Robert Desprez Communications

MOBILE PODCASTING FOR EMPLOYEES

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Microsoft employ­ees can use an “inter­nal YouTube” plat­form to cre­ate pod­casts, lis­ten to oth­er pod­casts that are cre­at­ed by fel­low employ­ees, and even rate and com­ment on the dig­i­tal files using Web 2.0 technology.

Three years ago, Microsoft launched Acad­e­my Mobile, which is now host­ing thou­sands of employ­ee-gen­er­at­ed pod­casts. The idea behind the plat­form is that any one of Microsoft’s 90,000 employ­ees can share exper­tise with each oth­er. Pao­lo Tosoli­ni, a social video con­sul­tant who launched the ini­tia­tive for Microsoft, was one of the speak­ers at the recent Writ­er­sUA conference.

Here are some of the highlights:

Employ­ees gen­er­ate the con­tent. Any Microsoft employ­ee can share exper­tise on a giv­en sub­ject and upload it to the secure plat­form. Employ­ees have cre­at­ed 19,000 pod­casts to date, there are 800 new uploads each month, and 90,000 down­loads on a month­ly basis.

Pod­cast­ing tools are sup­plied. Microsoft pro­vides each employ­ee with all the audio and video tools need­ed for free as long as the employ­ee agrees to cre­ate three pod­casts per month.

Rewards pro­gram. Each employ­ee earns “points” for each pod­cast pub­lished and addi­tion­al points when anoth­er employ­ee views it. Points can be used to redeem gifts.

Plat­form takes advan­tage of Web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies. Acad­e­my Mobile is built on Microsoft Share­Point but the user inter­face looks dis­tinct from Microsoft’s oth­er cor­po­rate sites. Pao­lo referred to the site as an “inter­nal YouTube” site. Employ­ees can take advan­tage of Real­ly Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion (RSS), com­ments, and peer rat­ing of each podcast.

Employ­ees can down­load the pod­casts to a vari­ety of devices. Being Microsoft, you might expect that employ­ees would only be able to down­load con­tent to devices like Microsoft’s own Zune MP3 play­er. But Pao­lo not­ed that Acad­e­my Mobile con­vinced man­age­ment that pod­casts should be com­pat­i­ble with all sorts of devices—including iPhones—so that employ­ees can eas­i­ly lis­ten to the content.

Microsoft’s Acad­e­my Mobile appears to be one inno­v­a­tive way that orga­ni­za­tions can har­ness the exper­tise of their peo­ple. If I was dri­ving to work, I’d def­i­nite­ly con­sid­er lis­ten­ing to a pod­cast and tak­ing advan­tage of Acad­e­my Mobile.

WHY WEB 2.0 IS RELEVANT FOR TECHNICAL WRITERS

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In Decem­ber, I start­ed a dis­cus­sion in a few LinkedIn groups titled, “Most tech­ni­cal writ­ers are not embrac­ing Web 2.0.”

It stirred up a lot of feed­back. Most peo­ple seemed to agree, not­ing that they haven’t had time to research Web 2.0 when wrestling with chal­leng­ing projects, such as set­ting up doc­u­men­ta­tion in XML and DITA.

Some mem­bers, how­ev­er, respond­ed by say­ing that Web 2.0 is just a “mar­ket­ing con­cept,” imply­ing that it has lit­tle val­ue for tech­ni­cal writers.

I strong­ly disagree.

Here’s why I think Web 2.0 is rel­e­vant for us:

  1. Social media is not just a fad and it’s not going away. Quite the opposite—more and peo­ple appear to be using it. Here’s one star­tling fact about Face­book: it has more than 500 mil­lion users and peo­ple spend “700 bil­lion min­utes per month” on the site. In case you’re count­ing, Face­book users out­num­ber the com­bined pop­u­la­tion of Cana­da and the U.S. (Check out Facebook’s sta­tis­tics page.)
  2. We’re no longer the gate­keep­ers of con­tent. In decades past, tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tors wrote the tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion for a prod­uct and it was the offi­cial con­tent for a com­pa­ny. These days, we no longer have a monop­oly on sup­port con­tent. Online dis­cus­sions may abound about your prod­uct, and most of it is indexed by Google and is read­i­ly acces­si­ble. It’s not uncom­mon to find that this “unof­fi­cial” sup­port con­tent (i.e. forums) is often dis­played before our offi­cial con­tent in search results. This pos­es a chal­lenge to writers—how do we ensure that our con­tent is eas­i­ly found by all users?
  3. Peo­ple are already shar­ing their thoughts on your prod­ucts. With Web 2.0, online com­mu­ni­ties and dis­cus­sions are some­thing we all take for grant­ed. Online com­mu­ni­ties are rat­ing books on Ama­zon. Vaca­tion­ers are rat­ing hotels on Tri­pAd­vi­sor. And they may be rat­ing your prod­uct and your doc­u­men­ta­tion. In short, dis­cern­ing online users have nev­er had so much con­trol over their pur­chas­ing deci­sions. For writ­ers, we should mon­i­tor if users are writ­ing feed­back on our prod­ucts using tech­nolo­gies like Google Alerts.
  4. Writ­ers are already using Web 2.0. Anne Gentle’s book Con­ver­sa­tion and Com­mu­ni­ty doc­u­ments a few exam­ples in which com­pa­nies are using tech­nol­o­gy like wikis for tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion. The Adobe Labs wiki, for exam­ple, tar­gets devel­op­ers using Adobe tech­nol­o­gy and is appar­ent­ly one of the top wikis for daily-use.

I believe that Web 2.0 is one of the trends that will for­ev­er change how we do our jobs. Ignor­ing it or sug­gest­ing it’s just for mar­ket­ing folks is seri­ous­ly under­es­ti­mat­ing its importance.

WEB 2.0 and TECHNICAL COMMUNICATORS

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Web 2.0 has rev­o­lu­tion­ized the way soci­ety uses the Inter­net. Whether it’s Wikipedia, YouTube, Twit­ter, or LinkedIn, we’ve moved from pas­sive read­ers to active contributors.

Giv­en this fun­da­men­tal change, why is it that most tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tors are oper­at­ing as if Web 2.0 nev­er occurred? Based on what I’ve seen, most writ­ers haven’t embraced the col­lab­o­ra­tive mod­el that is com­mon­place with Web 2.0. Why? Here are a few guesses:

  • Some of the web sites are rel­a­tive­ly new. Twit­ter, for instance, has real­ly only tak­en off in the last 18 months. Most writ­ers haven’t fig­ured out whether to use sites like this and how to use them in their jobs.
  • Our tools haven’t ful­ly embraced Web 2.0. The tools that tech­ni­cal writ­ers use don’t ful­ly take advan­tage of Web 2.0. RoboHelp’s new­er Help for­mat, AIR Help, does per­mit users to com­ment on a giv­en top­ic but it doesn’t allow writ­ers to mod­er­ate those com­ments. To me, this is “Web 2.0 lite.”
  • Slow accep­tance of social media by tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion depart­ments. Mar­ket­ing peo­ple have ful­ly embraced sites like Face­book, LinkedIn, and Twit­ter. But from what I’ve seen, tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion depart­ments appear to be tak­ing a “wait and see” approach when it comes to lever­ag­ing these technologies.

Of course, there are orga­ni­za­tions that have tak­en full advan­tage of social media—more on this lat­er. But I believe these orga­ni­za­tions are the excep­tion rather than the norm.

Too bad. I believe that incor­po­rat­ing Web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies into tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion could make our con­tent bet­ter, fos­ter more dia­log with our cus­tomers, and change—and improve—our careers.

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About Me

Robert Desprez I have worked as a Vancouver technical writer for more than 20 years, working at Kodak, Boeing, Teck Resources, and FortisBC. In addition, I have worked as a writing instructor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Contact Me

Robert Desprez Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc.
North Van­cou­ver, British Columbia
Canada
Phone: 604–836-4290