of:

  • Disorganized information
  • Inaccurate information
  • Bad writing

I don’t think a magic solution to this problem exists. If you have an entire documentation team, someone could be responsible for monitoring the user-generated content. But the ability to do this either as a team or as a lone writer depends on the amount of information you’re dealing with and how many people are contributing, among other things. However, if social media and user-generated content are wrapped in with the overall doc strategy, then it can be accounted for and balanced out with the regular writing.

I’m talking mostly about wikis here, but suppose you had guest posts on a product blog by enthusiastic users. Someone has to edit that kind of thing.

2. Conversation and Relationships

If your organization is interested in interacting with customers and even developing relationships, social media and tech comm are probably a good way to do this.

Currently, I use release notes as a way to keep customers and users informed, a way to say, “We’ve heard you report these problems, and here’s how we’re doing on them.” These notes are only part of a conversation, though, and so aren’t a dialogue in and of themselves.

Blogs and forums are great avenues for informing people about changes to products. Twitter, and yes, even Facebook, are other avenues. I’m not talking marketing, but helping the customers and users better use the products by giving them assistance through these vehicles. Using these methods, where users can give feedback, can build their trust and loyalty. Giving them assistance in a space where they can ask questions and get more information on demand can build trust and loyalty. But only if it’s done sincerely. People can tell when you’re not actually listening, in person or otherwise.

Wrap-Up

I work in an organization where people are accustomed to one-way communication flow, so they don’t engage in conversation much when communication comes from headquarters. I think this culture can get in the way of innovative collaboration, which is something we’re encouraged to develop among our teams and groups, both as leadership and as individual contributors. I think people are gradually coming out of this mindset. Perhaps as it changes, we’ll get more official support for social media technologies and find it easier to incorporate these media into technical communication here.

I’d love to see a method for analyzing an audience and deciding which social media would be effective for engaging them. I don’t have the expertise to put it together at this point. If you’re aware of something like this, let me know.

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