Communications Is So Big

As I look for a new position (hire me!), I spend a lot of time thinking about how to position myself. I started in technical writing, and I’ll always love it. I spent years doing developer advocacy, and that connection to users on the pointy end of our products is so real I can’t imagine trying to do without it. I love learning enough new technology to understand how it changes business processes. Training and teaching are a part of my life as far back as I can remember.

I’ve decided that the problem is not that my experience is too scattered, but that we have too many silos around “communications”. Communicating with a software user is everything from user interface to technical support. However, that is too many jobs all at once, so we divide it up into categories. The problem with the categories is that we forget that they are all on a continuum, and stop treating them all as “comms”.

The comms continuum

This still isn’t inclusive, but I think it demonstrates why an all-purpose communicator can end up searching for the right job title.

• User interface
  • Usability
  • Accessibility
  • Microtext
• Technical writing
  • Admin docs
  • User docs
  • Reference docs
• Technical education
  • User training
  • Support training
• Marketing
  • Purchaser marketing
  • User marketing
  • Category marketing
  • Sales enablement/training
  • Social marketing
  • Partner marketing
  • Event marketing
• Ongoing comms
  • Community management
  • Updates and upgrades
  • Social media
  • Press
  • Support

Of course, each of those is not just its own role, it can break out into a whole department, depending on how big your organization is.

But wait

Because all these roles touch users at different points, it would be immensely useful if the information you collect could feed back to an appropriate part of the product team. For example, if I were running socials for a brand that drastically changed their interface and was hearing a lot of chatter about how much people resented it, I’d want a channel to push that feedback to the UX team. If I was setting up partner webinars and they started using a new industry term, I’d want to be able to share that with PMM and category marketing and probably sales.

It’s easy to default to thinking of comms as the company communicating to the outside world, but we shouldn’t neglect information that could flow the other way.

So?

If you’re a communicator, look around at what you’re doing and see if there are ways you can communicate what you’re hearing back to the organization. If you’re hiring communicators, ask about their breadth of experience as well as their depth. You may be surprised by what else someone has to offer.