The Content Wrangler

Everybody’s talking about bots, but even if you don’t have one yet, how do you get your content ready for a future full of bots? And what about the next thing after that, and after that? The key is writing and structuring content in a clean, simple, granular way.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and former journalist—and Microsoft Office content strategist—Doug Kim, for a free, one-hour webinar designed to help you understand the need for structured content in our fast-changing technology-powered world. Doug will discuss why structured content is needed for much more than multi-channel publishing 

Attend this session to learn how to lay the foundation for future by restructuring your content, why it’s critical to match single intents to single answers, and why we need to reuse content in bots, instant answers, and other advanced content forms.

Doug willl give pointers on how to:

1) Lay the foundation for future by restructuring your content
2) Match single intents to single answers
3) Reuse content in bots, Instant Answers and other advanced content forms
4) Learn how clean, simple content benefits accessibility and inclusivity

About the presenter

Doug Kim spent his formative years in journalism, where he eventually became Arts and Entertainment editor of The Seattle Times. He’s been at Microsoft for eight years, where, amongst other things, he’s led efforts to revamp the voice and tone of content and UI text in the Microsoft Office suite and improve video and multimedia content. More recently, he drove the content strategy for the Bing-based content form known as Instant Answers for Windows 10. While continuing to nurture Instant Answers, he leads a team focused on accessibility, Inclusive Design and Microsoft’s experimental new Virtual Support Agent.  So yes, he went from editing Britney Spears reviews and restaurant coverage to technical content, but in his mind it all makes sense.
 

Industry analysts predict chatbots and intelligent assistants will overtake traditional web interfaces as the primary consumer touchpoint; replace or augment mobile apps; and completely transform customer service. Are you ready?

The good news is that with some engineering, chatbots can employ and extend existing content repositories.  Intelligent content allows us to single-source content out to interactive channels such as chatbots and intelligent assistants.  The side-effects may include boosting the ROI of existing content, increasing sales cycles, improving conversions, and reducing customer service costs while improving satisfaction.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, with intelligent content expert, Cruce Saunders, founder and principal at [A] (simplea.com) and author of Content Engineering for a Multi-Channel World, as he discusses chatbots as a new content distribution channel that we can’t afford to ignore. Cruce will cover basic chatbot content requirements, components and construction. And, he’ll discuss how to future-proof content with a content model, making it chatbot-ready.

Attendees will learn:
* Practical steps to integrating chatbot content elements into your existing content types
* The various types of chatbots available today and the value they serve as an engagement tool and content channel
* How to leverage existing content to power one or more chatbots, and practical ways to integrate chatbot components into your CMS structured content types
* The high-level first steps to building a chatbot-enabled content model 

Advances in narrow artificial intelligence make possible agentive systems that do things directly for their users (like, say, an automatic pet feeder). They deliver on the promise of user-centered design, but present fresh challenges in understanding their unique promises and pitfalls. In particular, these systems challenge content strategists and technical, marketing, and support writers, and product managers alike to think in new ways since they deliver value mostly when the user isn’t paying them any attention.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Christopher Noessel, Global Design Practice Manager for Travel and Transportation at IBM for a free, one-hour discussion about agentive technology. Christopher will introduce us to the concepts from his new book, "Designing Agentive Technology" (Rosenfeld Media, 2017). bit.ly/agentivebook

Attendees will learn what agentive technology is (and what it isn't), its history, how it fits in the artificial intelligence mix, and why agentive systems are so interesting and potentially useful. Come prepared to ask questions.

About the presenter

Christopher Noessel is the Global Design Practice Manager for Travel and Transportation industries with IBM. He teaches, speaks about, and evangelizes design internationally. His spidey-sense goes off semi-randomly, leading him to speak about things from interactive narrative to ethnographic user research, interaction design to generative randomness, and designing for the future. He is co-author of Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction (Rosenfeld Media, 2012), co-author of About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, 4th Edition (Wiley, 2015), keeper of the blog scifiinterfaces.com, and author of Designing Agentive Technology: AI That Works for People (Rosenfeld Media, 2017).

Just a few years ago, providing context-sensitive software product documentation was a goal for many technical communication teams. The aim was to provide contextually relevant—and helpful—content based on a customer's location in a software product. By breaking large technical documents into smaller pieces, these forward-thinking companies were able to make discrete chunks of content available in the product interface; no need for customers to go looking for assistance in a user manual or online help portal.

Today, contextually relevant content is expected by digitally-savvy consumers. The definition of context has broadened to include many additional factors (user profile data, geographic location, product model, version number, preferred language, time zone, previous interaction history, and the capabilities of the device used to consume the content). Providing contextually-relevant content today is no trivial matter. It's challenging, especially for teams that have not adopted advanced information development management practices, e-methods, and tools.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for a free, one-hour webinar with structured content expert, Alex Masycheff, co-founder and CEO of Intuillion Ltd. We'll discuss how emerging delivery technologies can leverage structured technical content to deliver contextually relevant content via conversational user interfaces like chatbots. We'll delve into how chatbots can be used to provide improved context-sensitive assistance and we'll demystify the five elements that make chatbots a valuable addition to our customer experience arsenal. Attendees will learn when chatbots bring the greatest value; what makes a chatbot helpful; and, why structured content is critical to chatbot project success.

In 10 years, websites will no longer exist — at least not in the traditional sense. Over the last few years, customer expectations have changed the way we interact in the digital world. Being online no longer means sitting in front of a computer screen.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for this free one-hour webinar with my special guest, Alan J. Porter of OpenText. Alan will talk about the shift that is coming where we no longer will be driving people to our websites. Prospects and customers alike will instead demand that we provide them with the information they need to help them move along their process or digital journey as smoothly and efficiently as possible. We now need to deliver just the right amount of intelligent structured content in context — providing the customer the information they require at the time they need it for the platform/location they are on.

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.