How important are business brochures and flyers?

Have you ever met a business person and once you spent an hour chatting with them, you asked for their company's brochure or flyer and they wrote their contact info on a napkin instead?

Having a nice brochure or a flyer to give out to your potential customer is a great idea. Many believe that professionally designed brochures and flyers are expensive, when in reality, it's not that expensive and is a great way to promote your business. There are various ways to creating a brochure or a flyer. One method would be to use Microsoft Word or Microsoft Publisher. You have a few templates to choose from. Or you can hire a professional to do it for you and save yourself time and a headache. There are endless choices and opportunities. You never know, you might even barter with someone and get your brochures and flyers done for low cost or no cost at all :)

Video Testimonials?

Yeah, you read it right, VIDEO testimonials. I just think they are much more effective than written comments from your customers. We live in a society full of lazy readers. If there is anything out there that doesn't take up time reading, people are willing to stop and listen. Have there been a time when you visited a website to read some past customer success stories? How many of those times you just thought to yourself "man, that sounds so fake, the Marketing people really made up some good stuff". So do you have any options? Well, yes, it's called Video Testimonials. Whenever you perform a service or sell your product to a customer, and they are extremely excited about it, you should take the opportunity to 'capture' their testimonial on tape. Just take your handy, dandy video cam - or use a regular photo camera - those usually have video recording built-in and "capture" their comments. I say 'capture' because you don't want to tell the customer that you want to record their comments. If you say 'record', they might get scared, thinking that it's an invasion of privacy or something. Anyway, just say "I would like to capture your comments on video to share with potential clients, if that's ok". They will more likely agree to it - after all, who wouldn't want to be a star of their own show, right?

Is this a new trend? Might be. But it all depends on you and your company. Some companies are old-school - they don't understand how technology works, and they don't want anything to do with it. As long as their computer is on and they can receive email, that's all that matters. But in reality, if your company wants to stay ahead of the competition, they will need to think outside the box and try out new things. Like I've always said, marketing is a experiment after experiment - you try different techniques until you find one that works for YOU.

How little do users read?

So I came upon this article on Jacob Nielsen's website, and read about a study that was done ragarding how users read when they visit a website. Did you know that users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit to your company's website? Scanning the text is more likely a behavior that you would expect from high-literacy users. But websites are designed for ALL the readers out there, aren't they? The research yielded several interesting findings. The Back button is the 3rd most-used feature on the Web. Clicking hypertext links remains the most-used feature, but clicking buttons (on the page) has now overtaken to become the second-most used feature. The reason for this change is the increased prevalence of applications and feature-rich Web pages that require users to click page buttons to access their functionality. Having concise, clear text on a website is crucial to how your customers view your company's image.

Technical Communication in China - Is U.S. in the lead?

Have you ever wondered how the field of technical communication is growing in other countries? I stumbled upon an interview conducted by Keith Hoffman, president of the Madison Wisconsin Four Lakes Chapter, who spoke with George Hayhoe, editor of the Technical Communication Journal, about the emergence of technical communications in China and the forces behind the push for technical communicators.

In October 2002, George Hayhoe led a people-to-people delegation, consisting of 15 technical communicators who visited China. The delegation went for a total of 10 days and stayed in three cities which included Shanghai, Beijing, and Guilin. They spent approximately three days in each city and met with the professional delegation. The main goal was to get a general overview of technical communication in China. In the earlier visit to China which was in 1997, another delegation group consisted mostly of academics found that there was a great deal of interest in technical communication in China, but not many universities taught technical communication at that time. And there were not very many people who worked for a company who practiced technical communication.

During the 2002 trip, the delegation found that technical communication is virtually unknown in China. It’s the scientists and engineers who mainly take on the role of writers. They produce reports, journals, and books, and the science writers are more or less called journalists, who write for the general public, but there is nobody really who writes user documentation for software. To these people, this side of our profession is relatively unknown. One of the questions that Keith Hoffman brought up was – Do you see this changing in the near future? Hayhoe said that China is beginning to change, and that this is becoming more common for the Chinese companies to recognize the need for user documentation as they begin to market their products in the West. It will be a while for companies to recognize the need for technical communicators until they see the value in the field. The main problem is that there are not enough native English speakers who know the Chinese language to be able to do translations successfully. Technical communication may very well be outsourced to the U.S.

The most recent trip to China (2008) was led by Linda Oestreich, an STC Fellow and Delegation leader. Linda and her team of 15 technical communicators visited the same three cities as George Hayhoe in 2002, but they also visited the Peking University in Beijing. After hearing presentations from University professors and graduate students, they concluded that Chinese companies use a lot of visual communication. The Chinese believe that their approach to technical communication needs to be more visual because of the language difficulty and different literacy levels amongst the Chinese people.
In China, the top requirement for communication is accessibility, which means making content comprehensible to a wide audience. What’s interesting is that they say that the content must be designed to:
• Entertain
• Inform
• Create interest
• Be usable
Notice how “entertain” is at the top of the list. The Chinese audience is more visually oriented and those from the West are more text oriented. Do you agree?
The thing that was most interesting to me was a quote made by Lai Mao-Sheng, a professor at Peking University, who said “We have two very different ideas about technical communication. In China, technical communication is more about communicating with the people. In U.S., technical communication is about products in technology and business.

Tips on keeping your site user-friendly

A lot of people ask me, how do I make sure that my site is user-friendly? And I always give them the same 3 tips:

1. Keep it simple - don't clutter your site with information which potentially might overwhelm the reader.
2. Use light colors - use contrast throughout the site. Dark text on light backgrounds work best.
3. Don't lose the reader - there is nothing worse than having a user click through a dozen of different pages to get to the information. Present all the important information in chunks (categories). Remember only about 10% of visitors will actually read the homepage of your site.

My new site is up!

Hey all,

I've had quiet a few requests for writing and so I finally got my website up. Check it out: www.Miiaweb.com

To join or not to join?

I recently became a member of STC. Those of you who don't know what that is, STC stands for Society for Technical Communication. If you are a student, I encourage you to join. There is a lot of neat stuff that the organization offers (aside from paying just $50 membership fee for us students).

Logon to their website at: www.stc.org

Useful web casts

My professor gave us a link to the following site, which contains some pretty good web casts on Usability (something I wish to pursue in my career). Check it out!

http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/pastwebcast.asp

Who Am I?

Hello!

I am Marina and I am a Freelance Tech Writer! Well, I am in school now, pursuing a Master's in English: Technical Communication degree, and loving every bit of it! Who knew writing could be so awesome? I know many people HATE documentation and putting together manuals, but I LOVE that stuff!

I love to be able to share information with other new tech writers. Students like me, or anyone who is interested in pursuing this fabulous field.

So sit, back, relax, and don't forget to contribute to my blog...I would love your feedback!