My colleague, Merle Tenney, announced his upcoming presentation in a webinar some weeks back. It was sponsored by a content quality software company I’ll call Katzenjammer, just because I’ve been itching to use that as a pseudonym lately.

Merle says important things, and I want to hear them. I went to the registration form on the Katzenjammer site.

I sign up for several of these events each month, so it was with considerable surprise that I beheld the response after I clicked the Submit button:

Requiring an email address from a “non-free provider” struck me as a bit cheeky. I felt like Johnny Halladay singing “Quoi ma gueule ? Qu’est-ce qu’elle a ma gueule ?” So, what’s wrong with my email address? So what if it’s free?

The marketing managers at Katzenjammer have probably worked out that people who use a Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail or otherwise unpaid email address are not very serious prospects. If you have a free email address, you probably cannot afford Katzenjammer’s products, and if you can afford them and use a free email address anyway, then you’re probably still not a good prospect.

I suppose it works for them.

Free email users are lousy prospects

I thought it uncool of Katzenjammer to decline my email address so brusquely. Am I a lousy prospect for them? Sure, but if all you want are prospects with a high probability of conversion, why issue a cattle call for attendees? Many are called, but few are desirable, I guess.

Besides, Katzenjammer wasn’t the draw; Merle was. “Merle, we want you to headline our webinar, but we’re not going to allow people to register with a crummy email address, because it doesn’t serve our purposes.” Is that how they pitched it to him?

I guess Katzenjammer knows that most people flick in a throwaway address that they rarely check. On the one hand, I understand Katzenjammer’s thinking; on the other, if they provided only valuable content – like Merle’s webinar – and focused more on what’s in it for attendees than what’s in it for Katzenjammer, they wouldn’t have to worry about what they consider sub-standard email addresses.

Blame it on the email provider

Some weeks later I tried to sign up for a free webinar from MarketingProfs, that venerable fount of marketing wisdom. They too are tired of cheap email addresses, but they’re using a perfectly Teflon pretext and blaming their email provider:

MarketingProfs complains, “Sorry, your email address is being blocked by our email provider.” Of all the nerve.

I could be wrong about this. Maybe there are spam issues at work here. Maybe the script kiddies soak up all the available seats in the webinar and cause admin headaches. But if that were the problem, wouldn’t you use a simple Captcha?

On the other hand, if I want the webinar badly enough, isn’t it worth giving up my non-free address, then just unsubscribing if I don’t like whatever else they send me?

If it’s free, then you’re the product.

…says Chris Dancy, and he’s right.

There’s a tacit understanding that, if the webinar is free, then I’m the product. But if I pollute my value as the product by using a free email address, the deal is off now. What does that bode for deviously clever sites like GuerrillaMail.com, which obligingly give you an address for an hour, and even let you play a game while you wait for your reply?

Are you dissing prospects with free email addresses? Is it working out for you? How many hours have you spent tinkering with that, instead of just generating arrestingly valuable content?

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.”

Related posts:

1. Before You Load It into the Email Cannon, Read It!
2. Your Content is So Good that I Can’t Tell How You Make Money
3. When Your Email Marketing Misfires – The Abuse-Abyss

From MarketingProfs comes this post about the YouTube Creator Playbook for planning, posting and maintaining video on the site.

Have a look at it to see what they mean by “playbook.” It’s a very clever hybrid of:

• user guide
• how-to
• samples gallery
• collection of blog posts

from a company that knows something about content marketing. For that matter, it looks as though they may have created it in their parent company’s own humble Google Docs Presentation app.

Most of us in marketing would probably have called it a white paper. Why?

• It reveals a lot of technical detail.
• It explains how users can get the most out of the product.
• It describes the product in sufficient detail even for people who aren’t yet using it.
• You put it down and think, “These guys are giving away a lot of useful information for free.”

Most important, it persuades without trying to persuade.

For homework tonight, forward this playbook to several of your co-workers in sales, executive management and PR. My hunch is that, within a few days, at least one of them will walk into your office and announce, “This was really good. We need a white paper just like this.”

Fine. Get a good marketing communications writer to create it for you. Use it in your next content marketing campaign.

Just don’t call it a white paper. You can be more creative than that.

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.”

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Facebook’s “friend” metaphor takes on new meaning in marketing communications. Use your marketing content to make friends.

My friend and former business partner John Bromhead has often maintained that the purpose of marketing is to start a conversation. It’s easy to grasp that concept, especially when you’re trying to explain the difference between marketing and sales.

I happened onto a post last week by Johnny B. Truant, in which he blew the long-standing lid off that pot for me:

So I told him: People don’t come to me because I create the best WordPress websites in the world, because I don’t. The people who come to me do so because we’re friends…

If you write and talk about yourself as a whole person, rather than a one-dimensional business drone, people tend to be interested in you.

If you answer tweets and emails in a somewhat chatty, personal way instead of going for the sale when it’s not obviously warranted, people tend to enjoy talking to you.

And when all of those friends — and friends of those friends — one day have a need that you are able to fill, they won’t go to Google and look for the first search result or for the guy with the cheapest price. It’s human nature that they’ll come to you — their friend — first.

With that mindset, you don’t stop trying once you’ve got the conversation going, do you? Your goal is to make friends, and that will take more effort than idle chatter.

Marketing Communications for Friends

How can you make your marketing communications efforts work like that?

1. Don’t lie. Or even bend the truth. You didn’t make friends that way on the playground, and it won’t work on the Web.
2. Give more than you get. Give away a white paper or an e-book, and make sure the recipients get more out of it than they bargained for.
3. Don’t sell. People like to buy, but they don’t like to be sold to, and that goes quintuple for friends.
4. Put some humanity into your marketing communications. “Write and talk about yourself as a whole person,” says Johnny. Can you make your organization sound as though it’s made up of whole persons?

Johnny finishes:

The web has magnified our interpersonal connections and the ability to meet new folks in new ways, but it hasn’t changed the fundamental nature of relationships. If we like people, then we want to hang out with them more, and do more with them. It’s that simple.

Now get out there and make some new friends.

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: U.S. National Archives

Related posts:

1. Blogging is Tough. Passion Makes It Bearable.

I was pleased to see that client Xiam Technologies was making excellent (re-)use of their white paper, “Make It Easy on Me – 3 Ways Operators Can Use Personalization To Give Customers What They Want On The Mobile Internet,” the fruit of our collaboration this past summer.

Xiam is using the white paper as a content-lead into msearchgroove, a knowledge portal on mobile search, mobile advertising and social media.

Personalization is also a topic Colm Healy — CEO of Xiam Technologies, a Qualcomm subsidiary providing discovery and recommendations solutions to mobile operators — will examine in a series of thought leadership contributions on MSG beginning later this week.

The first in the series will outline the key takeaways of the company’s white paper, titled “Make It Easy For Me: 3 Ways Operators Can Use Personalization To Give Customers What They Want On The Mobile Internet.”

Content like white papers, case studies and technical articles is rich in SEO-potential and industry authority. Why restrict it to the corral of your Website when you can give it away and get it to roam the plains of the Web, seeding your brand? (Tip of the hat also to msearchgroove, who obviously sees the potential for leverage.)

Never forget the Content Buffet. Xiam is one of those laying out a rich spread.

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

photo credit: KVDP

Related posts:

1. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part III
2. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part I

• Let it die on the vine – There is always a bit more work you need to do once the authors, reviewers and artists are finished. As marketing manager, you need to give birth to the paper and ensure it sees the light of day. Pushing it those last few inches can take a lot of effort – like the effort to send that last e-mail message of the day when you’d rather close your laptop and go to bed – but do it.
• Hide it under a rock – You need to put the paper where target readers will find it. You probably know that already, but perhaps your organization doesn’t know how to capitalize on what good bait your white paper can be. Many companies bury this kind of content several levels down in their Website, on a product- or solution-page. Surfers are looking for this kind of paper, so don’t make them work for it; link to it from your home page, or create an easily visible page on which your white papers, case studies and published articles all live.
• Give it to the wrong stakeholder - Who is the best custodian of your new white paper? Sales? Business Development? Channel Marketing? Engineering? I’ve had good, rich content – news articles, which have time-value – slide into obscurity because it went to a Website owner who stuck it wherever it would fit, instead of to the champion who really promoted it on the site.
• Put a big form-fill in front of it – If you really want to waste time and money, put your white paper behind a long form. No reader wants to put up with that in this day and age. Naturally, you want to capture the lead, but people would rather buy without being sold to. I posted before on the idea of giving away your content, which is a good idea if you have mountains of it, but if you’re not ready to make it so freely available, just ask for an e-mail address (be prepared for it to be a throwaway address) and an optional comment on what the visitor is looking for. Whenever I’ve done that, I’ve been surprised at the uptake.

This series has described white paper projects that don’t go well, and how you can avoid this situation. Of course, they sometimes go quite well, and as a marketing manager, that’s where you’ll want to focus.

Related posts:

1. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part I
2. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part II

Are we ready to do that with our content?

Are you ready to tell your boss that you’re going to take the white paper for which you just paid US$6500, and give it away without asking for so much as an e-mail address in return?

Don’t tell her that I told you do to it; tell her David Meerman Scott told you to do it. And he should know.

“Lose control of your information,” he counsels. “We in marketing have controlled the external dialog for ages, but there is no control online anymore, so you’re better off throwing out the mechanisms for and pretense of control. Make all your e-content free without registration or e-mail address; if it’s decent content, it will get shared a lot more. I have clients who discover that 20, 30, 40 times more people are using their content.”

What does that bode for you?

It means you can’t leave your white papers, Web content, case studies and articles entirely up to your writer (unless your writer is David Meerman Scott, I suppose).

YOU need to infuse them with the schmaltz and chutzpah that will get people talking about your
IDEAS and your POSITIONS,
not your products and services.

Your writers need to understand this, and they need to see that you’re willing to let go in order to hang on.

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