The first step in writing a white paper is an outline, which acts as a skeleton that you flesh out with evidence and persuasion.

My post last October, 4 Elements of a White Paper Outline, resulted in a large number of visits, so I’ll go into more detail in this post. As a matter of fact, I’ll give you an outline, right in this post.

It’s the outline for a technical benefits white paper I wrote some years ago; the client has given me permission to use it. You may go ahead and steal it. After all, I stole the title for this post from Abbie Hoffman’s famous Steal This Book, so it seems only fair.

Your company’s hardware acceleration technology relieves system bottlenecks by offloading compute-intensive algorithms from software running on host processors to dedicated hardware. The task is to create a paper that interests engineers in your technology and convinces them that your approach makes sense.

Summary

This is 1-3 paragraphs on what the paper covers. It answers the reader’s question, “Why should I bother reading this?”

Many marketing communications writers defer writing the summary until after the body of the paper is finished. I prefer to take a stab at one at the outline stage. It shows my reviewers what I understand they want to convey and gives them the opportunity to straighten me out if need be.

Since you plan to discuss your own technology in the paper, mention it in the summary. Don’t be coy and spring it on the reader at the end.

Acceleration Opportunity

The Market and Competitive Threat
The Application
The Algorithm

In this section and subsections, you describe the landscape and trends around acceleration technology: who’s buying it (citations of recent market data help to make this more credible), how they’re using it (e.g., for speeding up anti-virus scanning at enterprise e-mail gateways), and the mathematics behind the algorithm.

It’s a good idea to put some buckshot in the air and point out to readers the necessity of their doing something different. The essence of a white paper is persuasion, and the subtle suggestion that obsolescence awaits readers who do nothing, goes a long way toward convincing them to act.

Your Design

State of the Industry
Your Solution

You’ve led the reader to the point in the paper at which you describe your own approach to acceleration technology.

It’s useful to describe existing approaches to acceleration – e.g., sacrifice network throughput in the interest of security, throw more boxes at the problem, create a custom chip, rewrite the software more efficiently – but for the sake of balance, the reader needs to understand that there are downsides associated with each one. Each approach also meets several different factors with varying degrees of satisfaction: cost, time to market, maintainability, performance, standards-maturity, and so on.

Your acceleration technology is not the fastest hardware and not the fastest software, but it combines and optimizes the mix of the two for a new approach, and it most nearly satisfies all of the selection factors. You may also leave an out for the next generation of your accelerator, which will indeed satisfy all of today’s factors.

Case Studies/Use Cases

XML Processing
Network Security
Cryptography

If you’ve kept your readers this far, it’s a good idea to trot out instances where your acceleration technology is in use, preferably with statistics to demonstrate that it’s better, cheaper and faster than what was in place before.

Case studies within a white paper are a relief to a reader. “I’m interested only in cryptography, so I get to skip the other two. That will help me get through this paper faster.” Don’t try to make all of your case studies fascinating to all readers; just ensure that each one will resonate for its particular audience.

If you can drop names of customers, it’s a huge benefit.

Hardware Acceleration-Main Messages

Conclusion
Follow Us

Now, you tell them what you’ve told them. This is useful because some readers will cut right to the chase and read the end, then go back for the body of the paper only if the conclusion convinces them that they’ve missed something.

The main messages are a series of bullet points (preferably three) that skim the highlights of your paper’s argument. Again, these help the impatient reader qualify the paper as worthy of his/her time and effort.

Your conclusion picks up where the Summary left off, adding more detail about your technology and its real-world applications and savings.

“Follow Us” used to be “For More Information.” If your paper has accomplished its goal, readers don’t need more information from you. They want to go out to the Web and follow you to see what other information they can find about you. Sure, you give them a phone number and a landing page, but point them to your presence in social media and on blogs.

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.

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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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Case studies can be low-hanging fruit for the marketing manager, but it’s easy to get them wrong and end up with ineffective content posing as a case study.

“I’ve got a series of webinars that are recorded interviews with customers,” the director of marketing said. “I want to have the webinars transcribed, then turn the transcripts into case studies.”

Great idea in principle. The customer has said good things about the product, we’ve recorded it, and the recording is ripe for pulling straight into a case study, right?

There are three things wrong with this idea, though:

1. The customer is not necessarily “on message.” Some customers think that the story is really about them, or some kind of “partnership” piece that trumpets their business, but it’s not about their business. It’s about their technology and how your product helps advance it, and your product may not be prominent enough in the transcript. Better: Have your marketing communications writer modify the transcript so that it does support your message. At the very least, use headers and subheads as signposts along the road you want the reader to follow.
2. The content first needs to be tailored to the ideal reader. The webinar audience has a different focus from that of the written case study audience. Your customer could go on for several hundred words about a business or technology situation; dropping that content into a case study is not the best way to tailor it to that would be better summarized in half a written paragraph. Better: Have the writer pour the transcript through the filter of your ideal reader. Separate the points that will appeal to him in writing from those he’d tune out if he were listening to the webinar.
3. Transcription is an inefficient way of doing almost anything in marketing. It might work for court reporting, but in this context, you’re just taking the mix of wheat and chaff from an audio file and putting it into text. It still needs to be distilled to satisfy points 1 and 2 above. Better: Have the writer listen to the webinar and pull out the useful bits himself. It makes for a better built story.

So, if you do have a full transcript, what’s the best thing to do with the eight or ten thousand words it yields? Hire a writer with the expertise to chop them up and use them for SEO bait on your Website. This content is rich in the kind of keywords for which you want to be found, so use it that way. Just don’t expect it to be compelling, attractive content right out of the can.

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: Joe Mabel

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Don't market to me, tell me a story.

People won’t read all the way through your 250-word press release, but they will read your 1000-word story. Can your marketing communications writer deliver a story for you?

 

Susan Straight, professor of creative writing at University of California at Riverside, posted an editorial in the Los Angeles Times:

Over the years, some people have said to me that it’s frivolous to teach writing — compared with a practical skill like auto mechanics or biology or engineering. But I say that each of my students who learned to tell a story, who taught someone else how to tell a story, who read a story and thought about it and kept it inside until its meaning was clear, learned something vital. The world runs on stories. It is how we humans survive.

What I tried to give them, and what I hope to give my students this fall, is the power that comes with the freedom to write about themselves, to tell their own stories and the stories of their communities, populated by people they know, real or imagined.

Can you believe that, as a marketing manager, it is part of your job description to start a conversation with your prospects by telling a story?

How else are you going to do it, and not turn them off? To paraphrase Susan, “your marketing effort runs on stories. It is how your company survives.”

When you hire a marketing communications writer, ask for a story among the writing samples. Case studies and customer success stories are fertile ground for this, but not all case studies make it to the promised land of good stories.

Three marketing managers are walking down a road in Texas when they come to a bridge over a creek…

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: ardenswayoflife

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In its report, “Social Media 10 x 10,” Beeline Labs calls these “the one social strategy with 10x the value of any other social media tactic.”

• An eVoc Insights study found that 48% of consumers need to read reviews before making a purchase decision.
• Neilsen’s research has found that consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising among 78% of study participants.
• Embedded customer reviews are the best social media investment for realizing strong ROI.

The most valuable and under-used social media strategy is embedding customer reviews in your Web site. Not blogs, Twitter, communities or tagging.

Short Form: Customer Feedback Forums

There’s a lot of value in these forums, as noted in “Managing an Online Reputation,” by Kermit Pattison:

Study local search sites like Yelp, Citysearch and Yahoo! Local. Forums for customer feedback have sprung up everywhere — Google Maps, Amazon, Angie’s List, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Epinions and a myriad of online communities and niche sites.

Prospects speed-surfing for your products get a lot of mileage out of these reviews, especially since they tend to have a snowballing effect and they are highly organic.

But not every business gets reviewed. The reviews are valuable, but they skew to gregarious customers. There’s also the fact that the reviewers get credibility points in many of these forums to encourage participation, so they’re not 100% grass-roots reviews. Finally, while nobody would look the gift horse of unsolicited, positive feedback in the mouth, a business owner could look at a year’s worth of reviews and say, “Nobody talked about the strawberry rhubarb flavor we worked so hard to launch,” or “How can we get people to talk about our signal-to-noise ratio? It’s our biggest differentiator.”

For these comments, you need to create your own content with targeted customer interviews.

Customer Interviews and How to Write Them

It’s not hard to get this kind of content onto your buffet line. Set yourself the goal of generating 4-6 case studies or customer success stories over the next 12 months.

Your sales team can help you identify customers with interesting uses of your products. Keep in mind that generally, the larger the customer, the longer each success story will take, because of the approval hoops your content will have to jump through. You’ll probably find as much enthusiasm – maybe more -  with smaller customers, and the resulting text rarely has to get through a phalanx of lawyers before you can use it. (See David Meerman Scott on this topic.)

Hire a marketing writer with at least some experience in your industry to conduct and record the customer interview, which should touch on:

• the customer’s business
• why they need your products
• how they use them
• how your products save them time and money, and how much
• an anecdote or two about their experience with your company and your products

The interview should take 30-45 minutes. It’s important to make it clear to the customer that you want to use her name in the success story, and that she will have the opportunity to review and edit the piece before you publish it.

Using the Customer Success Story

Do you see how the resulting 500- to 1000-word piece has more and longer lives than a Yelp review or an isolated tweet? You can re-use the text from the story at multiple points along your content buffet: callout boxes in other content, sidebars on your Web pages, blog posts, tweets, brochures, e-mail marketing, press releases…

These stories reinforce your relationship with your customers, too. If I told you how much I like your products, and you used my quote on your Website, don’t you think I’d be gratified to see my name in lights?

No wonder customer interviews and the resulting endorsements are so powerful.

photo credit: Garry Knight

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I was on the call because I had tried unsuccessfully for several months to get the VP to review and approve the draft of this case study that hadn’t gone all that well, so I dragged the ops manager onto the call to see whether we could unstick things. After a few telephonic slaps on the back and promises to look the piece over, they started talking about business.

“So, how are things going for you in this slowdown?”

“Not too badly somehow. How about for you?”

“Miraculously, we’re about where we were at this time last year. We’d like it to be better, but in the current climate, this isn’t so bad.”

“Yeah, we’re seeing that as well. It’s too bad, after all the quarters of growth we had, but at the moment we’re happy to be flat instead of down, the way a lot of companies are.”

“No kidding. We’ve been saying that ‘flat’ is the new ‘up.’ It’s not as good as the old ‘up,’ but it will do for now.”

I liked that: “Flat” is the new “up.”

The twenty-dollar bill is the new single.

Fifty is the new thirty.

It’s a clever turn of the phrase, one that should resonate with you as a marketing manager. See whether you can use it or one of its relatives in the next piece you write.

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“But if you want a technical case study, why interview the VP of marketing?”

“He’s the interview we can get. Make it work.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. One of my best friends is a VP of marketing and a very technically knowledgeable guy. He can keep up with engineers, but he knows that writing is the process of taking the cut-up dead chicken parts that engineers use to describe things, and turning them into “finger-lickin’ good” marketing content.

Most VPs of marketing don’t think that way.

So, when we got him on the phone, the VP spent most of his time telling us about Zog Systems and its 24-carat, ironclad commitment to customer satisfaction, instead of how his employees use our products. I gently guided him back to talking about our tools, but it was obvious from his bland remarks that he didn’t know much about them. He also pointed out that he couldn’t tell us much about his customers (“too confidential”) or very much about the applications on which Zog Systems had used our tools (“mostly consumer and high-tech electronics”).

Also, since our product manager was on the call, the VP misinterpreted the interview for a focus group, first by telling the product manager how to make the tools better – to which lecture the product manager studiously listened -  then by educating us on how we should position the tools against competitors.

After the call, I confided to the product manager that the interview had left me with little more than a bag of rocks, but that I was pretty confident I could make something of it. That the conversation had been a flop was lost on the product manager.

“I thought that went pretty well, didn’t you?” he asked.

Nyet.

So I wrote up the case study and the product manager liked it. He asked me to send it to the VP at Zog and to get some graphics from him to include in the piece. That was in September. After several empty assurances via e-mail that he would review it “right away,” I reached the VP by phone in late November. “I’ve got too many things going right now and I can’t focus on that until next month,” he barked.

I told the product manager that I didn’t want to strain a lucrative business relationship over a two-page case study, and that it was his call, since it was his relationship. In February they conversed, and after a few more weeks Zog’s VP gave me approval on the case study along with a graphic.

It wasn’t a disaster, but it certainly didn’t go well.

Morals:

• There’s something about VPs of marketing as subject-matter experts that doesn’t always work to the writer’s advantage.
• Record your interviews, because if you can’t find any meat on the big bones, you need to be able to pick through lots of small ones to salvage a decent story.
• Inform any of your co-workers on the call that the objective is to get a story, not to collect product requirements.

Not only that, but I’m glad there’s apparently no such company as Zog Systems, a name I just concocted. Maybe I’ll buy the domain just so I can use it in future posts…

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I’ll cut to the chase: Interviewing and writing up a customer success story or case study goes well when the customer contact is a clever person, and when the writer, if need be, can get a story out of a rock.

It’s also important not to focus on your product or service, but to let your customer do that.

A clever customer

We’ve interviewed over a dozen engineering companies for a series of case studies. Life is like a box of chocolates with these people – sometimes we get an animated small businessman, sometimes an M.D., sometimes a VP of engineering, sometimes a director of marketing.

The best content and the best case study experience has been with people smart enough to understand that we were after a conversation or a story. Once they have that mindset, everything else falls into place: the technology we’re trying to describe, the software tools of ours that they use, the business and technical benefits we want to convey to the reader, even the images and diagrams that accent the final piece.

How do you identify a clever customer? That’s the hard part. It’s not even guaranteed that every company has somebody who fits that description, let alone that they’re in a position to talk about your product.

Getting a story out of a rock

My old roommate , Arthur O’Donnell, used that term to describe the task of coaxing interesting content out of uninteresting material (or people).

Here’s an analogy from the world of optics: If the interviewee is the light source, the writer is the prism who generates the prism from bland light. For a case study to go well, the writer needs to understand what the ideal reader wants to see.

In the technical series I’ve described, the audience consists of engineers, and engineers usually want to know the answer to one main question:

How’d they do it?

It’s not been easy in this series, but we’ve managed in almost all of these pieces to explain the technical problem – usually in the area of chip design – and tell the story of how the customer solved it (preferably using our tools).

When you do that, you don’t need to tell people how great your products are. Your customers do it for you in the interview, and your readers catch on.

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But it’s not allowed. Your client:

• doesn’t grant endorsements or permit vendors to use its name in success stories;
• won’t do a joint press release with you, or allow you to use its name in a unilateral release;
• is likely to run your copy through a spanking machine of attorneys that will leave it insipid and banal;
• is elusive and won’t give you the interview or quotes you need for a bona fide case study;
• doesn’t want anybody to know it had a $35 jillion hole to plug up;
• wants to keep you and your technology in its back pocket as a “secret weapon.”

This makes your job as marketing manager a bit tougher, doesn’t it?

Try a caselet.

Caselets are brief case studies that describe your service or technology, the problem it solves and the benefits enjoyed by “a worldwide provider of [your customer's industry goes here].” We relied on caselets in the early days with one technology company for a simple reason: We had plenty of technology and target markets, but no customers yet.

Instead of interviewing your customer, you interview your own in-house resources – engineers, product managers, account executives – who have been close to the customer’s business situation and understand how your product has been beneficial. You’ll end up with slightly less detail (and no legitimate quotes) than in a real case study, but a good caselet is longer on sizzle than it is on steak.

And, don’t forget your original intention: you want to tell readers a story about your services, a story in which they can see their own predicament and begin to envision a solution to it. If the caselet is written well, the fact that you can’t mention Pepsi or the Vatican or The New York Yankees does not get in the way of the story.

Interested? You’ll find a few caselets on my site, about halfway down the page. They’re just a few hundred words, less than two pages. The sales team eats them up, and they help you tell your story.

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