Even after you’ve hired the writer, writing projects don’t just happen. Somebody needs to move them along, and it’s usually your writer (if you’ve picked a good one).
Nothing works because you want it to. You have to make the damned thing work.
-Thomas Edison (I think)
I saw that several years ago in a quotation-of-the-day calendar, and it has always stuck with me.
It applies to writing, doesn’t it? Writers realize that good content doesn’t emerge from their pen or keyboard because they want it to; they have to make it come out.
On a larger scale, as a marketing manager you should know that few of the projects you commission – white papers, Web content, case studies, technical articles – happen because you want them to; you (or somebody) has to make them happen. Facts need checking, reviewers need reminding, editors need prodding, interviewees need birddogging, text needs proofreading, final versions need approving…
Who does most of this?
Would you believe your writer does?
There’s a lot more project management to business writing than most people – including writers – realize. There are also a lot of steps you take for granted inside the organization on the path from idea to a deliverable, and in a writing project, most of them end up in the writer’s purview because nobody else handles them in a timely manner otherwise.
Paul Lagasse posted recently on the diplomacy that freelance writers need to exercise when their management of a project pulls them into onsite client meetings. Most marketing managers value writers for the “bricks” of good content, while overlooking the “mortar” of good project management.
One more Edison quotation to wrap up:
I never did anything by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.
Your organization’s content is no accident either, and sometimes it’s your writer who contributes the extra work to make the content happen.
John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.
photo credit: wikimedia
Your marketing communications play a big role in earning your customers’ trust. Writers can help with this, but it’s not easy to get them to do so.
With its 2010 Trust Barometer, the public relations firm Edelman reports that 83% of U.S. consumers value
transparent and honest practices, and a company being a “company I can trust” as extremely important
and rate these their first and second priorities.
A company’s strong financial performance, which was consumers’ third priority in 2006, is their tenth priority now, far below treating employees well and pricing goods and services fairly.
So as a marketing manager, you’re thinking, “Hmm. We should do what we can to earn trust and convey trustworthiness in our communications, shouldn’t we?” Well, if you haven’t been doing it up to now, this would be a good time to start.
Does Your Writer Keep You Honest?
Who drafts all of those communications you put out, all of the vehicles on which your customers will evaluate your trustworthiness?
Your writers, of course.
Do you pay them to make you toe the line? When you engage them, do you say, “If you catch us trying to say something that sounds fishy or unreliable, let us know”? If they call you on a dodgy statistic, or doubt the veracity of your sources, do you thank them and agree to find more solid ones?
I thought not.
You could do that, but here are some reasons why it probably won’t happen:
- This kind of purity may pit you against others in your organization. “It holds 985 megabytes of data,” says your Engineering team. “Call it a gigabyte and be done with it.” Your writer points out that there are 1 billion bytes in a gigabyte, so you’re stuck in the middle between the writer and Engineering.
- You need to beat a deadline. Is your time more important than your customers’ trust? How much back-and-forth with the writer can you afford to boost the veracity of the piece?
- Your writer doesn’t want to antagonize you. A common bit of professional camouflage goes, “Well, Bill, you know your readers and customers a lot better than I do, so I’ll take your lead on leaving that detail in the paper.” The writer wants to get paid and get hired again, so probably won’t go to the mat with you on a disagreement over your facts.
- There is ALWAYS a fib somewhere, and the only way to avoid them completely is to say nothing to your customers. You may just find out this out if you empower your writer to grill you on your evidence. It’s a marketing piece, not a New York Times investigation.
Rude Questions from Your Writer
Jason Cohen, of A Smart Bear fame, posted recently on Rude Q&A. Pardon the unnecessarily rude first sentence of the post – bloggers often pride themselves on shock value – but Jason offers a valuable lesson in tough questions that come from investors, for which businesspeople should have ready, defensible answers.
If you hire professional, diplomatic writers, you should be able to go through at least some of Jason’s questions peacefully:
- What are the top three features your competitor has that you lack? How do you address that today, and what are you doing about it in the next six months?
- What are three tangible, undeniable ways in which your product/company saves more money than you cost, and saves more time than you consume?
- There are thousands of companies who make the same basic claims you make: high-quality, on-time, on-budget, good service, happy customers. What makes you any different?
You should already have gone through these questions internally before starting your project, and you should ask your writers whether they are up to posing them of you as well.
John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.
photo credit:
emmma peel
What’s in your content: Marketing writing or corporate cheerleading? A parable for the marketing manager.
A dear friend who does a lot of business writing once remarked,
Compact, compelling copy that doesn’t fall into business jargon is tough. So much of it is fake words strung together with cheerleading.
I’ve mulled that over for a couple of years and can finally weave a parable around it.
In short, my response is:
You say “fake words” and “cheerleading” as if they were bad things.
Here’s why.
Sporting Event = Game + Cheerleading
I’ve taken to attending football and basketball games at my sons’ school of late. It didn’t take me very long to develop a deep appreciation for the role played by the top-flight cheerleading squad in these sporting events: they cheer, kick, jump, form pyramids, turn somersaults, sell raffle tickets and generally spice up the evening. They’re a show unto themselves, really, and I can easily forget about the game I’m supposed to be watching, for all the talent, energy and acrobatic skill they display.
Cheerleaders are unflappable. Regardless of the team’s plight or good fortune, their tone is upbeat, emotionally engaging and designed to make you feel good about being there. It’s a job they do well, and we spectators need them to do it for us. They don’t put points on the board, but it’s great performing nonetheless.
Meanwhile, on the field or the court, the game is in one of three states:
- It’s a wipeout, and we’re winning.
- It’s a wipeout, and we’re losing.
- It’s a close game, and it’s making us nervous.
The marvelous thing about cheerleaders is that, regardless of the state, they’re doing the same thing. Sure, maybe they’re doing the touchdown cheer less often in state 2, but they’re still cheering almost constantly, with smiles on their faces, pom-poms in their hands and high kicks in their legs.
Why?
Because their voice is an important part of the game, too. Other people have the job of scoring points; cheerleaders have a different job.
Writing and Cheerleading
As a marketing manager, you’re responsible for telling your organization’s story and starting the conversations that Sales will continue. But you can’t use the same voice or tone for every story and conversation. (If you do, you must be tired of it.)
What if “fluff” and cheerleading are an important part of your game, too?
Think of the marketing pieces you put out: white papers, press releases, case studies, technology overviews, market research, annual reports, corporate backgrounders, and all of the copy on your Website. Can you honestly look at all that content and say that it’s pure game, pure fact, pure attempts to persuade prospects with may-the-best-company-win objectivity?
Sure, you give your writers access to your executives, to industry analysts, to your internal data and research, and they give you back valuable content that Sales can use to persuade prospects and beat your competitors.
But fess up; you’ve also got some corporate cheerleading in there, haven’t you? A little rah-rah-sis-boom-bah-go-team-go that puts a sunny face on things, even if sales are tanking and your technology is under scrutiny by the European Union?
Can you be that honest with your marketing communications writers? Can you tell them, “That report you wrote last month was dead-on objective, but this needs to be an upbeat piece on how our product is making life better for soccer moms. Don’t mention our ongoing patent litigation; just paint a favorable picture. It’s what we need right now.”
More crucially, when your colleagues start making snide remarks about “fluff pieces,” can you take the heat?
Yes, you can. As a marketing manager you’ve done your job by providing both objective and “soft” content. Just tell the cynics the parable of the football game and the cheerleaders.
John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.
photo credit: avinashkunnath
Try to think of your ideal reader as a child. Have you ever met a child who preferred an explanation over a story?
Explaining makes for lousy marketing.
Dan Heath, Fast Company
Writing for a Child
As a marketing manager, have you ever thought of your ideal reader as a child?
We learn not to talk down to prospects, and we scold our marketing communications writers when they use terms that are too simple. But there’s an argument (which I’m about to make) for thinking of the ideal reader of our marketing pieces as a child. In short,
- They both like pictures.
- Neither one has much time to give you, so you have to take full advantage of a short attention span.
- Explanations bore both of them, but tell them a story and they’ll follow you anywhere.
Can you build a marcom credo around these points, and get your writers to follow it?
Mind you, this is not the same thing as treating your customers like children. If you underestimate their intelligence or their collective ability to wreak havoc with your company’s sales figures and reputation, you are treating them like children, and you’ll regret it.
Explanation or Story?
So, to return to the Dan Heath quote, telling a good story about your product or service is better than explaining it, particularly if it’s a short story that gets to the point quickly. Content like case studies, blog posts, podcasts and video can do this effectively when it’s well written, and even better when you think of your ideal reader as a child.
There are times, usually late in the sales cycle, at which you need to explain rather than to tell a story, and content like white papers, technical articles and application notes is better suited to this.
John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.
photocredit: Patrishe
White paper summaries or abstracts take time to write and to read. Are they worth it? They are if they help answer tough questions in a hurry.
Do you rely on an abstract at the beginning of a white paper to tell you what you’re about to read? Do you think the readers of your own papers rely on your own abstracts? Do you wonder whether it’s worth it to create them?
You can find a lively, ongoing debate on the topic in forums like whitepapersource.com, with experts contending that an “executive summary” (read the scorn I heap on that term elsewhere) takes away from the persuasive essence of a white paper. Other experts contend that the abstract is necessary for packaging, SEO, article submittal, etc.
They frame their debate in the context of a reader with a white paper in hand and ready to read, but a post from Mark McClure of SamuraiWriter.com zooms out for a much broader context.
Personally, I think that an abstract should answer 1 question very quickly:
- Is it worth my time to read this entire paper?
Mark takes a step back, recalling organizations in which “director-level decision makers were preparing a report or presentation for their bosses…where technology directors were in the hot seat over project ‘x’ with various C-level dignitaries.”
Mark points out that the goal of these meetings was to answer 3 questions about the project under discussion:
- Can we delay or cancel it?
- Can we get it cheaper or go elsewhere?
- What if it doesn’t work?
“White papers that helped middle managers address the concerns (nay, fears) of the budget-holders and influence-wielders in such meetings were deemed ‘worth reading’ in the preparation for the meeting.”
What if you could kill these 3 birds with 1 abstract in your white papers? Better yet, cut to the chase: Instead of opening with an “abstract,” call it your “Summary and Recommendation”. Catch your reader unaware by making your recommendation right off the bat:
“The translation/localization industry is not doing enough to help customers develop new pricing models.”
“CEOs should refrain from corporate blogging because it dulls rather than sharpens their influence.”
“Wireless carriers who resist offering personalization and discovery technology to subscribers will have their lunch eaten by new kids on the block.”
Think about it: Isn’t that the answer your readers are after? Give it to them early on, and use the body of the paper to support it. Now, that’s real value in your content.
John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.
photocredit: Marshall Astor
Rescue your marketing communications content from the tar pit. Your readers can find it more easily and it will tell your story better.
Around 1900, a few men standing near the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California, realized that there were animal bones in the tar.
“What a find!” exclaimed the first. “We could do research for decades on the fossils in this tar. It’s an archeological treasure.”
“Yes,” said the second, “but we need to figure out how to get that treasure out of the tar.”
Getting Your Content Treasure Out of the Tar
As a marketing manager, what do you do when you inherit a tar pit of content?
Maybe your company acquires another company and you need to bring its marketing content in line with your own. Maybe you’re hired into a company that has been desperately trying to tell its story, but whose efforts have never yet amounted to anything interesting. Maybe you’ve been breathing your own exhaust for a long time, and you wake up one day and decide to change what you’ve done.
Here are four ways to get your story out of the content tar pit:
- Break up walls of text. Can you even bear to read your own stuff anymore? Is it just a forbidding collection of long sentences and paragraphs? Can you break it into smaller pieces of value that tell the story without snowing the reader under?
- Rewrite your text in terms of customer needs. Visitors don’t want to know how many transistors you can pack onto a single chip; they want to know how all those transistors can help them get their work done better, cheaper and faster. It’s easy for your content to fall into this tar pit, but you can rescue it by changing “chicken pieces fried and battered at 145 degrees” to “finger lickin’ good.”
- Bucket the text better. Are you sure that your ideal readers can find your content? If your entire Website is a tar pit, and the white papers, webinars, case studies and product data are all mixed together, it becomes difficult to locate your story, let alone tell it. Rearrange the text into buckets according to what visitors want to see, instead of what the writers wanted to describe.
- Give examples and make them interesting to read. Examples make the best stories. Start out with “You know how…” or “In the same way that…” and start telling your story orally. Once you have it sketched out, fill it in with your products and services and how your customers use them.
The treasures are in the tar pit. You just need to find them. Eventually, you can create content that never gets trapped there in the first place.
John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.
photo credit: David Berkowitz
A: When you’re clever enough to get leverage from the content in other formats and forums.
I was pleased to see that client Xiam Technologies was making excellent (re-)use of their white paper, “Make It Easy on Me – 3 Ways Operators Can Use Personalization To Give Customers What They Want On The Mobile Internet,” the fruit of our collaboration this past summer.
Xiam is using the white paper as a content-lead into msearchgroove, a knowledge portal on mobile search, mobile advertising and social media.
Personalization is also a topic Colm Healy — CEO of Xiam Technologies, a Qualcomm subsidiary providing discovery and recommendations solutions to mobile operators — will examine in a series of thought leadership contributions on MSG beginning later this week.
The first in the series will outline the key takeaways of the company’s white paper, titled “Make It Easy For Me: 3 Ways Operators Can Use Personalization To Give Customers What They Want On The Mobile Internet.”
Content like white papers, case studies and technical articles is rich in SEO-potential and industry authority. Why restrict it to the corral of your Website when you can give it away and get it to roam the plains of the Web, seeding your brand? (Tip of the hat also to msearchgroove, who obviously sees the potential for leverage.)
Never forget the Content Buffet. Xiam is one of those laying out a rich spread.
John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.
photo credit: KVDP
There is an art to writing slide decks that support your presentation, and an art to presenting without a slide deck. Hire a writer who can help you with both.
Have you ever seen a slide deck get in the way of a presentation? Your own presentation, perhaps?
You’re standing in front of forty people delivering an animated presentation, when it dawns on you that the members of your audience are not engaged. At first they ogle the screen and leaf through your handouts. As your presentation goes on, some of them pick up their phones, check e-mail and surf a bit. Finally, you begin to read a message on a few faces: “All right, we’ve got the deck with your information. May we go now?” If you could read their tweets, you would probably confirm that they’ve checked out (and are telling people about it in real time).
Disadvantages of a Slide Deck
- PC logistics are against you. Your goal is to convey a message between two parties: yourself and the audience. Like it or not, the laptop, the remote control and the screen get involved as well, even if you’re fortunate enough that they’re all behaving properly.
- Your audience is reading the screen instead of reading you. You lose eye contact each time there’s a change on the screen. For that matter, by clicking from one slide to the next, you are the one deliberately sending people’s attention away from your on-stage presence.
- The presence of a slide deck induces – in fact, rewards – laziness. If I don’t have to do any work, I probably won’t remember your message for very long. “Can you send me a copy of the slide deck?” means, “I’m not engaged right now, so send it to me and I’ll ignore it later.”
Quit doing too much for your audiences. Try throwing away your PowerPoint™. Try delivering a “self-propelled” presentation.
Presenting without a Slide Deck
How are you going to pull this off? You’ll need to engage the audience in other ways.
- Carry the structure in your oral delivery, not in bullet points. You have created a good presentation when you don’t need no stinkin’ bullets because your structure is obvious and your message is clear. The audience gets it, because your quotes are compelling and you’re first-second-thirding the information straight into their brains. (Caution: This may mean that you’re finished in ten minutes instead of 45. Then what?)
- Feeling your oats? Tell them there are no handouts (“Socrates never used them”), or that your dog ate your homework, and that they’ll need to take their own notes. If you’re doing a good job as a presenter, they’ll jot their own notes. Now that’s valuable content.
- Reinforce your points with interactive exercises instead of charts on the wall.
- Turn your delivery of data into a quiz; e.g., “Hummer sold 65,000 units in 2006 in the U.S. How many did it sell in 2009?” (answer: 8700).
- Get the audience members involved by piping up with anecdotes that support or refute your points.
- Pause halfway into your presentation and say, “Is there anybody in the audience who is completely lost? If so, then I’m not doing my job successfully and I need to know how to fix it.”
You’ll need to tell your writer, “I’m going it alone, so create me a presentation that doesn’t need a slide deck.”
Will she be up to the task? Have you ever done a presentation without a slide deck? How did it go?
John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.
photo credit: mecookie
Before you try to write witty corporate or marketing content, know your ideal reader intimately. Otherwise, don’t even bother.
Witty? Says who?
Well, that’s really what it all gets down to, then, isn’t it? Who says your writing is witty? And who gives him/her the authority to judge it?
“Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth,” wrote Archimedes, and if you have been writing for very long at all, you know exactly how to paraphrase him:
Describe to me the ideal reader, and I will make him laugh.
It is, of course, your ideal reader who deems your writing witty. The more you know about that person, the more you can appeal to his sense of humor. If you don’t understand what makes that ideal reader tick, how can you expect him to read what you’ve written and find it engaging?
Witty content in a business context is a rarity, almost as rare as witty content about Catholicism. But consider IBM’s series of deadpan “Art of the Sale” videos, or just about any nun joke. The essence of their wittiness is The Great Unexpected, and you too can take advantage of that essence.
Consider a few content channels in our Web 2.0 world, and their likely receptiveness to witty writing.
Wit in Corporate Writing – Maybe
- Blogs - If you’re reading a blog, you deserve what you get. You expect to derive some eventual value or information, but the channel is so informal that you could land on a real gem of inspiration in a hilarious wrapper. I think this is the best place to start. And, when your blog is new and undiscovered, you can write just about anything you want, secure in the knowledge that nobody will be reading it. Yet.
- Customer success stories – Depending on the customer and the success (and the customer’s lawyers), you might be able to make this work. Your reader would be deep in The Great Unexpected when he came across a closing line like “We liked working with Acme’s new line of optical routers, and we have a good relationship with them. We just need to figure out what to do with all this extra pizza.”
- Web pages – Here is another place where witty content can thrive. Imagine an organization that describes certain aspects of itself and its history with good-natured self-deprecation. It would be a breath of fresh air, like hearing a head of state say something funny. Most organizations relegate such content to blogs, though.
Witty Corporate Writing Need Not Apply
- White papers – Face it: even with the evidence as you lay it out, these are an attempt to get ideal readers to think for themselves and draw their own conclusions at a certain point in the sales cycle. Wit in a white paper would probably feel like bumps on a smooth road. I would like to read a white paper infused with wit, but I cannot imagine what it would look like.
- Annual reports - Probably not fertile ground for wit. If you publish an annual report, your ideal readers are analysts, investors, chartered accountants and people who will drop your stock like a hot potato at the first sign of The Great Unexpected. Still, if your stock has already tanked this year, what do you have to lose?
- Social Media answers (e.g., LinkedIn, Yahoo! and other collaborative forums) – I’m not convinced that anybody who posts questions in these is really interested in the answers, which means that the ask-er is probably not your ideal reader. If you want to turn your wit loose on the answer-ers, however, you might get noticed.
- Twitter - Can you be witty in less than 140 characters? Will anybody care? One fellow has over 900,000 followers, but I don’t know where he’s leading them (us, really), if anywhere.
- Press releases – Don’t even bother. Journalists are always under pressure and they’re looking for extractable facts, not wit. If you want to flex your wit on these ideal readers, take them out to lunch sometime.
- Brochures, sales collateral – Again, you’re asking for trouble. By default, these pieces get used when casting a wide net, and it’s too difficult to define the ideal reader.
In short, if you don’t know your ideal readers or can’t get enough information on them, you’re skating on thin ice by trying to use wit. But when you do know about them and what will appeal to them, give wit a chance.
As usual, I’m happy to be proved wrong. Send me samples of witty corporate and marketing communications.
John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.
photo credit: nukeit1
Hire marketing communications writers who can tell a good story. Then have them tell yours.
The biggest problems around creating new, interesting content are:
- Finding time to do it consistently.
- Finding talent to do it “magnetically.”
- Finding an angle to do it “engagingly.”
These problems go away if you think in terms of stories. Prospects won’t listen to you, but they’ll listen to your stories.
So, What’s a Story?
“Tell the truth and make it rhyme.”
A songwriter named Terry Black tells me that that line comes from a Pirates of the Mississippi song in the 1990s. I once saw it ascribed to John Lennon (or maybe Bob Dylan talking to John Lennon), but I can’t recall where.¹
This is how Homer conveyed The Iliad and The Odyssey. He told the truth and made it rhyme.
All the poets in all the languages do it.
Why? Because it’s:
- consistent, as Steve Shaw points out on his Article Marketing Blog
- magnetic, as Jason Cohen describes on Copyblogger (point #9)
- engaging, as in the Chris Baggott Guide to Blogging
But most of all, it’s the way we want to hear things, and the way in which we best remember them almost from the beginning of our lives.
As a marketing manager, you need to set the tone and message for your content. Can you keep it coming back to stories? The same format you’ve known since you were a toddler?
Case Studies: Stories out of Whack?
Think about the last case study you read. Wasn’t it a story gone wrong? Some writer took all the fun out of a perfectly good story by shoehorning it into a problem-solution-result structure. “It makes for better reading,” he said.
What if he had simply told the truth and made it rhyme? Wouldn’t it have been more interesting? For that matter, why bother publishing the case study if there’s no story to it?
John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.
¹After posting, I stumbled onto a Linked Answer from Tim Lemire that referred to this same topic. Lennon-minded readers may enjoy the detour: “John Lennon once said: ‘Write what you’re feeling, make it rhyme, and put it to music — there’s your song.’”
Even after you’ve hired the writer, writing projects don’t just happen. Somebody needs to move them along, and it’s usually your writer (if you’ve picked a good one).
