LavaCon Speaker Series

Oded Ilan recently joined Ed Marsh to talk about his upcoming LavaCon presentation, Personalization of Content and the Power of Metrics. Currently the Chief Marketing Officer of Iridize, Oded’s start in content can be traced back to his degree in English literature. When he joined the world of high tech, he quickly learned the experience of writing and telling stories could be used to make a living: marketing and sales is all about telling stories. In the end, it’s content creation.

People working with content know that managers want metrics, but some metrics are easier to capture than others. For example, when there is a change in the user interface, we can measure the impact by the number of clicks. But how do you use metrics to follow a “solution”? How do you measure the effectiveness of support or training materials? When content is used once or twice, there is usually no option to know if an application’s feature was used as a result of the content related to that feature.

That’s where personalization steps in. Personalization is the other side of metrics. When you have metrics that give you an understanding of what people are doing, what types of people are doing it, and what people in the same environment are doing, you can combine that data with intelligent algorithms to launch content to users based on that activity. The end result is personalized, contextualized content.

Analytics show how people behave, which translates into dollars.

Think about solutions that let you see the number of times content is being used. Let’s say you are able to cross-reference that with the number of support calls reduced to the organization. You can then present the amount saved to the organization. When organizations decide to save money, they decide to cut things they do not understand. But they definitely understand money. And they understand numbers. This is a simple demonstration to management of how much you are worth to the organization.

About Our Guest

Even before Oded Ilan had graduated from the university in 1999, he spent 4 years as a high school teacher. Following graduation, Oded worked in various high-tech industries as a business developer. He still believes that his hardest “sell” to date was convincing children to “purchase” education. Getting the message across, creating appealing yet meaningful content and delivering the correct story to the customers has always been a passion of Oded’s. As Iridize’s Chief Marketing Officer, he gets to see, first hand, how technology helps the training and documentation landscape with a new approach.

Iridize is a Platinum Sponsor of The LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and TechComm Management. Be sure to stop by the booth in the vendor hall and say hello!

About Our Host

Ed Marsh is proud to be from New Jersey. He uses the Oxford comma, and never uses two spaces after a period. He is a technical writer at Goldman Sachs, and the creator and host of the Content Content podcast. Find him at edmarsh.com and @edmarsh on Twitter.

In this podcast, Eric Kuhnen and Michael Rosinski of Astoria Software join Ed Marsh to talk about their upcoming presentation at LavaCon, Making a Quantum Shift in Structured Authoring.

According to Eric, one of the key changes in the content industry has become the inability for multiple groups within a department to share content while using a common set of tools. The technical documentation team works with structured content, and the content repository is often not available to those outside the team. Astoria Software now provides integration with Witty Parrot to enable “rich sharing” and ensure that XML-based content is available to non-XML content creators.

Julie Newcome of Ultimate Software, an Astoria Software customer, immediately saw the appeal of the integration:

When we first saw the demo with Witty Parrot, it really excited us. One of the things we have had to overcome is the challenge of sharing content between departments. The for us is that allows other departments to use vetted content, content that is accurate for a customer-facing audience without having the technical skills to author in DITA, and that’s huge for us.

Ultimate Software is scheduled to go live with their integration of Witty Parrot soon after the LavaCon Conference. You can see a demonstration of their implementation at the Astoria booth; the demonstration includes:

* Pulling technical content, such as a task or FAQ, from the content repository and sharing it with a customer

* Generating instructor slides for a training class directly from the source DITA and creating an updated course manual, which is a faster, more efficient, and better managed process

About Our Guests

Astoria Software is a Platinum Sponsor of The LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and TechComm Management, as well as Monday’s dessert sponsor! Be sure to stop by their booth in the vendor hall and say hello!

Eric Kuhnen has more than 20 years of experience in product research, development and management. Mr. Kuhnen was most recently responsible for competitive positioning, product marketing, and product management at Astoria Software, GoRemote (acquired by iPass), and Oracle Corporation.

Michael Rosinski has been Chief Executive Officer of Astoria Software, Inc., since December 2007 and serves as its President.

Julie Newcome is a Content Management Analyst at Ultimate Software.

About Our Host

Ed Marsh is proud to be from New Jersey. He uses the Oxford comma, and never uses two spaces after a period. He is a technical writer at Goldman Sachs, and the creator and host of the Content Content podcast. Find him at edmarsh.com and @edmarsh on Twitter.

Chellie Campbell joined Ed Marsh to talk about her LavaCon keynote presentation, People Love to Give You Money! And Recognition! And Headcount!

Chellie started her career as a musical comedy actress and then became a bookkeeper. When she learned that not many people could read their financial statements, she started teaching them, which led her to write books and teach workshops. She has found that most people look at money from the perspective of stock brokers and financial planners, which means they view money with a negative perspective:

These people say, “You’re going to run out of money. You’re not going to have enough money for medical expenses.” It’s a place of fear. It’s ridiculous. You should be enjoying your money. I take the money piece, and I make it fun. Budget means Baby U Deserve Getting Every Thing, and I talk about that in my talk.”

Chellie believes people focus too much on what’s wrong or what’s missing, which means they miss out on what’s right and how to be happy. Her keynote session addresses working with user-friendly people, getting along with people who are not user-friendly, and how to think positively about people and money. Positive thinking and affirmations can help us put together a plan: thoughts followed by actions can lead to results.

Register for LavaCon Portland 2017 today so you can learn more from Chellie!

About Our Guest

Chellie Campbell is the creator of the popular Financial Stress Reduction® workshops, is the author of The Wealthy Spirit, Zero to Zillionaire, and From Worry to Wealthy, and she has contributed stories to Jack Canfield’s recent books You’ve Got to Read This Book! and Life Lessons from Chicken Soup for the Soul. Chellie is  prominently quoted as a financial expert in The Los Angeles Times, Redbook, Family Circle, Pink, Good Housekeeping, Lifetime, Essence, Woman’s World, and more than 50 popular books.

Learn more about Chellie at chellie.com.

About Our Host

Ed Marsh is proud to be from New Jersey. He uses the Oxford comma, and never uses two spaces after a period. He is a technical writer at Goldman Sachs, and the creator and host of the Content Content podcast. Find him at edmarsh.com and @edmarsh on Twitter.

Listen to the Interview

Keith Boyd recently talked to Ed Marsh about his upcoming keynote,  How MOOCs, SPOCs, and Next Generation e-Learning are Impacting Content Strategy. The growing popularity of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs) provides the opportunity for traditional technical communicators to work with other teams and incorporate e-learning into their content strategy, resulting in mastery and deeper commitment from customers. By becoming aware of the options, we are better equipped to have conversations with the other teams, identify opportunities, and deliver engaging solutions.

I’m going to talk about how learning science is impacting our ability to motivate people, to keep them in the game, and to keep them wanting to learn.

Attend Keith’s session, and learn how to make a difference in your organization. Register for LavaCon Portland 2017 today!

About Our Guest

Keith Boyd is a 17 year veteran of Microsoft Corporation, where he currently serves as the Director of Structured Learning Programs in the new Learning and Readiness organization. He joined the Learning Experiences team in 2015 to lead Microsoft’s Online Learning strategy. In that role, he was a member of the team that conceived of the Microsoft Professional Program – a role-based certification program to help fill the technical skills gap using emerging technology like MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses). He subsequently became the leader of this new business, which in its first six-months has attracted 50,000 students to its curriculum on Data Science. There are 15 additional curriculum in development. Prior to joining the Learning Experiences team, he managed technical documentation and samples for developers in both the Windows and Cloud and Enterprise divisions.

Keith contributes to the Microsoft Learning blog Born to Learn, and also posts on LinkedIn (search for Keith Boyd).

About Our Host

Ed Marsh is proud to be from New Jersey. He uses the Oxford comma, and never uses two spaces after a period. He is a technical writer at Goldman Sachs, and the creator and host of the Content Content podcast. Find him at edmarsh.com and @edmarsh on Twitter.

Listen to the Interview

Melinda Belcher, Senior Director of Digital Experience at Mastercard, joins Ed Marsh to talk about experience-first content strategy and the importance of leveraging internal teams to weigh in with their areas of expertise. Each team, whether it be sales, support, marketing, and so on, has knowledge needed to contribute to a project and ensure the customer has an optimum experience. Her upcoming keynote at LavaCon Portland, “Stop, Listen, and Collaborate: Creating an Experience-first Content Strategy,” talks about how our challenge is to deliver an experience that tells a larger story and aligns with business goals (view program). To do this, we need to stop thinking about our deliverables as stand-alone pieces and consider how they interact with each other.

“How do we make sure we’re creating a consistent end-to-end experience, where we’re singing from the same songbook, and we’re creating the same kind of customer narrative for our users?”

Attend Melinda’s session, and learn how to make a difference in your organization. Register for LavaCon Portland 2017 today!

About Our Guest

The key to creating a great experience is talking to the right people about the right thing at the right time. That’s why Melinda Belcher sees herself as a “content experience designer.” She has managed all phases of content strategy—content strategy and content mapping, content partnerships and sourcing, editorial and social calendars, publishing and translation workflows, localization strategy, content audits and inventories, taxonomy, metadata, SEO, CMS and content tagging. Melinda specializes in the B2B, finance and technology space.

Follow Melinda on Twitter at @melindarox.

About Our Host

Ed Marsh is proud to be from New Jersey. He uses the Oxford comma, and never uses two spaces after a period. He is a technical writer at Goldman Sachs, and the creator and host of the Content Content podcast. Find him at edmarsh.com and @edmarsh on Twitter.

Listen to the Interview

Jon Ann Lindsey joins Ed Marsh to talk about her upcoming keynote at LavaCon Portland, “It’s Amazing What You Can Learn When You Actually Listen to Customers” (view program). A content strategist at Google, Jon Ann and her team traveled to eleven countries, meeting with users about translation issues. By talking with language experts, such as journalists, copy writers, and bloggers, they were able to identify translation problems from the perspective of readability, voice and tone, and comprehension, as well as obtain a colloquial point of view.

In the languages themselves, one of the things that was a recurring issue was Anglicisms: what do you call a “wearable” in Dubai? Do you call it a wearable? Or do you call it the word for “something you wear”?

Attend Jon Ann’s session, and learn how to make a difference in your organization. Register for LavaCon Portland 2017 today!

About Our Guest

Content strategist Jon Ann Lindsey works with writers, editors, and UX researchers to create clear, friendly Help Center content for Google users worldwide. She mastered explanatory writing and the inverted pyramid the old-fashioned way: as a reporter, editor, and copy desk chief at the San Jose Mercury News. In the online world, she was a producer for the front page of Yahoo when it was the No. 1 site on the internet. Later, on the global content team at PayPal, she got her first exposure to writing for a global audience and the challenges of localization. She also wrote a book about using PayPal for online fundraising.

Jon Ann is inspired by the fact that for literally billions of people, online Help Centers are the only direct contact they have with Google. Her team strives to provide quick solutions to their problems in easy-to-understand language, no matter where they are in the world.

Find Jon Ann on Twitter at @EditorJA and her articles on LinkedIn:

* Our biggest translation problem has been hiding this whole time

* To improve translation, wield the period and the (typographical) bullet

About Our Host

Ed Marsh is proud to be from New Jersey. He uses the Oxford comma, and never uses two spaces after a period. He is a technical writer at Goldman Sachs, and the creator and host of the Content Content podcast. Find him at edmarsh.com and @edmarsh on Twitter.

Listen to the Interview

In this inaugural LavaCon podcast, Ed Marsh interviews Stephen Walsh of BuzzSumo and AndersPink. At LavaCon Dublin, Stephen’s presentation, From Filter Failure to Savvy Surfer: Riding the Crest of the Content Tsunami, explored continuous learning and how content curation supports continuous learning. Tools and algorithms help us curate meaningful content, but we can make it more valuable by adding the human factor and sharing it with the right people in the right channels.

As we always say in Ireland, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, there’s just the wrong clothes.”

About Our Guest

Stephen has over 20 years of experience in Learning, Content, Marketing and Technology. He started his elearning career in the US in the mid 1990s with Roger Schank at Cognitive Arts, building some of the earliest examples of video-driven scenarios for corporate learning. He ran the Chicago team and led the company’s expansion into Europe. A regular blogger, writer and speaker on content curation, marketing, learning and technology, Stephen is honored to be included in the 2017 elearning movers and shakers list.

Find Stephen on Twitter at @stephentwalsh and @anderspink.

About Our Host

Ed Marsh is proud to be from New Jersey. He uses the Oxford comma, and never uses two spaces after a period. He is a technical writer at Goldman Sachs, and the creator and host of the Content Content podcast. Find him at edmarsh.com and @edmarsh on Twitter.

Listen to the Interview