I, too, share your enthusiasm for the social web and the ways it can provide direct access to our audence. I am even more passionate about the ways the social web can assist product development, in the best spirit of the agile methodology.

I’ve already dropped by your excellent blog several times and will continue to read your timely thoughts. Thanks, in the meantime, for dropping by here and for your detailed feedback. –Peg

I believe social media can “power up” our efforts to write customer-facing doc, or assist customers in writing doc themselves. This shift likely means tech comm departments will further align with customer support, sales and marketing, or training and education, which may dictate the level of involvement in social media.

What may end up happening is that tech comm’s content will be the most desired and requested content by users. Then, the overarching content strategy will simply have a social media publishing strategy within it.

Who knows what the future holds? It sure is an exciting time to be a technical communicator.

The hybrid role you mention of trainer, techical support, and editor is already arriving, with the advent of social media. It seems to me that other groups, including marketing, customer support, and professional services, are already starting to use social media to fullfill these merged functions, and that technical communicators, by virtue of where we are placed in the organization (not customer-facing), will lag behind these other disciplines (really as we always have), evolving in this direction.

My view is that technical communicators will continue to write the most technical, back-end docs, for an IT or developer audience, and that the customer-facing doc will more and more be off-loaded to the customer-facing parts of the organization. This has been my experience in small to medium-size companies of late. Larger companies will probably continue to keep some semblance of a centralized technical writing function, even for the customer-facing docs, but to remain viable, technical communicators will need to deliver those docs in formats that users are accustomed to consuming these days (shorter quick reference docs and podcasts, as Tom Johnson suggests, or where applicable, interactive formats).

Part of the reason I am blogging about marketing and technical communication here, is because I see many more of my traditional technical documentation functions in the marketing discipline these days. As far as a hybrid role, I attended a wonderful MarketingProfs webinar on Customer Experience Management, which provides a framework for the kind of merged functions you mention.