The Content Buffet - By John White » marketing manager

Marketing Mangers: Make Up Your Own Job Title

John White — Thu, 17 May 2012 20:03:00 +0000

What’s in a marketing manager’s job title? Did you invent your title? Which title would you pick, if you could?

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

Your Marketing Writer Is Working on Other People’s Content. Find Out What It Is.

John White — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:00:44 +0000

Your marketing writers are valuable nodes in your network. Thinking about them that way pays off in making your own content broader and richer.

On Monday, you phone your marketing communications writer to kick off a white paper on mobile game pricing. On Thursday, a marketing manager with a different company asks your writer to work on a paper about translating mobile games.

Your writer is no world-renowned expert in mobile gaming. It just happens that these two clients need content on that topic at about the same time.

Both of these corporate marketers have a common connection to the writer. What they don’t know is how much common value in mobile gaming lies just the other side of that connection.

Have you ever asked your marketing communications writers about the other topics they cover, besides your products and services?

An overlooked link

You probably value your writers (and keep giving them work) for a few reasons.

They write effectively.
They’re a quick study.
They understand your business and its audiences.
They do research and write about it in ways that reflect well on your organization.

How about this reason?

They know useful stuff you don’t know.

Last year, in separate pieces for clients in completely different industries, I cited the statistic that the human race had recently crossed the threshold of five billion telephone connections. I don’t remember for which project I first came across it, but it didn’t matter because it supported both arguments very well.

When an analyst with a research firm re-purposes information like that, clients expect it. They take for granted that it’s her business to know such things and they gladly pay her to impart them.

But when a marketing communications writer does it, it’s serendipity.

And, you can get in on it.

Either your marketing writers tell you…

I’ve often wished I could introduce all of my clients to one another – say, in a large restaurant on Maui – and see what came of it. Almost all of them are marketing managers or directors, and I think it would be easy for them to find value in connecting. In fact, it would probably be easier for them to find that value talking to one another in that Maui restaurant than networking through me.

Your writers may not have such lofty designs, but they may have ways of letting you know what they work on, starting with the Clients page on their Website.

Do your writers tweet, post or put out a newsletter on current projects? Do you follow them?

What other kinds of work besides yours is in their portfolio? What can you learn from it? More importantly, what does your writer learn from it that can make your content bigger, deeper and wider?

Consider your writers more than just writers: they’re resources.

…or you ask them

You can do this without being nosy, without intruding and without running afoul of anybody’s non-disclosure agreement. It sounds like this:

So, what else are you working on these days (that you can tell me about)?

or like this:

We need a series of case studies on how pharma’s use our services. Do you work with any companies in that field?

It’s really not that different from “Say, Marie, I really need a good electrician. What do you know about finding one in this town?” which is a conversation that takes place about 50 times per second all over the world, as people make casual use of their networks.

If we learn anything from our collective investment of time in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other networking vehicles, it should be that our circles of acquaintance are like crabgrass: most of their connections (and value) are invisible, waiting for us stumble onto and benefit from them through normal curiosity.

The only thing more important than your network is your network’s network.

When you ask your writers about other work they’re doing, you’re making good use of these nodes in your network.

So, corporate marketers: The hidden value is there. You just need to sharpen your curiosity and start finding out what other content your marketing communications writers are working on.

And stop waiting for an invitation to a restaurant on Maui.

John White is a marketing communications writer who 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,” then take your best shot at hiring him.

photo credit: faungg

4 Tips for Contributed Articles

John White — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:06:53 +0000

Writing a contributed article, or byline: easy. Getting it to look in print the way you intended: not so easy. A few tips for marketing managers getting from A to Z.

It’s like a bucket brigade, really – the path between the marketing communications writer and the finally posted content. The bucket starts out full, but by the time it’s gone through a dozen or so hands, there’s quite a bit missing.

So the client’s marketing manager said, “We have the opportunity to contribute an article to a publication. Our PR firm set it up, and the editors like the pitch. Interview the product manager and write it up.”

The publication had some guidelines for writing, mostly about style rather than mechanics. It offered even fewer about what to expect once the article ran.

So we got to work: interview, drafts, contributor’s bio, images, carefully selected links, approvals, ready. That took about two weeks.

The marketing manager handed the finished copy (~1900 words) off to the PR agency, who passed it to the publication. It ran on the Web the next morning, and the eye is never so able to find problems as just a little after it’s too late.

Fixing problems with your contributed articles

Maybe some of our problems stemmed from working in Microsoft Word. Fortunately, it’s lingua franca for moving copy around during review cycles. Unfortunately, it’s not like HTML, and it’s really not like Drupal or WordPress or Joomla or any of the other content management systems online publications use.

Mostly, though, it’s a few questions we didn’t ask. We’re smarter now, and I want you to be that much smarter as well.

1. Images and sidebar

Problem: We included two images and a sidebar in a text box. Knowing how fussy people get about images, we shipped them as colossal, high-resolution JPEG files and let the publication crunch them down as much as they needed to. The images included captions (Figure 1, Figure 2) and the copy referred to them.

The problem was the sidebar, which the magazine had recommended we include. It supplemented a paragraph near the middle of the article, but the magazine dumped it at the bottom, just before the author bio. It was useless down there, but the moral of the story (which I had forgotten – my bad) is that sidebars don’t get along well with these pages.

Fix: Use a sidebar, but create it as an image near the text you want to emphasize.

2. Links

Problem: We embedded several hyperlinks in the article, mostly to webinars and pages on the client’s site. Not all publications like that, because you’re using their real estate to promote your content. In fact, the author bio contained four links; the publication scrubbed them all on the main page, but allowed them on a separate About the Author page.

Fix: Find out the publication’s policy on hyperlinks. They may have a limit of one link per 500 or so words, and they may have a policy that favors authoritative links (e.g., to Wikipedia or Reuters) over linking to your own assets. For that matter, include links to other content in the publication; they’ll probably like that even more than links to Wikipedia. Is there a more sincere form of journalistic flattery?

3. Numbered lists

Problem: It’s hard enough in MS Word to list four numbered items, then enter some non-numbered text, then resume the numbered list. It’s even harder on the Web.

Fix: Don’t clown around with this kind of formatting if your article is destined for the Web. It just annoys the people who have to tear it apart and disrupt the structure of your article. Or, hard-number the items into the text instead of using automatic numbering and list items (

4. URL

Problem: To the extent that a keyword-rich URL gives your content an SEO boost, it’s a nice thing to hope for. Unfortunately, the CMS assigned the article a lame URL: http://www.sys-con.com/node/2207848. Not much SEO juice from that, and no benefit to the publication, either.

Fix: Ask for a decent link. All they can say is “no.” The CMS should be able to accommodate this.

These four fixes should ensure that more of your water survives the bucket brigade.

What else have you found out about submitting contributed articles to Web publications? It’s a different world from paper-based press, isn’t it?

photo credit: mcoughlin

3 Tips on Creating Your eBook

3 Ways to Personalize Your “About Us” Page

John White — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:34:48 +0000

Of all the pages on your organization’s site, About Us is probably the windiest. If you really want visitors to know something about you, be smarter than that.

Do you ever look at the About Us pages of other organizations? Have you ever seen a good one? What if you put some real thought into yours?

Stop and think about the chance you have for intimacy and a personal connection to your visitors on an About Us page. Amid the blizzard of pages grouped around Products, Solutions, Services, Pricing, Support and Contact, it can be a window into your company’s soul.

It can be a lone page crying in the wilderness, “Never mind all of the commerce and hyperventilation. Here’s a look at who we are, how we got this way and what we want to do with the company.”

First, personalize your email campaigns

With one client, I was working on a email campaign to both prospects and existing customers. In the closing, I included the text

As usual, please get in touch with me at hermione@zengen.com or simply reply to this message if you want to discuss this with me some more.

Then I appended a signature block with Hermione’s name and title.

“What’s that for?” Hermione asked when we reviewed the draft over the phone.

“This is email. When you receive email, you expect to see the sender’s name at the bottom, don’t you?”

“Yes, but this is different. I see no reason to personalize an email campaign.”

“Why not? Are you afraid that they don’t really want to hear from you?”

“It just seems a bit odd to use personalization in an email campaign.”

And, of course, personalizing your About Us page is even more odd.

Then, personalize your About Us page

This is a taller order, but consider these three steps:

Remove all of the existing nonsense about who you are and how great your products are. Nobody cares anyway; they care about their business problems and whether they can rely on you to solve them. This means you have to get rid of lots of meaningless words that just fill up space – words like “flexible,” “robust,” “world-class,” “scalable,” “cutting-edge,” “mission-critical,” “market-leading,” “industry-standard,” “groundbreaking” and “innovative” – and the sentences that contain those words.
Have your marketing communications writer come up with a SHORT description of what your organization does, or what you want your website/blog to communicate to visitors. Believe it or not, there are millions of people who don’t know what you do, and your About Us text has to make it clear to them.
Use the words “you” and “I”. Sure, every organization is a team effort, but your visitors and customers deal with only one person at a time. Instead of hiding behind a corporate veil, put somebody – the CEO, the bizdev manager, the customer advocate, the receptionist – out in front of the castle gates by putting his/her name at the bottom of the About Us page.

To some degree, of course, your company should agree on the description of its soul embodied in your About Us page. The shorter it is, the less there will be to quibble about and disagree over in review loops. And you can always change it in two months; it’s only HTML. Have a look at what no less than The Blog Tyrant considers the 12 best About Us pages in the known galaxy.

I drafted another client’s About Us page touting four goals of most of the site’s likely visitors and describing (in you-oriented language) how the client’s software tools helped achieve those goals. I added a personalized signature block. It wasn’t bad, but it was a reach.

The feedback?

I really like what you’ve done here. While I think the personalized idea is a good one, I am just not sure how it will work in practicality since there are so many stakeholders to this site. There are quite a few groups that touch developers, and nothing internally holds these groups together. So I fear our internal dysfunction makes your good idea hard to implement.

So it goes. The result, after client edits, was about 65% of what I’d hoped to achieve, and the rest landed on the cutting room floor.

Marketing managers: Have you managed to nudge your company toward personalization? How is it going?

photo credit: Wootang01

No Blog, Wimpy About-Us Page – Are You Hiding Something?

Six Reasons You Can’t Get Your Content Marketing to Work

John White — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:11:55 +0000

Excuses, reasons, challenges, obstacles…call them what you will, they’re mosquitoes at your Content Buffet that hamper marketing efforts.

Marketing managers: If you’re trying to understand content marketing, you need to follow these three sources:

Marketing Charts – thought-provoking data and useful factoids served up daily
Content Marketing Institute – most of what you need to know about the mechanics of using valuable content in your marketing
MarketingProfs - webinars, forums, lessons and list-posts for anybody with the word “marketing” in his/her title

These three FREE resources sometimes converge to give you gems like this:

In other words:

Six reasons you can’t get your content marketing to work

Which of these do you need to fix in your organization?

1. Producing engaging content – 42%

You put content out, but its boring. Nobody comments on it, nobody is quoting or re-using it, it’s not helping you in the search engines, and it’s not moving the sales-needle. Whether it’s blog posts, case studies, white papers, podcasts or video, it’s just not adding up to an engaging story. It probably isn’t valuable (meaning “valuable to your prospects,” not “valuable to you”).

Try this: Have your marketing communication writers write for a real human being, not for a demographic or market segment. And since nobody cares about your products, have them write about your customers’ problems instead.

2. Producing enough content – 20%

How much content is enough? If you’re serious about getting onto the first search engine results page (SERP), you need to put out valuable content with masterful use of relevant keywords about five times per week. Hey, what marketing manager can’t do that, especially with legal reviews of the content?

Try this: Cross-examine yourself. If you land on page one, will you necessarily attract qualified prospects and the kinds of customers you want to have? Or will you attract tire-kickers, time-wasters and people who wannabe you? If you can’t generate enough content to get above the noise in your keyword-space, then generate enough to look credible to prospects who find you through other means. That’s a different “enough,” but it’s an important “enough.”

3. Budget to produce content – 18%

This goes hand in hand with #2. You ask the VP of marketing or engineering for budget to write a white paper, or to hire a marketing writer for a series of case studies or blog posts, and she tells you “no dice.” It happens a lot in a soft economy.

Try this: Find content other people are already producing about you and ride those waves. Here’s the Yelp listing (B2C) for a nearby restaurant with hundreds of reviews; that represents acres of valuable (because user-generated) content that nobody needed budget to create. Here’s the Facebook page (B2B) of Johnson Controls, with a mixture of free content they want and free content they don’t want. They may not have a white paper budget, but they can use this as a starting point for producing content.

4. Lack of executive buy-in – 12%

Yes, some execs still haven’t gotten the memo, or don’t yet consider it dangerous that their competitors are consistently generating valuable content. Content marketing can be a tough sell, especially if you have to justify return on investment (ROI).

Try this: You may not be able to get attention around producing new content, but nobody in his right mind would ignore things – both good and bad – that other people are saying about your products and services. If you can’t sweet-talk your execs with terms like “content marketing,” then shake them up a bit with “reputation management.”

5. Producing a variety of content – 7%

Limited resources, unlimited possibilities: video, podcasts, white papers, case studies, eBooks, newsletter articles, blog posts and more. But especially on a small team, it’s hard to produce every kind of content you want and do it consistently and well. Or, maybe you’re accustomed to just one or two kinds and haven’t tried any others.

Try this: Do a six-month rotation, generating two types of content per shift. At the end of a couple of years, you’ll know which types are the best match for your organization.

6. Budget to license content – 1%

Instead of generating your own content, you decide to shore up your website with somebody else’s content. Or, maybe you want to license a report with independent (favorable) information about your products. That’s not so much “content marketing” as it is “someone-else’s-content marketing.” Fortunately, not many of you face this predicament.

Try this: Build your own brand with your own content instead. And get your customers to rave about you so that you don’t have to pay industry analysts to do it.

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: Toronto History

Before You Load It into the Email Cannon, Read It!

John White — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:42:56 +0000

When your marketing copy ends up in unintended places, make sure it doesn’t embarrass you. If it’s not good enough to be caught anywhere, it shouldn’t be your copy.

I subscribe to Fierce Wireless. Every day, they send me a free newsletter with wireless industry news. Big names – Cisco, Ericsson, AT&T, Nokia – sponsor the newsletter, so every week or so I get email with an ad.

I don’t mind an ad, but I do mind lousy copy in an ad.

And I really mind a datasheet that somebody mistakenly used as an ad.

The wrong copy for email

Twice in a week I received a sponsored email through Fierce Wireless from the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company (not its real name), an outfit that certainly knows a thing or two about marketing.

The email reads something like a product announcement, with lots of jargon-crammed bullets describing capabilities, features and benefits. It tells me all about active network abstraction and an XML-based Broadband Query Language (BQL) API.

I don’t care about this stuff.

I might care, if the copy talked about the problems that afflict people who need it. But the copy doesn’t even give me that chance.

The copy does mention (twice) that service providers and other network operators can now upgrade. But it doesn’t tell them why they should care.

The wrong email for the audience

Obviously, I’m not a network operator, so I shouldn’t have received this message. It was the wrong email for such a broad audience. It was wasted on me.

But it really didn’t have to be.

People are going to see your marketing communications – white papers, case studies, Web content, newsletters, blog – whether you intend those people as the audience or not.

At the very least, a poorly targeted impression should still help you as a marketing manager to build your brand. Your copy shouldn’t turn potential acquaintances off in a hailstorm of features and benefits.

Don’t put out dull copy. You never know where it’s going to land. Or whom you’re going to turn off when it does land.

photo credit: foxypar4

A Japanese Take on Content Marketing

John White — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:11:23 +0000

Marketing communication managers grow long-lived bodies of content like white papers, case studies and blog posts. What if time didn’t matter in content marketing?

Consider a Japanese approach to content marketing in which the content disappears after about a day. What can you learn from that?

American content marketer extraordinaire David Meerman Scott wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, which is now available in Japanese and enjoying brisk sales.

Scott has partnered with Shigesato Itoi on the localization and publication of the book, and saluted the real-time nature of the content on Itoi’s site, Hobonichi. In an interview with Itoi, Scott comments:

A particularly interesting aspect is that daily content is available for only 24 hours, and then disappears. There is no archive of the daily information. This unusual content strategy is exactly the opposite of what SEO experts would tell you to do and therefore, because it is unique, is a very Grateful Dead approach.

Whether you’re Japanese or not, transitory content feels more like a conversation with your readers. As Itoi says,

Maybe it’s because it allows me to discuss the same theme over and over again. It’s natural: don’t we do that every day? Perhaps I wanted to replicate this behavior.

It’s not important to show people what you and your organization were thinking six months ago, or even last week. The important thing is to take what you’re thinking TODAY and turn it into engaging content. That would be easy, except that today becomes yesterday (then last Tuesday, then last month, then last quarter…) awfully fast.

This Japanese take on content marketing spans both this Content Buffet blog and my Localization Project Management blog, which focuses on international product marketing. Isn’t it surprising how people in other parts of the world think about and relate to content? What if it’s only in the West that time matters to content marketing?

“Why Should We Keep Putting Out White Papers?” Influence.

John White — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 04:31:58 +0000

Veteran marketers may tend to become jaded about the value of white papers, but that’s unwise. For one thing, they’re still influential. For another, not everybody knows what they are.

Eccolo Media has released its 2011 B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report, covering 501 executives of US companies with influence on technology decisions. I want to mention two findings in particular.

White paper consumption down, influence up

White paper consumption decreased 14 percentage points since 2010, from 76 percent to 62 percent.

However, white paper influence increased from 41 percent to 65 percent, as measured by the number of respondents who found white papers influential or very influential.

So, marketing managers may encounter internal resistance to white paper campaigns because “fewer people read them,” but those who do read them, rely on them more.

So, write better papers and assume that they’ll be of greater impact.

Not everybody knows about white papers

This one really threw me.

Twenty-eight percent reported that they began consulting white papers for the first time in the last six months.

Huh?

So there you are, a marketing manager assuming that most decision-makers will instinctively reach for a white paper, when in fact 28 percent of your audience had never used one until recently.

Have that many people been promoted from the shop floor to management in the last six months? Unlikely in a – can we talk? – double-dip recession.

So, no matter how big the intended audience of your white paper, assume that it could handily be about one third larger.

Have a look at the entire report (free download) from Eccolo Media. It’s a good arrow to have in your marketing manager’s quiver.

photo credit: Jesse757

White Paper Blues – When Execs Want to Help

John White — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 04:42:09 +0000

You can’t fault an exec for wanting to get involved in creating your marketing content. But you should handle it delicately.

“So I have good news and bad news,” the director of marketing started off.

Just when I thought we were out of the tunnel on this campaign…

“The good news is that we’ve shown an early draft of the business-benefits piece to our CEO, and he quite likes it. In fact, he himself wrote a paper for a C-level peer at one of our customers a few months back that draws the business case around our product, and he’d like to provide it as material for our project.

“Obviously, that’s also the bad news.”

He laughed. I laughed. The agency laughed.

Drat.

Managing executive expectations for marketing content

As a kid, I spent a lot of time at Milne Brothers Bike Shop on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, California. Mr. Jenkins had a sign on the wall in the service department out back that read:

Labor Rates

$5.00/hr.

$7.50/hr. if you watch

$12.00/hr. if you help

I’ve thought about that as a model for managing customer expectations and involvement, but I doubt most businesses would get very far with it.

The point is that people who do know what they’re doing, don’t generally welcome the involvement of people who merely may know what they’re doing.

So consider these levels of involvement for the executives of your client-companies:

“Let me make sure we’re on the same page.” – When, as in this case, the CEO has devoted some time, thought and potentially high-value perspective to his own material, you cannot afford to have your marketing content run afoul of how your CEO sees things.

It’s probably better if you can convince the exec to let you review his material, instead of having him review yours.

“Let me just approve what you’ve written.” – This is smart. One of my favorite CEOs did this with all the content we generated beyond datasheets and product briefs. He never rewrote our copy, but he had his fingers on its pulse, and we knew that he had the ultimate say.
“Let me help.” – This is a pain for everybody. Execs rarely have time to help on these projects, and they become bottlenecks, if well-intentioned bottlenecks. Writing a paper or a thought-piece with a VP or C-level exec is usually very difficult. You’re better off recording her at a conference and turning that into a paper.
“Let me butt out.” – Optimal for most parties concerned, in the short run. Really, though, you should try to make your work visible to the execs, if only to justify your effort.

The sound marketing director

“I’m just kidding,” continued the marketing director. “I plan to manage the process so that we can keep our campaign moving ahead without delays. The CEO told me he’d like to see the early direction of the piece, and I’ve told him that I would like to review the material he put together.”

Whew. Option 1.1.

“He wants to be in the loop on this piece. I think he’ll have useful input, and he’ll be receptive to our description of business benefits. It’s a win for us, so long as we manage the changes smoothly.”

The sound marketing manager can make things like this work well. How do you handle it when execs want to help?

photo credit: Kelvyn Skee

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I Fought the Law(yers) and The Law(yers) Won

John White — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 04:02:58 +0000

Corporate blogging is not all it’s cracked up to be. Legal review of your marketing content takes some of the fun out of it. But for a good reason.

I don’t care what Google’s stock price is. They build an enterprise and reputation their way, and we build it our way. We’re not letting employees shoot from the hip in a blog post.

Nobody has said that to me, but it’s how I imagine a client in that position would think.

And, truth to tell, I haven’t fought the lawyers. I would stand nothing to gain and lots to lose.

As a marketing manager, you can crank out – or have a marketing communications writer crank out – blog posts that border on the fanciful. Face it: you’re in the business of imagination, and to keep the interest of your company’s followers, you may be tempted to “push it” every now and again. That’s because:

People want to read controversy – or at least opinions – in a blog. They look to a blog for a peek behind the curtains at what’s going on in your organization. That’s usually the antithesis of legal review.
The opinions they want to read do not include how great your products are. They want to know how you regard the market and especially your competitors. Legal review is not set up for that.
Legal review slows down the blogging process and can deprive timely posts of their edge. Mostly, though, that’s a good thing.

So you can gripe and moan that all your best stuff ends up on the cutting room floor because it was censored. But keep in mind that the responsibility of legal reviewers in the content creation process is to ensure that you avoid publishing things you couldn’t prove if you had to. These people are trained to assume that you will have to prove it someday, and they’ve been correct often enough that their role is a valuable one.

Don’t fight them. And if you do fight them, let them win. Someday you can be David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal officer of Google, and raise as many hackles as he did last month in a blog post about Microsoft and Apple.

But until then, just tell the truth “and make it rhyme.”

photo credit: Mike Willis

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