Resuming from last week’s post on creating an eBook, I had chosen Microsoft PowerPoint as an adequate application with which to build an adequate eBook.

Start with a template…

The usual design guidelines apply to your choice of template: colors that suit your company’s palette, ample white space, dark (preferably black) type on light (preferably white) background, legible font, decent type size. PowerPoint comes with several templates, and there are hundreds more on line.

I used two different templates, or master slides: one for the content pages and a slightly different one for housekeeping pages (cover, intro, closing, about). The color schemes are identical, with the colors in different places. I’m no designer, but I think the reader’s eye welcomes the break.

I didn’t want to simply reformat my content in landscape and call that an eBook (although I’ve seen several authors do that). Landscape is a vehicle, and it puts your reader in a different mindset from portrait, so I assume that somebody reading in landscape is in a slide-deck reading mindset. I chose to take advantage of that by keeping the layout of the main content pages as consistent as possible.

Unfortunately, master slides in PowerPoint are not very clever. You can mistakenly nudge “Click to add text” boxes out of alignment from one page to the next, foiling your attempts at consistent layout. Also, once you’ve created the master slide, it seems to accept updates capriciously and doesn’t make them all retroactive to previously created slides.

I’m sure they’re working on it.

Meanwhile, don’t get frustrated if you decide to update your master slide, then find that you have to manually update all of the pages you’ve already based on it.

…add content…

Remember: you’re navigating between the bullet-soaked slide deck and the wall-of-text white paper. Take advantage of the best of each world.

I would like to say that I “poured” the content into the template from the original Word doc, but it was hardly that painless, mostly because I had so much editing to do.

I was determined to make each page be a unit unto itself, holding a single question and corresponding answer. This obliged me to be far more concise than I had been in the original document, to the overall benefit of the eBook.

Knowing that I was going to make the eBook available as a PDF, I avoided the temptation to fill the content pages with hyperlinks. They would take the reader away from my copy and be useless in a printed version, so I used them on the copyright page and the about-page, but not in between.

I used only one font, Georgia. It’s close to the Times New Roman war-horse, but distinctive. An unsympathetic reader might say that I used italics and bold type too liberally, but I had reasons for using them and I took pains to use them as consistently as possible, so that the same kind of content would be easy to find from one page to the next.

I didn’t number the pages (the PDF takes care of that), but I did number each of the ten questions.

…then summarize and tell them where to find you.

I wrote a summary page with more words than I wanted to, but it contains several incompressible truths I thought it was important to include. The summary page is not as eye-catching as a conclusion should be – something people will gladly read if they don’t want to read the pages in the middle – but the information it contains is useful.

The about-page is rather busy and contains seven hyperlinks, but I tried to ensure that each of them would stand out at a glance:

• a link to my online portfolio
• a link to this blog
• a SurveyMonkey link on which to harvest reader feedback
• my e-mail address
• a RetweetThis link
• a link to my LinkedIn profile
• a link to my Twitter profile

It’s not likely readers will engage me on all seven links, but they can easily find their preferred method of engagement and get there from the page.

The final eBook weighs in at 2040 words, the equivalent of about 2.5 pages of 10-point text. It’s 18 pages long, and I don’t think I could make it any easier for interested readers to find what they’re looking for.

It took me several weeks to decide to use PowerPoint, but once I’d made that decision it took me about 15 hours over 4-5 days to design the templates, edit/rewrite the content, and create the about-page.

So, get started on yours! Feel free to contact me with any questions, and let me know how yours turns out.

Meanwhile, here’s a link to the final product, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer” (alternative titles welcomed).

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

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1. How to Create an eBook in Less Than 20 Hours (Part 1 of 2)
2. 3 Tips on Creating Your eBook
3. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part III

There is an art to writing slide decks that support your presentation, and an art to presenting without a slide deck. Hire a writer who can help you with both.

Have you ever seen a slide deck get in the way of a presentation? Your own presentation, perhaps?

You’re standing in front of forty people delivering an animated presentation, when it dawns on you that the members of your audience are not engaged. At first they ogle the screen and leaf through your handouts. As your presentation goes on, some of them pick up their phones, check e-mail and surf a bit. Finally, you begin to read a message on a few faces: “All right, we’ve got the deck with your information. May we go now?” If you could read their tweets, you would probably confirm that they’ve checked out (and are telling people about it in real time).

Disadvantages of a Slide Deck

1. PC logistics are against you. Your goal is to convey a message between two parties: yourself and the audience. Like it or not, the laptop, the remote control and the screen get involved as well, even if you’re fortunate enough that they’re all behaving properly.
2. Your audience is reading the screen instead of reading you. You lose eye contact each time there’s a change on the screen. For that matter, by clicking from one slide to the next, you are the one deliberately sending people’s attention away from your on-stage presence.
3. The presence of a slide deck induces – in fact, rewards – laziness. If I don’t have to do any work, I probably won’t remember your message for very long. “Can you send me a copy of the slide deck?” means, “I’m not engaged right now, so send it to me and I’ll ignore it later.”

Quit doing too much for your audiences. Try throwing away your PowerPoint™. Try delivering a “self-propelled” presentation.

Presenting without a Slide Deck

How are you going to pull this off? You’ll need to engage the audience in other ways.

1. Carry the structure in your oral delivery, not in bullet points. You have created a good presentation when you don’t need no stinkin’ bullets because your structure is obvious and your message is clear. The audience gets it, because your quotes are compelling and you’re first-second-thirding the information straight into their brains. (Caution: This may mean that you’re finished in ten minutes instead of 45. Then what?)
2. Feeling your oats? Tell them there are no handouts (“Socrates never used them”), or that your dog ate your homework, and that they’ll need to take their own notes. If you’re doing a good job as a presenter, they’ll jot their own notes. Now that’s valuable content.
3. Reinforce your points with interactive exercises instead of charts on the wall.
   • Turn your delivery of data into a quiz; e.g., “Hummer sold 65,000 units in 2006 in the U.S. How many did it sell in 2009?” (answer: 8700).
   • Get the audience members involved by piping up with anecdotes that support or refute your points.
   • Pause halfway into your presentation and say, “Is there anybody in the audience who is completely lost? If so, then I’m not doing my job successfully and I need to know how to fix it.”

You’ll need to tell your writer, “I’m going it alone, so create me a presentation that doesn’t need a slide deck.”

Will she be up to the task? Have you ever done a presentation without a slide deck? How did it go?

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: mecookie

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1. Breathing life into a bag of bullets

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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Re-purposing content is part of the art of marketing. Have your marketing communications writer convert big-bite content into multiple smaller pieces and put them into different channels.

“We have a white paper, but it’s too long for this day and age.”

Of course, the engineer or executive who wrote the paper doesn’t think that, but you as the marketing manager can see it, as you peruse your content-landscape for pieces that will catch the attention of prospects and influencers in your industry.

Have your writer edit long pieces down to short marketing pieces that take on their own life and tell your story more succinctly. MarketingProfs’ “Get to the Point!” series does this very well for its paying members by distilling marketing-oriented content from a variety of long-winded sources down to regular, five-paragraph e-mail messages.

Source Content

Some obvious candidates for repackaging:

• White papers and thought-leadership papers. Companies place a lot of store by these pieces, so don’t treat them like wedding china and leave them hanging in a cupboard on your Web site for only occasional use. Have your writer pull out individual sections (The Problem, Current Approaches, What the Industry Needs, etc.) and make them self-standing.
• Webinars and podcasts. These are good sources, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that this is a simple matter of transcription. Even trained speakers introduce a lot of non sequiturs and interrupted sentences to live delivery, so your marketing communications writer needs to bend the text back into useful shape and logical flow.
• Slide deck presentations. I’ve posted on this before, and presentations are bagfuls of bullets waiting for an chance to live outside of the projector. Your sales and product teams probably have dozens of them that you’ve never seen before, but that can help you tell your story better and more authoritatively.

3 Ways to Make Them Work

You don’t need to tell your in-house contributors that their content is too long; just tell them that you’re going to give it life in several more important channels.

1. Teasers. Use them like movie trailers to bring visitors back to a landing page with the entire piece. The right five paragraphs in front of the right technical audience will result in clicks, page visits, downloads and conversions.
2. Blog posts. You do have a blog, don’t you? Have a look at Seth Godin and Tom Peters on the power of blogging, and follow Denise Wakeman for tips on making corporate blogging work. When you have ready-made content you can post, you’re halfway there.
3. Article/content marketing. Another important place for shopping your content out is in content repositories like ezinearticles, goarticles, articlecity, buzzle.com, articledashboard.com, amazines.com, ideamarketers.com and others oriented to your industry. Of importance here is the resource box you create to ensure that readers can find and follow you once they like your content. Read Steve Shaw at Creative Article Marketing for more on this channel.

In most organizations it’s easier to find long marketing pieces than short ones, but there’s a lot of value in the content once you’ve re-purposed it for new channels.

Have you tried this in your organization? What results do you see?

Related posts:

1. 3 Ways to Make Long Marketing Pieces Work
2. 5 Ways to Bring Your Marketing Writer In Closer
3. 3 Ways to Make Your Subject Matter Experts Think

There’s no denying, though, that most slide decks – pardon me for avoiding the trademarked term, “P****P***t,” from the company in Redmond – are pretty dry. There’s also no denying that there’s a lot of gold in them, if you know how to mine it.

Here’s how I describe it to clients:

“Your president or subject matter expert (SME) goes to a conference with a brilliant idea in her head. She creates a slide deck around it and presents it to 500 attendees, all of whom agree that it’s brilliant. They all get copies and forward them to their colleagues back at the office. These colleagues open them up and see…a bag of bullets. No narrative, no anecdotes, no flesh on the skeleton – just a bag of bullets.

“What happened to all of the brilliance, and how can we preserve it? We convert the presentation into a white paper or technical article, then make that available, instead of the slide deck.

“Once it tells a story, Marketing can use it, our PR company can use it, Sales can use it, even the execs can use it.”

We’ve done this for several presentations from product managers. We need the content out of their brains and into print anyway, and getting it from a conference presentation is usually the most efficient way of packaging it, because they’re always to busy to sit down and commit their knowledge to the printed word.

Here’s what your writer needs to do this properly:

• a copy of the slide deck
• a recording – audio or audio/video – of the presentation
• access to the SME in case of questions
• 15-30 hours

Important: Some SMEs try to record their delivery while commuting to the office, or while shaving, or while waiting for their children’s soccer games to start. The results are not as crisp as in a recording from a live delivery of the presentation before a live audience, which ensures the requisite amount of adrenaline and lack of self-consciousness for a properly delivered, playing-to-the-gallery, think-on-your-feet presentation, warts and all. Digital audio recorders, Flip cameras, and sound panel recordings from the conference engineers will get your writer what he needs.

How do you prise this kind of 24-karat content from the heads of your SMEs and execs?

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