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This will be our first time at the CEX event and we are looking forward to mixing with the new generation of content entrepreneurs to learn about building profitable content-based businesses.
The annual conference for the Society of Technical Communicators has been a regular highlight of our year for many years now, and I’m delighted to once again be participating as both a speaker and industry panelist.
Despite the fact that for over half of my career technology companies have paid my mortgage, I have always been a long standing, and increasing vocal, proponent of the idea that in deciding to pursue any business-process change or innovation the technology must come last. In fact I devoted a whole chapter to the topic in my book The Content Pool (end of shameless plug).
At one industry conference a few years ago I even ended up getting a quick round of applause during the closing panel discussion when I said that audience members should stop talking about tools and start talking about business need.
A sign that I thought meant we were making some headway.
Another sign that we may be making headway was a recent conversation with a potential vendor for a client project I’m currently working on, where one of the first things the vendor pre-sales team asked my client for was a list of their top three business priorities for the project.
However anothetr conversation a few days later reminded me of a past project that I worked on that was still ticking over after nearly three years and not making any apparent progress. I recalled that the norm on that project was for conversations to quickly get into the weeds about the features, functionality, and development efforts needed around various alternative technology options.
When I asked the basic question of what was the project’s high-level business objective, no one could articulate it.
The whole conversation reminded me of an acronym developed by a major consulting group: P.O.S.T.
The P.O.S.T. approach was developed as part of a corporate social network strategy, but I believe it applies equally well to implementing any innovation or process improvement strategy:
P = People
O = Objectives
S = Strategy
T = Technology
Seems obvious doesn’t it.
Start with those who have a need, figure out what you need to do to fill that need, develop a strategy to do it, and then think about the tools you can use to do it.
You should be thinking along the lines of “We need to decrease the time it takes to get our information into the hands of our customers,” not “We need to install Wizgadget3.0.”
Just remember that if you put the T first, all you are left with is a P.O.S.
I’ll confess I love origin stories. They are among the storytelling tropes that first attracted me to comics, and over the years I’ve even written a few origin stories. Sure they can be overdone — do we really need to revisit Batman’s or Spider-man’s origin in every single movie incarnation? — but they can also be an effective way of defining who a character is; their motivation, moral compass, and mission.
The same is true of a brand. Knowing the story behind the brand can go a long way to establishing the brand’s culture. Thinking about this reminded me of a networking event I attended for small business owners and entrepreneurs.
In the space of two hours I must have heard about at least a dozen new businesses — what they did and what they were called. That’s a lot of information to take in in a short time. On the drive home I did a quick mental review to see if I could recall the salient points from each conversation. I managed to recall something about everyone, but what struck me was that the first two businesses that came to mind were the two that had stories attached, and one in particular that had a story attached to the brand name.
Brand names with a story behind them stick.
Several years ago I wrote a regular marketing newsletter that included the stories and histories behind some of the most well-known brand names. That section was always the most popular part of the newsletter. It gave me the idea of maybe writing a book on the subject, but then I found out that someone had already done it. Evan Morris’ fun book From Altoids to Zima is now one of the most thumbed books on my content marketing book shelf.
There is a story behind most company and brand names. I’ve worked for companies named after bags of chips, science fiction villains, a historical event, and even one that got its name from a typo.
Discover your origin story – tell your origin story. People will remember it, and they will remember you.
Back in the mists of the primordial internet when I built my first website, also known as the mid-nineties, I recall one of the best pieces of advice I was given was, ‘don’t post anything online you don’t want shared.’
The basic purpose of that very first website was in fact to share information and establish some credible provable subject matter expertise for a book idea I was shopping around. But in the twenty-eight years since, of multiple websites, blogs, and a dozen different social media platforms, that single piece of advice has remained my mantra.
I am pretty open about my online activities, and I’ve written and published a lot on the web, but I give very careful consideration before I post something I consider my intellectual property (IP).
Yet, I’m constantly amazed at the number of companies I talk to who, mainly unwittingly, are happy to throw the content that contains their IP into the digital world without thought of the consequences just to save a dollar or two.
Think about the content that is produced across your company. No matter which functional group produces it, or what its purpose is, your content contains everything a company is, knows, and does. The information contained in your content is the lifeblood of any organization, it will outlast most employees, and by default is one of, if not the, highest value assets a company has. Yet it is rarely thought of that way. So why do many organizations carelessly just give it away?
Over the last decade or so the rise of social media platforms spurned another truism that is worth remembering, “if the platform is free, then you are the product.” While the companies that run these platforms may not be really ‘selling’ us as individuals, they are definitely selling data about us collectively, and about trends in online behavior. They need the information we put on-line to be able to train their tools.
The same goes for most of the free on-line tools that consume and manipulate content. They need to build a corpus of content from which to analyze and learn.
Many of these tools can be very useful, let’s take on-line automated translation tools for instance. I use the one I have on my phone a lot when exchanging messages with my friends in France and Germany, when my schoolboy level proficiency fails me. On a trip to Japan a few years back I would never have been able to navigate my way around Tokyo without such an app. The accuracy of these sorts of tools comes down to the volume and history of the translation memory that sits behind them, and each time we use them we add more data, and more examples to that memory.
This is where the issues with IP start. I have had way too many conversations with senior-level executives who insist that because they used a well known free web-based translation tool on their latest European vacation, that they don’t need to pay for a professional translation service anymore. They fail to realize that by uploading their business content, which often includes company confidential or competitive information, that they are adding it to the general pool of content owned by the platform developer.
This doesn’t just apply to translation tools, it also applies to things like online grammar checkers, workflow tools, and other free productivity tools that store, move, manage, or manipulate your content.
The rapid rise in interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and Large Language Learning Models (LLM) has added another dimension, as the developers of AI driven solutions are ravenous for content on which to train their platforms.
Tools which we didn’t necessarily think of as content-centric are now wanting to crawl and scrape any scrap of content that they can get their hands on, and that means your content.
At the beginning of August 2023 the leading on-line virtual conferencing collaboration platform was at the center of a controversy when they issued new terms and conditions that gave them the right to: “A perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights required or necessary to redistribute, publish, import, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe, create derivative works, and process Customer Content and to perform all acts with respect to the Customer Content, including AI and ML training and testing.”
In short they could take whatever you said, presented, shared, or posted through their platform and do whatever they liked with it, including any of your proprietary content. Such was the outcry once this was made public that within a few days the company concerned had retracted and issued a new Terms & Conditions document that stated: “ (Company) does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments or other communications-like Customer Content (such as poll results, whiteboard and reactions) to train (platform name) or third-party artificial intelligence models.”
While this was the right result, it begs the question why the company concerned felt it had the right to use its customers’ content this way to start with, and how many other companies are rushing to do the same? I’ve seen similar discussions happening around the use of photography and art work by a well-known supplier of creative studio software.
So how do we avoid exposing our intellectual property to potential misuse or oversharing? To quote another maxim, one I first heard from the Content Marketing Institute, ‘don’t build your content home on rented land,’ i.e. be wary of developing content on platforms you don’t control. I’d add to that also be wary of sharing your content on platforms you don’t control, especially your high value content.
Think about what your content contains, and what it means to you. Look at any free platform you use and ask yourself, why is it free? What am I supplying that is valuable to the company that owns it? Read the terms and conditions, and then consider, is that a place where you want to share the things that make your organization special?
Welcome to Intelligent Content for an Intelligent World – so ran the tag line for this year’s Adobe DITAWorld which bills itself as the world’s biggest DITA Online Conference for Marketing and Technical Communication Professionals.
I’ll be honest I’m not a big fan of online conferences as I tend to find my focus drifting away by the distractions of being in my home office. I much prefer being at in-person events. When I’m in a session listening to a speaker I can remain focused on them and what they are saying. Outside of the sessions I can network with other attendees or vendors, or just enjoy a little people watching.
So when I do sign up for a virtual event the pressure is on for the organizers and speakers to put together a program that will keep my attention over a span of several days. Not an easy task, but I’m glad to say that this year’s DITAWorld did just that.
It was an engaging three days with topics running from the current rise of generative AI, to deep dives in to DITA coding and verification, by way of practical use cases in structured content, knowledge management, and translation. And the sidebar chat and Q&A channels were equally engaging. – It was almost like being at an in-person event.
Here’s a quick rundown of the sessions that I enjoyed and found educational and thought provoking.
Day 1
Is AI the meteor? Are we the dinosaurs? An early assessment of AI in Content Operations – Sarah O’Keefe, CEO at Scriptorium, USA
All Knowledge in Balance: EY’s Knowledge Evolution – How EY uses DITA to Drive the Evolution of Global Assurance Knowledge – Brian R. Scordinsky, Technology Director at Ernst & Young, USA – Shannon Waida, Associate Director at Ernst & Young, USA
The Best of Both Worlds – Why Mayo Clinic chose Adobe Experience Manager Guides – Sebastian Fuhrer, Director of Content Engineering & Operations at Mayo Clinic, USA – Bernard Aschwanden, EVP, Business Development at Precision Content, Canada
Content Symphony – Orchestrating Excellence – Elevating Enterprise Communication in the AI Age – Chad Dybdahl, Senior Solution Consultant at Acrolinx
From Structure to Process – Why Structured Content is more than you think! – Markus Wiedenmaier, CEO at c-rex.net, Germany
Day 2
Structured Content Horizons: Mapping the Future – Harnessing DITA, Adobe Experience Manager Guides, and AI for future experiences – Rob Hanna, President & Co-Founder at Precision Content, Canada
Using the Power of DITA – Creating content for multichannel delivery – Hanna Heinonen, Digital Content Lead at KONE, Finland – Kristian Forsman, Solution Owner Content Management at KONE, Finland
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel – Implementing Structured Authoring – Amanda Patterson, Technical Communications Manager at Hunter Douglas, USA
Intelligent Content for the Manufacturing Industry – How to digitalize content in a traditional industry – Ulrike Parson, CEO at parson AG, Germany
Day 3
Pioneering Journeys: Tracing Content Evolution – Customer Engagement Transformation –Julian Murfitt, CEO of Mekon, UK
Engineering Global Connections – Multilingual Mastery – Ronald Egle, Content Systems Administrator at Ariel Corporation, USA
Stick to Your DITA Standards – Using Schematron to add custom DITA validation – Marco Cacciacarro,, Enterprise Documentation Manager at BlackBerry, USA
Recordings of the session are available on YouTube in theAdobe DITAWORLD 2023 Playlist.
And I must give a shout out to Stefan Gentz, Senior Worldwide Evangelist for Technical Communication at Adobe Matt Sullivan, CEO at Tech Comm Tools for organizing the event and being excellent co-hosts across the three days.
“Ice-T? Why would they have Ice-T at a conference dedicated to customer experience?” Well by the conclusion of my two days at the CMSWire CONNECT conference in Austin last week I had my answer.
But more on Ice-T later.
First off a nod of thanks to my CMSWire editors Dom Nicastro and Siobhan Fagan for arranging for me to attend the conference as a CMSWire contributor. It was great to spend time in person with people I’ve been writing for over the last six years. It was also an excellent opportunity to meet other members of the CMSWire team too.
Early encounter with AI personas
My two days started off with attending a very thought-provoking Breakfast Briefing from Erin Reilly of the University of Texas on The Rise of Virtual Beings and how they are transforming the customer experience. I must admit I hadn’t given much thought to the use of three-dimensional avatars beyond gaming applications, but her examples of AI-driven personas certainly gave me pause to think about how the digital landscape is continuing to evolve.
Metrics of CX – data and experience
In his discussion on The Customer of the Future, the University of Texas’s Art Markman discussed the application of cognitive psychology to customer behavior and how we measure it. One point that really caught my attention was the observation that
“If we spend time just looking at data we start to think that every interaction is a digital experience. We need to look beyond that and embrace the real-life experiences and engagements.”
This really resonated as I’ve had several conversations recently about the relative importance of quantitative and qualitative metrics when it comes to determining the quality of content-driven interactions. This drove home that both are equally important. As one later speaker put it, and I’m afraid I missed taking a note of who it was, it’s no good knowing the ‘What’ if we don’t know the ‘Why.’
Katrina Taylor of LuLu Lemon also summed it up nicely in her excellent presentation on Human-Centered Design for Omni-Channel Delivery when she stated:
“You can go through all the data in the world, but you will learn way more in a 30-minute conversation with those on the front line who interface with customers.”
Intelligent content drives personalization
I must admit my heart gave a little jump to hear Matthew Shaeffer from REI talk about the need for intelligent content in his talk on Modernizing the CX Stack. His observation that Intelligent CX needs to be a series of uniquely assembled interactions driven by content that is structurally rich, and semantically categorized was great to hear. Engineering content in such a way is key to delivering the granular levels of personalized interactions most companies are looking to achieve, and it was great to hear of a major retailer adopting this approach.
Tarunam Verma from Lowes made a smart observation during his presentation on Hyper-Personalization that what we think of as personalization isn’t just about applying technology, in reality, it’s a mix of culture, mindset, and the technology.
Is AI really Augmented Intelligence rather than Artificial Intelligence?
The second day of the conference had a strong theme around the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) with some excellent observations and talking points discussed throughout the day. Here’s a snapshot of some of the ones that caught my attention:
“Use AI in support of creativity not instead of creativity” – Karna Crawford (ex-Ford)
“AI is most useful currently as a back-office application that detects operational inefficiencies.” / “There are two waves of AI: (1) recommendation engines – which are established, and (2) generative – which we are still trying to figure out.” / “Don’t implement AI just for the sake of it, know what problem you are trying to solve. / AI requires us to rethink how we do things.” – Daniel Wu (J.P. Morgan)
“Think of AI as ‘Augmented Intelligence” that helps us do our tasks better, not ‘Artificial Intelligence’ that will replace us.” – Raj Krishan (Microsoft).
One of the best questions of the day came from CMSWire facilitator Kate Cox who posed her panelists a pretty philosophical question:
“If I use AI to craft an email and you use AI to read it, are we actually communicating?”
Ice-T on Walls and Boats
Which brings us back to Ice-T as the conference closing keynote. I wasna sure what a former gangster, turned rapper, turned actor would have to say that would be relevant to an audience full of technologists. In fact, I was in two minds about staying, thinking I’d leave a bit early to get ahead of the Austin downtown Friday traffic exodus; but I’m glad I did as he delivered one of the best conference keynotes I’ve seen.
It was entertaining, full of amazing stories, and above all an inspirational discussion on handling change. Here are just a few of his observations that I jotted down:
“There are walls – things that you can’t change – and obstacles that look like walls. Get over the obstacles by talking to people that have already got over them. But then make sure to put in the work that they put in.”
“Don’t ever get annoyed at the lack of results from the work you didn’t do.”
“Anything you do you bring your perspective to it. That’s your value. Make it your own thing.”
“Don’t complain, just figure stuff out.”
“Take opportunity when it turns up. A lot of times the opportunity is right in front of you. Just get in that boat, at least for long enough to say ‘I don’t like it.’ If you don’t you’ll never know.”
And if the CONNECT conference was one thing, it was a great opportunity to learn from, meet, and network with a whole raft of new people. Thanks to all I chatted with be it after presentations, at vendor booths, or over coffee or meal breaks.
“You have answers when others only have questions.”
“Thoroughly devoted to customer service, patiently working with us on the most minute details until our final product met our excessively high expectations.”
“Gave us an important view on the opportunities available with our content.“
“Knowledge of the content business was encyclopedic and his judgment of the potential of emerging technologies was unerring. One of the pathfinders in digital publishing,”
The Content Pool 