Category Archives: STC

Society for Technical Communication

STC Spectrum 2014 – Leadership Day

I have traveled so much this spring that everything between March and April are a huge blur in memory, photos, Facebook posts, and Tweets. This year is going to be the year that I go on my conference presentation run and, quoting Todd DeLuca, “get my presentation legs.”

Spectrum 2014 – STC Rochester

Many thanks go to the organizers and volunteers of the STC Rochester – Spectrum 2014 Conference. Their planning and dedication made this event a nice full-stop mini conference. Both John Lukes and Bobbi Werner, conference co-chairs, did a great job organizing everything. From Leadership Day, Keynote Speech, and Lightning Talks, I had a great time attending sessions and networking with as many professionals as possible. I will talk about the rest of the conference in a later post.

I was happy to present three times during Spectrum. The venue for Spectrum is on the wonderful Rochester Institute of Technology campus. Next time I return, I will take time to venture the campus when it’s not raining or snowing. 🙂

For Leadership Day, I presented on “Leveraging Social Media to Advance Your Organization,” which is a slight off-shoot from my co-presented webinar and progression from last year with Viqui Dill. I move away from my original presentation from 2009 which introduced people to social media, now I’m introducing people to social media as an extension of an organization’s website. In addition, I show how to use social media effectively and nearly automatically to promote an organization’s website. I explain the similarities to the Hub and Spoke distribution method, where the website is the hub and all the social channels are the spokes.

STC Spectrum 2014 - Leadership Day Photo

Roger presenting the hub and spoke analogy for websites and social media. Photo: David Caruso

During the first day of Spectrum, there was an inside joke (and here) about the Niagara Escarpment–which was supposedly started by Ben Woelk and then continued by Bernard Aschwanden, and myself. According to a few colleagues, they like the word “escarpment.” In my view, it’s a geology term which I know from my undergraduate days (note: I was only one semester away from a minor in Earth Science, but instead I minored in Spanish Studies and History). A few other presenters mentioned it in their sessions too, even created a QR code for it.

Lastly, I want to thank Ben Woelk for inviting me to present during this year’s Leadership Day. I really enjoyed the variety of talks during the first day, ranging from discussing ideas, planning for an organization, volunteering challenges, and conflict resolution. I also felt quite comfortable presenting because I’ve been around many of these colleagues before.

I’ll write more about my insight about attending STC Spectrum 2014 in a later post.

Below is my presentation and handout from Leadership Day.

STC PMC – “Seeking Sunshine in Cloud Tech”

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As technical communicators upgrade technologies, one thing we should consider is moving to the cloud. Before soaring into the clouds, we should take a moment and find out more about the history of cloud technology, the tools we currently use, and what cloud tools are available to increase our productivity and maximize our return on investment (time and money). In this presentation I gave to the 2014 Mid-Atlantic Technical Communication Conference, I went into the details about cloud technology, the pitfalls, and provide insight from fellow technical communicators on their usage of cloud technology.

I also want to give many thanks to the STC Philadelphia Metropolitan Chapter for putting together such an amazing event this year. They were kind and gracious to accommodate me in Pennsylvania to present. Many thanks goes to the conference chairs, board members, and volunteers who set this conference up.

If you have never been to a professional conference, I highly recommend starting out with regional conferences and this one is very accessible to many technical communicators within the Washington DC, Philadelphia, and New York metropolitan areas. We had such a great time at the conference, Danielle Villegas felt the conference was better than the previous year. As an added bonus and I am quoting Barrie Byron on an earlier conversation, these weekend conferences offer “high value and are low cost.” The return on investment is extremely great. Why not attend one?

Now, the presentation. If you want to check out more presentations from this year’s Mid-Atlantic Technical Communication Conference, almost all of the slide decks are uploaded on SlideShare and tagged as STCPMC14.

Warning #1: Spoiler Alert

If you plan to attend the STC 2014 Spectrum Conference, attend my session and skip these slides. If you are unable to see my talk, feel free to check my slide deck below.

Warning #2: Spoiler Alert

Using Meta Description Tags

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Ever wonder how Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+ makes (or not makes) your posts pretty when you share a website link? Social media sites rely on meta description tags on websites to help figure out what to add in that preview box under your post. If a website has a poorly written description or no description at all, the preview box will look pretty boring or embarrassingly sad.

What about STC? This description is not helpful.

Meta tags are helpful for search engine optimization (SEO). They are also great when used correctly for both keywords and description! People who share your information on social media sites will love you forever if you properly write a meta description. The added benefit is that you will get better search results too. Not doing so leaves us to wonder if your content is useful to be posted on social media or if we can understand what you are writing about when we browse search results.

What is going on with this search result entry???

If a book can be judged by its cover, a webpage can be judged by the meta description when Facebook, Google+, or LinkedIn parses it before you click Post. It’s all about appearances! How tidy (or untidy) your website looks will determine how successful it is against the countless websites out there.

Facebook Preview Box: STC Keynote from STC Summit

Notice that the name repeats itself in the description. Facebook is scraping data from the website to generate the description content. Why do we need redundancy in the redundant department office?

In order to make your descriptions look better online, you need to add this meta description tag to each webpage between the <head> </head> tags.

<meta name=”description” content=”Replace this content with a carefully crafted description of the page using fewer than or up to 155 characters and spaces.”>

Social media websites pull information from a webpage that you are about to share in order to make your post more interesting. Those sites read the information from the meta description tag and sometimes chooses an image from the page to insert in the preview box for your post.

Most content management systems have the ability to create descriptions, yet most do not come with this feature installed. Instead, I use a WordPress plugin called WordPress SEO by Yoast to add metadata to my website. Before publishing a post or page, I include a short description and keywords. The plugin also helps you out!

Here are some examples of meta descriptions tags as seen on Facebook and Google, both good and bad.

STC Election

The description is great, but it’s poorly worded. I would not post this page on Facebook using that description. Even the title is not helpful in this case.