Being in the TeleSeminar field there are a limited number of FAQs so the answers are also limited and also very useful when available in real time as you suggest.

I recommend using a service like http://post.ly or its big brother http://www.posterous.com to send longer messages in real time to Twitter.

It would send the title of your message to Twitter, along with a link, immediately. The full text of the instructions appear on the posterous site. People can easily retweet the title and link, but you can continue to edit and improve the full length message on Posterous.

Very easy to use. I haven’t explained it very well — try it out! (I use it for my blog, and all of my posts automatically and immediately appear on Twitter too.)

We tweet the release notes on the main company Twitter account. We’ve thought about having a separate one for the documentation tweets, but that just makes life more complicated for our customers, with too many feeds to follow. If we were tweeting more often, though, it may make sense to have a separate account.

Thanks for the Twitter link! I’m following it now.

Cheers
Sarah

Thanks for your thoughts on this topic. Using Twitter for release notes is a great idea. Where do you put them: on a main company feed, or do you have a separate one for docs or tech support (don’t answer if it’s proprietary!)?

It sure looks more and more to me that hashtags are a basic requirement for any tech doc tweet. Your experience is a prime example. Now you’ve got me thinking about them more. It’s just one more thing to add to the list for planning doc setup. IMO, content management is becoming increasingly important; one needs to manage information down to the smallest detail – even hashtags.

My Twitter feed goes along with this blog. It’s http://twitter.com/2moroDocs. Thanks for asking! I use it primarily for sharing tech information. I view Twitter as an indispensible tool. For me, it’s a time-saving way to keep up with IT trends. It’s replaced my morning paper, so to speak. I now start the day quickly perusing the different topics and read what people have found to share, and to just keep up periodically through the day. So I think that putting doc-related info in tweets just makes sense these days.

This is great stuff. I’ve read your other posts on using Twitter too. It’s something we’ve been experimenting with in various ways. We’ve used Twitter to publish our release notes, in much the same way as you’ve used it for procedures. So each feature in a new release will become a single tweet, with a hash tag to link them all together. If someone searches for the tag, they get all the items in a series. Voila, the release notes! Of course, we publish the release notes document in a more formal format too. (In our case, that’s our documentation wiki.)

Your point about “going where your users are” is the one that rings true to me. Using Twitter is a great way of engaging the readers in the documentation. They feel involved and empowered to make their own comments and contributions. That’s social documentation.

Are you on Twitter yourself? I did a Twitter search and found quite a few Julie Norrises, but I’m not sure which one is you.

Cheers, Sarah

I think that your note about using real-time information to deliver better products is spot-on. Collaboration, with users in particular, is becoming the new rule of the day. From my short little real-time writing experiment, I can tell you that it’s wild. On a large scale, it would be challenging to manage. That’s why I think it’s good to start working with it right away.

Some great ideas here.

One of the attractions of Twitter (and real-time information flow) is that you get feedback much more quickly.

Compare this to a book you print, send out, and maybe, maybe, maybe… get some feedback – but, usually not.

The use of ‘Twitter’ inside organizations is something lm looking to explore this year.

How can we use it to share/exchange information almost instantly to correct, refine and deliver better products?

Of course, just as I write this I thought – isn’t that what Google Wave’s for?

Hmmm, need to think this through…

Bye
Ivan