The LugIron Software Blog

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

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

Technical writing is a profession in transition. The way companies think of, use, and manage the people who help users make sense of and use products is absolutely changing. A lot of companies have started to use the term “information developer” to describe their technical writing positions. I don’t really care what label the profession [...]

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