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Providing Marketing Content

Marketing provides the product content that customers read first. This content introduces customers to features, to actions, and to parts of the user interface. Customers will then expect to find those things in the documentation, using the terminology they read in the marketing materials to search the contents or to check the index.

For example, if the Web site says "Publish your documents using the Simple Deploy wizard from My Servers," users will look for documentation about publishing, about the Simple Deploy wizard, and about the My Servers section of the UI. Does the documentation use those same terms? If any names were changed by the product team or by marketing, were the new names communicated to everyone in time to use them consistently? Even though the marketing team and the writing team generally move in different circles, each needs to pay attention to what the other team is doing.

To get a perspective on marketing as content providers, I talked with Mike Hernandez, the product manager for Visual Studio Tools for Office.

This podcast is 7 MB in size, and is 9 minutes, 11 seconds long.

Download this podcast

Published Monday, July 31, 2006 12:37 PM by HarryMiller

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Tuesday, August 15, 2006 6:12 PM by John

# re: Providing Marketing Content

In addition to language divergence, beware the creep of Phantom Capitalization!

This job can be much harder outside Microsoft, where there's less clarity about functional group roles.

Hey, blog about drafting. It's one of my favorite tasks!
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 9:51 PM by HarryMiller

# re: Providing Marketing Content

Yeah, that's for sure. It's amazing how everything becomes a proper noun in the right context. :-)

Tell me more about drafting--it's not something I'm familiar with (at least by that name). You mean like drawing blueprints?
Wednesday, August 16, 2006 8:10 PM by John

# re: Providing Marketing Content

I mean drafting prose. I might rely on tricks and techniques more than others, though I'm not sure how that could be. On hard subjects, I create a massive and chaotic cache of clues. Early on I like to print these clues and cut them into strips which I lay out on the desk and re-order. I might do this two or three times. It helps when I have to pro-actively choose facts, and then order and re-order them by topic. Many people assume the order comes from the top downward but I bring it from the bottom up. Once the ordering is right, I draft by printing and penning re-ordering, deletions, and re-wordings. I might do this ten or twenty times, until there's just nothing left to fix. There must be a story here. How do you tackle deadly complexity? It seems to be the secret sauce of doing this job well.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006 9:14 PM by HarryMiller

# re: Providing Marketing Content

That's a great topic. There's definitely a story there. What size documents are you writing? Books and articles? Online Help? We usually write hundreds of tiny topics that are primarily for reference, and users typically find a topic through a search engine or by using the index. To make that kind of reference, we take complex subjects and break them down into small components, document the components, and then hook them together with walkthroughs and conceptual overviews. At least that's one take on the process--I'll have to ask around and see what other viewpoints I can get.
Thursday, August 17, 2006 6:13 AM by John

# re: Providing Marketing Content

I'm talking mostly about conceptual overviews, or more specifically about developer guides. Those are my favorite. I like the task of being the first thing smart people read to understand a whole system in its totality. It's not necessarily comprehensive, an editorial element that surprised me about these guides at first, and I'm interested in which and how much detail, and in what order. That's why I love drafting so much. With each read I have to forget everything again, and then kindly lead my empty mind into enlightenment.

I've written reference of course and I accept that it comes with the territory. But it seems so mechanical. Not really challenging or interesting to me. I usually focus on speed and automation. I do have some innovative tactics for it. Usually I can make up a tool using C# or XML parising that lets devs see the topics in one page and fill in Excel or Word cels rather than wrestling with whatever half-baked tool the UA team uses for reference content management.

Anyway, I like hearing about people's tricks for doing the job. I want to know all the tricks so I can be globally respected/feared in my field. Keep up the good blog.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006 12:20 PM by Harry Miller's Technical Writing Blog : Writing the First Draft, Part 1

# Harry Miller's Technical Writing Blog : Writing the First Draft, Part 1

PingBack from http://blogs.msdn.com/harrymiller/archive/2006/08/22/712814.aspx
Wednesday, February 11, 2009 6:22 AM by cod5 no sound

# re: Providing Marketing Content

after the patch it worked just fine.

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