Mark Fidelman
EVP Sales of MindTouch. Mark has advised many start ups including a social networking site that was sold to Barry Diller's IAC. Before joining MindTouch, Mark led global sales efforts as an Executive Vice President for a publicly traded company, headed sales efforts for a technology division of AT Kearney and EDS, and served as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for a Singapore based corporation. Mark blogs at Seek Omega
ThinkPassenger Private Full Service Enterprise 2.0 Communities
ThinkPassenger’s red velvet rope approach is unique in the industry. It requires corporations to shed the megaphone approach to customer messaging and to connect with their customers one on one. They make it exclusive, fun and rewarding to both company and participant. It’s typically full service, private and very exclusive. Think “privileged”. It begins with [...]
Why Product Documentation Needs to be More Like a University and Less of a Textbook
If you want to learn how to program software for the first time would you read an outdated textbook or attend a Computer Science class? Would you go at it alone or involve your peers? Would you teach yourself or use an expert guide or teacher? If like me you answered each question with mostly [...]
5 Critical Questions to Determine if Your Product Documentation is Strategic
“You’re letting the barbarians control the information about your product.” If you listen to most so called social media guru’s they’ll tell you that resistance is futile. Embrace sites like YouTube, Yahoo Groups, Industry Forums, Product Review sites and other online destinations that are discussing your product or brand without your participation. But why let [...]
The Top 10 Best Technical Documentation Sites of 2010
We polled over 300 Technical Communicators to determine the best documentation sites on the web. If you’re looking for the best product or service documentation sites, look no further than the sites below. The winner, Microsoft was chosen by Technical Communicators due it’s great search capabilities, product coverage is excellent and it’s easy to use. [...]
6 Ways Smart Technical Communicators Will Become Invaluable
Would you use Microsoft Word to build your organization’s website? If you don’t use Microsoft Word to build your website then why do you use it to build content for your online product documentation? According to our survey , 56% of Technical Communicators use Word. Why? Because it’s easy to use. But it’s not an [...]
How well do you know Technical Communicators and their tools?
A few months ago we conducted a survey of over 300 Technical Communicators from a cross section of industries and company sizes. The results surprised us. Not only did we learn that most Technical Communicators believe that in order to use Wiki’s you needed to know Wiki text, but that they were rarely using any [...]
Is Your Technical Communication Career a Dead End?
“You’re position in the company is of little value,” he said indifferently neither in attempt to injure or blame but merely in the tone of stating a situational fact as he’d say to another man, ‘you’ll always be worthless you can’t help it. It’s in your blood.’ Or to be more scientific, your conditioned that [...]
10 Questions to Ask Technical Communicators Delusional Enough to Believe They Don’t Need to be on Twitter
According to a recent Edison Research study 51% of active Twitter users follow companies, brands or products on social networks. That means they are most likely following your brand and your product. That means they are discussing how, why, when and where they use your product and service. And you’re not there? Twitter now has [...]
Stop Wasting Money on Community Building – 5 Powerful Reasons to Use Social Documentation Instead
Every major brand is struggling to launch a community site around their company’s products. Maybe it’s an indirect community that you hope brings traffic and future sales, or maybe it’s a community about your product that has been designed to increase sales. But unless you are a very big brand with a passionate following (e.g. [...]
Why Technical Communicators will need a Enterprise 2.0 Content Curation Strategy
Ever wonder how Wikipedia maintains such a high degree of quality material on any given subject? They have an army of unpaid content curators. They also have you. The all-volunteer team of curators is constantly checking new submissions to ensure they meet the rules that Wikipedia established that were designed to prevent self-promotion, that articles [...]
5 Powerful Project Management Features You can only do on UnaWave (Google Wave)
Google Wave has been lambasted for its lack of a killer app or specific business use case. A new application built on Google Wave seeks to become that first killer app. UnaWave is a new work management solution built on Google Wave. They call it work management since it’s been developed to work the way [...]
All you need to know about Chatter –Salesforce.com’s Collaboration Cloud
I’ve had two experiences with Marc Benioff. One positive and one less so. The positive experience dealt with Marc taking a direct role in helping a friend of mine find a job within Salesforce. Marc didn’t have to but he did it because he cares about hiring great people. The second experience was in the [...]
Imagine there’s no I.T.
Imagine there’s no IT responsibility, it’s easy if you try No software to install, only cloud software to buy Imagine all your employees, working on the fly Imagine there’s no Microsoft Office, it isn’t hard to do Nothing to download and install, and no updates too Imagine all of your employees, working online to get [...]
Operation Enterprise 2.0 – How to Save The Corporate Patient
Many corporate champions liken the process of implementing Enterprise 2.0 solutions to corporate surgery. The corporate patient realizes that an operation is needed, but may procrastinate until on life support. It’s the enterprise equivalent of ignoring the pain to prolong the inevitable. It doesn’t have to be. In fact, I’ve created a simple E2.0 operating [...]
Is Microblogging for Your Organization? Dan Keldsen Answers
Never short of an opinion on Enterprise 2.o topics, Dan Keldsen tells it like it is. It’s refreshing to hear an unvarnished opinion on topics concerning today’s corporations and Dan doesn’t disappoint. When we spoke a few weeks ago, Dan was more than happy to share. I am breaking up our discussion into two distinct [...]
