The LugIron Software Blog

I just finished the book, Julie/Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. The author calls her readers “bleaders” – apparently it stands for blog readers. When I first read “bleaders” I guessed that means they bleat like sheep, and chuckled every time I read it. Who are the people behind the “bleaders”  – [...]

Technorati Tags: community, Facebook, funnel, management, platform, Twitter

Ideas. Inspiration. Innovation. Ignition. What is the spark that ignites a new idea? Inspiration for ideas can come from any where, any one, and serve customers, neighbors, businesses, or employees. Some companies are finding ways to ignite ideas using web-based applications that give the “crowd” a chance to crowdsource so that their ideas are heard. [...]

Technorati Tags: gift cards, ideas, innovation, inspiration, spark, Starbucks

Here’s a group of links I found useful this week while reading about social support communities, and community growth and management. Some are new, some are old, all are borrowed. Enjoy. Creating Customer Communities « Dachis Group Collaboratory | Social Business Design Our key recommendation, … was to move away from customer community building being a specialist [...]

Technorati Tags: community, community management, Customer Support

As “Avatar” director James Cameron said to The Sun recently, “My reputation probably was deserved at one point” for being an intense person to work with, apparently. But what about building a reputation for being helpful, or a reputation for being knowledgeable? Reputations are built every day using the social tools on the web such [...]

Technorati Tags: customer service, Customer Support, movie, persona, reputation, service, social, social support communities, ssc, support

Last week I attended the Web Content 2009 conference in Chicago. I found the conference informative and entertaining. I was glad to see useful content about an emerging and troubling issue: the identity crisis of the technical communicator. However, I was surprised to see the topic show up in a marketing discussion. On the second [...]

Technorati Tags: CommunityBuilding, CustomerSupport, Documentation, TechnicalWriter, TechnicalWriting

I’ve previously discussed the evolution of technical writing and documentation on this blog, in fact that’s one of the primary topics I tend to orbit around. Regular readers will by now understand my fundamental belief that technical writers are an important and underutilized asset to most businesses; however, I also believe that technical writers have [...]

Technorati Tags: CommunityBuilding, Documentation, TechnicalWriter, TechnicalWriting, UserEngagement

There’s a lot of talk about how social media is going to change the way companies interact with and support their customers and there is evidence that by making this change companies can realize significant value from the community they build. I’ve been wondering about the ROI of such investments and came across a presentation [...]

Technorati Tags: CustomerEngagement, CustomerSupport, SocialCustomers, SocialMedia, UserEngagement

Companies are starting to realize that it’s in their best interests to try to engage with their users and let them provide feedback across various touch points. One such example is in their documentation. Being able to leave comments and feedback on documentation is an effective way to engage with your end users, but if [...]

Technorati Tags: DocumentationSucks, OnlineDocumentation, OnlineHelp, TechnicalWriter, TechnicalWriting

I came across this very interesting post by Paula Stern over on the WritePoint Staff Blog. Paul very clearly identifies the growing challenge for technical writers that I discussed in my previous post, Growing Happy Users–One Customer at a Time. The traditional “product manual” is going the way of the dinosaur because users are being [...]

Technorati Tags: CommunityBuilding, InformationDeveloper, InteractiveDocumentation, TechnicalWriter, TechnicalWriting, UserEngagement

In a previous post I mentioned that an engaged user, a customer who engages with a company providing them input, feedback, and insight, is more valuable than a passive user. This post by Larry Hawes over at the Gilbane Group Blog is interesting because it discusses a recent study by IBM of data from 400,000 [...]

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, CommunityBuilding, CustomerEngagement, SocialCustomers, SocialNetworks, TechnicalWriter, TechnicalWriting