The Content Wrangler

You know all those "rules" you were taught in school about "good writing?" They were lies. Our focus today needs to go beyond grammar and punctuation, and towards clarity and understanding. What works for real people? And what really ARE the rules?

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for a conversation with rockstar writer, Shelly Davies. You'll learn the difference between grammar rules and grammar conventions; how readers interact with text and receive messages; and how not to sound like a jerk (unless you want to).

About Shelly Davies

Shelly Davies helps businesses save time and money. How? By giving us permission to write like humans. Using research-based approaches to writing better, Shelly builds our confidence and helps us write in ways that make readers want to hug us! (Or not - it really depends if hugs are what we're after. But whatever outcomes we want, Shelly can get us there! She's kinda awesome like that.) Shelly Davies Writing & Training. Because plain English has been cool since way back.

It is intuitive to believe that visuals are more memorable than text. To a certain degree, science confirms this. Research shows that visuals impact recall because they help viewers process information faster and assist them to pay attention by being more engaging than text.

But there is such a thing as a forgettable visual. Think of all the information you encounter in a typical week. How much of it do you remember? We tend to forget our lives almost as quickly as we live them and visuals can still escape our memories.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for a free, one-hour educational webinar with cognitive neuroscientist, Dr. Carmen Simon, to learn how to stay on people’s minds by applying science-based guidelines from the angle of how the brain processes visuals.



You will learn how to use visual thinking skills in four areas that are prevalent in business communication: facts, processes, data, and abstracts. And, you’ll discover how to use design elements such as images, text, lines, shapes to create interesting—and memorable—content. Dr. Simon will provide you with universal visual design principles and explain how they influence viewer attention and retention.

In just one hour, you will learn how to create and select visuals that impact memory and how to avoid those that don't. Visual thinking is important because when you use images correctly, you have the luxury of staying on your audience’s minds long-term. This helps you influence their decisions because people act in your favor based on what they remember, not on what they forget.



About Dr. Carmen Simon

Carmen Simon is a cognitive neuroscientist, bestselling author, and leading expert on using memory to influence decision-making. Her most recent book, Impossible to Ignore: Create Memorable Content to Influence Decisions, has won the acclaim of publications such as Inc.com, Forbes, and Fast Company, and has been selected as one of the top international books on persuasion.

The company you work for is trying to give its audience the best product experience in the world. As a technical writer, you want to contribute to that effort by creating awesome user assistance for that product.

There are many great tools out there that can help you to achieve this. These tools include text editors, and graphic and video tools. But how do you decide when to use text, images, or video for your product assistance?

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and special guest presenter, Ferry Vermeulen of INSTRKTIV (http://instrktiv.com) for a free, one-hour presentation designed to help guide you make the best choices.

More than 80% of all marketing communications are predicted to be visual by 2018, and social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined. That’s a lot of competition for marketers to fight for customer’s attention. How can you make sure you don’t squander precious views once you get them?

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, with my special guest, Guy Larcom, an Instructional Designer at TechSmith, where he designs and develops tutorials, educational videos, marketing videos, writes documentation, and blogs about visual communication.

Through research, experimentation, and testing, he has learned some of the best ways to create engaging videos and some of the things that make videos less engaging. But it’s not just about making engaging videos. Knowing the best ways to distribute your content plays a big role, too. In this session, Guy will share what he has learned about creating engaging video content, how to add human elements to keep videos feeling genuine, tips on how to get your content to your audience, and how you can avoid viewer drop offs during your videos.

Agile is a rapidly growing method for the development of software. It emphasizes rapid iteration and adaptability. But Agile is no longer just about software—agile is being adopted by organizations in many industries to enable them to be lean and responsive. The traditional content process to create, review, approve, translate, and deliver simply takes too long and is unsustainable.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler and my special guests, Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper of The Rockley Group for this free, one-hour webinar. Ann and Charles will discuss how a new agile process is required to develop modular, nimble content, how to significantly shorten the content lifecycle, iteratively translate content, and then publish continuously.

ABOUT ANN ROCKLEY

Ann Rockley is CEO of The Rockley Group. She has an international reputation for developing multichannel content strategies and digital publishing solutions. She has been instrumental in establishing the field in content strategy, content reuse, intelligent content strategies for multichannel delivery, and content management best practices.

ABOUT CHARLES COOPER

Charles Cooper is VP of The Rockley Group and has over 20 years of experience in quality assurance and over 16 years of experience in eContent, user experience, taxonomy, workflow design, composition, and digital publishing.

As companies grow, so does their content, creating a content conundrum, where there are hundreds or thousands of files but no one can find what they need. The key to overcoming this challenge is to create dynamic systems that deliver personalized content, but that is much easier said than done. CMS tools like MadCap Flare drive efficiency and reuse for professional writers, but about a third of the content in a typical ecosystem is created by “Subject Matter Expert" writers using Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, and even the writing groups don’t always have the time they need to be really innovative with their tools.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guests, Lynn Carrier and Kathleen Pierce, for this free, one-hour webinar. Kathleen and Lynn came at this content problem from complementary angles—improving the content-creation and the content-delivery engines for customers and the field.

You’ll come away from this talk with practical ideas for taking a smart approach to personalization; getting SME authors on board with best practices; using low-end tools to show the possibilities and make the case for further investment; and taking advantage of the right tools to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time, every time.

After over 15 years working on multichannel-friendly, personalization-friendly, and future-friendly content, Noz Urbina has latched firmly on to customer journey maps (CJMs) as today’s most vital content technique.

A customer journey map goes beyond static personas and helps diverse content stakeholders to design content plans and models that deliver the right type and level of content to the right user when and where they need it. CJMs bring together large amounts of user information and map it out to support improved content structures, content types, and editorial plans that work across channels and siloed touchpoints.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Noz Urbina, global content strategist, for this free, one-hour webinar. Attendees will learn how to more effectively communicate with agencies, partners, subject matter experts, and other content creators; how to collaborate across teams on personalization-ready content; how to build future-friendly content models and content plans; and how to get more leverage out of your content assets over time and across devices.

ABOUT NOZ URBINA

Noz Urbina is a globally recognized leader in the field of content strategy and a customer experience consultant who can effectively bridge organizational and user goals. Noz is well-known as a pioneer in customer journey mapping and adaptive content modeling for delivering personalized, contextually relevant content experiences in an omnichannel environment. He is a co-author of the book “Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits” with Rahel Anne Bailie, and a lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences. Noz has coached teams, developed processes, and spearheaded solutions that have helped some of the world’s largest organizations leverage their content assets to stand out in their sectors while avoiding headcount increases and wasted costs.

Silos and collaboration are usually posed as contrasts against each other. But in reality, they don’t have to be. Do you know how you can harness the power of silos to create efficient collaboration? It begins with addressing the silo "frame of mind."

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest, Christian Gericke, Chief Marketing Officer at smashDOCs as he reveals the key methods of helping companies in every industry become more effective in their cross-team creation process.

You will not only learn the cautionary tales about silos but also how they are essential to a company’s health and how to "use tech" rather than simply "have tech." Collaboration occurs when embracing the challenges of silos and moving with their power, rather than fighting against them.

Takeaways:

—Silos may be dangerous, but they are also essential, and when their power is harnessed, it leads to collaboration and accountability
—It's a mistake to assume "having" tech is the same as it using tech effectively
—Speedy collaboration is a competitive edge in achieving long-term business success

ABOUT CHRISTIAN GERICKE

Christian Gericke is the CMO for smashDOCs and a volunteer for Translators without Borders who manages this challenge both online and offline. Christian spent the last 25 years in various management positions in the document and information management industry for companies such as Acrolinx, HP, and Exstream Software.

Knowing what needs to be done and achieving it are dramatically different things. While there’s consensus that carefully and deliberately establishing and articulating a content strategy for a product, an organization, or an enterprise is a good thing, execution remains an elusive holy grail.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Toni Mantych for this free, one-hour webinar. In this session, we’ll take a look at real challenges—logistic, political, and technical—faced as one Fortune 300 company undertook to develop a “unified content strategy” across functional groups (documentation, training, knowledge management) and divergent content.

We will discuss techniques and strategies such as emphasizing common goal of client/user satisfaction to unite groups with different historical foci; employing data-driven decision-making to ensure good decisions but also to relieve organizational bias, and using charters and other project management tools to identify, celebrate, and effectively make use of the unique skills, perspectives, and assets of each participating group.

ABOUT TONI MANTYCH

Toni Mantych solves client problems with content, and content problems with technology. She is currently Director, Technical Project and Portfolio Management at ADP. In that role, she oversees content strategy and architecture projects and leads the Information Architecture and Content Strategy team for the Information Development Services group (IDS). Over the last five years, Toni has spearheaded the adoption of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and component content management within IDS and ADP.

Would you like to know how to break down content silos, why content that is cross-functional benefits end-users, and when to produce content by segment?

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Ena Gordon, Vice President for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management for this free, one-hour webinar. Ena's presentation will demystify the steps needed to move a large organization away from traditional siloed content production approaches and toward a unified content strategy. She will examine how Morgan Stanley adopted a unified content strategy and she will share best practices and lessons learned along the way.

ABOUT ENA GORDON

Ena Gordon is content strategist that specializes in transforming content strategies built for paper into dynamic webified experiences.