Louis Marascio of LugIron Software points out that companies lose important customer attention and interaction when people can’t easily find what they need:

The majority of documentation today is published in one or two channels: PDF and WebHelp. This content is usually distributed on the corporate web site, after which the writers set to work on the next release.

Users, however, are finding their answers in forums, on wikis, on Twitter, and in other communities where people share information. It’s not because the documentation doesn’t contain the answers, in fact a lot of time forum messages that solve a problem are either links to specific references in documentation or a summary of the content available there. The true problem is that of distribution, search, and findability.

Organizations can attract consistent customer attention by treating documentation, community, and marketing as complementary parts of a larger process:

1. Replace traditional marketing output with authoritative, helpful information that directly solves customer problems and establishes the organization’s authority.
2. Treat documentation as a gateway that potential customers can use to understand a product, and find answers to their questions.

It makes sense for the people who know how to get the message out to work with the people who are producing valuable information, so it has the best chance of serving as the starting point for relevant conversation that 1) helps customers be more successful and 2) informs the future development of both a product and its documentation.

Photo by Michael Steele/Getty Images (Source: Denver Post)