@dirk asked for feedback on a tech post today, and thought I’d share an example of one I think is really well done–check out this visual walkthrough and tone from Forrst: http://createsend.com/t/y-A0BBE2324F4C466C
I think it is a great post for a non technical audience.
@dirk what is the audience of the technical posts? To make non-tech people understand what’s going on, or only to speak to the tech folks?
I think tech posts have the opportunity to express how tech features help users–which is largely a non-technical audience. What say you?
I think we have a mixed crowd.
On the one hand we want to explain to people without tech knowledge what is going on, while on the other hand we want to give enough information for someone that is knowledgeable about tech stuff to draw feedback and give opportunity for engagement.
I also think that they way you did the Marvin message was great. First 1/3 was for everyone, said what was needed, explained the how and the why of what you’d been doing.
Then, with a very clear “okay folks, unless you’re interested in tech detail, you can stop reading now” you then led into the rest of the message, which was a good balance, I reckon.
There are different types of posts / information:
(1) We’ve built something new that you can use. That’s the category that the forrst post falls into. Screenshots, non-tech language, etc. all make sense for those. Maybe our posts weren’t quite as nice as the forrst one, but I think we’ve done a pretty good job doing these whenever we released a big new thing (course UX, badges, etc.).
(2) We’re in the process of building / fixing / doing. This might affect you in the future. There is also a need to keep everyone in the loop with tech development on a regular basis. Currently we have a tech call right before community call and then Dirk copies our notes over into the community etherpad. We’ve been trying to make those notes better (so they make sense to someone who wasn’t on the tech call) but there is still room for improvement. Weekly blog posts would be overkill for this.
If we do these two well, is anything missing in the way we communicate tech stuff?