I don’t care what Google’s stock price is. They build an enterprise and reputation their way, and we build it our way. We’re not letting employees shoot from the hip in a blog post.

Nobody has said that to me, but it’s how I imagine a client in that position would think.

And, truth to tell, I haven’t fought the lawyers. I would stand nothing to gain and lots to lose.

As a marketing manager, you can crank out – or have a marketing communications writer crank out – blog posts that border on the fanciful. Face it: you’re in the business of imagination, and to keep the interest of your company’s followers, you may be tempted to “push it” every now and again. That’s because:

1. People want to read controversy – or at least opinions – in a blog. They look to a blog for a peek behind the curtains at what’s going on in your organization. That’s usually the antithesis of legal review.
2. The opinions they want to read do not include how great your products are. They want to know how you regard the market and especially your competitors. Legal review is not set up for that.
3. Legal review slows down the blogging process and can deprive timely posts of their edge. Mostly, though, that’s a good thing.

So you can gripe and moan that all your best stuff ends up on the cutting room floor because it was censored. But keep in mind that the responsibility of legal reviewers in the content creation process is to ensure that you avoid publishing things you couldn’t prove if you had to. These people are trained to assume that you will have to prove it someday, and they’ve been correct often enough that their role is a valuable one.

Don’t fight them. And if you do fight them, let them win. Someday you can be David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal officer of Google, and raise as many hackles as he did last month in a blog post about Microsoft and Apple.

But until then, just tell the truth “and make it rhyme.”

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. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Mike Willis

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Jason Cohen, a technology entrepreneur who’s not afraid to blog about his profession, extends all the sympathy you would expect of a Marine Corp drill sergeant to fellow entrepreneurs who can’t get around to blogging. In “Attacking your sucky excuses for not blogging,” he soothingly reminds us:

Not much in life that’s worthwhile is easy, especially at the beginning. That’s not an excuse to not do it.

Here’s a bunch of other excuses you’re probably using to avoid becoming a good communicator with influence in the world. Maybe by showing you ways around them you’ll take the plunge.

He then deflates most of the frequently invoked excuses for not blogging, which, if you’re not blogging, you probably already know.

Symptom of a deeper issue

Or, maybe you’re a social media loser.

There are lots of things that are not for everybody, and maybe you’re just not good at expressing your organization’s opinions, let alone talking about yourself.

Blogging is meant to be informal, and maybe the informality intimidates you. (Formality probably intimidates you even more.)

But what seems more likely – and more ominous – to me is that you have something to hide.

When I visit a Website of a small company, I always look at their About Us page to see whether they are brave (or honest) enough to identify themselves to the audience. (I also do this to see whether it’s just two guys and a dog behind the outfit; actually, I don’t even mind that it’s just two guys and a dog, as long as they’re willing to show me that they’re small.)

What are you hiding?

Why don’t you tell us your story somewhere on your site and blog about the things you and your company are doing? Who are you? Where were you before, and how come you’re not there anymore? Is it just you and your laptop behind this Flash-besotted multimedia Website, or are other people in your company?

Your blog, Facebook page and About Us page are different sides of the same thing: whether you have the cheek to tell your story in front of everybody.

If I have a business problem, I don’t care that the company that can solve it is small or shy or too busy to blog more than a couple of times a month.

But I do care if it doesn’t have the nerve to tell its story on the Web so I can see whether it’s the kind of outfit with which I want to work.

What’s on your About Us page? For that matter, what’s on mine?

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. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Helga Weber

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1. “It’s Time to Feed the Blog Again”

Jessica Shieh reports in Marketing Profs that recent studies suggest the buzz around Facebook may be in the fast lane to diminuendo.

For many of us, dizzied by the number and variety of social media channels in which to tell our story before our competitors get there and tell theirs, it’s not too soon. “Whew,” we gasp, “now we need to focus only on our Web site, blog, Twitter profile, e-mail campaigns, direct marketing and videos.”

Facebook less popular to whom?

What the decline in popularity of Facebook means – if there really is a decline – is that you need to court prospects elsewhere. If you have engaged followers and paying customers on Facebook, however, they’re probably not ready to throw the towel in by a longshot. They’re still having a good time on your fan page, and you’ll do well to continue giving them one.

I hope you’ve been feeding your website and blog all along though, since unlike Facebook, those are properties you can own. They’re also zones in which you can play by the normal, healthy rules of search.

But maybe you’ve benefited from the information about your followers for which Facebook is taking so much flak lately. If so, personalize while the personalizing is good, and transplant what you learn about your followers into buyer personas to implement on your own site and blog.

So, yes, you should heed Jessica by hoping for the best (the Facebook witch hunt will chug along innocuously) and planning for the worst (you need to depend exclusively on your own site and blog).

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. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: chadly

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It’s the beginning of the week, and time to round up some meat to feed the content beast in your organization. Do you keep sending your marketing communications writers back to the same sources for ideas, like industry reports from MarketingCharts and articles on iMedia Connection?

Try looking under a few new rocks.

Trip reports as content sources

I’m reading a fat book on General Douglas MacArthur: American Caesar by William Manchester. If you know anything about the General, it’s probably that he wasn’t encumbered by modesty. He enjoyed language and wasn’t afraid to use it.

With a sudden vacancy in their ranks, the members of the 1928 American Olympic Committee asked MacArthur if he wanted to be their president. Facing a dismal paucity of war opportunities, MacArthur seized on this and ended up inspiring U.S. athletes to set 17 records and win more contests in Amsterdam than the next two countries combined. He turned his trip report for President Coolidge into a blustering missive into which any marketing manager would gladly sink his or her teeth:

In undertaking this difficult task, I recall the passage in Plutarch wherein Themistocles, being asked whether he would rather be Achilles or Homer, replied, ‘Which would you rather be: a conqueror in the Olympic Games, or the crier who proclaims who are the conquerors?’ And indeed to portray adequately the vividness and brilliance of that great spectacle would be worthy even of the pen of Homer himself. No words of mine can even remotely portray such great moments as the reisistless onrush of that matchless California eight as it swirled and crashed down the placid waters of the Sloten; that indomitable will for victory which marked the deathless rush of Barbuti; that sparkling combination of speed and grace by Elizabeth Robinson which might have rivaled even Artemis herself on the heights of Olympus…

Obviously, MacArthur had his reader’s attention and opportunely hammed it up, but look at how clever he was in interweaving his own trip report with the Hellenic character of the games themselves.

Even if the people your company is shuttling around the world are not as eloquent as the General, they do have stories. Whether they survive to see the light of your blog is up to you.

Status reports as content sources

When it comes to this category of business writing, most managers probably paraphrase Groucho Marx:

I thought my razor was dull until I read that report.

The writer tries to avoid admitting mistakes and schedule slips, and the reader scans the report for red flags, as well as content for his/her own status report, which another manager will in turn decry as boring.

Still, a clever marketing manager will spot details in the status reports that may add up to trends:

• Why are we working so much on our Oracle implementation?
• Why is there such a scramble for talent in the Shanghai office?
• What did we learn from the Romanian partners who visited?

Naturally, you can’t publish everything, but censorship is part of your job anyway, and it’s the source of ideas that’s important. What if you pulled this into a weekly blog post called

Here’s What the Hell We Did this Week

You may – ahem – season to taste.

CRM logs as content sources

This one is bound to make you friends. Take the elevator down to the third level of the Inferno, where your nameless, faceless colleagues with headsets and cush balls listen to what real people say about your products and services all day long. If you can’t get content ideas from them, then you’re really not trying.

Read between the lines of what prospects are asking you and customers are telling you. Search for stories they’re trying to tell you. Look at how long the logs are: is that a story about lengthened sales cycles? Are they using your products in unexpected ways? Mine those for customer success stories.

Keep the “R” (relationship) in “CRM” (customer relationship management). Your relationships with your customers are the stuff of marketing communications and content, so don’t lose sight of them.

Those are a few unexpected places in which to find ideas for new content. The enterprising marketing manager will figure out incentives by which to turn this effort into a contest for employees.

Where are you looking for new content ideas?

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. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Klearchos Kaputsis

Related posts:

1. Wit in Corporate Writing? 3 Places to Try It, and Lots of Places to Avoid It
2. 4 Places to Lead Your Writers

Josh Shipp, the motivational speaker behind HeyJosh.com, freely describes his rough upbringing as a foster child. Realizing that he was adept at grabbing his classmates’ attention and making them laugh, he plied that talent in ways that disrupted class and got him into trouble at school.

One day, a discerning teacher asked him,

Good job, Josh. Now that you have their attention, what are you going to tell them?

This question helped to turn his mischievous side into a constructive one, and he has spent much of his life bringing parents and teens together.

As a marketing manager focused on content marketing, you need to keep that same question in front of you.

Now that you have their attention…

Social media, blogs, video and networking sites are this year’s vehicles for getting attention and building an audience. Here’s a story of how I got a little attention a couple of weeks ago.

Last spring I figured something out about social media and how I fit (or don’t fit) into it. I hammered out a pretty good blog post on the topic, but realized I could put it to better use as a guest-post on a social media-oriented blog. So I spent about three months watching blogs like Copyblogger, Duct Tape Marketing, Convince and Convert, Marketing Pilgrim, Social Media Explorer, Social Media Examiner, Brass Tack Thinking, Techipedia, Louis Gray, Brian Solis, Problogger, Chris Garrett and Junta 42 – trying to find a post with good traffic that would accept content from guests.

(This was an education in itself, and frankly not as easy as some would have you believe. I hope to post on it in greater detail one of these days.)

Finally, I submitted it to Mark Schaefer of Businesses {grow} who liked it and thought it would be a good fit. He ran it on July 29 as “This is why you’re a social media loser.” I had created a signature with a link to my own blog and site, anticipating a bump in traffic.

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of tweets I received (69, though most were duplicates) and the number and tone of comments that Mark’s community wrote. Even Mark himself parachuted into the comment stream and gave me a tip of the hat.

Well, now that I had their attention…

…what are you going to tell them?

What, indeed?

The morning the guest-post ran, I was waist-deep in an e-book I’d been planning as incentive content for the visitors from the guest-post. I designed the e-book for marketing managers who need to – but don’t really know how to – hire writers, Unfortunately, I didn’t finish it in time to catch this wave of traffic, so I need to chase the wave on Twitter and hope to catch up to it.

Of course, this is just one loop around the cycle. For most of us, the nature of content marketing is to launch one attention-getter after another, then tell or sell one new thing after another to the ever-growing audience.

If you’re in content marketing, your job is to keep the plates spinning. No wonder Jay Baer says,

Every company is its own TV station, magazine, and newspaper.

Plan to keep the hits and headlines coming. And always be ready with the next thing you’re going to tell them.

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. Download his e-book, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: lissalou66

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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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1. “It’s Time to Feed the Blog Again”
2. Customer Interviews in the Content Buffet

"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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1. Ghost Blogging As If It Were Alec Baldwin
2. 3 Ways to Make Small Marketing Pieces Work
3. 3 Ways to Make Long Marketing Pieces Work

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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1. Blogging is Tough. Passion Makes It Bearable.

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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