The field of technical communication has come a long way in a short time. We’ve been impacted in positive ways by all sorts of technological advances. We’ve moved from authoring content on typewriters to personal computers, from creating printed documentation to digital files, and from authoring content in proprietary formats to creating content that adheres to open, international standards. We’ve learned new approaches, adopted lessons learned from other disciplines, and discovered the secret to creating multiple deliverables from a single source of content. We’ve challenged ourselves to reduce the jargon, to standardize terminology, to reuse content—to componentize, optimize, and personalize it.
We’ve made all these changes, and yet, despite our best efforts, we’re still failing to meet the most basic needs of our customers. We’re stuck creating Help 1.0 style content in a Help 2.0 world. And, that has got to change.
Help 2.0 is about letting go of old school, preconceived notions about our role as content providers. Help 2.0 forces us to realize that by leveraging the knowledge of the crowd we can help users find the right information quickly and easily, whether we created the content ourselves or not. And, perhaps most importantly, Help 2.0 is about creating socially-powered support experiences in which users help us learn what they want and need, while also allowing them to assist one another — and us — in ways that are meaningful to them.
Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for a glimpse into state-of-the-art Help 2.0-powered support centers that harness the power of the crowd by providing socially-enabled, contextually-relevant technical and customer support services via the web. Attendees will learn how real organizations are actually using Help 2.0 techniques and collaborative software platforms to create exception customer experiences. Real stories, metrics and use cases will be shared. Attendees will discover how engaging the community in new and innovative ways can provide unexpected benefits, impact the way they work, alter their roles and responsibilities, and change the tools they use. Attendees will also learn how creating support communities that can provide meaningful metrics about our content and those who use it, help link content creation and customer support efforts directly to sales, can provide technical communicators with a wealth of employment opportunities and help upper management see the value of our contributions as content creators, curators, and community leaders.
Scott Abel (scottabel@me.com), aka The Content Wrangler, is an internationally recognized content management strategist and social networking choreographer whose strengths lie in helping global organizations improve the way they author, maintain, and deliver information. In addition to his popular business blog, TheContentWrangler.com, an online resource for content professionals with an interest in content management, content standards, and content technologies, Scott maintains several online communities on Facebook (facebook.com/scottpatrickabel) and Linkedin (linkedin.com/in/scottabel), and is a popular and influential technology blogger on Twitter (@scottabel).
He also manages the social networking activities for several software and services firms in the high technology and digital mobile publishing arenas. Scott writes regularly for trade and industry publications, blogs, and newsletters. He also co-produces several content industry events, including the Web Content conference in Chicago (webcontentconferences.com) and Intelligent Content conference (intelligentcontent2011.com) in Palm Springs, CA. He’s also a popular dance music mashup artist, dj, and music producer who has been spinning since 1982.
