FEATURE: Cherryleaf – How We
Work with Technical Communicators

by Ellis Pratt, Sales & Marketing Director, Cherryleaf

We were asked by Jackie Damrau to write an article on how Cherryleaf works with technical communicators and describe some of the trends we’ve covered in our monthly newsletter. That isn’t as easy a question as you would imagine. Let me explain.

Winning by sharing

Cherryleaf is a technical writing company based in the United Kingdom. We offer a number of different services: an in-house writing team that creates user documentation for clients; a training division that trains technical writers; and a recruitment division that places permanent and contract technical writers. So, fellow technical communicators can be customers, competitors, suppliers, partners and recommenders of our services. Indeed, they can be more than one of these at the same time!

One of the dilemmas for us was, how should we manage all these relationships? The reality is that many companies adopt an adversarial posture towards their employees, customers, partners and suppliers. Our answer to the dilemma was influenced by the philosophy of networking expert Leon Benjamin, something he calls “winning by sharing”.

Benjamin stated that “recent European research had unequivocally found that the most sustainable, non-destructive means of creating value was by sharing competencies, relationships, and intellectual capital across traditional company boundaries. In other words, the most economically productive approach to commerce was by cooperating in a more profound way than has previously been practised in business.”

Sharing information

We decided that we would be open and share some of our knowledge and expertise with pretty much everyone. We hoped:

• We could keep in touch with our contacts without being pushy.
• We could be of use to technical communicators throughout the different stages of their career.
• We could demonstrate our knowledge and expertise.
• We could become a trusted brand.

It’s a way of doing business that, we hope, creates an atmosphere of trust, transparency, integrity and responsibility.

We began by writing articles on our Web site about issues that we thought were important and interesting, such as: What’s the value of technical documentation? How many technical writers should an organization recruit? We then started a monthly emailed newsletter, followed later by a company blog and, even later still, by a Twitter account.

Our newsletter

The most successful of these has probably been the Cherryleaf newsletter. Our subscribers want to keep current with the new technologies and standards relevant to their careers. They also like the content that takes a step back and looks at the role of technical documentation in a wider context. We’ve addressed questions such as:

• What’s the benefit of user documentation?
• What can technical communicators learn from advertising copywriters?
• What is it that makes a great technical writer?

Since Cherryleaf started its free monthly electronic newsletter six years ago on technical communication and user assistance, we’ve seen a number of trends emerge. (To subscribe to our newsletter, simply send an email to info@cherryleaf.com with SUBSCRIBE NEWSLETTER as the subject heading.)

Jackie asked us to highlight some of the more recent ones we’ve seen, and this is what I have outlined in the remainder of this article.

Web 2.0 technologies

One of the key trends we’ve discussed is the development of Web 2.0 technologies and whether these could and should be used in technical communication. One way is to understand Web 2.0 is to see it as those Web sites and Web services that enable conversation, collaboration or aggregation of knowledge.

There is an increasing number of users whose natural instinct is to search the Web for answers to their questions. However, a straw poll by Cherryleaf found that only 16% of technical documentation was in a form that was discoverable by search engines. This means much of the output technical writers create is invisible to Google and, therefore, to those who prefer to get assistance through that channel.

Web 2.0 technologies are of interest to technical communicators because they:

• Offer the ability to provide better forms of user assistance
• Enable the technical writer to better understand the needs of the users and their “world views”.

The read/write manual and the right to remix

Recently, Web 2.0 has been seen by Professor Lawrence Lessig and others as part of a much bigger movement. Lessig promotes the idea of “the right/write web” and “the right to remix”. In a technical communication context, this means users could create content as well as comment and consume content. This creates challenges of its own, such as the risk of having incorrect information, and identifying what is official and what is unofficial information.

We’re already seeing this trend manifesting itself in technical documentation. The FLOSS manual project (http://en.flossmanuals.net), which provides user assistance for a number of open source applications, enables users to remix the manuals to create their own customised version by a drag-and-drop system on its Web site. Microsoft’s “Community Clips” Web site (http://communityclips.officelabs.com/) contains a collection of user created animation guides to using Microsoft software. Indeed, a number of authoring tools (such as Author-it Live! and XMetaL XMAX), together with wikis, offer a browser-based authoring environment.

Single sourcing

We have also seen the trend towards single sourcing of content. This has been in part due to a desire to move from a craft-based approach to creating documentation and towards a more systematic and, by implication, efficient approach.

DITA XML and component-based authoring have been the most discussed developments. However, Web 2.0 is multi-sourcing in nature, so it’s unclear whether the Web 2.0 and single sourcing approaches will compete, coexist or complement each other.

Conclusion

We think this open approach to sharing information has worked. We still get consultancy project work, partly because we can never tell you everything you need to know, and each scenario is different—it would be impossible to cover all bases.

Don’t let anyone ever tell you technical communication is staid and boring! We decided to offer a newsletter as a way of sharing and demonstrating our knowledge, and as an incentive for people to start a conversation with us. What we’ve found is there’s always more than enough interesting information to fill each newsletter. What’s more, we seem to be in a time of significant change regarding what user assistance is provided, who provides it and how it is provided.

Ellis is Sales and Marketing director for Cherryleaf, a technical writing training, consultancy and recruitment company, based in the United Kingdom. To subscribe to our newsletter, simply send an email to info@cherryleaf.com with SUBSCRIBE NEWSLETTER as the subject heading.