A World with Fewer Walls, by Noz Urbina
Overt selling has given way to problem solving. Sweeping statements have given way to conversation-like messages -Robert Rose
Silos are a general metaphor for “separation”
- A lack of understanding
- A lack of communication
- A lack of usability
Generalizing communication
- A source hands a medium to an audience
- A source within an organization hands a medium to another source within the organization
- Every organization section is a silo into itself
- Organizations spoke but couldn’t hear
- Now we’re in the net – a different medium, where the sources and audiences are all connected
What are the different ways we separate our social media communications?
- Professional vs. Personal begins to merge
- Philosophical shift
- Clients are looking for solutions, not sales
Everything is marketing
- Tech docs are marketing materials
- Call centers are responding to problems
Everything is user assistance
- “Should I buy now?”
- “Should I buy your thing?”
- They need to be assisted along the way
- A technical communicator is necessary and relevant across all marketing and all UX
We have so many formats and channels
- Writing for specific channels is no longer a viable option
- We need to merge channels
- Web (Marcomm)
- Customer lifecycle, focusing pre-sale
- Strong branded voice
- Direct revenue driver
- Grew up on websites
- Little motivation to reuse anything – just linked everywhere
- But that’s not how the web works – pages work as portals now
- Techcom
- Focused post-sale
- Didn’t have to “sell” to get engagement
- The voice was very neutral
- Focused offline, via PDFs and manuals – static content with little
- Little access to behavioral data – just handed over assets and left
- Very good at reuse (handed over lots of large documents)
The CMS
- In techcom, this is the thing that serves
- In marcomm, this is the thing you use to create, manage, and serve content. It’s all encompassing.
- In tech, an author does everything
- In marketing, an author just works with words
- Tech and marketing have all of these words that mean different things to each of them
How do you keep up with accelerating change?
- You can’t.
- We need to stop trying to keep up, and start trying to prefict
- We need to aim for where we want to be tomorrow, not where we want to be today
- We need future-proof, future-ready content
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