In the 1968 comedy The Odd Couple, Jack Lemmon plays Felix Ungar. At a dinner party, he mentions that he writes for TV news broadcasts. Doe-eyed neighbor Cecily Pigeon replies, “That sounds like a fascinating profession. Tell me, where do you get your ideas about what to write?”

Boirrrrrr.

When you’re building out your company’s blog, where will you get ideas for content?

Mistakes – regardless of who committed them – are rich material. You can weave a post around a mistake and turn it into valuable content with a title that reads something like “4 Ways to Avoid…” or “13 Things Not to Do When You’re…” Your readers will enjoy and learn from these lists, and chime in with comments.

But Will They Respect You in the Morning?

Suppose you decide to post on mistakes that your customers have made. What do you do when you know that your customers are in the audience, and when they may recognize themselves in the post? Will they leave you a snarky comment? Will they Facebook-fire you, on your own blog, yet?

Helen Popkin summarized the balance between the temptation to post and the urge to stay alive:

Never post anything you wouldn’t say to your mom, boss and significant other…And thanks to Twitter further eroding the wall between your big mouth and a moment required to download some good sense, the Internet is now empowered to get you fired faster than ever.

Still, you’re convinced that it’s a good story, and so you decide to post on it. You can anonymize it the way Henry Miller did with the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company in Tropic of Cancer, but if your customers are in your audience, they’ll recognize themselves. Worse yet, if you’re describing a mistake they don’t even know they made, you’ll be in double the trouble.

“That Won’t Happen to Me”

Maybe you think that your customers won’t ever subscribe to your blog or find out what you’re posting. Or maybe you think you’re indispensable, so even if they do read your post, they’ll just slap you on the back and let bygones be, as they buy  more of your goods and services.

Prudent bloggers think twice about that.

Joel Spolsky ran a blog called “Joel on Software,” which has a long, broad following among software developers. Last month, Joel announced he would cease posting to the blog. Among the reasons he gave:

We have so many customers that I can’t always write freely without inadvertently insulting one of them.

Getting Out of the Pickle

So you want to keep your blog going, and you want to write (nicely) about the mistakes your customers make, and you want your customers to read your blog. How do you reconcile all of these?

1. Don’t post the mistake as a rant. The lesson you’re trying to impart will dissolve in the vitriol and you’ll have two problems: an insulted customer and an alienated following.
2. When you describe the mistake, describe the solution. If the company hasn’t gotten to the solution yet, WAIT to post until there’s more closure to the story. It will make for a better lesson anyway.
3. Don’t name names. If your readers can see their own company in the business situation you’re describing and think, “How did they deal with it?” then what will they care whether the company was Exxon or a hot dog stand?

And if my customers are reading this, I promise I’m not posting about you.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. He also publishes a newsletter and would be honored if you subscribed.

photo credit: Jeffrey Beall (CC2.0)

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"Ghost" in Chinese

Blog-posting for somebody else can play a role in your marketing communications effort. Here are three ways to make it work.

In “Ghost Blogging As If It Were Alec Baldwin,” I mentioned that ghost blogging, or posting to a blog in the place of people who are unable to do it themselves, has proponents and opponents. In the rarefied air of Web 2.0, a lot of people feel they’re being cheated if they find out that a ghostwriter is providing the content for a blog purporting to belong to a CxO or company exec.

I have no ox to gore – I’ve never cared for that visual – in this matter, but I’ve posted and I’ve ghost posted enough to note at least three things marketing managers had better take into account if they’re going to use ghost posting in their marcom mix of content.

1. Start with an existing following. Bootstrapping a blog can be a drag. If it takes too long, then the exec for whom you’re ghosting may pull the plug on the effort, and you’ll lose a nice, fat brick in your content-marketing edifice. So start with the exec’s connections, network and Rolodex to launch the blog with a ready-made following. S/he can send out a message like, “I’m starting a blog. If I point you to it, will you send me some feedback and let me know what you think of it?” Not as catchy as offering a free iPad to the first 5 subscribers, but if the exec has a decent professional network, it should yield a good population of early adopters and fans.
2. Have a voice-review. You shouldn’t be writing these posts; you should be suggesting them. Tell the exec that, to maximize the value and minimize the annoyance of ghost posting, you’ll provide content and the exec will carefully review it for voice. The goal here is to get the exec to say things like, “No, that’s not how I would phrase that,” and “I’d rather say that a different way,” and then actually rephrase them. Some people can do it by editing the text, and others do it better in a conversation. This makes the content more authentic because the exec is actually involved in the process and not just a name. It’s more like blogging, the way the millions of us other people do it.
3. Get ready to reply to comments quickly. When people comment on your post, it’s good netiquette to reply to them with at least token acknowledgment according to this tip by Tony Hue. Now, here I would feel cheated if you ghost posted a reply to my comment, because visitors treat the comments like private mail (even though the whole world can see the thread). Also, it boosts a blog’s credibility when the author replies to comments in short order, like in less than 12 hours. Unless she runs a Wall Street brokerage house or is a head of state, these comments probably won’t be numerous, but you need to be ready, so arrange for the exec to check comments and reply to them.

Are you ghost blogging? What other things are you finding to make it work?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

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Ghost blogging backs up a recognized person with professional writing experience. Marketing communications writers may also need to tune the person’s voice. Is it blogging?

“By the way,” the vice president of product development told me. “I want the posts to have a certain personality. They should sound as if Alec Baldwin wrote them.”

Alec Baldwin? Which Alec Baldwin? Alec Baldwin in “It’s Complicated,” or in “30 Rock,” or in “The Departed,” or in “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends?”

“More or less like ’30 Rock,’” he continued. “Don’t be afraid to use a little bit of irony, a bit of dry humor in the posts.”

Ghost blogging – Pros and Cons

As the term suggests, ghost blogging is like ghostwriting, except for a blog. The rich and famous are well known for hiring ghostwriters to pen their autobiographies, sometimes for partial credit, sometimes for no credit, as in Theodore Sorenson’s work for John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage. (Even Mozart is said to have ghostwritten music for wealthy patrons.)

The vice president in question is keen to build a stream of content and comments around a newly launched product. Someday, a collaborative approach to this blog may arise, with experts on his team contributing alternating posts. Meanwhile, he wants to get the ball rolling, and marketing communications writers doing ghost blogging will work for the time being.

It’s easy to find opposing views on ghost blogging. Proponents believe that it allows impossibly busy people to provide content to a waiting audience, and opponents consider it a treacherous breach of Web 2.0 trust.

But hey, we all know that Barack Obama has people who write his speeches. And, when it boils down to the choice between ghost blogging valuable content and imprisoning it in the head of somebody with no time to write it down, isn’t the Web better served by the former?

“Bring me the voice of Alec Baldwin”

So with that ethical speed bump behind us, we turn to the issue of voice.

The vice president of product development does not look like Alec Baldwin, let alone sound like him. If we study enough video on YouTube, we can come up with a way of drizzling his brand of on-screen wit and personality over the  business and technical problems that underpin the blog. I’m not worried about that, because it’s just another dimension of persuasion, which is the heart and soul of the Web.

However, even if we can assemble valuable content and season it with the actor’s tone, isn’t the result a Web-based double chicane? Is it bogus? Will the blog get flamed? Will digg and reddit pan it? Regardless of our desire to pump out valuable content, vox populi, vox Dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God), and we shall have to live with the consequences.

Frankly, however it pans out, it’s a pretty interesting project. Potentially inflammatory, but interesting nonetheless.

Back to the vice president of product development: “One more thing: Not the voice of Alec Baldwin in his blog. I can’t stand the guy’s writing.”

How would you handle this?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: David Shankbone (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported)

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Thousands of blogs are born each day, but it’s not all sweetness and light. A summary of the downside of blogging, whether for yourself or for your organization.

Even back in 2006, Technorati was estimating that 175,000 new blogs were born each day, or one every half-second. Even if only one-tenth of them made it past five posts, and even if many of those same keystrokes are now being pumped into other social networking platforms, a lot of people are still maintaining blogs and a lot of us are still reading them.

“What’s Wrong with Blogging?” ProBlogger Asks

In a recent post, A-class blogger Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net asks us, “What’s wrong with blogging?” Darren’s following is colossal, and he had over 120 comments within 24 hours, covering a gamut of complaints about blogging in general. A digest of some of what’s wrong with blogging:

• English is the dominant language in blogging (so far), and other cultures/languages are missing out on valuable content.
• Journalists deride blogging.
• Journalists thrive on blogging.
• Blogging has become a form of advertising.
• Many bloggers are reluctant to link to other blogs in the same niche.
• It’s hard to generate valuable content regularly that will get a blog noticed.
• Generally, the quality of writing is low on blogs.
• Too many posts are merely about content on other blogs (like this one, I presume).
• Only bloggers read blogs.
• The get-rich-quick crowd and affiliate marketing are polluting blogging.
• Upstart bloggers are displacing experts in their field.
• Desire for popularity trumps quality in content.

This is a cautionary tale for marketing communications writers working on corporate (and personal) blogs. It is tough work. It probably won’t pay off in the short run. You may not experience instant gratification or a huge following. So why do it?

To tell your story. Passionately.

Use Your Blog to Show Your Passion

Your organization is a going concern, which means that things are constantly changing in it. There’s a story in that, and your followers (newspeak for customers, vendors, friends, investors, journalists, competitors) want to know it.

And, if it’s a good story, you should be passionate about telling it.

Those press releases you publish a couple of times a month? Not much passion in those, is there?

Use your blog to tell people the why behind the news, in a way that shows what your organization is passionate about: child literacy, green power, military hegemony, helping people get rich. Readers won’t magically flock to it, but when they take a close look at you, they’ll see passion, and that’s where followers come from.

Change your objective from boosting blog readership to telling your organization’s story passionately, and you’ll subtract a lot of the stress from the process.

Blogging will still be tough, of course, but it will be much more bearable.

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: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pingnews/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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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

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Hire marketing communications writers who can tell a good story. Then have them tell yours.

The biggest problems around creating new, interesting content are:

1. Finding time to do it consistently.
2. Finding talent to do it “magnetically.”
3. 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:

1. consistent, as Steve Shaw points out on his Article Marketing Blog
2. magnetic, as Jason Cohen describes on Copyblogger (point #9)
3. 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.’”

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Re-purposing content is part of the art of marketing. Have your marketing communications writer convert big-bite content into multiple smaller pieces and put them into different channels.

“We have a white paper, but it’s too long for this day and age.”

Of course, the engineer or executive who wrote the paper doesn’t think that, but you as the marketing manager can see it, as you peruse your content-landscape for pieces that will catch the attention of prospects and influencers in your industry.

Have your writer edit long pieces down to short marketing pieces that take on their own life and tell your story more succinctly. MarketingProfs’ “Get to the Point!” series does this very well for its paying members by distilling marketing-oriented content from a variety of long-winded sources down to regular, five-paragraph e-mail messages.

Source Content

Some obvious candidates for repackaging:

• White papers and thought-leadership papers. Companies place a lot of store by these pieces, so don’t treat them like wedding china and leave them hanging in a cupboard on your Web site for only occasional use. Have your writer pull out individual sections (The Problem, Current Approaches, What the Industry Needs, etc.) and make them self-standing.
• Webinars and podcasts. These are good sources, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that this is a simple matter of transcription. Even trained speakers introduce a lot of non sequiturs and interrupted sentences to live delivery, so your marketing communications writer needs to bend the text back into useful shape and logical flow.
• Slide deck presentations. I’ve posted on this before, and presentations are bagfuls of bullets waiting for an chance to live outside of the projector. Your sales and product teams probably have dozens of them that you’ve never seen before, but that can help you tell your story better and more authoritatively.

3 Ways to Make Them Work

You don’t need to tell your in-house contributors that their content is too long; just tell them that you’re going to give it life in several more important channels.

1. Teasers. Use them like movie trailers to bring visitors back to a landing page with the entire piece. The right five paragraphs in front of the right technical audience will result in clicks, page visits, downloads and conversions.
2. Blog posts. You do have a blog, don’t you? Have a look at Seth Godin and Tom Peters on the power of blogging, and follow Denise Wakeman for tips on making corporate blogging work. When you have ready-made content you can post, you’re halfway there.
3. Article/content marketing. Another important place for shopping your content out is in content repositories like ezinearticles, goarticles, articlecity, buzzle.com, articledashboard.com, amazines.com, ideamarketers.com and others oriented to your industry. Of importance here is the resource box you create to ensure that readers can find and follow you once they like your content. Read Steve Shaw at Creative Article Marketing for more on this channel.

In most organizations it’s easier to find long marketing pieces than short ones, but there’s a lot of value in the content once you’ve re-purposed it for new channels.

Have you tried this in your organization? What results do you see?

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When you meet marketing communications writers in networking situations, here are 5 useful questions for qualifying them.

Believe it or not, freelance marketing writers do get out in the wild from time to time, where, if you’re shopping for writers, you can hire them.

You may encounter them at chamber of commerce meetings, industry get-togethers and networking mixers for your profession. Note that they don’t frequent the same venues as most technical writers or even copywriters. Some of them fancy themselves closer to the people whose custom they seek than to their colleagues and peers.

Still, they all want work, and they may even want it from you. Here’s a sequence of questions you can pose to determine whether to short-list the writer who approaches you in the wild:

1. “What do you write?” This is the first hurdle. Regardless of his industry or specialty, you want to know what kind of content the marketing communications writer generates. If you’re a product manager or an engineer who needs a white paper, and the answer comes back “direct mail copy and press releases,” this is a bit of a stretch. Or, if you need a grant written, and the answer is “case studies and LinkedIn profiles,” you’d better keep looking.
2. “Are you freelance?” Don’t forget that many agencies and companies have their own in-house staff of writing talent. There are freelancers who work for agencies, and that’s not an obstacle to your hiring them, but if they work as employees anywhere, they won’t likely have time to dedicate to your projects when push comes to shove.
3. “Do you have a card?” Asking for a card is just an expression of interest, not a tacit commitment to hire. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but I recommend you judge a writer by her card. A serious writer has a serious card. If it’s flimsy, or it reads “vistaprint.com” on the back, then you’re probably holding the card of an unsuccessful or fledgling writer. Maybe that’s all your budget can support, but know what you’re getting into. If she says, “I have a résumé,” that is NOT a business card; it means this person has not yet decided to make a living of freelance writing, and you should not yet decide to hire her. If she says, “I don’t have any cards with me,” then she’s an engineer – they never carry business cards with them (or are hopelessly stingy about giving them out).
4. “Do you have a Website or a blog?” A blog is the easiest thing in the world to put up nowadays; a small Website is the second-easiest. This question is another way of gauging the seriousness of the writer. If your needs will tolerate a good writer who is clueless about visibility on the Web – are there any left? – then don’t worry about the answer to this question. Otherwise, visit the site with measured expectations; it’s not going to look like disney.com, but it should satisfy your basic curiosity.
5. “Where can I see your writing samples and clients?” Frankly, hoisting lots of writing samples onto a site is rather laborious, so you may have to content yourself with e-mail attachments. Once I hired a writer who had NO electronic samples – he mailed me an envelope of printouts – but I needed his subject matter expertise. Note that there is a bad reason for having no writing samples: The writer is just getting started or is dabbling. Note also that there are good reasons for having no samples: The clients have so “enhanced” the writer’s work with typographical and other errors that the writer no longer feels any ownership, or the writer has written pieces which the client has not released externally.

In short, most real marketing communication writers have:

• a card with an address on it
• a phone that isn’t the house phone
• a Web site or a blog with occasional updates
• examples of their work
• a client list

In addition, most really professional marketing communication writers have:

• a compelling piece on why you should hire them
• a social media presence (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Ning, etc.) that demonstrates a following
• endorsements from clients

The kind of writer with which you want to do business DOES NOT have:

• excuses for any of these things

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It’s not easy to keep your content machine fed, is it?

You’re finding out that providing valuable content to your readers really does take some work, doesn’t it?

When you were a kid, responsible for the family dog, your mom would holler up the staircase, “Timmy! It’s time to feed the dog again!” You remember that, don’t you? There’s a cosmic reason that “dog” rhymes with “blog,” and your responsibility is nearly the same.

Whether it’s the company blog or a content marketing campaign or even an e-newsletter, somebody has to write the stuff, somebody has to chase the stuff and somebody has to keep it moving along. Those somebodies are usually you, the marketing manager.

You begin to get a bit disillusioned.

• If you haven’t yet seen results, you’re wondering, “When should I pull the plug?”
• If you’re seeing results, you’re wondering, “How do I keep this up?”

Here are three things you need to remember when you get tired of feeding the blog:

1. You need to work with People who Love to Write. Even if you hire a writer to generate content about your niche technology for deep packet inspection and pay her handsomely, she can get tired of it in a hurry and run out of things to say and ways in which to say them. A true Lover of Writing will not suffer from this disease.
2. You need to Write for the Audience. Actually, if you’re not writing for the audience – for its questions and worries and headaches – then what’s the point? You can feed the blog candy just to see it get fat, or you can feed it something nutritious that will preserve it and increase its value to the audience. Besides, the more you know about your audience, the easier it is to keep your blog fed.
3. You, your company and your writers need to Write About What You Know About, and you need to be prepared to convey it persuasively for months, maybe for years. I came across this point in an article by Lloyd Brown last week:
   

   If you try to discuss the benefits of the acai berry when your only knowledge is what you read on another blog, the broader community is going to realize that you have nothing unique to offer. All they have done is burned a little of your bandwidth. Even worse is the abundance of blogs that simply import RSS feeds from other blogs to provide content. If you want visitors to stay longer than a few seconds and return at a later time, you must give them a reason. This means providing original content. The only way you can do this is if you know your subject.

Your blog won’t fetch sticks the way your dog did, but a well-fed one will fetch leads and attention. And, you don’t need to give it a bath.

photo credit: SpaceRitual

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