Think back to grade school. Think back to math tests. Remember what the teacher said at the start of every exam? "Check your work." The teacher knew that although you may know the heck out of long division or fractions, it's still easy to make really dumb mistakes - and the dumber the mistake, the easier it is to make. Worse, the smarter students are more confident of their ability to do error-free work, so they're less likely to catch their own really dumb mistakes. Sad but true: In my fifth-grade class, the class brain misspelled his own name on an exam. The teacher docked him three points for it, so he scored 97%.
We don't magically get over this when we finish school. What was true in grade school is still true, and it's more complex in the workplace because we aren't just answerable to ourselves; we rely on other people to do their work accurately, too.
You should be able to trust your teammates, but we all make mistakes. You won't make any friends by compulsively checking everyone else's work - and you'll run out of time to do your own work if you try - but if your organization doesn't already have a formal mechanism in place, you can set an example by asking your teammates to check your own work. "Do you mind checking this section for accuracy? If you like, I'll check whatever you have ready while you're looking at my material."
A couple things seem to cause a lot of trouble in technical writing and marketing collateral: company URLs and email addresses. I have seen far too many tech-savvy businesses (including IT service providers and multinational telecoms companies) publish contact email addresses that did not exist on their mail servers. They instructed their customers to contact them via email addresses that returned error messages. How smart would that make your company look? Although the warranty card may have always included the email address support@yourcompany.com and the URL www.yourcompany.com/support, that doesn't necessarily mean they work.
Take a few seconds to see what happens when you follow that link. Take a few seconds to send a test message to that email address, with an explanation and request for reply. Check your work.
Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts
Friday, January 8, 2010
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Packaged on: 05APR09 Sell by: 04APR10
I just looked at the date on my last post - it's very stale material by now. I'm sorry. There were reasons for the silence; chief among them being that sometimes it's the better part of valor to sit down and shut up. (Natural disaster, badly damaged car, much to-ing and fro-ing with insurance company and body shop, if you must know.)
But I'm back now.
Recently I saw some product documentation that clearly needed work. Certainly it needed the deft touch of a good technical writer; but what struck me first and hardest was that it needed to look like a product of this millennium. It seems the company had designed their documentation and the process for creating it some time in the mid-1990s, and had been using early documents as templates for later ones ever since. Meanwhile the world kept on advancing; and with it, documentation conventions, tools, and best practices.
With few exceptions, we need to step back and look at our organizations' product documentation about every three years, or every time our colleagues the marketing specialists update the appearance of the company web site and marketing materials. During these periodic reassessments, we need to ask ourselves, "Does this material reinforce our organization's main message? Does its appearance reinforce and expand upon the first impressions that our marketing material and web site create? Does this look like it comes from the same company?" We also need to consider whether we still deliver our material in the way customers expect to see it. Are we still writing software manuals instead of providing help? Are we still using section numbering when all our competitors have stopped doing so?
Marshall McLuhan said "The medium is the message", and that's far truer now than it was when he said it. The words and pictures are not the sum of your product documentation. The words, pictures, look and feel, and delivery method all work together to produce a powerful message about the product and the company. It behooves us to ensure that the message never becomes "We have been doing it this way for the last fifteen years and we're not about to change."
But I'm back now.
Recently I saw some product documentation that clearly needed work. Certainly it needed the deft touch of a good technical writer; but what struck me first and hardest was that it needed to look like a product of this millennium. It seems the company had designed their documentation and the process for creating it some time in the mid-1990s, and had been using early documents as templates for later ones ever since. Meanwhile the world kept on advancing; and with it, documentation conventions, tools, and best practices.
With few exceptions, we need to step back and look at our organizations' product documentation about every three years, or every time our colleagues the marketing specialists update the appearance of the company web site and marketing materials. During these periodic reassessments, we need to ask ourselves, "Does this material reinforce our organization's main message? Does its appearance reinforce and expand upon the first impressions that our marketing material and web site create? Does this look like it comes from the same company?" We also need to consider whether we still deliver our material in the way customers expect to see it. Are we still writing software manuals instead of providing help? Are we still using section numbering when all our competitors have stopped doing so?
Marshall McLuhan said "The medium is the message", and that's far truer now than it was when he said it. The words and pictures are not the sum of your product documentation. The words, pictures, look and feel, and delivery method all work together to produce a powerful message about the product and the company. It behooves us to ensure that the message never becomes "We have been doing it this way for the last fifteen years and we're not about to change."
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