If you’ve read the responses of the 25 most influential tech comm bloggers and honorable mentions to being listed, you may have noticed that I haven’t said anything about it before now—other than on Twitter the day the list was posted. One reason is that I had other post ideas and some guest posts I wanted to publish first.

Now I’ve gotten around to it.

What Influence Is

Brian Solis recently wrote about how influence has been confused with online popularity. He says:

Over the years, I’ve explored the roles of influencers in social networks and as a result, I’ve refined the definition as simply the ability to cause measurable actions and outcomes. Intentional influence then assumes that certain actions are therefore definable and as a result, desired activity and results are now designed into strategies. The execution of these plans is then dependent on the reach and conviction of the influential voices to which they’re aligned.

One of the classes in my communication minor in college focused on persuasion and social influence. (Yes, majoring in English and technical writing and minoring in communication may be redundant. But the minor gave me a perspective on how people communicate in general, not just how to communicate technical concepts to people.) In this period of the ubiquity of social media, thinking about social influence is highly relevant.

Our textbook was Persuasion, Social Influence, and Compliance Gaining, of which our professor was a coauthor. The book is based partly on the premise that the three named concepts are closely related or synonymous and that they’re aimed at changing people’s thoughts, attitudes, or behaviors.

I believe influence is different than a social circle or even than attraction. Someone may be in my circle without being influenced by me. People may be drawn to my blog through a link on Twitter and never be influenced by what they read. I agree with my college professor’s view of influence: it’s bringing about change in someone else.

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I started my current job five years ago this week. Reaching the level of senior technical writer brings me to ask whether I’ve got the smarts to go along with the time I’ve clocked.

A Narrow View of Tech Comm

When I graduated from Utah State University two months before starting as an intern, I thought technical communication consisted mainly of writing manuals, help systems, and the occasional tutorial. I thought the main activities were writing and creating images for print or Web.

My definition of a technical writer didn’t differ much from most people’s if at all.

I hadn’t heard the terms CSS, single sourcing, structured authoring, DITA, social media, Agile, RSS, SEO, or content strategy. Some of these things were either relatively new or not dreamed of at that point.

I belonged to the student chapter of the Society for Technical Communication, but the chapter members mainly learned from each other. There was only so far we could go that way.

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Last week I posted about social media and tech comm, and I asked for some way to know when to use what media to communicate with users of products.

It occurred to me in the meantime that the answer is actually fairly simple: Use the media your users use to communicate.

One of the buzzwords of technical communication is multichannel publishing, or pushing information out in multiple formats. I believe the purpose of doing this with a single documentation project is meeting various communication preferences of your users. A PDF isn’t going to meet the needs of all users—or their desires, which is what we’re after, right? We want people to want to use our communication products.

In thinking about this, I remembered a post Tom Johnson wrote about responding to coworkers and others using the communication medium they used to contact you in the first place. It can be argued that you have every right to communicate with people the way you want, but keep in mind that if you communicate with people only in the way you choose, they may not be listening. If I’m waiting for a phone call from someone and they send me a letter, I may miss the message.

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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.

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