Marketing communication writing projects live and die on review loops. Marketers like talking about what needs to be changed, but writers would rather see it in print.

Bigglehole, our staff writer, would like to weigh in on this topic, and respectfully directs these four reasons to clients, in the spirit of delivering to them the high-quality content they want.

This is easy, so I’ll get right to the point:

1. No ambiguity. That’s pretty obvious. If you strike the word “approach” and replace it with “solution,” then I know your preference and I can propagate it through all of the work I do for you. If you write, “Title needs to convey automakers’ sense of urgency,” then I know what you want me to change and how you want me to change it. When you put your comments and changes in writing, it shows me how you would like the piece to look if you were writing it, and that goes a longer way toward helping me get you what you want than if you just talk about it.
2. You have to do some of the work. It may seem a bit perverse, given that you’re paying me to write, but I like it when you put some work into this, too. The fact of the matter is that most writers don’t write; we suggest. The combination of our suggestions and your reactions results in a better finished product.
3. Makes things go faster. I’m for anything that accelerates the process of getting from project-start to project-end successfully. To the extent that written feedback gets your point across to me more efficiently, it helps ensure that you too want to keep things moving. As Alvy Singer (in “Annie Hall”) might have put it, the writer-client “relationship is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.” We don’t want that fate to befall your project.
4. It shows that you care. When you take the time to go through a draft with a red pen or revision marks, it shows me that I’m not working in complete isolation. When I see you working on the piece, it makes me want to put more work into it to match yours. Conversely, when you complain vaguely over the phone, it suggests to me that what I’m working on is not very high on your list of priorities.

Having said all that, Bigglehole concedes that some clients are more comfortable and adept at providing oral feedback than written comments. “As long as they let me record the conversation and charge extra for it, I can work that way. But it still doesn’t get as close to the client’s target as written comments do.”

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.

artwork credit: Charles Napier Hemy

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Even after you’ve hired the writer, writing projects don’t just happen. Somebody needs to move them along, and it’s usually your writer (if you’ve picked a good one).

Nothing works because you want it to. You have to make the damned thing work.

-Thomas Edison (I think)

I saw that several years ago in a quotation-of-the-day calendar, and it has always stuck with me.

It applies to writing, doesn’t it? Writers realize that good content doesn’t emerge from their pen or keyboard because they want it to; they have to make it come out.

On a larger scale, as a marketing manager you should know that few of the projects you commission – white papers, Web content, case studies, technical articles – happen because you want them to; you (or somebody) has to make them happen. Facts need checking, reviewers need reminding, editors need prodding, interviewees need birddogging, text needs proofreading, final versions need approving…

Who does most of this?

Would you believe your writer does?

There’s a lot more project management to business writing than most people – including writers – realize. There are also a lot of steps you take for granted inside the organization on the path from idea to a deliverable, and in a writing project, most of them end up in the writer’s purview because nobody else handles them in a timely manner otherwise.

Paul Lagasse posted recently on the diplomacy that freelance writers need to exercise when their management of a project pulls them into onsite client meetings. Most marketing managers value writers for the “bricks” of good content, while overlooking the “mortar” of good project management.

One more Edison quotation to wrap up:

I never did anything by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.

Your organization’s content is no accident either, and sometimes it’s your writer who contributes the extra work to make the content happen.

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: wikimedia

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Writer on the wrong path?

White papers – or any long pieces – need structure, and you need to agree on the structure before you write the paper. Be sure your writer includes these elements in an outline.

How often do you get started down a path in your work, only to realize you have to backtrack and go down a different path? Is there anything more frustrating than discarding work you’ve already done and restarting it?

For example, your marketing communications writer interviews three subject matter experts for a white paper you’ve commissioned, then writes up the interviews and sends you a draft. You read it. You scream.

“No!!!” you holler. “This isn’t where I want this to go. We have to tear this down and start over.”

White paper draft gone astray

Here’s what can go wrong on a long piece when the writer just dives in and goes straight to the draft:

• Off-topic – “This isn’t what I wanted you to write about,” you complain. “I don’t want the paper to describe the history of the industry. I want it to describe our technology.”
• Off-fact – Does the draft cover the facts I want in it? Think Thomas More in Utopia: “Include nothing false, omit nothing true.”
• Off-message – The white paper supports an organization’s goal and message – thought leadership, lead generation, sales support – and each paragraph needs to move the reader in that direction. If I’m trying to build trust over time, don’t give me content that bellows “Buy Now!”

You need to see structure before you see the draft. A good writer will take care of that for you by first providing an outline.

White paper outline

Look for these four elements in the outline of a marketing or technical white paper:

1. Summary – Sometimes airily called “Executive Summary” – hey, we’re all executives now, so let’s get over this – this will tell readers what they’re going to get out of the paper, and in a draft it tells you what the writer understands about the subject. Frankly, most people would argue that draft-stage is too early for a summary, but it shows you which path your marketing communications writer intends to take the reader. If you don’t like it, this is a good time to let her know.
2. Main messages – Three (count ‘em) bullets in a box either just before or just after the Summary. Bullet 1 states the problem and why it costs customers time and money; bullet 2 mentions the inflection point, or why things are ripe for change; and bullet 3 vaguely describes the new solution and how it will help customers save time and money. The writer must get these right, and you must agree with them.
3. Bullets for the rest – A reasonably well thought-out series of bullets that build the argument yet give readers the impression that they’re drawing their own conclusions from facts you’re presenting. Be sure they include nothing false and omit nothing true.
4. For More Information (How to Follow Us) – Homework for you. The writer isn’t responsible for what you want readers to do once they’ve finished the paper; that’s your job. By including this in the outline, the writer is giving you time to talk to Customer Service or your sales team or your Web team and put the plumbing in place for readers who want to take the next step.

Isn’t this the kind of structure you want when you’re spending big money on a project like this? What do you put in place to keep your writer from going too far down the wrong path?

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: pfly

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Skeleton? Outline? Draft?

You and your marketing communications writer should agree on an outline for larger projects. It’s helpful for business purposes, but sometimes it’s a creative pothole.

Have you ever watched somebody hang a picture or organize a workbench in a way that worked, but was alien to you? “It would never have occurred to me to go about it that way,” you say. “I’d have started at the ends and worked inward, or measured first.”

An outline presents the same problem. Some reviewers just can’t work with a mere skeleton. They need the body and prefer the skeleton hidden.

Problems with outlines

If you’re a marketing communications writer doing a paper for me, I want you to send me some evidence that you understand what I’m trying to convey, and that you can organize the message in a way that will make sense to my ideal reader. If we wait until the full draft, you can be so far down the wrong path that it will cost us both too much time and money to get back on track. That’s why I want to see an outline.

But the solution to that problem usually introduces a few more problems:

• Outlines are like slide decks: long on bullets and short on real meaning. You raved about a presentation you saw at a conference last month and asked the speaker for a copy of the deck. You opened it and went through it later, but all of the presentation juice was gone. Worse yet, you showed it to a colleague who got nothing out of it. The same thing can apply to an outline: You have an underlying message in mind for the paper, but you can’t tell from the outline whether the writer gets it.
• What’s the right amount of detail to put in? The writer wonders, “How much detail do I have to write up to show that I get it? (If I get it?)” The writer also doesn’t quite know the amount that the marketing manager wants to read and has to wing it.
• Some writers think that outlines get in the way of organic writing, and they don’t think creatively within the confines of an outline. (Larry Brooks posted on this a few weeks back in regard to creative writing, and the point is valid for marketing copywriting as well.) The outline they deliver feels forced to both the writer and the reviewer. Drag.
• Maybe the reviewer just doesn’t get it. Like the example of hanging the picture or organizing a workbench, some people cannot look at an outline and make enough sense of it. They want a full story they can modify right away. They don’t want to see the skeleton at all.

Making an outline work

Here’s a hybrid solution: Have the marketing communications writer give you a skeleton, but with a head (or at least a hand).

Ask for the bulletized outline of points and sub-points that the writer intends to cover in the paper, then have her write a couple of summary paragraphs that will go at the beginning of the paper and set its tone. Or, if she doesn’t plan to include a summary, then ask for the conclusion along with the outline.

Either of these will synopsize the paper and give you an idea of where the writer plans to take the reader. Each of them is an opportunity to use important terminology (and SEO keywords), so you can correct the writer’s grasp and usage of terms that your company values.

When you as a marketing manager can see a completed head or hand, it builds your confidence in whatever else will go onto the rest of the skeleton.

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: billolen

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When you hire a marketing communications writer, you should expect a description of her method. Ask for it, and be sure it makes  sense to you.

You’re evaluating a marketing communications writer to do a white paper or a case study for you. “So, how do you do this?” you ask her. “What’s your writing process? What steps do you follow in writing a piece like this?”

You should get an answer that makes sense to you, and that doesn’t sound like a rambling, off-the-top-of-the-head proposal.

Here are 5 steps a professional may enumerate for your writing project. If the writer includes these, so much the better; if not, at least you’ll know what to ask for.

1. Review existing materials. A good writer is willing to perform some research on your industry and specialty. To save her time and ensure that she avoids material that will muddy the waters, you should point her to the basic information – Web sites, analysis, published reports – she’ll need to know to conduct a fruitful interview.
2. Interview – Assuming the task is to take what’s in somebody’s head and get it into print, the writer will need to conduct an interview with those somebodies. This is not a grilling, broadcast journalist-caliber interview, but one designed to get the subject matter expert talking. Perfect interviews are rare, and few experts are adept at imparting their information flawlessly, but a professional marketing communications writer can always get something writable out of an interview.
3. Outline – For a paper or a report, it’s important that the writer lay out the piece and let you verify that it makes sense to you. While it’s not so important in short pieces like brochures and case studies, long pieces need to guide readers down a path to explain and convince. You need to see the path the writer envisions and ensure that it’s where you want to guide those readers, and the outline is the best way to do that. Extra credit goes to the writer who fleshes out the outline, say, by writing the introduction or conclusion, so that you can see whether she has picked up your messaging correctly.
4. Drafts – Once you’ve approved the outline, the writer hangs text on it and produces a draft. Most of the battle should be in the first draft, which should result in something close to what you had in mind. Circulate this, get comments, reconcile them and get them back to the writer for a second draft. The writer gets extra credit if she introduces ideas and angles you hadn’t seen before. This is one of the big advantages of hiring an outside writer: you breathe your own exhaust day in and day out; a good writer who sinks her teeth into your business provides outside perspective.
5. Final review – After the final draft, there’s not much for the writer to do, but her job isn’t yet over, either. Most content requires layout (Web, print, InDesign, Quark), and that effort begins after the final draft. You should have your writer review the piece once it has emerged from layout to find and resolve any discrepancies between her final draft and the pre-publication piece. (Hint: There will almost always be some, intentional or otherwise.) This is a good chance for the writer to clean up final typo’s and tell you what looks right and wrong before you go live with it. (BTW, as I’ve posted before, most companies omit this step.)

Don’t go into the writing process blind. Good writers have a method and they can explain it in ways that will make sense to you.

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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When you hire a marketing communications writer, you’ll need to put some paperwork in place. Professional writers have these items ready and are prepared to send them promptly.

“Send me a contract,” you tell the marketing communications writer, once you’ve decided you like the cut of his jib.

It should be a bit more granular than that. It’s possible to put everything you need into a single contract, but that’s rather unwieldy. Keep in mind these 5 items when kicking off your relationship with a marketing writer:

• Proposal/Statement of Work – Before you sign a contract, you should get a statement of the work to be done. This sets out rather concretely what the writer is going to do for you and by when he will do it. (Don’t expect many details as to how he’s going to write your white paper or brochure; that’s up to him.) You should review the proposal and ensure that it makes sense to you, adding/editing/deleting language as necessary.
• Contract – The role of the contract is not to help us sue each other if it comes to that; contracts are to remind me of what I said and what the writer said, because memory and written notes are not always perfect. Most professional writers have their own contract, and if I have the choice, I’ll use theirs because they’re generally simple. Contracts from the corporate  side may be long, and that’s not a problem, but in some corporate contracts the terms are biased too strongly against the writer, so you may end up working with just a purchase order.
• Non-disclosure Agreement (NDA) – You’ll expose the writer to proprietary information. I can’t guarantee you’ll be glad you put an NDA in place, but it’s an effective way of telling the marketing writer that there’s a confidential aspect to what you’re telling him. Give the writer extra points if he has his own bilateral – the mutuality is important – NDA and offers to use it in your relationship.
• W-9 – This IRS form gives the writer’s tax identification number (Social Security number or Employer Identification Number).  The writer doesn’t need this, but you do.  Kudos again to the writer who has it signed and ready to send to you or your Accounting department.
• Down Payment Invoice – This is optional and negotiable. I don’t mind it when a writer asks for a down payment, because it’s a card I can play if his schedule suddenly starts slipping or he stops returning my calls: “I gave you a good-faith down payment and this is the thanks I get??!!”) A professional writer will let you know ahead of time that he’s going to ask for the down payment.

It sounds like a Big Bunch o’ Paper – and he hasn’t written a single word of marketing content for you yet – but any business relationship worth putting in place is worth putting in place correctly. I’d rather work with a marketing writer who has all these items in place and can send them to me preemptively, than have to scurry around the company and bundle them up myself.

And, if you’re aspiring to a paperless office, you’ll be glad to know that you and the writer can move all of these back and forth – including signatures – without ever using a printer. Between digital signatures on PDF (free), PayPal (2.9%) and electronic funds transfer (free at most banks), you and the writer can do it all without paper.

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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When you hire a marketing communications writer, her responsibilities should include a final, pre-publication look at the piece, just before the train leaves the station. Your responsibilities should should include giving her that opportunity.

Marketing writers don’t write; they suggest. You don’t need to apologize for changes you make to drafts, but you owe it to yourself to give your copy – once it has traveled the long and winding road to final format – to your writer for a final scan.

One writer did a rush job for us last week, hammering very rough copy into a product datasheet, FAQ and sales teaser. She also added a lot of good content and figured out how to make the pieces tell our story, much better than it had occurred to us to do.

All of the copy ran the gantlet here, and everybody had revisions to make. A couple of the sales and marketing managers had misgivings about running it past the writer one last time before we sent the pieces to print – “What if her nose gets out of joint over the changes we’ve made?” – but I argued that it would be silly not to let her go over them. “What’s a marketing communications writer for?” I asked rhetorically.

I sent her PDFs with our revisions on Wednesday afternoon, and she had returned embedded comments – don’t forget you need more than just the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to make those – by Thursday morning. Among the things she noted:

• Two sentences with missing words – Somebody was writing too fast.
• Two occurrences of “Best-in-class” in adjoining paragraphs – This was a qualifier we had added. She pointed out, “This phrase adds nothing, and may even detract from the technical value of the piece.”
• Three clunky sentences that she re-plumbed to make more sense.
• A hail of phone numbers in our company information box – “People who have this datasheet in their hand will need just one big, fat toll-free number.”
• Disclaimer language for mentioning other companies’ trademarks – Without a phalanx of lawyers poring over ever sentence we publish, we sometimes forget about fine points like this.

She told me it took her less than a half-hour to review and make comments: thirty minutes our marketing communications writer invested in making us look good. She also mentioned that she always offers her clients a pre-publication review of content, even for projects on which she has not worked.

“Most clients don’t take me up on it,” she noted. “I don’t know why not.”

Do you give your writer this opportunity? You’re leaving money on the table if you don’t.

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It starts with The Event. Maybe you’ve undergone an internal transformation, and you now have a secret sauce that will help you leave your rivals in the dust. Perhaps you’ve survived a hostile takeover bid that has left you stronger. Or you’ve just received approval for your patent on a better mousetrap.

You have the noble goal of writing up The Event and putting the story into people’s hands so that they’ll admire you, seek to emulate you and want to buy your products.

Good luck.

Thought Leadership Hubris

It’s a bit cheeky, saying that you’re going to lead thought. It reminds me of resolving to get somebody to fall in love with you. In fact, that’s what it is, and that’s why there are several obstacles to your thought leadership effort:

1. I’ve worked on thought-leadership white paper projects. They’re devastating. They are more taxing than The Event. Everybody has a different perspective on the project and it will almost surely take you longer and cost you more than you bargain for. It’s too big a bite.
2. In your own experience, have you ever read anything and suddenly noticed that your thought was now being led in a different direction? What makes you think your paper – or entire content campaign – will have this effect on anybody else? Probably the biggest popular force leading thought these days is Apple Inc., and they’re doing it with the impact of their products on consumers, not with their content.
3. In the era of social media, it’s almost silly to think you can lead thought, because thought is more mercurial and fickle than ever. People want to follow, but they don’t want their thought led. If your content does result in new customers, how are you going to greet them: “Thank you for letting us lead your thought,” or “Thank you for following us”?
4. As a marketing manager, your goal is to start conversations. What kind of conversation are you trying to have if you attempt to lead people’s thought?

Don’t Lead Thought; Develop a Following

Smart marketing managers will look at this differently: Instead of trying to lead thought, they devote the energy to building a following.

This is an important nuance because you can’t measure how much thought you’re leading, but you can measure the development of your following. This is the true value for business of platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Mind you, people like David Meerman Scott lump blogs, podcasts, case studies and all other sorts of marketing communication into the category of “thought leadership,” and maybe they are able to lead thought with campaigns like that. But most of us are just struggling to get our content ducks in a row, and “thought leadership” is shooting for the moon to us.

The Moral: You can lead eyes to your story, but you can’t lead thought.

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This paper starts out awful and goes downhill from there.

I’ve never said that to a marketing writer, but it has a funny, ironical ring to it. I would chuckle as I clicked on “Send” to deliver news like that, fancying myself a proud successor to H.L. Mencken or Winston Churchill.

But even if your editor or writer can hose off the sarcasm, what will he do with the remark? It’s not very actionable  (another term to avoid) and your business goal should really be to give the copywriter the information necessary to write the piece you want.

Writing criticism we see

Is the first sentence (“Jack is a power architect”) needed?

An engineer asked this about the opening sentence to a case study. The interview with Jack had yielded very little interesting content, and so the writer took a chance on a this opening. Unfortunately, he bet wrong, and the engineer had no choice but to hate the rest of it.

I didn’t send it to the writer, but instead told the engineer to do one of three things:

• Explain the rationale for not liking the sentence.
• Suggest a better one.
• Simply strike the line in the draft and ask for a different opening.

None of those options is complex, and each of them gives a marketing writer a point of departure.

First page was oppressive, second page picked up and gave me a slew of ideas…

I knew the writer wouldn’t know what to repair in an “oppressive first page,” so I had the product manager briefly outline what she wanted to see on the first page, given the slew of ideas that the second page generated. It took a re-write of the page and most of the technology essay, but the result was worth it.

It’s not what I had in mind.

This is nearly useless feedback. It’s like defending Nixon: “I don’t know what you can say, but you can’t say that. Try something else.”

If the writer had his way, you’d return edits in red so that all he had to do was accept the changes and tighten up the grammar a bit. It’s not necessarily your job to hit that mark, but try to meet the writer in the middle somewhere.

Give your editor-writer clear criticism

As a marketing manager hiring a writer, you need to keep your eye on the business goal of delivering useful content in your review loop. Clear, unambiguous statements about what you want to change and how you want to change it trump sarcasm and support the business goal of writing. Whether you’re acting as the gatekeeper and reconciling your company’s feedback for the writer (the preferred way) or coaching reviewers on how to give useful feedback, make your wishes clear.

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It’s not easy to keep your content machine fed, is it?

You’re finding out that providing valuable content to your readers really does take some work, doesn’t it?

When you were a kid, responsible for the family dog, your mom would holler up the staircase, “Timmy! It’s time to feed the dog again!” You remember that, don’t you? There’s a cosmic reason that “dog” rhymes with “blog,” and your responsibility is nearly the same.

Whether it’s the company blog or a content marketing campaign or even an e-newsletter, somebody has to write the stuff, somebody has to chase the stuff and somebody has to keep it moving along. Those somebodies are usually you, the marketing manager.

You begin to get a bit disillusioned.

• If you haven’t yet seen results, you’re wondering, “When should I pull the plug?”
• If you’re seeing results, you’re wondering, “How do I keep this up?”

Here are three things you need to remember when you get tired of feeding the blog:

1. You need to work with People who Love to Write. Even if you hire a writer to generate content about your niche technology for deep packet inspection and pay her handsomely, she can get tired of it in a hurry and run out of things to say and ways in which to say them. A true Lover of Writing will not suffer from this disease.
2. You need to Write for the Audience. Actually, if you’re not writing for the audience – for its questions and worries and headaches – then what’s the point? You can feed the blog candy just to see it get fat, or you can feed it something nutritious that will preserve it and increase its value to the audience. Besides, the more you know about your audience, the easier it is to keep your blog fed.
3. You, your company and your writers need to Write About What You Know About, and you need to be prepared to convey it persuasively for months, maybe for years. I came across this point in an article by Lloyd Brown last week:
   

   If you try to discuss the benefits of the acai berry when your only knowledge is what you read on another blog, the broader community is going to realize that you have nothing unique to offer. All they have done is burned a little of your bandwidth. Even worse is the abundance of blogs that simply import RSS feeds from other blogs to provide content. If you want visitors to stay longer than a few seconds and return at a later time, you must give them a reason. This means providing original content. The only way you can do this is if you know your subject.

Your blog won’t fetch sticks the way your dog did, but a well-fed one will fetch leads and attention. And, you don’t need to give it a bath.

photo credit: SpaceRitual

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