tekom-Jahrestagung 2012 - ActiveDoc

Social Media
SOCIAL MEDIA
Presentation
Engaging readers in your documentation –
how and why with social media
Sarah Maddox, Atlassian, Sydney, Australia
Blogs, websites, forums... There is so much information out there! We
know that our documentation is the best source of information available
to our customers. How can we make sure that people find our documentation?
How do we even know that people are looking for information
about our products?
One answer lies in the clever use of social media.
Introducing social documentation tools
We begin by examining why you would want to use social media as part
of your technical communication toolbox.
This presentation shows how to integrate your documentation with
Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, in order to draw readers into the documentation.
I’m using a wiki called Confluence. The tools shown in the
presentation are applicable to most web-based platforms, including
Confluence.
You will learn innovative techniques and take away ideas to put into
practice in your own technical communication. For example:
−−
See how to harness the information that expert bloggers provide.
−−
Find out how running a doc sprint can improve your documentation,
enhance your team‘s reputation, and add value your organisation and
its products.
−−
Investigate how rewarding your readers can keep them interested
in the documentation, ensuring that they absorb what they read and
complete the tasks assigned to them.
Feedback
Some documentation platforms, such as a wiki, allow readers to add
comments to the pages. We will look at the types of comments received
on a live documentation wiki.
As an alternative to comments, we will see how to add a feedback form
via an online service called Wufoo.
Blogs
Engaging with bloggers is a good way of giving customers extra information.
It is also a way of generating links back into your documentation
from the bloggers’ sites, thus drawing readers into your documentation.
What’s more, it is a good thing to have the support of bloggers,
since many of them are influential in your community of readers and
customers.
This presentation describes a model for linking from the documentation
to relevant external blogs.
tekom-Jahrestagung 2012
379