The LavaCon Content Strategy Blog

Oded Ilan recently joined Ed Marsh to talk about his upcoming LavaCon presentation, Personalization of Content and the Power of Metrics. Currently the Chief Marketing Officer of Iridize, Oded’s start in content can be traced back to his degree in English literature. When he joined the world of high tech, he quickly learned the experience of writing and telling stories could be used to make a living: marketing and sales is all about telling stories. In the end, it’s content creation.

People working with content know that managers want metrics, but some metrics are easier to capture than others. For example, when there is a change in the user interface, we can measure the impact by the number of clicks. But how do you use metrics to follow a “solution”? How do you measure the effectiveness of support or training materials? When content is used once or twice, there is usually no option to know if an application’s feature was used as a result of the content related to that feature. Continue reading “Content Personalization and the Power of Metrics – The LavaCon Conference: 2017”

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In this podcast, Eric Kuhnen and Michael Rosinski of Astoria Software join Ed Marsh to talk about their upcoming presentation at LavaCon, Making a Quantum Shift in Structured Authoring.

According to Eric, one of the key changes in the content industry has become the inability for multiple groups within a department to share content while using a common set of tools. The technical documentation team works with structured content, and the content repository is often not available to those outside the team. Astoria Software now provides integration with Witty Parrot to enable “rich sharing” and ensure that XML-based content is available to non-XML content creators. Continue reading “Make a Quantum Shift in Structured Authoring – The LavaCon Conference: 2017”

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Chellie Campbell joined Ed Marsh to talk about her LavaCon keynote presentation, People Love to Give You Money! And Recognition! And Headcount!

Chellie started her career as a musical comedy actress and then became a bookkeeper. When she learned that not many people could read their financial statements, she started teaching them, which led her to write books and teach workshops. She has found that most people look at money from the perspective of stock brokers and financial planners, which means they view money with a negative perspective:

These people say, “You’re going to run out of money. You’re not going to have enough money for medical expenses.” It’s a place of fear. It’s ridiculous. You should be enjoying your money. I take the money piece, and I make it fun. Budget means Baby U Deserve Getting Every Thing, and I talk about that in my talk.”

Continue reading “People Love to Give You Money! And Recognition! And Headcount! – The LavaCon Conference: 2017”

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Keith Boyd recently talked to Ed Marsh about his upcoming keynote,  How MOOCs, SPOCs, and Next Generation e-Learning are Impacting Content Strategy. The growing popularity of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs) provides the opportunity for traditional technical communicators to work with other teams and incorporate e-learning into their content strategy, resulting in mastery and deeper commitment from customers. By becoming aware of the options, we are better equipped to have conversations with the other teams, identify opportunities, and deliver engaging solutions.

I’m going to talk about how learning science is impacting our ability to motivate people, to keep them in the game, and to keep them wanting to learn.

Continue reading “How MOOCs, SPOCs, and Next Generation e-Learning are Impacting Content Strategy – The LavaCon Conference: 2017”

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