I am thrilled to be a part of this special issue of Intercom celebrating the business value of content. Content is crucial to business—and business is finally warming up to this idea. The recent boom in content marketing and content strategy and end-to-end customer experience, the focus on metrics and analytics, and discussions of the vision of content in the age of artificial intelligence, bots, and the unknown industry trends of the future all bode well for content’s heyday.
The big question, in my mind, for technical communicators is this: Are you ready to seize this opportunity? Are you ready to stretch, reposition yourself, take on new challenges and responsibilities, remain teachable and flexible, and embrace the ambiguity enough to drive the future of content in business?
I am currently reading Killing Marketing by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose. In it, these veteran content marketing thought leaders take apart their own field, dissect its history, and examine the relevance of its existing approaches. They look at where marketing is going, the new trend in brand-owned media, and they see marketing organizations that are paying for themselves—sometimes several times over.
I see technical communication once again on the cusp of a massive change. Those who can create opportunity from challenges, be clearly relevant to their customers, rapidly experiment and course correct, and drive change will be most successful. As the articles in this special issue show, there are many ways to drive the thinking needed to keep technical content valuable in the business equation and to demonstrate the necessity of highly skilled technical communicators in designing and creating these valuable business assets.
In “Aim and THEN Fire: The Business Value of Content Strategy,” Melissa Breker presents an argument for the value of content strategy. An end-to-end content strategy is the foundation on which your entire house of content should be built—from marketing awareness content all the way through to technical, issue-resolution content and everything in between. Melissa describes how important it is to build your foundation first!
Once you have a strategy, and before you start implementing it, you need to have a system in place for measuring your success. Colleen Jones lays out a framework for content metrics that will give you a starting point for creating your own end-to-end content metrics plan as part of your content strategy in “Uncover the Value of Content to Modern Business with a Fresh Approach to Metrics.”
Next, exploring the value of technical content in the context of the end-to-end customer experience, I present some suggestions in “Content Marketing: The Straightest Line between Content and Customer” for how we can show up in a valuable way to our marketing teams—and maybe even get some acknowledgment for directly driving revenue!
In “Client Service: The Essence of the Technical Communication Business,” Saul Carliner makes a compelling case for technical communicators in services and support. He provides so much actionable information that it is a blueprint for making your mark in this era of high-value client care.
Demonstrating how some of these concepts work in practice, Jenifer Schlotfeldt presents “IBM Bluemix Case Study: Driving Customer Acquisition and Retention with Technical Product Content.” Working with other product-development functions, her content team was able to add measurable value to a part of the content experience typically owned by marketing.
Finally, Joe Gollner and Jack Molisani give us a wonderful peek into the future in “The Human Face of Content 4.0.” In this age of thinking machines, what is in store for us as technical communicators? Between Joe’s research and Jack’s reach across our industry, they provide a vision of what’s to come.
I encourage you to dive into this issue, read and contemplate the implications, and reach out to the authors for more conversation. I look forward to seeing you in our wildly successful future, where technical content is prized highly and we, the amazing humans who create that content, are sought after for the skills, drive, and thought leadership that we bring to the table—the skills that enable our companies and clients to craft stories and experiences for their customers that bring them wild success! Enjoy!
—Andrea L. Ames
