About Michael Torok

"Throughout my career, I have chosen to teach, build communities, remove redundancy, communicate change, and streamline processes. I have provided thought leadership, built Info Dev and Community teams, won writing awards, kept customers aware of changes and security issues, measured outcomes, used data to pivot, created partner training and certification programs, redesigned systems and platforms, and always listened to the customer base."

"I'm looking to bridge support knowledge, documentation, community, and training as a meaningful voice-of-the-customer, self-service collaboration. I see these departments as a union and would like to harness the power of running them as a force multiplier working together."

Email: TorokWork(at)gmail.com

Michael Torok

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Listen at Scale
Use your community to listen to your customers.
Get the Word Out
This video speaks to the movement we were creating, but every community should also act as an announcement platform.

Listening at Scale

Thanks to Higher Logic for interviewing me a few years ago at Super Forum. The videos here provide some insight into both my feelings that communities, whether on your site or elsewhere, are a necessity and why. Community platforms give your customers a voice and provide you with advocates, ideas, feedback, and brand awareness.

Without the communities I led, SolarWinds product managers would have much less information from customers on what directions the products should go. Delphix would have lost much more money in support calls—losing a primary location for ticket deflection and abandon. And, Lifesize would not have had a destination for partner collateral and joint branding.

Ideation and requests for enhancement naturally exist within the community ecosystem. Right now, if you are not listening, you are missing the voice of your customers. They are talking somewhere, I would suggest you find out where and encourage them to come to you.


Metrics and Measures

If you can’t measure it, then you don’t know the impact and you don’t know if you were successful. You also don’t know what to course correct or what to leave unchanged. Measuring views has helped me prove the value of knowledge base articles, informative blogs, and documentation. Using up-vote metrics, I’ve helped product understand the urgency and support for a new feature or idea.

With the help of an excellent federated search spanning multiple knowledge assets, I have tracked the entire customer experience from inquiry to answer or case. Working with Support and Finance, I created hard data on ticket abandon and money saved, allowing me to further reinforce the impact of my purview: knowledge articles, community, and documentation.

Instrumenting products has allowed me to see where documentation or knowledge is used most often and bring that feedback back to development and product. It opens conversations around whether something could or should be more clearly explained or if a feature is simply confusing. Does it flow naturally where it was implemented?

From savings to eliminating confusion to finding the gaps between knowledge assets, metrics and measures have always helped bring and prove value to the business.

Metrics and Measures Metrics and Measures

Technical Writing

Technical Writing

I began my career in IT as a technical writer and continue to enjoy it. There is something incredibly satisfying about diving into a new feature or a new process and cataloging the steps to success. I like clearly describing an action and offering that to a new user or someone who has been waiting for a feature. No matter what my title, I have always continued my technical writing. When migrating to or introducing a new community, my first blogs and vlogs have been about how to post, how to blog, how to rate replies, how to mark something as correct.

When you are the person who is documenting a new feature, there are opportunities to come back to the development team with feedback. There have been many times when a window or dialog may contain language that can be cleaned up or a procedure seems convoluted. I have been fortunate to work with excellent dev teams, but that does not always mean they aren’t too close to a feature or that they understand the logical flow from the end user’s perspective.

Technical writers belong at the table when the decision to ship or not is being made. I’ve made sure my teams have a seat at that table, and I have taken that seat many times. A feature provided without documentation may as well not be shipped. If by chance it is found, people won’t know how to use it and will flood support with questions that should have been answered before the release.


Winning Documentation

When I first started my career at Mission Critical (soon to be part of NetIQ), I was exposed to the Society for Technical Communication and their annual awards. As a newer technical writer, it was empowering, motivating, and vindicating to receive accolades from my peers. While there, I won merit and excellence awards.

When I became a lead, I encouraged my team to seek this same encouragement, often seeing them win awards for their work. When I started the SolarWinds Information Development team, I had the incredible satisfaction to see work from my employees and myself again receive Excellence awards. We also secured an Apex award in 2008. It is incredibly important to me so see my teams succeed and to bolster their confidence and recognize excellence.

These awards were yet another achievement to present to the wider company. The more you show confidence in your team and believe in what they do, the more the other departments will recognize their value and respect their voices.

Award-Winning Documentation

Communications

Communications

Whether I am ensuring our customers are aware of high priority security issues that need action or letting the community know about changes that have benefits but require attention, crafting language is my expertise. I’ve asked the ultimate question (Would you recommend us to a friend or colleague?) and built internal communications hubs for corporate messaging.

I have created blogs that have a friendly tone and encourage engagement. I have also created security bulletins which cut to the chase and give the recipient the information needed and the steps to correct the issue.

During my time at Lifesize, I earned my Satmetrix certification and ran the relationship NPS program, collecting data, ensuring the proper teams were notified, and following up with all customers who took the time to let us know how we were doing. Good or bad, I made sure that we reached out and listened to our promoters, passives, and detractors. I’ve had the incredible opportunity to turn detractors into promoters and am directly linked to more than one such person on LinkedIn today.


Thought Leadership

During my tenure at SolarWinds and Delphix, I am proud to have been asked to present at JiveWorld twice, to be a Webinar speaker for both Jive and SearchUnify, and to have presented at Higher Logic’s Super Forum. I was also honored to have thwack represented in a case study for Rajat Paharia’s book on gamification Loyalty 3.0: How to Revolutionize Customer and Employee Engagement with Big Data and Gamification and to also be quoted in the bestseller.

I consider my role one of evangelizer when I work for a company. I am happy to work behind the scenes to make the right choices and make decisions that create the right outcomes. But, I am just as comfortable in front of a room full of people explaining why what we do is not only important but revolutionary and ground breaking. I’ve enjoyed speaking at and hosting user groups and am comfortable in front of crowds and in boardrooms.

ThoughtLeadership

© Michael Torok 2025