you bet i do that is a good practice and when you're we're hosting meetings so and presentations yes yes yes all right well let's go ahead and get started stephen and thank you very much everyone all righty welcome everyone to another episode of mvp meetup uh knowledge20 and this one will be writing community articles something near and dear to my heart so let's get started in the old safe harbor thing just make sure everyone knows that whatever i say or do here is on your own if you try it this is me i am a long time author a five year mvp with servicenow in the community i am also an acts ask the expert contributor and i've written over 160 articles out on the uh out on the community and many many more to come i have 11 topics i teach actually 12 now and i am certified in a number of uh different things so i uh i'm also a senior servicenow architect for north american worldwide practice at accenture okay so what we're going to be talking about here is basically how to get started in the world of writing blog articles um why you even want to do this what kind of topics can you write about and then you know article organization so actually setting down and understanding how to assemble the article in the best way to engage your reader and to impart the information to the reader successfully also maybe even how to do a little bit of entertainment in the process and then um how do i ever find time to write i am a senior technical uh director type individual and i've got a lot going on in my plate you know as far as work is concerned how do i carve out enough time to be able to actually do these things so i've got some thoughts on that i thought i'd impart to you how i manage anyway and then uh where do you take this i mean okay great i'm writing an article or written an article now what you know what are the options available to me how can i uh take this to the next level so let's get started all right and they'll do exactly that getting started all right so why should i write anything you know what's what's the big deal well i've got something i found in servicenow let's say i'm excited about it i'm passionate about the platform i want to convey this information to the rest of the world and that is really the foundation for uh wanting to uh write an article i mean it's the desire behind the thing right so the big one is knowledge transfer obviously you've got something really great that you want to impart to people and you want to take what you learned and be able to be the first one to leap out there and say i'm the guy who's going to write this and uh therefore you know i'm the person who's going to do the knowledge transfer i'm going to be the one who actually uh shows this to the rest of the world for the first time all right so there you go uh the final one is get points if people like your article on the community you get points for it and you move up in the community ecosystem and you eventually get into an area where you'll be recognized as an mvp and i'll get to that here to taking it to the next step um one of the things i want you to be careful of is corporate policy um my company has a very strict policy on what i can impart uh the first thing i got to watch out for is these are my ideas not the ideas of my employer so i went out and looked up uh corporate policy for accenture and said okay what do i got you know what i got to do to be able to publish articles the first one was it needed to be approved by management um the second one was is that i needed to be careful not to impart any intellectual property and then the final one was i had to stamp on my article that this was my own idea and it has nothing to do with the company i work for so you will see things like that when i publish an article i have that boilerplate on the very front end of my article stating that these are my ideas and not accenture's ideas so watch out for your corporate policy that when you're publishing you're not violating your company's rules and getting yourself in trouble also i go out to google the internet and i take a look and see if anything has been done on the article i'm writing about one out of 20 of my ideas turns out to not to be unique i work a lot with the advanced stuff so there's not a lot written on it but i go out and i look anyway just in case and what i usually find is a bunch of people asking the question that i'm about to solve for them in the article so i keep tabs on those so that i can go back and say hey you want to answer this go read my article and that helps point to my article and get more points out of it plus helps them get their problem solved um so be diligent make sure they're not replicating the wheel out there and in the same manner don't reuse someone else's stuff in other words if you're creating an article and you go out and plagiarize someone else's article and put it in your name that's no good so don't do that you'll get caught at it it's embarrassing you'll be discredited you know just stay away from that it's not necessary so i'm real careful about that due diligence tells me if anyone's written on this before if they have uh it's usually inside the servicenow community in which case i go and like their article because they already thought of something great you know hey my article you know i was gonna go do it it must be great right so they've already done the work and i'm gonna go recognize them for it and that's just being a good citizen out on the community all right now um the number one place to begin writing for you is to join first off the servicenow community if you're not a member the second one is to join a users group and the users group you automatically have the ability to blog there so what's really cool about that is this is how i got started back in 2015 writing uh articles seriously so uh this is kind of humorous i um i started writing articles out there uh we have maybe 200 members in the servicenow users group that are real members they really exist you can uh you know they work in companies around the north dallas area and it's uh you know it's a pretty robust group and they're pretty active um thank you lisa and uh lisa's putting stuff into the chat uh what was interesting about it was is that uh you know i've started writing articles and putting them out on the servicenow users group north americans or north texas servicenow users group and uh started driving traffic to the users group and people started joining users groups that were from all over the world just so they could be clued as to when something got written and published i when i hit article number 50 i got contacted by the community management and asked if they could move all my articles out of the servicenow users group and into the various uh categories like you know development and everything else and they would give me access to those areas to blog in those areas and i said sure you know but uh i said so why are you doing this and they said well you've got over 1 000 members now in the service now users group or texas and you're driving a tremendous amount of traffic away from our old our other blogs so we'd like the traffic to drive to the right location not to the users group so there you go you know you can start out in the users group you start getting recognized by management on the servicenow community side and they'll help you get access to the rest of the blogging area also another thing you need to do is if you know to get started is look to see what people are asking questions about that's usually one of my favorite areas to go and look for ideas that and i teach and when i teach i get asked really wild questions and it makes me go look up stuff and figure things out and then i'll write an article about it but i've gone out and monitored the main page to see you know someone's got a problem and they can't solve it i'll go out and i'll uh create a uh article based on a solution that i've created so i'll go out and mess around and get it figured out and if it's solvable a lot of times when i see it it is solvable it's just that i don't have an article wrapped around it yet and i've got a piece of code that will fix their problem this allows me to actually go write an article to help more than just them so if i answer that question that's one thing but if i go and write an article about it i help everybody and that's that's the bigger deal all right um also you know there's uh you know reviewing how others have written their articles so you know there's me i'm kind of i'm an example of someone who does this quite often i have my own style and my own method don't take that as the way you need to do things necessarily but i try to pattern most of my articles um that i'm writing for you know like my um mini labs that i do i try to pattern them kind of after the way servicenow does uh labs so if you go out to the developer site you'll see they're learning their e-learning side of things and so i write my articles in such a way that's step one step two step three and we'll get into how i organize things but that's you know that's kind of the idea i go and think about these things um one of the things you're going to do is uh go out to and get your own personal developer instance from the developer.servicenow.com uh if you don't have one already and you're looking to write an article that's where i go solve my the problems that i find or that i've run across i want other people to replicate what i teach them so if i'm teaching something in my article or i'm doing a lab or something i want a nice example that actually works to be able to give them not just bits and pieces and say here figure out the rest yourself i hand the whole answer to them when i do my articles i i feel like this is much more productive much more useful so i i do all this on my personal developer instance really helps a lot you can install an application there so i've done discovery i've done service mapping i've done event management i've done all these different things on my personal instance and actually you know um it's really easy to install these things and i've i learned a lot just putting together my articles uh i think i know the answer to something generally i have a sort of working eye principle or idea and then i'll work out the problems on it and get it working um it has an interesting side effect i usually find a bug or two inside servicenow and i get to report that so famous you know um then finally you know playing just playing on servicenow uh trying out something new and then relating your uh experiences to the rest of the world so what do i write about that segues into this again you can do processes you know i've done several process articles on how to do software development life cycle for example it's things i know things i have experience with i've been in the industry now 38 years i have a lot i can bring to the table that is servicenow centric i've done 10 years of service now and i've actually got to apply all of this experience into the servicenow arena so quality assurance and testing and everything else i know a lot about this area and therefore i just bring what i know and i say okay this is how i've made this work inside servicenow so you'll see my process documents my patterns documents my procedures best practices stuff and that's you know that's one kind of article you could write um i'll do you know something on an application so i'll explore you know discovery for a little while or i'll just i'll explore my experiences with source mapping or you know i'll just pick one of the applications to start working through it i do a lot on topics like scripting i mean i've got a gazillion articles on scripting 50 60 articles just on scripting i'll pick on a topic like glide records and explore the topic to exhaustion i write what i know and what i understand and what i run into so that's the best approach for you because then you're the expert on the topic you're actually writing about okay organization so here uh what you do is you pick where you're gonna write now if all you've got is a servicenow users group right there don't stop with one article don't get wore out and just say oh i can't do it you know what happened to me i i went out there and the first week i published three articles next week i published three articles next week i published three articles i have a stack of over 200 topics that i've run across right now that i have not published on yet and these are ones i'm allowed to publish on they're not intellectual property they're things i've run into the platform they're things that i've solved uh their ideas i've had their processes you know things on the way i think they should be organized or whatever but you get the idea you know i just uh i just take that idea and i begin moving it around on a piece of paper um no microsoft word so i give it a title i give it you know i put in my company's policy boilerplate it's like a line and a half i always have an introduction what is what am i trying to convey what am i trying to do and i'm real palsy whales you on this stuff man i'm not kidding about the you know make it light because this is usually pretty technical so it's kind of like oh you know dry as a bone good insomnia cure you know that kind of stuff make it light you know throw in a little bit of humor um it's okay to do that uh i it's called a hook it grab the attention of your audience and and make them want to read what you're conveying to them but you want to be succinct you don't want to be worthy about it you want to say this is you know this is what i'm doing this is how i solved it in it cool and then i began talking about possible approaches i took to a particular problem and the failures that were involved so that my audience doesn't go well why didn't you do this or why didn't you do that and i show them my process which is really important sometimes to a technical solution to make sure that people understand what you tried and then what actually worked um so you know what what research should i throw in you know it's always good to throw in an article there may be more than one solution if you have a solution and then a better solution go ahead and give that you know start out with the the one solution and then go to the next one and the next one and then finish off with your best solution and then finally make sure you do this as step by step and don't leave anything else out i usually go back and i um i look at my step-by-step as i'm putting it in and i'll tweak it or add bits to it or whatever as i go down and you know some of these are very simple that i've done some are very very complex i throw in screenshots i throw in extra code i throw in you know process i'll create diagrams in vizio or draw.io pick your flavor and stick it out there and i'm always even though i mark things as advanced or intermediate i take it from the perspective i walk you through step by step and i don't assume anything so yes it can be tedious yes it can be a pain in the rear to actually convey the information sometimes that's part of this process if you want to write the article make sure that you give your audience everything necessary to be successful at it so it may be tough for you but to them that's gold and you're implying you're imparting that piece of information to them that's gold so to them they're mining for this information and they just found it and they were successful with your article all right finally wrap it all up conclusion make sure they know exactly what you've uh just accomplished how cool the accomplishment was and they get to celebrate with you on it okay so how do i find time to do all this stuff um yeah off hours and it's because i'm passionate about the platform and i'm passionate about what i do it's not really a hobby but at the same time i'll take time i'll just go take time you know if i'm not working on a certification or something like that i'll sit down and watch a football game during the fall i've written more articles watching american football and you can shake a stick at and it makes some good background noise and uh so you know i'm trying to do something important here which is i'm trying to take the information i know and give it to everybody and yeah i get noticed for that but at the same time i'm trying to help out i'm trying to allow someone else to get across the finish line with whatever they're working on with whatever problem they're trying to solve and that's important to me so i'm passionate about the whole thing write all your ideas down keep a notepad and pencil buyer bed stand or whatever and you know you dream about the answers wake up and think of an idea write it down but uh keep track of all the topics uh that you know and would like to write about um build up a list like i said i've got over 200 things i haven't written about yet then i'm really interested in writing about sometimes i'll get a piece of code i'll stick it under my title and leave it to the time when i can get to it uh other times i'll have most of an article i'll just keep writing on it you know i'll just keep saying oh yeah and then i'm going to put this in and then i'll put this in and then eventually i've got like 80 of the way there and it's just a matter of polishing on an event publishing um so article outlines you know my introduction you know everything else but the core piece is usually when i come up with first my solution is first finally don't be afraid to write absolutely don't be afraid to write that stops a lot of people they sit there and go oh no one's gonna look at my stuff well that happens i rolled an article out once i'd spent a tremendous amount of time on it and it had 30 hits that was it and it stayed that way for a very long time and i was a little disappointed but it had 30 hits 30 people looked at my article and several of them liked it they got help from it so cool you know i helped if i help at least one person i'm doing great right so don't be afraid to write you're gonna get it wrong first time probably or you're gonna you know if you feel like you've messed up or if you feel like you didn't convey it right there's an edit button and you can go back and correct your article so i've done that multiple times where someone's found a bug in my code or a problem with what i said and said hey wait a minute you forgot all about this over here and it's usually something i didn't know about i had to go figure it out and incorporate it in my article i've even had the to the point of totally rewriting articles before because i got something completely wrong in my perception on how it worked so don't be afraid of getting it wrong don't be afraid to write your article um stick it out there take the criticism even if uh you know i haven't ever had anyone be vitriolic about something i've published and you know go do the work and fix it up um later on as you get better and better at your writing uh you can go back and revisit an article and rework it so that it is better written you know but you got to start someplace and getting your name out there is the best best thing to do um tackling large topics the final element of this it's a biggie um i get uh so to speak i get into these twists where like i did a bunch of stuff on strings and string manipulation and libraries that exist in servicenow but we don't have access to and how to get at it and all that other stuff i ended up with five articles on strings and the reason was because i kept finding things you know okay here's one way to do it there's another way to do it there's another way to do it there's another way to do it and all of them were once i tried out inside servicenow and decided you know i'm going to make this work and it has some interesting side effects on it uh ended up doing some pretty serious in-house work on strings for one of our customers and that was like after i put the final dot on an eye inside of my last article and published it out about two weeks later i had a major uh project come up inside of one of our clients that used the exact code i had just written for an article so i just went copy paste and had waffle rolling with my article but um neat stuff is to be able to break this up you're not committed to writing the monolithic gargantuan article uh busted up into smaller pieces okay so where do we go from here um essentially i've published my first article in the servicenow's users group whatever that one is and it's starting to get hits people are starting to say nice things about me they're liking my article and stuff like that publish another one uh keep doing that uh throw a email at me and i'll go take a look at it you know if you've written an article and you published it on your servicenow user group i'm one of the ones who as an mvp i go out and i review articles from time to time and i look at these and i'll you know say thumbs up and good job and oh my gosh what were you doing but anyway and you know i i'm i'm here to help and i'd be happy to you know um talk to you about uh the way you've written your article but if you get to a certain point where we publish four or five of these i can put you into contact with the community people and we can see about getting you ability to blog on other areas so you don't have direct access to itom and uh you know developer and some of these other areas but you can ask questions out there but you're not a blogger so you want to be able to work your way up to the point where you're doing this fairly regularly and contributing to the community and as recognition of that they will open this up so that you can go look and uh blog in these various areas don't forget about ask the expert there are other areas that once you establish yourself in these areas you know the community we need more people in the ask the expert program to actually talk about what they know and uh it's an exciting thing so i do this on a fairly regular basis i bring to you uh what i know uh sometimes it's just what i perceive and you know i talk to a particular topic you get to a certain point and the mvp program kicks in and they will recognize you and if you get selected as an mvp you get a a personal developer instance that never expires for one year so never expires for one year i like that and also uh you get recognized at knowledge as an mvp and then throughout the year as an mvp so there's some nice perks to the mvp program but i got all that from writing articles i wrote over 50 articles got moved over and then got my first recognition in uh january 2016 and it was because of my contribution to the community um also you know as an author show up if you go to knowledge show up to uh the community booth and help out there uh you're you're a person who contributes to the community people have written you know read your articles you're a writer so show up there and be a person of note and help out at the community booth um participate in creatorcon participate in theater now talk about what you know and that's really the segway from writing articles i mean it's getting recognized and standing up in front of people and saying hi everybody you know i'm a technical guy and uh you know here's here's uh what i'm speaking about i was absolutely astonished at the first creator con i ever ran back in 2015 i had 150 people in my session blew me out of my socks um so and then there's the possibility of speaking at the users groups so whatever user group you joined you have that ability to go and actually speak there and be recognized for what you know okay that's pretty much it um let's open it up for a few questions here we got a couple of minutes before i have to run yes and um you can unmute yourself or you can type it into the chat um but i can't offer this if you're going well what's an ask the expert event um that's me so if you all are interested in trying to learn a little bit more about that just you know you can shoot me an email um as well as i can also control the blogging so that's me as well yeah she's the one you go to by the way if you want access to blog on an area but really you know the constraint is you've got to establish yourself a little bit as a writer they'll move your articles free out of the servicenow users group area but uh you know if you're serious about writing lisa is your go-to person on that yeah any other questions we've got about just two more a little less than two minutes i'll post this deck out for everybody and um if you take a look you can save the chat and lisa has put a whole bunch of things into the chat links wise if you uh do a right next to the file down there if you never use zoom there is a tri-lips if you just click on that and uh it's it's got a save in it and it will save it to disk that way you can hang on the links and plus we'll post this presentation out for you to be able to download okay everybody well thank you for your time and i appreciate it and uh hope to see you blogging out there that'd be great we need more authors we need more more people to participate in this venue it is a rare one we have a handful who actually do this you're quite welcome everybody thank you very much