From PR Web comes a thought-provoking post, “Newest Member of Marketing Team Tasked with Creating Her Own Job Title.” Marketing new-hire Meg Strobel monitors DiamondNexus’ social media presence and creates new content for the company’s channels. She was hired without a title, and has yet to arrive at one, which became a problem when she had to order business cards.

Current candidates for her title include: Social Media Strategist, Web Communications Architect, or Facebooker Extraordinaire. “I’m kind of leaning towards Web Communications Architect, because how cool would it be to actually be an architect?”

How cool indeed?

The not-so-new hire reached out to the director of marketing, Kyle Blades, for help. Blades, unavailable for comment, reportedly told Strobel, “I don’t know. It’s really not that important – just make it up.”

I don’t agree that it’s not important, but making it up could be a very good idea.

The marketing manager’s title

After all, “marketing manager” is rather long in the tooth as a title, isn’t it? Is it your title? Are you still happy with it? Consider a few others:

• Content manager – Yes, you probably do manage content, but so does a content management system (CMS). Your website and blog involve content management, but you actively work at creating the content, not just at organizing it. It’s too close to Technical Publications.
• Community manager – This title is becoming much more current, even in enterprises, and it describes the important function of keeping your online plates spinning. But it smacks of herding cats and handing out the new toys to keep them interested, rather than building those toys.
• Content wrangler – You do wrangle content from its source to its target, don’t you? It’s a pretty accurate title, but it’s taken.
• Conversation manager – At its heart, marketing is the process of starting and maintaining conversations. That’s what all the fuss is about, and it’s what really leads to sales. I wish “conversation manager” didn’t sound so much like a euphemism, because it would help people better understand the role of marketing.

One marketing manager for a technology company told me how difficult it is to explain the role and value of marketing in an  engineering-heavy organization: “They think we throw parties.”

That’s why your job title is so important. It needs to be concrete enough for others (even co-workers) to understand, yet with a hint of the figurative.

So, I wish Ms. Strobel luck in coming up with her title. The article suggests she’s willing to crowdsource the process:

Strobel welcomes further suggestions from the general public. She can be reached via facebook.com/diamondnexus.

But as of this posting, the communication that she’s architecting there focuses more on the product than on her title.

That’s a better conversation.

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.”

photo credit: Katherina London

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Nobody cares about your products or how cool they’ll be if they buy them. They care about their problems and whether they can trust you to help fix them.

Sorry, but that’s the deal.

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. Sign up for his Content Buffet Newsletter and get the free eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Ed Yourdon

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“I’d like to cite some figures in this paper about adoption rates for this technology,” said the marketing communications writer. “Can we find data on how sales are rising from year to year?”

Seemed like a natural question to pose. If readers see that 15% of the market used turbo-synchronized schmedlapps last year and 20% used it this year, a smart manager would see a trend and make a note of it as something to follow.

“Actually, we don’t have much data on this,” replied the client. “I prefer to keep our copy around this figurative and stay away from specific numbers.”

Huh?

“As a company, we try not to get tied to individual figures or sets of data.”

HUH? This time, the writer capitalized it.

“Our preference is to point to trends loosely, as in ‘The trend for asynchronous schmedlapps is down and the trend for turbo-synchronized schmedlapps is up.’”

HUH? Capitalized and italicized it.

Then the client uttered the clincher:

Customers are happy to drag sales conversations down statistical ratholes.

Let’s think about that for a moment.

Marketing believes that statistics enrich a white paper

It’s hard to argue against using data to back up the claims you make in your white paper or marketing communications content. After all, most people base their buying decisions on one of three things:

1. Recommendations from trusted sources
2. Facts and figures
3. Brilliant rhetoric that intimidates or inspires them

The writer has little control over #1, and makes a living crafting copy around #2, but really shouldn’t be relied upon to make #3 work (at least not in B2B).

Research and reports are the mainstay of marcomm content, so when a customer says, in effect, “We don’t use those,” it leaves the writer at a disadvantage to produce good copy.

On the other hand…

Sales believes that statistics cripple the white paper

This is a salesperson’s perspective, and salespeople spend lots of time talking to and hearing from customers.

If you as a salesperson know that, upon reading the persuasive content your marketing manager has created, a prospect is simply going to pick it apart, impugn the data source and turn it into a speed bump on the road to a purchase order, you might argue to keep the statistics out, thankyouverymuch.

Some prospects may look at your set of data as a challenge to cite an opposing set, or search for an opposing set if they have that kind of time to kill.

So, as desperately as Sales wants collateral and content from Marketing, they may at times prefer that it be, shall we say

content unencumbered by research

Since Marketing is in business to help start conversations, and not to gum them up, some content may need to go this way.

So marketing managers, grit your teeth and endure the HUH?s from your marketing communications writer (and prepare to utter a few of your own). There will be plenty of other opportunities for you to quote all those analyst reports you’ve subscribed to.

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.”

photo credit: Editor B

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Entrepreneurs breathe their own exhaust. Marketing managers ask the audience what it thinks and try to keep entrepreneur-exhaust from poisoning it.

The DEMO Innovation Tour came to town last week and held a reception at the office of one of the sponsors. Plenty of entrepreneurs were there, and their enthusiasm was palpable. In fact, it was dripping from the rafters, like Dali’s soft watches.

Marketing managers, you need to rescue your audiences from entrepreneur-exhaust.

Movie dubbing in arcane languages

A woman with impeccable skin and vibrant, focused eyes told me about the dubbing platform they’re building. (Whenever I hear “platform,” I know I’m going to have to work hard to understand whatever comes next, because it won’t make sense if I just listen to the words and try to add them up. “Ecosystem” is in the same category.)

The platform allows movie studios to outsource overdubbing projects to small vendors. Think “Ironman” in Urdu: Few studios would want to fund that, but a small vendor in Pakistan might, if it had the chance.

Her colleague with the crew-cut joined her and explained that multiple vendors would, over time, compete with their respective overdub tracks, and users would rate them. This product will benefit an entire ecosystem (!) of small, in-market dubbing vendors, who can earn royalties on their work; of movie studios, who can wring a few more bucks out of titles they would never have paid to dub; and of users, who get the titles they read about on Yahoo! and Amazon in their own language.

There was a clock on the wall behind them, and I watched 15 minutes of my precious attention span go by before I finally understood their story. Or at least, the first part of it. There was more, but I excused myself from the entrepreneur-exhaust and grabbed some food.

Router and database – all in hardware!

I ran into Rick, whom I know from one of my former clients. That company has since folded, and Rick related the saga to me. His description of the final days there was breathless but entertaining, and I was enjoying his company. And then I went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like…

“So, what are you working on now?”

With equal breathlessness, he told me about his long-standing plans for a router modeled on gate arrays and EPROMs – “nobody wants to fund a chip” – with a database in hardware so that nobody could ever copy it, and about the crying need for this in SQL Server because the database instances can’t synchronize to one another fast enough to keep up in high-volume environments. He’s found the opportunity for some funding from a Russian investor, but they don’t look at things the same way as venture capitalists, so he’s still getting comfortable with the new financial language…

I like Rick’s accent, his barrel-chested delivery, and his penchant for invoking childhood recollections of Alexandre Dumas novels. It was an entertaining chat, but after a while my smile began to wither from entrepreneur-exhaust, and I felt my face begin to crack. I feigned dry mouth from the pita bread appetizers and excused myself to search for water.

Contracepting pigeons in the park

A husband-and-wife team is building a business around a pharmaceutical agent that interferes with the process of fertilization in pigeons.

The Mrs. had impeccable skin also – I should wear my glasses to these events more often – and a delicate frame, and the Mr. was affable and gregarious. They had sensible, concise answers for how the drug works, and they even had a few customer success stories, but their entrepreneur-exhaust was still oppressive.

They took me through an audio tour of their business six ways from Tuesday, explaining why it works on pigeons but not many other birds, how they’ve successfully navigated EPA and FDA, how PETA is on their side, and how their closest competitor – a purveyor of poison – has thrown in the towel, leaving the market ready for a new take on the problem of the uncontrolled pigeon-fecundity.

“Go ahead – ask me anything about pigeon birth control,” they tacitly said in unison. “For that matter, don’t bother; let me just tell you.”

Ask them what they think, already!

I’ll ask again: Do you do things like that to your audiences? Or do you ask them what they think of your idea? Do you care what they think of your idea? Can you turn the corner from unidirectional persuasion to marketing as a conversation?

All of these happy entrepreneurs talked about their product’s features and benefits at length. I didn’t mind – as long as they were talking, I could fill my mouth with free food – but if I had had a purchasing decision to make, I would have become cranky that they weren’t interested in me and the problems I have to solve.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Nobody cares about your products or how cool they are. They care about their business problems and whether they can trust you to solve them.

Most organizations don’t understand the function of marketing managers, but in a startup, they protect the audience from entrepreneur-exhaust.

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.”

photo credit: U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class Jonathan Chandler

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Content marketing doesn’t happen automatically; marketing managers almost always need to jump through hoops to make the effort worthwhile.

A recent Hubspot article called “5 Common Content Marketing Challenges”
mentioned lack of time, lack of experience, lack of readership, lack of results and lack of organizational support as primary reasons for not being able to get content rolling out on a regular basis.

As a marketing manager, you have people asking you – maybe you’re asking yourself – “How hard can this be? The channels are everywhere. We should be pumping content out so people know about us.”

I note a few other obstacles besides the ones in the Hubspot article:

Lack of faith – “How do I know that any of this stuff will really work?” you ask. Well, you know that you need content one way or the other, because you have stories you absolutely need to tell. You don’t need to be the next Ashton Kutcher or Betty White. All you need to do is ensure that Sales has what it needs to do its job: leads and something to show to those leads.

Lack of focus – Pick a couple of channels and get good at them. You’ll kill yourself and those around you trying to spread yourself too thin, so don’t try. It can take a while to find out where your prospects spend their time and how to appeal to them, so get ready for a hunt.

Lack of sleep – Spending those first waking hours answering questions in forums? Hunching over your pastrami sandwich while you tweet? Sitting in bed with your laptop, studying your Web stats? Good luck. Obsessing over the stuff doesn’t really make you a better marketer, just a more tired one.

Remember that your job is to start conversations. And after all, how hard could that be?

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/senor_codo/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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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.

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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.

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“Marketing communications” and “I promise” don’t always fit in the same thought, but they should. Once you make the commitment to your customers, your marketing communications writer can convey it.

There’s nothing more discouraging than a broken promise, and nothing more encouraging than an honored one.

Which one do you want to make to your followers, prospects and customers?

Figure Out Your Promise

Sonia Simone of Copyblogger renown writes about promises in the context of sales copy in part 6 of her series, “Internet Marketing for Smart People”:

In a more content-driven sales system, you don’t use a single letter like this one to deliver your entire sales message.

Instead, you figure out the most important promises you’re making, and you create content that addresses each one.

…

The first thing you need to think about is what kind of “big promise” you can make to your audience.

I’ve mentioned that the lot of the marketing manager is to start conversations, but what if you spent some time figuring out what your organization’s promise is? What are you in business to promise people, and deliver on?

Sonia again:

What pressing problem do you solve?
What pain do you remove?
What value do you add?
What pleasure do you create?
What freedom do you permit?
What connection do you allow?

Do you think of your company that way? Isn’t that what marketing managers should do?

Build Content around Your Promise

Once you’ve figured out the promise you can reliably deliver on (without going out of business), you need to baptize your writer in it. It’s as important as your message, maybe more so.

She then needs to wrap your content around the promise, with sentences as forthright and determined as the promise itself:

• “Readers of this white paper will find three solid reasons and the data behind them to build their own business case for mobile content personalization technology.”
• “Don’t see your industry, use case or price range among our case studies? Call us, and if we don’t have what you’re looking for, we’ll tell you so right away.”
• “If you’re tired of never being able to find anything on your company’s portal, click here for a demo of our search technology. Within 60 seconds, you’ll know whether it’s right for you or not.”
• “I believe the time to act on teens’ behalf is now. Sooner or later the teen or teens you care about are going to be facing the issues this product addresses, so you can make an investment now, or attempt damage control later. I don’t know why you’d choose the latter.” (from Josh Shipp)

Do you know what your company’s promise is? If so, can you get your writer to convey it? If not, can you get the ball rolling and find out what it is?

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: kayladavis

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Attention + conversation = following

At its core, the goal of a marketing effort these days is to create a following and start conversations that include you. Hire a writer who understands how you want to go about it.

My friend and colleague John Bromhead is fond of saying,

Marketing is the process of starting a conversation.

David Meerman Scott is more specific:

Marketers, PR pros, advertisers, and salespeople are on the payroll for one reason: To generate attention.

In short, we’re all trying to generate attention in order to start conversations. For a long time, we’ve assumed that the conversations would be between our prospects and us, but the big lesson of social media is that the most powerful attention and conversations take place in this “following” that we’re creating in our wake.

Your marketing communications writers need to understand that, and they need to deliver content that fits the way your organization is creating its following.

Don’t most of your marketing pieces contain a section titled, “For More Information”? Why?

Your ideal readers have just met you, and you’ve just shoved a few hundred or thousand words of copy down their throats. Do you really think that most of them want more information? Do you think that they are ready to mail you a check now?

Instead of “For More Information,” say “To Follow Us.” That’s what they’re ready to do now. They want to tune in to the conversations going on about you, to see how/whether you’re engaged with the audience. They want to see what kind of attention you’re generating, and what you’re doing with it.

Do your white papers, case studies, Web content and copy still pump information at your readers so that they’ll buy from you? Or, does your content give readers enough value for them to want to follow you, then decide whether they want to buy from you when the time is ripe?

How have you made that change? Have your marketing communications writers made it with 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.

photo credit: Brianforbes37

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

photo credit: ardenswayoflife

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