What’s in your content: Marketing writing or corporate cheerleading? A parable for the marketing manager.

A dear friend who does a lot of business writing once remarked,

Compact, compelling copy that doesn’t fall into business jargon is tough.  So much of it is fake words strung together with cheerleading.

I’ve mulled that over for a couple of years and can finally weave a parable around it.

In short, my response is:

You say “fake words” and “cheerleading” as if they were bad things.

Here’s why.

Sporting Event = Game + Cheerleading

I’ve taken to attending football and basketball games at my sons’ school of late. It didn’t take me very long to develop a deep appreciation for the role played by the top-flight cheerleading squad in these sporting events: they cheer, kick, jump, form pyramids, turn somersaults, sell raffle tickets and generally spice up the evening. They’re a show unto themselves, really, and I can easily forget about the game I’m supposed to be watching, for all the talent, energy and acrobatic skill they display.

Cheerleaders are unflappable. Regardless of the team’s plight or good fortune, their tone is upbeat, emotionally engaging and designed to make you feel good about being there. It’s a job they do well, and we spectators need them to do it for us. They don’t put points on the board, but it’s great performing nonetheless.

Meanwhile, on the field or the court, the game is in one of three states:

1. It’s a wipeout, and we’re winning.
2. It’s a wipeout, and we’re losing.
3. It’s a close game, and it’s making us nervous.

The marvelous thing about cheerleaders is that, regardless of the state, they’re doing the same thing. Sure, maybe they’re doing the touchdown cheer less often in state 2, but they’re still cheering almost constantly, with smiles on their faces, pom-poms in their hands and high kicks in their legs.

Why?

Because their voice is an important part of the game, too. Other people have the job of scoring points; cheerleaders have a different job.

Writing and Cheerleading

As a marketing manager, you’re responsible for telling your organization’s story and starting the conversations that Sales will continue. But you can’t use the same voice or tone for every story and conversation. (If you do, you must be tired of it.)

What if “fluff” and cheerleading are an important part of your game, too?

Think of the marketing pieces you put out: white papers, press releases, case studies, technology overviews, market research, annual reports, corporate backgrounders, and all of the copy on your Website. Can you honestly look at all that content and say that it’s pure game, pure fact, pure attempts to persuade prospects with may-the-best-company-win objectivity?

Sure, you give your writers access to your executives, to industry analysts, to your internal data and research, and they give you back valuable content that Sales can use to persuade prospects and beat your competitors.

But fess up; you’ve also got some corporate cheerleading in there, haven’t you? A little rah-rah-sis-boom-bah-go-team-go that puts a sunny face on things, even if sales are tanking and your technology is under scrutiny by the European Union?

Can you be that honest with your marketing communications writers? Can you tell them, “That report you wrote last month was dead-on objective, but this needs to be an upbeat piece on how our product is making life better for soccer moms. Don’t mention our ongoing patent litigation; just paint a favorable picture. It’s what we need right now.”

More crucially, when your colleagues start making snide remarks about “fluff pieces,” can you take the heat?

Yes, you can. As a marketing manager you’ve done your job by providing both objective and “soft” content. Just tell the cynics the parable of the football game and the cheerleaders.

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: avinashkunnath

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“Write a series of technical articles to help evangelize the technology,” we said, “two to three pages each. They should introduce developers and customers to the new features they can use in programming on the platform. We need to get the word out about this, so we’ll put the articles on the developer Web site. We’ll give you the topics, and you do the rest: interview the engineers, talk to the product managers, write it up, circulate drafts, edit it and submit it to the Web team.”

That was about all we told him, and he did all of that, for several months. He delivered reliably and on time.

Turns out that what we told him to do is not what we wanted him to do.

“There’s too much fluff in the articles,” observed the VP of Engineering. “We need more meat instead of muffins.”

The writer was perplexed. “I’m doing what you told me to do, but if you want me to turn up the technical heat, I will. But I assume that, if you just wanted pages of technical language, you’d have the Documentation group do this. You hired a technical marketing writer to help persuade people to work on the platform, right?” He underlined it.

Right.

“Can you give us something more technical, yet not turn the content into a user guide?” we asked.

“Sure. I just need to know whether you want meat, muffins, or meaty muffins,” he said. A good way to put it. Must be why he’s in marketing.

The articles got deeper and the VP of Engineering became more pleased. People started reading them more, and spending more time on them, according to our Web logs.

Moral: When you hire a writer, be sure to explain how shallow or deep you want the content to be. Meat or muffins. Corporate cheerleading (I always enjoy envisioning that) or something that a developer will pass on to a colleague, maybe even retweet.

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“Basically,” he said, “Mrs. Correia doesn’t want us to use words like ‘very’ or ‘like’ or ‘many’ or ‘lots of’… words that don’t really add any value. She also doesn’t want us to, like, begin sentences with ‘basically.’”

Like basically, I agree, so I’m getting dead words out of our copy – cold turkey.

There are probably 2700 blogs with lists of words to avoid in business writing, so plenty of us have thought about this already. Dead words can turn decent copy into fluff. If you want to make a science of it, collect the boilerplate paragraph from the press releases of middle-tier technology companies and lump them all onto a single Web site: museumofnonsense.com.

Herewith a few:

• Best practices – Why would we mention the worst practices? I hate this expression, and I was encouraged when an engineer agreed with me in a meeting last week.
• Solution – The most overused word in technology writing. I’m galled that it occurs 12 times in a 10-page paper we published just a few months ago, but I plan to refrain from using it from now on.
• High-tech – There is no high technology anymore. It ended about 2001 when everybody got a computer.
• Leading provider – You wouldn’t want to work with a trailing one, would you? Throw it away.
• Today’s – I’ve decided I’m not going to read any piece that begins with this word, as in “Today, content professionals are tugged in multiple directions…” or “In today’s socially networked world…”
• Embraced – There’s too little embracing going on in the world right now, so let’s use “adopted” or “accepted” and be more accurate.

Runners-up:

• Resources – I don’t like this word, but it’s pretty hard to work around it. Usually, though, what we mean is “money,” so perhaps I should be more frank in the future.
• Support – Long in the tooth, but another tough one to get around. If there were a better way to say “Windows XP supports remote desktop management,” I’d use it.
• Business-critical/mission-critical – In other words, “Pay attention to the next noun – it’s important!” I think I can get away without these; if not, I’ll post and let you know.

So, I’m notifying my writers that I’ll assume they have a writer’s disease and deduct points if they use these dead words in copy they send me.

Also, I don’t understand why people pronounce it “processeeze.” Does that make it high-tech?

Basically, that’s another post.

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Figure out which one you want before you award the project.

One of our engineering directors has funded a series of news articles on a technology platform we’re rolling out. (Actually, a marketing manager is funding it, but the engineering director got to pick the writer and is picking the topics for most of the articles.)

In a meeting yesterday over a draft of the seventh article in two months, I saw the light begin to go on for him.

“You know, we need to stop and think about these articles,” he said. “My boss tells me the ones so far have been a little bit ‘too slick,’ but this latest one is a much deeper dive into interfaces and newfuncs and libraries. This is a really different kind of thing, isn’t it?”

Uh, yes. It is.

I kept hearing the f-word – fluff – applied to the first six articles, usually from people with an engineering background. (In fact, I posted on it.)

• I looked at it as technical marketing content; they looked at it as confetti.
• I was being mindful of the role of persuasion in getting people to adopt the platform; they want to dive in and start writing code.
• I’m focusing on the external audience that doesn’t know what the platform is for; they’re thinking about people who breathe the same exhaust as they do and want to reduce memory footprint while enabling statically linked window management.

“I need you to strategize some more about these articles before we do any more writing,” he said to me. “We need to start answering a couple of basic questions, like ‘Why should I want to register and download the kit?’ and ‘Why should I move to the new platform from the old version?’”

I wish I’d thought of that.

He told me that the marketing manager had wanted to hire a writer who was a a real writer, but he had wanted somebody who knew the platform and knew this building and the people in it, which is how we ended up with our current writer. I think we’re all bouncing back and forth between wanting a technical marketing writer and a technical writer, between needing to persuade readers and assuming they’re already convinced.

Have you run into this? Do you cut it with the same knife?

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He knows the client and the client knows him, and it’s a good fit. It has taken longer than anticipated to crank out the articles – mostly because of client-side review loops – but it seemed that it was going well.

In a meeting the other day, the chief engineer told the writer, “Hope we don’t bruise your ego, but we’re going to edit your articles to remove a lot of the fluff that’s in them.” The writer took it in stride, saying, “If somebody will show me the fluff in question, I’ll be sure to avoid it in future articles.” Further discussion was not on the engineer’s agenda, and he moved to another topic.

I’ve reviewed every word the writer has put out, and I don’t see the fluff. Granted, at its core it’s technology marketing content, and you need some persuasiveness and upside among the one’s and zero’s, but I don’t see fluff.

My favorite journalist, Robin MacNeil of the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, once described the quiet popularity of the show by saying, “People are tired of having TV journalists throw confetti at them for a half-hour each night. We don’t do that.” I keep that in mind when I think of fluff: Don’t throw confetti at your reader, persuade him intelligently. I think the writer has been doing this.

Somebody on the review cycle disagreed, I guess.

The articles are destined for a Web site that will be launched shortly. I had a look at pages written by other people – the ones who, I think, are crying fluff – and found…well, I’d call it confetti at worst and imperfect writing at best, but now I’m not thinking objectively. In four paragraphs I found ten instances of “ecosystem” and multiple instances of sentences that don’t really add up to much meaning.

Do you have to deal with allegations of fluff in your organization? How do you do it? Do you stick up for the writer or the fluff-crier?

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