upholstery lankiness: STC13: Alyson Riley about effective IA

Friday, May 10, 2013

STC13: Alyson Riley about effective IA | Kai's Tech Writing Blog

Posted on 9 May 2013 by Kai

In her session ?Building Effective IA Teams in Resource-Challenged Times?, Alyson Riley from IBM offered her take on the recent theme that tech comm needs to ?speak business? to prove its worth. (This is part of my coverage of the STC Summit 2013 in Atlanta.)

Alyson argued that ?nice to have? initiatives are no longer compelling enough to get tech comm a budget or a mandate. To play a mission-critical role in a corporation, tech comm must plug into the corporate strategy. However, that strategy and its stakeholders usually isn?t waiting for us to put in our two cents. So we tech comm?ers must:

Focus on corporate strategy as opposed to tactics.
Play to the motivations behind the strategy, so we can come up with ways to support it with our unique skills and contributions.

The following moves can help with that second step:

Address the ?buyer evaluates? and ?buy? stages of the product. Usually, we speak to the ?customer uses? stage of our product where there?s often more cost than income. The challenge is to make it compelling for buyers and sales to also use our content to their benefit in the more profitable stages. A good start is to ask sales: ?What is the hardest part of your job?? and see if we can help them with the information we provide.
Influence social content to help leads along the marketing funnel from awareness to loyalty and advocacy. That doesn?t mean to ?sell out? completely to marketing. It?s often as easy and sensible as including customer benefits in our content. Simply add the ?why? to the ?how? and give clients a chance to understand and promote your product.

Both moves boil down to the same principle: Don?t educate stakeholders in sales, marketing, product management, etc. about the product. Instead, imagine what the success of these respective stakeholders looks like and address that:

Analyze opportunities your product can address in the terms of sales and marketing.
Craft an effective story that centers on your content and how it can drive revenue, sales, customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Prove it with metrics that speak to the stakeholders.

When it comes to metrics, page views of documentation usually don?t impress managers much. Instead, Alyson suggested ?time-to-value? (TTV) which measures the customer?s time from buying or paying for the product to the moment they reap value from it. This is similar to ?return-on-investment?, but TTV can be clearer to measure when investment consists of one-time payments plus maintenance fees. Also, it?s easier for tech comm to favorably influence TTV?