The Content Wrangler

You finished your amazing content and released it to the public. You eagerly await the day that it’s cherished and consumed. But no one uses it, and you don’t know why. After all, it’s the best content on the planet. 

So what happened? In your rush to release this incredible content, you missed one important step—making it findable.

How do you make content findable? For starters, come to this webinar. Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler and Cheryl Landes, Technical Communications Consultant and owner of Tabby Cat Communications, where you will be introduced to the world of findability. Cheryl will explain why findability is important and share tips for allowing your content to be discovered and retrieved whenever and wherever your users need it.

You’ll understand what findability is, learn why findability is important in discovering and using content, and learn tips on how to make content findable whenever and wherever your users need it. Don’t miss this informative webinar—your content will thank you for it.

To engage customers on a global scale, you must create great content that speaks to them in the language they understand best—their own. But, success in foreign markets involves more than just choosing the right words. You have to deliver them to the right person, at the right time, in the right format and language, on the device of the customers’ choosing.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler on Wednesday, September 21, for a free, one-hour webinar featuring Tim Steele, President of Content Rules, and intelligent content guru, Joe Gelb, President of Zoomin Software. The presenters will discuss the importance of expectations, buying preferences, content consumption habits, culture, religion, and tradition when creating content for global audiences. And, they'll tackle the role of delivery technology and its place in global content strategy projects.

In a world where everything is getting more complicated and we are all experiencing personal information overload, there is a growing need to understand the tools and processes that are used to make sense of complex subjects and situations. 

These tools aren’t hard to learn or even tough to implement, but they are also not part of many people’s education. Information Architecture is the practice of making sense — a set of principles, lessons, and tools to help anyone make sense of anything.

On Tuesday, September 20, join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and Information Architect Abby Covert for this free one-hour webinar. Learn how to increase your comfort with taking on larger information architecture challenges; learn tools and concepts for developing controlled vocabularies and taxonomies; and better understand how to choreograph an organization’s information architecture across audiences, contexts and channels.

Whether you are a student or a professional, a designer, a technologist or a small business owner, or an intern or executive – you can learn how information architecture can help you make sense of your next endeavor.

For the most part, human beings don't like change. It’s scary. It's stressful. And it can be difficult. Adapting to a new way of producing medical device content is no different. To succeed, we must educate stakeholders about the need for intelligent content and explain the benefits. And, we must help everyone involved in the content production lifecycle understand the changes required, the problems they solve, and the benefits they will provide both the company and its content creators and managers.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and Ann Rockley, content strategy expert and president of The Rockley Group, for this free, one-hour webinar. You'll learn how leading medical device manufacturers tackle big changes to content production methods and you'll discover change-management best practices you can put in place in your organization.

Don't blame PowerPoint. Since the overhead projector was invented in the 1950's, people have gotten into the habit of having one-way presentations that usually don't resonate with their audiences. Combine that with 50-plus years of an industrialized top-down culture of instruction, and most people think they have to produce a TED Talk to present their products and services. But this is not true; TED Talks aren't sales pitches anyway.

Based on the principle that people hate being sold to—but love to buy—this webinar will focus on a how you can transform your presentation into a genuine conversation with your audience, regardless if you are presenting to one person or a thousand. Most people hate public speaking because presenting is hard; but conversations are easy.

The only way you will get your prospect to turn into a customer, or the audience to turn into fans, is to engage them and give them a voice. Having conversations is much easier and natural for people than presenting. The future of presentations is about knowledge-sharing and the experience that happens when you have a conversation that translates into action.

Join Scott Abel (The Content Wrangler) and Val Swisher (Content Rules) for a presentation from—and discussion with—Greg Rosner—on a different approach to presenting. In this session, we will weave the conversation around three things: 1) a rubric for transforming a presentation into a conversation; 2) suggestions for free and paid technology you can use to enable voting, polling and word clouds; and 3) a mindset to use when going into your next presentation that will transform meeting outcomes.


Concept, task, and reference have served well as archetypes in technical publications, but are there others needed to serve the needs of the enterprise? Explore various techniques employed in learning theory and cognitive research that can extend the utility of DITA beyond technical publications. Learn how authors can focus on better content reuse.


Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and Rob Hanna of Precision Content for this free, one-hour webinar where attendees will learn to work with Precision Content® information types, focus on writing blocks rather than topics, and apply rigor to titles and short descriptions.


Please also join us for the first webinar in this series on July 21 (recorded after that date) — The Cognitive Science Behind Intelligent Content. Check out the Content Wrangler channel to sign up by July 21 to watch live, or you may watch the recording after July 21.

We live in a digitally driven world. And while the direct interactions consumers have with brands has become as easy as clicking a "like" button or pinning an image, what drives passionate advocacy continues to rest squarely on your brand’s shoulders. Understanding how people see your brand around the world is critical in driving real business value. These insights allow top brands to empower their audience and gain genuine, organic word-of-mouth, which directly translates into increased relevance and financial value. Knowing where you stand could make the difference between continued global expansion and closing up shop.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, Michele Westphall, Associate Producer of the Brand2Global Conference, and Alex Hunter, Former Head of Digital Marketing at Virgin Group for this free webinar. Our guests will talk about how some of today’s global brands are building passionate followings by leveraging the digital world in which we live and creating strong brand cultures.

You’ll hear about what matters most when building a global brand, why you need a global brand strategy that takes into account local needs, and how to empower your employees and customers as brand co-creators in this digital world. Don’t miss this exciting event, brought to you by your friends at the Brand2Global Conference.

Presentation. It matters. A lot. It fuels first impressions and—when done well—can help us convert prospects into paying customers. Over time, the dynamic delivery and presentation of content across all customer touch points can engender loyalty.

Automating the presentation of content and providing for its dynamic delivery requires the separation of content from its formatting information. It requires structured, modular, semantically rich intelligent content and a delivery platform designed to tackle the job.

On Tuesday, August 9, 2016, join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and intelligent content guru, Joe Gelb, President of Zoomin Software, for part three of a three-part webinar series on content delivery. You’ll learn what dynamic content delivery is, how it works, and why you need a platform designed to automate content presentation. You’ll discover how separating content from its formatting information allows you to automatically control how it's presented to those who need it on the device of their choosing. You’ll find out how controlling presentation can turn prospects into customers and provide exceptional content experiences for all.

Explore the science that makes for effective topic-based authoring with DITA. Semantic specialization should be a leading differentiator for selecting DITA for projects, yet it is one of its most underutilized features. Information Typing is truly at the heart of DITA, yet it is one of the most poorly understood concepts behind creating effective DITA topics. Content reuse is cited as a primary reason for moving to DITA, yet it is one of the hardest features to deliver expected gains in reliability, efficiency, and consistency over time.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and Rob Hanna of Precision Content, for this free, one-hour webinar where attendees will learn to look at concept, task, and reference in a new light, see the value in effective semantics, and consider new guidelines for writing for reuse.

We also hope you will join us for a follow-on webinar with Rob Hanna on August 18 — Advancing the Science Behind Intelligent Content. Check out the Content Wrangler channel to sign up!

GIFs are eating the world. But they're not just fun and games. Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and Daniel Foster, Strategy Lead for TechSmith, for this free, one-hour webinar in this discussion about real-world examples of how animated GIFs are being used in documentation, support, and beyond. Also, get practical tips for when, how, and why to create them. Attendees will learn 1) 5 ways to use GIFs in your content (with real-life examples); 2) tips for when to use GIFs vs. videos vs. images; and 3) best practices and pitfalls for creating effective GIFs.

Today's guest presenter, Daniel Foster, is the Strategy Lead for TechSmith and has 14 years of software industry experience, much of it in marketing communications, content creation, and social media. Daniel currently heads up market and product strategy for Snagit, the premium tool for screen capture and screen recording on Windows and Mac which combines traditional screenshots, videos, and image editing to help you share important information with the people who need it most. Daniel has spoken at various events including STC Summit, World Usability Day at Michigan State University, and MarketingProfs University.