Social Media and Technical Writing in Today's Economy

At some high-tech companies, there may be active use of social media resources among their technical communication groups.  However, at a number of companies, many parts of lower management have heard of the hacking of Target's customer database and have an active fear of the weakness of their company's Internet and Intranet systems.  Fear of letting proprietary information about the company product out on the web paralyzes quite a few supervisors.  Still, possibilities exist within social media applications (SMAs) (Stolley 350) that could be useful to technical writers like me.

The safest proposal to advance tomanagement would involve setting up a wiki on our local, protected Intranet.  On that wiki, both technical writers might be able to share information, post edited photos of new components, and store copies of style guides or other reference documents (Wagner and Schroeder 71).

Additionally, I think that it would help technical writers to use tagging to find what blogs, Twitter, and other new media might be saying about the company products (Stolley 356) (Urbina 3).  If I were to be able to prove the value of letting technical writers bookmark sites for an hour and reviewing the results for a few hours per month (as opposed to limiting ourselves to only revising documentation)(Stolley 356), then we might be able to produce documents that address the needs of the audience.

The problem with both of these proposals will be that most technical writers in today's economy are up to our necks in work.  As Panke and Gaiser mentioned (and Amidon and Blythe before them), many corporate writing groups have “minimal physical presence” (323).  Therefore, asking for something that takes time will be a big request.  Still, as Zarella points out, the price is right because:

“New web technologies have made it easy for anyone to create—and, most importantly—distribute their own content. A blog post, tweet, or YouTube video can be produced and viewed by millions virtually for free.”

References

Panke, S., & Gaiser, B. (2009). With my head up in the clouds: Using social tagging to organize knowledge. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 23(3), 345. doi: 10.1177/1050651909333275

Stolley, K. (2009). Integrating social media into existing work environments: The case of delicious. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 23(3), 356. doi: 10.1177/1050651909333260

Urbina, N. (2010). A super-role for technical communicators. ISTC Communicator,  Retrieved from http://www.farbey.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/ISTC_Supplement_on_Social_Media.pdf

Wagner, C., & Schroeder, A. (2010). Capabilities and roles of enterprise wikis in organizational communication. Technical Communication, 57(1), p.71.

Zarella, D. (2009). Social media marketing book O'Reilly Media, Inc.