What do you think about scaring your prospects and customers a little bit?

How do you feel about getting them off the dime to buy your products by prodding them or making them feel uneasy? Can your marketing communications writer pull that off in a white paper?

There are subtle ways in which to do that, and the innovation white paper outline shows you how to nudge readers out of their comfort zone and into action.

You just need to put a little Buckshot in the Air.

Title

Use a title that conveys urgency:

• Don’t Look Now… – Engineering Managers and the Coming Wave of Environmental Compliance
• What’s Spam Got to Do with It? Network Administrators Fight This Year’s Threats with Last Year’s Technology

The paper will embody some tension and conflict (see David Meerman Scott on conflict-driven business writing), and the title has to set the stage for it.

Summary

You’re probably going to describe your own innovative remedy for the problem, so do the right thing and prepare readers for that in your summary.

Being honest about it is better than pretending that it’s an independent, authoritative resource, and then stealthily injecting advertorial late in the game. Readers don’t like that.

Introduction

Keep your goals modest as you introduce the body of the paper.

• Your product will not overcome global warming; it will improve scrubber technology.
• It will not make malware evaporate; it will strengthen security at e-mail gateways.
• Your service will not fix the Great Recession; it will help cautious employers screen middle-manager candidates.

Don’t bother discussing the overarching topics of global warming or malware or the economic crisis, because your readers already know about them. Devote a couple of precious, introductory paragraphs to the subset of the problem that your product addresses.

The Buckshot in the Air

Your readers are comfortable with their understanding of the problem and their approach to it, so you need to describe the danger they face in relying on that old-think.

Two uncontrollable forces make up the Buckshot in the Air (as in, “something or somebody pursuing and shooting at you”): competitors and changes in the industry.

Your readers are afraid of these forces because they cannot predict them. You cannot predict them, either, but you have a new way of staying one step ahead of them. That is why people are willing to read your white paper.

Consider a personalization technology that helps people discover interesting mobile content without hours of fruitless searching on the phone. The ideal readers are wireless carriers, who already enjoy a tight billing relationship with users. The Buckshot in the Air might look like this:

1. You don’t own all the data on your users. There are intermediate parties providing good content to your users, and they own very valuable information about your users’ preferences.
2. A new category of competitor is arising, populated by last year’s strategic partners.
3. You can try to direct your users to interesting content, but if they don’t find it relevant, you’re doing them – and yourself – more harm than good.

Does that feel as through you’re pushing the envelope? Are you afraid that your readers will think you’re bawling them out? Are you wary of sticking your nose into their business?

You are pushing it, you may be bawling them out and your nose is in their business.

This is what it looks like when you stop croaking about your products and start focusing on the problems you solve for your customers.

The Innovation

Here you describe the innovation toward which you’ve scared your readers:

• how it differs from other approaches
• how it will give readers a leg up on the competition and help them stay ahead of industry developments
• why it is important to find out more about the innovation as soon as possible

Of course, most companies want the paper to describe their own innovation, and this is where they begin naming their own name. If you prefer, you can keep this section anonymous, then drop your name in the last paragraph of the conclusion.

(In the pure sense of a white paper, they should refrain from naming their products, using the paper instead to build their own authority quietly. In practice, though, few can justify the time and expense involved in producing a good paper without talking about themselves and their products. Good marketing communications writers can balance the tasks of naming names and focusing on the customer’s problems.)

List a few technical details  in a subsection (e.g., “How Does [the Innovation] Work?) – just enough to add some depth to the paper and to whet the reader’s appetite for more.

Conclusion and Follow Us

Recap the threats and the new-think for dealing with them. If you’ve left your innovation nameless up to now, mention it in passing in the conclusion.

Be sure to invite readers to follow your blog, newsletter, podcasts and webinars. If they like the way you look at their business problems in the paper, they’ll want to keep an eye on you for more insight.

The result is a first-pass white paper outline you can circulate. Your reviewers will be able to see where you’re taking the readers of your innovation white paper. Once you have their feedback, you can start on the draft.

Next, the Why-We-Did-This White Paper: Customers-Industry-Us Outline

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 with more tips on working with your writers.

photo credit: Major Nelson (CC 2.0)

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Part 2 in a continuing series of white paper outlines, each with a different structure and focus. Here, an outline for white papers that guide readers through revolutionary change.

This white paper outline is about The Revolution that your new ideas and technologies ignite in your customers’ organization.

Suppose you want your prospects to:

• replace a zillion spreadsheets with a customer relationship management (CRM) package
• move from a central headquarters to a virtual structure
• switch from Microsoft Office to Google Docs
• change from a traditional phone system to one based on the Internet (VoIP)

When your product or service causes a seismic shift in how your buyers do something as business-integral as place a phone call, you should create a story around it that tells them what they’re in for. A revolutionary change is going to affect People, Process and Technology, and this is the structure on which you’ll base your white paper.

Title

Summary

The same things that apply to the white paper outline for the educational white paper apply here. Establish the people-process-technology theme in the summary and maintain it in your structure throughout the paper.

IMPORTANT: Avoid talking about your product or service by name. This white paper outline is about The Revolution that you occasion, but it’s not specifically about your features and functionality. Leave those for your brochures.

Then dive in. Assume your readers already know what has their hair on fire, are familiar with The Revolution, and want to know how it is going to affect their…

People

First talk about people. Describe how to sell the revolution to different groups in the organization, because if this doesn’t happen smoothly, then process and technology won’t matter very much.

Use a series of quotations – real and imagined – to give a voice to objections, warnings, praises, recommendations and water-cooler talk about The Revolution:

• “We don’t need agile development because our release cycles are so long.”
• “Our QA staff is stretched too thin as it is. The added workload of migration would break us.”
• “We want to spend less on trade shows but aren’t sure that social media is where we should put those dollars.”
• “We’ve already switched to authoring in DITA/XML tools, but our team is still doing things pretty much the same as before, only more slowly.”
• “We need to get our overseas offices on board with buying postage off the Web.”

You’ll build the People section around these quotations, ending with a brief segue into…

Process

The Revolution will introduce new vocabulary and new workflow to your readers’ organization. In this section, define that vocabulary in your own terms (this is stealth branding) and outline that workflow as you’ve seen it play out with your other customers.

For example, client Service-now.com reinforces the message that the most successful implementations of its IT service management platform rely on putting processes in place first. Outline these processes in this section as a series of easy-to-read steps.

Technology

Assuming The Revolution has a technology component, it comes last in the white paper outline. Now that you’ve addressed the People’s fears and the novelty of Processes, describe the software, hardware, machinery, materials and capital expansion required:

• cooling towers
• data center equipment
• earth-moving equipment
• gas turbines
• rubber bands and staplers
• Linux servers

If The Revolution is a service, explain the steps for implementing it:

• 30-minute interviews with executive staff
• recorded depositions
• subterranean termite inspections

This isn’t the place for the bill of materials, but you should list anything required to get The Revolution going successfully in terms that make both business and technical sense.

What Can We Expect from The Revolution?

List some of the business and technical benefits customers have experienced. Use pull-quotes. Refer and hyperlink to case studies and success stories, but soft-pedal mention of your product or service, because the essence of the paper is still The Revolution. Don’t worry: your readers know where to find you.

Conclusion and Follow Us

Use these sections to briefly tie up the white paper outline and invite readers to follow you. Your “Follow Us” section should be boilerplate, with the usual pointers: social media, phone, Web, e-mail.

Again, let other marketing pieces specifically describe your product or service. The goal of this white paper is to convince readers that nobody knows more about The Revolution than you do.

How about that? The result is a white paper outline you can circulate. Your reviewers will be able to see the path down which you intend to take the readers of your revolutionary white paper. Once you have their feedback, you can start on the draft.

Next: The Vindication White Paper: Seven Myths Outline

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 with more tips on working with your writers.

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If you’re writing a white paper for yourself, you can get away without writing an outline first, but if other people will approve the paper, you need a white paper outline. Period.

In other posts about white paper outlines, I’ve explained this. The outline is to your white paper project what blueprints are to a construction project: they demonstrate how you understand the objective of the project, and they act like a skeleton that you flesh out with content.

‘Nuff said.

It’s All in the Structure

Readers crave structure. It’s how they follow along. If they can’t figure out the structure in your paper, they think you’re rambling. Literary authors (and some sportswriters) can get away without structure, but don’t try it in marketing communications.

Also, focus on the structure that makes the most sense to your ideal readers – depending on what they’ve come to expect in a white paper – more so than on the structure that appeals most to you.

• You want to inform and persuade, so your structure needs to support those goals.
• Your readers want you to solve their business problem, not tell them how smart you are, so show them how you can solve it.

The structure in your white paper outline is an important part of this.

A White Paper for Educating

Suppose your product or service does something completely new (or does something old in a completely new way). The kind of thing that causes your prospects to ask, for example,

You mean I can make phone calls anywhere for free?

You mean I can have my DNA mapped?

You mean I can double the capacity of my hard drive?

You’ve got some educating to do, and your first white papers should follow the Background-Trends-Emerging outline:

Title

Your title answers the reader’s first question: “Is this worth my attention?” Don’t spoil a good white paper with a lousy title; this kind of paper needs a title that grabs attention without straining credibility. Reinforce it with a good subtitle as well:

The Doctor is In…Your Phone – Testing and Transmitting Blood-Sugar Levels over Wireless

Starting the entire project with your title is not a bad idea, but don’t weld yourself to it, because the paper may evolve in a different direction.

Summary

Start with a couple of paragraphs on what the paper covers, to answer the reader’s second question: “What am I going to get out of this?”

Many marketing communications writers wait until the end of the project to do the summary, but I suggest sending a tentative one with the outline. It helps avoid misunderstandings about message and direction.

If you plan to discuss your own products in the paper – not the ideal course in an educational white paper – mention that in the summary instead of springing it on the reader on page 8.

Background and Problem

Sketch out a few bullets on how the business problem came to be. Write only about things you’ll need later in the paper, not about every conceivable market condition.

By the way, if you’re not careful, you’ll lose your readers in this section. They’re scanning to avoid things they already know and don’t care about, so sketch the background in a way that makes it easy for them.

Finally, phrase the problem in a way that meshes with your title:

IT managers are stuck in an Optimization Triangle, spreading scarce improvement-resources among business process, infrastructure and users.

If that’s the problem you want to emphasize, and if it doesn’t support your title, then change your title.

The problem statement, a pivotal point in the paper, is where you move toward conflict-driven business writing and depart from brochure copy.

Existing Products and Market Trends

Next, list 3-4 ways the industry usually deals with the problem, and the relative dis-/advantages of each:

• More deep-water drilling
• Cap-and-trade
• Tax-based conservation incentives

Then, mention market trends that threaten to make these existing solutions obsolete in the long run:

• Sooner or later, oil will run out.

This puts your readers on notice that they cannot afford to stand still. It’s another pivotal point in the paper.

Emerging Technology

Something new is on the landscape, though, and here you describe the technology behind your product.

Educating readers about a new category is not the same thing as telling readers about your products, so stay away from self-promotion. Outline a few bullets that describe how the new technology addresses the old problems better than the existing products do, while accommodating market trends.

If you really need to mention your product, couch it in terms that suggest, “We’ve seen this coming and here’s what we’re putting in place. It may not be ideal for every organization, but this is how we think the market is evolving.”

For More Information, Follow Us

Invite readers who have made it this far to follow you. That says, “We know that you may not buy from us (yet), but keep an eye on us for the day when you do.” The marketing writer who understands “following” is your biggest asset here.

Emphasize social ways for your readers to keep tabs on you: blog, Facebook, Twitter, discussion groups. Add your phone and URL for good measure, but remember that few people use an 800-number or a Website for serious following.

The result of this process is a white paper outline you can circulate. Your reviewers will be able to see the path down which you intend to take the readers of your educational white paper. Once you have their feedback, you can start on the draft.

Next: The Revolution White Paper: People-Process-Technology Outline

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 with more tips on working with your writers.

photo credit: justiNYC

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Don’t you wish you could be inside your reader’s head as he reads your content? What text could you throw away? What text could you monetize?

Active listening is difficult. In fact, it’s exhausting, especially if you’re new to it.

Do you know people who practice active listening? You’d know if you did. They begin their sentences with clauses like:

• “If I understand what you’re saying, you want me to…”
• “What you’re telling me is…”
• “You’re saying that you…”

Relationship counselors recommend active listening techniques because the most important question in interpersonal communications is:

Do you understand this the way I intend for you to understand it?

But What Are You Thinking About?

There is a similar question, which skeptical people like me wonder about, and which shy people like me rarely pose:

What are you thinking about while I’m talking to you?

Probably not about what I’m saying.

Now think about that dynamic and your content. Don’t you want to ask your prospects:

What are you thinking about while you’re reading my white paper/case study/Web page/collateral?

Maybe your marketing communications writer did a perfect job creating valuable content, and your ideal reader understands your message and your products exactly the way you’d intended. But that still doesn’t guarantee that the reader’s mind isn’t wandering as he reads your paper, does it?

Magical Window in Your Content

What if you could embed some kind of magical, interactive window on page 6 of your document that would connect you to the reader in real time? Your reader turns from page 5 to page 6, and your head pops out of a small frame in the middle of the page.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” you say, “but would you mind telling me what you’re thinking about right now?”

If your marketing writer has really done her job, of course, the reader will look quizzically back at you, surprised you would even pose the question. If it’s a white paper on solar power technology he’d say, “Why, I’m thinking about the solar panels installed on the roof of my company’s parking structure.” If it were the letter to the shareholders in your annual report, he might say, “I’m trying to figure out why your sales were off last year when you spent so much on upgrading your CRM system.”

Most of the time, however, that is not the answer that would come back. Instead, you’d likely hear, “I’m thinking about my daughter’s broken finger,” or “I’m thinking that I forgot to take out the steaks to thaw for dinner tonight.”

You Lose Money When the Reader’s Mind Wanders

Face it: Can you get through one of your own white papers without your mind wandering? What do you think about when you read your company’s Web copy?

This is your new test for readability in your content: Can you get every paragraph to contribute to revenue generation? Are you willing to throw away the paragraphs that don’t contribute?

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 with more tips on working with your writers.

photo credit: D Sharon Pruitt

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“White paper” covers a multitude of formats, and it’s rare to find two people who take it to mean the same thing. Poisoned white papers harm the publisher more than the reader, but there are antidotes.

I’ve looked at a half-dozen documents called “white papers” in the last few days and marveled at the variety among them. It’s a maligned term, really, and I think it has come to represent a type of marketing communications content that:

1. is long;
2. is different from a brochure, a case study or an advertisement.

That covers a lot of ground. I’ll leave it to folks like Jonathan Kantor to describe what a white paper is and isn’t, but whatever you or your marketing communications writers have produced, you should make sure that you don’t poison it – let alone your readers or your reputation – with it.

4 Ways to Poison Your White Paper…

1. Wall of text – This can more resemble a rant than a white paper. If you go on for more than a page or two with nothing but text, you’re probably poisoning your readers, no matter how engaging your content.
2. Aimlessness – This is more like a blog post (and a poor, long one at that) than a white paper. It is usually a sign that the author is enthusiastic about the product but does not know how to tell a story about it.
3. Leading the reader by the nose to your product – This is more like a brochure than a white paper, because the goal of a white paper is for readers to sense that they are drawing their own conclusions – at least, some of them. If you’re not leaving them with that feeling, then it’s a brochure.
4. Hiding it under a bushel – This is more like a diary entry. White papers are the main course at The Content Buffet, and they should be prominently posted, tweeted, Facebooked, excerpted and blogged about. If you’re not thinking “Write once, use many,” you’re missing most of the social media wave.

…and 3 Antidotes

1. Break up the text in your paper with diagrams, charts, callout boxes, photographs, quotations and anything else graphical that gives the reader’s eye a much deserved rest. It’s easy to go overboard on this, but if you can give your readers a vacation once per page, it will be easier for them to get through the entire paper, and they’ll remember you more fondly for it.
2. Maintain a balance among sections. For example:
   • 5% summary
   • 25% introduction and presentation of problem
   • 30% current approaches and why something new is needed
   • 30% details and advantages of new solution (ours)
   • 10% conclusion and follow-us.

   This is the antidote for aimlessness because it gives readers a mental pace to keep.

3. Focus on your ideal readers. If you really know them well enough to aim a white paper at them, you should be able to include miniature case studies that tie applications of your product back to real-world people and companies. This is a very powerful antidote because it introduces relevance.

So, whether you’ve produced a pure-land, bona fide white paper, or just something that is long and is not a brochure, take care to remove the poison from it before handing it on to your customers and prospects.

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

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Your marketing communications play a big role in earning your customers’ trust. Writers can help with this, but it’s not easy to get them to do so.

With its 2010 Trust Barometer, the public relations firm Edelman reports that 83% of U.S. consumers value

transparent and honest practices, and a company being a “company I can trust” as extremely important

and rate these their first and second priorities.

A company’s strong financial performance, which was consumers’ third priority in 2006, is their tenth priority now, far below treating employees well and pricing goods and services fairly.

So as a marketing manager, you’re thinking, “Hmm. We should do what we can to earn trust and convey trustworthiness in our communications, shouldn’t we?” Well, if you haven’t been doing it up to now, this would be a good time to start.

Does Your Writer Keep You Honest?

Who drafts all of those communications you put out, all of the vehicles on which your customers will evaluate your trustworthiness?

Your writers, of course.

Do you pay them to make you toe the line? When you engage them, do you say, “If you catch us trying to say something that sounds fishy or unreliable, let us know”? If they call you on a dodgy statistic, or doubt the veracity of your sources, do you thank them and agree to find more solid ones?

I thought not.

You could do that, but here are some reasons why it probably won’t happen:

1. This kind of purity may pit you against others in your organization. “It holds 985 megabytes of data,” says your Engineering team. “Call it a gigabyte and be done with it.” Your writer points out that there are 1 billion bytes in a gigabyte, so you’re stuck in the middle between the writer and Engineering.
2. You need to beat a deadline. Is your time more important than your customers’ trust? How much back-and-forth with the writer can you afford to boost the veracity of the piece?
3. Your writer doesn’t want to antagonize you. A common bit of professional camouflage goes, “Well, Bill, you know your readers and customers a lot better than I do, so I’ll take your lead on leaving that detail in the paper.” The writer wants to get paid and get hired again, so probably won’t go to the mat with you on a disagreement over your facts.
4. There is ALWAYS a fib somewhere, and the only way to avoid them completely is to say nothing to your customers. You may just find out this out if you empower your writer to grill you on your evidence. It’s a marketing piece, not a New York Times investigation.

Rude Questions from Your Writer

Jason Cohen, of A Smart Bear fame, posted recently on Rude Q&A. Pardon the unnecessarily rude first sentence of the post – bloggers often pride themselves on shock value – but Jason offers a valuable lesson in tough questions that come from investors, for which businesspeople should have ready, defensible answers.

If you hire professional, diplomatic writers, you should be able to go through at least some of Jason’s questions peacefully:

• What are the top three features your competitor has that you lack? How do you address that today, and what are you doing about it in the next six months?
• What are three tangible, undeniable ways in which your product/company saves more money than you cost, and saves more time than you consume?
• There are thousands of companies who make the same basic claims you make: high-quality, on-time, on-budget, good service, happy customers. What makes you any different?

You should already have gone through these questions internally before starting your project, and you should ask your writers whether they are up to posing them of you as well.

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:

emmma peel

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Try to think of your ideal reader as a child. Have you ever met a child who preferred an explanation over a story?

Explaining makes for lousy marketing.

Dan Heath, Fast Company

Writing for a Child

As a marketing manager, have you ever thought of your ideal reader as a child?

We learn not to talk down to prospects, and we scold our marketing communications writers when they use terms that are too simple. But there’s an argument (which I’m about to make) for thinking of the ideal reader of our marketing pieces as a child. In short,

• They both like pictures.
• Neither one has much time to give you, so you have to take full advantage of a short attention span.
• Explanations bore both of them, but tell them a story and they’ll follow you anywhere.

Can you build a marcom credo around these points, and get your writers to follow it?

Mind you, this is not the same thing as treating your customers like children. If you underestimate their intelligence or their collective ability to wreak havoc with your company’s sales figures and reputation, you are treating them like children, and you’ll regret it.

Explanation or Story?

So, to return to the Dan Heath quote, telling a good story about your product or service is better than explaining it, particularly if it’s a short story that gets to the point quickly. Content like case studies, blog posts, podcasts and video can do this effectively when it’s well written, and even better when you think of your ideal reader as a child.

There are times, usually late in the sales cycle, at which you need to explain rather than to tell a story, and content like white papers, technical articles and application notes is better suited to this.

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.

photocredit: Patrishe

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Rescue your marketing communications content from the tar pit. Your readers can find it more easily and it will tell your story better.

Around 1900, a few men standing near the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California, realized that there were animal bones in the tar.

“What a find!” exclaimed the first. “We could do research for decades on the fossils in this tar. It’s an archeological treasure.”

“Yes,” said the second, “but we need to figure out how to get that treasure out of the tar.”

Getting Your Content Treasure Out of the Tar

As a marketing manager, what do you do when you inherit a tar pit of content?

Maybe your company acquires another company and you need to bring its marketing content in line with your own. Maybe you’re hired into a company that has been desperately trying to tell its story, but whose efforts have never yet amounted to anything interesting. Maybe you’ve been breathing your own exhaust for a long time, and you wake up one day and decide to change what you’ve done.

Here are four ways to get your story out of the content tar pit:

1. Break up walls of text. Can you even bear to read your own stuff anymore? Is it just a forbidding collection of long sentences and paragraphs? Can you break it into smaller pieces of value that tell the story without snowing the reader under?
2. Rewrite your text in terms of customer needs. Visitors don’t want to know how many transistors you can pack onto a single chip; they want to know how all those transistors can help them get their work done better, cheaper and faster. It’s easy for your content to fall into this tar pit, but you can rescue it by changing “chicken pieces fried and battered at 145 degrees” to “finger lickin’ good.”
3. Bucket the text better. Are you sure that your ideal readers can find your content? If your entire Website is a tar pit, and the white papers, webinars, case studies and product data are all mixed together, it becomes difficult to locate your story, let alone tell it. Rearrange the text into buckets according to what visitors want to see, instead of what the writers wanted to describe.
4. Give examples and make them interesting to read. Examples make the best stories. Start out with “You know how…” or “In the same way that…” and start telling your story orally. Once you have it sketched out, fill it in with your products and services and how your customers use them.

The treasures are in the tar pit. You just need to find them. Eventually, you can create content that never gets trapped there in the first place.

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: David Berkowitz

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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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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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