Feeling left behind when it comes to new technologies? Do you know instinctively that you should establish a public professional presence but don’t know where to start? Do you want to expand your professional network, and access to people with incredible expertise?

One way to increase your corporate value is to ensure that you have a strong and easily-identifiable personal brand. It’s not enough simply to have good references or have no embarrassing pictures on Facebook.

Whether it be to the corporation that employs you, or a professional practitioner demonstrating your potential to clients, your brand forms an impression before you hit the meeting room, and extends far beyond the resume.

Creating and protecting your personal brand is an important career strategy, and not just for independent consultants. An online professional presence has become the single most important self-marketing tool for demonstrating expertise and professional credibility. Learn to use social media in a smart, responsible, career-enhancing way.

Is this workshop is for you?

This workshop will be helpful if you:

• Don’t have your own website or blog or aren’t posting to it regularly
• Don’t have a LinkedIn profile or aren’t actively using it to build your personal brand
• Don’t have a Twitter account, or have one but aren’t sure how to use it effectively
• Wonder whether social communities (Facebook, MySpace, Ning) are useful for you
• Want to use social media without it becoming a waste of time
• Want to put technology to work for you without making big mistakes along the way
• Want to take pride in your presence online for your career, practice, or small business

Participants will learn:

• The six basic aspects of personal brand management
• How to create a distinctive, unforgettable brand
• Techniques for presenting an integrated brand
• Tools that can help to easily manage a personal brand

January 16, 2010 workshop, co-sponsored by STC Canada West Coast
Location: Downtown Vancouver >> Register online

January 30, 2010 workshop, sponsored by Intentional Design
207-14888 104th Ave, Surrey >> Register by email or pay through PayPal

The workshop in May was a great success. A friend had asked me to run a workshop because she felt she’d gotten so busy doing her work that when she looked up, there were all these new career “things” she was supposed to have kept up with, and she could use a crash course in how to figure all the pieces out. If you’re in that same boat and want to kick-start your public presence, for for yourself, your consultancy, or small business, I’ve put together an inexpensive, 1-day workshop that you can take this month.
The workshop is limited to a maximum of 16 participants, for maximum learning and interaction.

Date: November 7, 2009
Time: 8:30 to 5:00
Location: Downtown Vancouver
Cost: $120 per person (includes morning, afternoon refreshments)

Register by contacting Rahel Bailie.

Best line of the day: My daughter told my son that I was going to a workshop to learn the stuff they already know how to do.

Best insight: When I can’t find enough information about a person online, I start with what I can find, and fill in the blanks by writing my own story – which could turn out to be fiction, but that’s what people do – so I can mitigate that.

Slides are here. Participants are setting up a group where we can continue the discussion started at the workshop.

If you haven’t gotten on the blogging bandwagon, don’t worry. Blogging is on its way out, replaced by microblogging and social media. Or is it? The music is not in the violin, the saying goes. Instead, the music comes from the way the musician plays the instrument, either eliciting the sweet strains of a symphony or cacaphonic screeching. The same applies to the social media tools you choose and use to network, advance your career, and connect with those who consume the content you publish.

A friend asked me to do something similar here. She felt she’d gotten so busy doing her work that when she looked up, there were all these new career “things” she was supposed to have kept up with, and she could use a crash course in how to figure all the pieces out. If you’re in that same boat and want to kick-start your public presence without waiting for October and going to New Orleans (although Bourbon Street at Hallowe’en is a lot of fun), I’ve put together an inexpensive, 1-day workshop that you can take this month.
The workshop is limited to a maximum of 8 participants, for maximum learning and interaction.

Date: April 30, 2009
Time: 8:30 to 5:00
Cost: $120 per person (includes morning, afternoon refreshments)

Register by contacting Rahel Bailie.

If you’re being asked to use your content in more than one way, you might be at the stage where the more part includes methods or technologies you’re not really familiar with. Maybe content re-use means syndication or collaborative creation with other departments or divisions, or incorporating content from other sites or user generated content. It could mean figuring how to build community or provide better support or get better feedback.

Maybe more means creating or incorporating help from the technical side, sharing the content in a knowledge base, putting it on the Web, maybe with automatic updates, and adopting XML, perhaps figuring out how the new DITA standard works for you in all of this.

No matter what your situation, you’re in the position where you’re supposed to figure out the XML stuff and the Web stuff and the quality stuff and the stuff around RSS feeds and copyright, how it all fits together, and why you need any of it, anyhow.

After all, if you’ve even tried to coordinate content creation between departments, or track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns, or just share content between a CMS and LMS, you’ll recognize how hard it is to find two systems that play nice together, let alone get an entire corporate strategy in place. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. The promise of content management was to solve the silo problem, but in many cases has simply created larger silos.

I’ve posted slides from my workshop, where we look at:

• The concepts of content convergence and integration, the principles behind it, and the market forces that are driving the trend
• Opportunities created by content convergence in various contexts, from technical documentation converging to support documentation to marketing material to user-generated content
• The changing nature of content to allow for successful convergence, and the changes in processes to support it
• Ways to prepare your organization to adapt, and explore ways to allow content convergence to drive improvements in business efficiency and customer relationships

Getting a community to grow and thrive isn’t the no-brainer that some companies think it might be. The edict of “set up a [name your social app here] community and let’s make money with it” sounds silly when phrased that way, but it seems to be the prerogative of executives to expect this to happen. At some point, there may be a science to community building – mix this compound in this petri dish and grow substance “x” – but now it is more an art, knowing the appropriate motivators, indicators, and enticements to have members come, participate, and value your community enough to stay.

One of the aspects of community is community management, and after attending a SXSW panel discussion on the topic, with managers of some of the most successful communities around, I distilled the key points into article for TechCom Manager. If you’ve wondered if you have what it takes to be your corporation’s community manager, you can get an idea of what it’s like – before you get handed the keys to the kingdom and told to make magic happen.

Therein lies the problem. The teasers don’t entice me on television and don’t entice me here. You can tell me to watch Living Vancouver or Hockey Night in Canada till the cows come home, but that’s not going to make me like hockey or appreciate the local entertainment scene. It’s a cheap trick, and by now, we all know how to read the cues.

Compare that with how The Hour uses Twitter. They don’t really implore me to listen to their show. Instead, they tell me about interesting items: “Big news this past weekend – “GhostNet” Chinese Virus Busted by Canadian Hackers – http://tinyurl.com/cax5fk Way to go CDN hax0rs!”. They have established themselves as the bringers of news, the custodians of cool. If I’m inclined to watch, it’s because they proved that they were interesting and drew me in.

Twitter can seem like a no-brainer. It’s like a cocktail party, and cocktail party manners – well, manners at civilized cocktail parties – apply. You can wander through Twitter and eavesdrop on groups of people talking; you choose become part of whichever conversation in which the topics seem interesting. A recent article humorously encapsulates the fourteen personality types you can find at the Twitter party, and you know how you gauge your reaction to each of them. You may find yourself backing away from the person who is way too earnest, or too crude, or who tries to sell you life insurance immediately after you exchange contact information. Those you follow are likely to be those you find have interesting things to say on a consistent basis.

There is no right way to Twitter, because everyone participates for a different reason. The question becomes whether you achieve your goals. If you’re not on the mark, you can ask yourself how you’re coming across to your audience, and how you can change your approach to make yourself more approachable by those you want to follow you.

Having gone on this little Twitter rant, I feel compelled to divulge why I spend time on Twitter, and I had to ask myself that same question, as I am not part of the Twitterati whose goal is to have the most followers ever, or who has an obvious, specific agenda. Aside from “this is part of my business and if I don’t particpate, I can’t understand it”, I concluded that I love being helpful, and Twitter became the forum where I connect with my friends and contacts and (more often, now) strangers, and can pass along information and connect people. In fact, I often pass along information I find on Twitter to my non-Twitter friends and colleagues when I think it might interest them. It’s also the way I get my information. My own network is spread out across the globe, and it’s hard to keep up with them. It’s also hard to keep up with technologies and trends, so by following a number of people who are passionate about technology, it’s easier to keep up with things I may want to know to enrich my personal knowledge. Have I met my personal goal? I think so – when I’ve polled my followers about whethe r I bring value to their day, the answers I get back are a definite yes.

Though social media uses the medium preferred by introverts – communication that can be prepared and posted, rather than real-time communication such as phone or meetings – it is, after all, an activity that doesn’t fit the profile of the average introvert. As a personal pursuit, it can be seen as a time sink. When asked to learn about this as a professional endeavour, it can be perceived as a world of hurt.

So what happens when social media meets technical communication? In what may be described as the next big shift for the technical communication workplace, where technical content converges with marketing communications, e-learning content, knowledge management, and user-generated content, the shift to a social media model in the coming decade may be as profound a shift as that to content management during this decade.