I have written
about MindTouch several times (see for example: MindTouch 2009
Provides Enhanced Development Platform for Rich Collaborative Applications). I
recently spoke again with Aaron Fulkerson, their Co-Founder and CEO, on MindTouch 2010. First we set some context for
this latest release.
MindTouch was
first released in 2006 as an Open Source wiki-based platform. The initial goal
was to attract users and this has been achieved with over a l million users in
hundreds of thousands of installations. In 2008 MindTouch began to sell support
subscriptions. Then in 2009 they released a commercial version that sits on top
of the free Open Source core. They discovered that many users were building
product and service documentation with the MindTouch platform. These strategic efforts were used to
engage potential customers, retain them, and increase cost savings through greater
self-service. The decision was
made to create MindTouch 2010 to provide greater capability through an
intelligent platform for this growing use case. I think it was a wise decision.
As Aaron
describes in a recent Forbes article, The
Evolution Of User Manuals, product and service documentation has evolved from a
tactical cost center to a revenue generating strategic tool. The advent of
online documentation has learned with this transformation. Now you can apply SEO to the
documentation to proactively attract potential customers and MindTouch has done
this. You can also track their pathway through the documentation to determine
their areas of interest and offer appropriate solutions, another area that
MindTouch supports.
Aaron writes that some
companies that he has spoken to report that their documentation brings in over
50% of qualified leads. He also notes that in his own company receives 70% plus
of our site traffic from organic sources, and our documentation generates more
than half of our overall site traffic. In addition, over half of their lead
generation is driven by our documentation.
I can certainly believe this as I have seen similar
results. This applies to both self-service documentation and that which
supports call center reps. For example, is one company I worked with, the reps who
made full use of the supporting product and service documentation were three
times more likely to cross sell, moving from a below industry average achieved
by the non-users to an above industry average for the documentation users.
MindTounch 2010 has enhanced three major areas to
support this major use case. It now provides new capabilities for
authoring, discovery, and curation of strategic content:
To support authoring MindTouch
2010 offers a multi-user, XML-driven editing platform that supports all rich
media types. Users are able to publish in-a-click from commonly used desktop
tools. The Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) ensures data portability. They also
offer templates and Aaron walked me through some of these. A tutorial template
not only provided short cuts but also offered good instructional format
suggestions. Here is a sample opening
page offering templates.
To support discovery MindTouch
2010 publishes content in a web-based format, dynamically generating navigation
from content semantics and including effective search engine optimization
tools. The enterprise-ready Adaptive Search engine delivers increasingly high
quality results by learning from your users’ behavior.
Content curation is
great new capability. To support this MindTouch 2010
introduces some targeted curation analytics. Customers can analyze their
documentation by quality, aging and customer behavior in aggregate or by
specific topics. You can use
out-of the-box reports can create custom versions. Here are two sample reports
covering aging and rating..
Aaron showed me a few client examples. Autodesk
provides CAD software. They had a large user base. So they provided a MindTouch
powered set of educational services. Based on participants’ interest, they now
can cross sell through the educational materials. The pilot was very successful and now they are rolling the
offering across all products. This is a clever approach.
I like what they are doing. It is a great example
of a company listening to its users to identify an expanding market
opportunity. They not only
listened well but also provided some useful new capabilities to serve this use
case.
Link to original post