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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.”

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: Mike Willis

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Pamela Wilson published a report called “8 Incredibly Simple Ways to Get More People to Read Your Content.” It’s not about how to build white papers, case studies, Web pages or articles, but about how to dress them up. Line breaks, subheadings and bullet lists, as Pamela points out, make it easier for readers to get through your content.

There’s a lot of psychology at work in this.

“I want people to listen to me.”

As the publisher, you have a crying need for people to listen to you. Your organization has a story to tell, and you’ve paid a marketing communications writer good money to tell it.

You want attention.

“I want to learn a little and get through this thing.”

The readers in your audience want two things: to get value out of reading your content, and to get your content behind them as quickly as possible. They’ve accepted somebody’s influence to visit your site and find your paper and they’ve awarded you a few minutes of their precious time, so hurry up and get to the point.

They want gratification.

Giving readers their gimme

Nothing gets in the way of making your readers content with your content like subjecting them to a wall of text.

You’ve seen those, haven’t you? Maybe written a few of them? A page of copy that is just paragraph upon paragraph of narrative, devoid of graphics, callouts, white space, subheadings or anything to break up your deathless prose?

Or a paper that begins to buckle under its own weight, because everybody who reviews it wants to add more ideas to it?

You need to give your readers a damned good reason to slog through every page of your content. A graphic, a table, a callout box in the margin, a bullet list…Your reader needs to feel that she has accomplished something by the bottom of every page.

Have a look through some of your content (or the content your predecessor published, if you’re lucky enough to have a scapegoat). Pour it through the two filters described above:

1. Does it tell my story?
2. Can readers learn something useful to them in a hurry?

Go ahead – pick one of your white papers, case studies, newsletter articles or blog posts. It’s easy to tell your story; it’s not so easy to make your readers content with your content.

How do you do it? Let me know in the comments.

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: Marshall Astor

Related posts:

1. Giving the Readers Value
2. 3 Ways to Make Long Marketing Pieces Work
3. Statistics in Your Content – Make Sure They Stick

Josh Shipp, the motivational speaker behind HeyJosh.com, freely describes his rough upbringing as a foster child. Realizing that he was adept at grabbing his classmates’ attention and making them laugh, he plied that talent in ways that disrupted class and got him into trouble at school.

One day, a discerning teacher asked him,

Good job, Josh. Now that you have their attention, what are you going to tell them?

This question helped to turn his mischievous side into a constructive one, and he has spent much of his life bringing parents and teens together.

As a marketing manager focused on content marketing, you need to keep that same question in front of you.

Now that you have their attention…

Social media, blogs, video and networking sites are this year’s vehicles for getting attention and building an audience. Here’s a story of how I got a little attention a couple of weeks ago.

Last spring I figured something out about social media and how I fit (or don’t fit) into it. I hammered out a pretty good blog post on the topic, but realized I could put it to better use as a guest-post on a social media-oriented blog. So I spent about three months watching blogs like Copyblogger, Duct Tape Marketing, Convince and Convert, Marketing Pilgrim, Social Media Explorer, Social Media Examiner, Brass Tack Thinking, Techipedia, Louis Gray, Brian Solis, Problogger, Chris Garrett and Junta 42 – trying to find a post with good traffic that would accept content from guests.

(This was an education in itself, and frankly not as easy as some would have you believe. I hope to post on it in greater detail one of these days.)

Finally, I submitted it to Mark Schaefer of Businesses {grow} who liked it and thought it would be a good fit. He ran it on July 29 as “This is why you’re a social media loser.” I had created a signature with a link to my own blog and site, anticipating a bump in traffic.

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of tweets I received (69, though most were duplicates) and the number and tone of comments that Mark’s community wrote. Even Mark himself parachuted into the comment stream and gave me a tip of the hat.

Well, now that I had their attention…

…what are you going to tell them?

What, indeed?

The morning the guest-post ran, I was waist-deep in an e-book I’d been planning as incentive content for the visitors from the guest-post. I designed the e-book for marketing managers who need to – but don’t really know how to – hire writers, Unfortunately, I didn’t finish it in time to catch this wave of traffic, so I need to chase the wave on Twitter and hope to catch up to it.

Of course, this is just one loop around the cycle. For most of us, the nature of content marketing is to launch one attention-getter after another, then tell or sell one new thing after another to the ever-growing audience.

If you’re in content marketing, your job is to keep the plates spinning. No wonder Jay Baer says,

Every company is its own TV station, magazine, and newspaper.

Plan to keep the hits and headlines coming. And always be ready with the next thing you’re going to tell them.

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 e-book, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: lissalou66

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The title of your white paper is where you sell your idea to the prospective reader. Don’t blow your chance to make a good impression.

Industry colleague Jonathan Kantor publishes a list of free white papers each week from his blog, White Paper Pundit. I’ve followed it the last few weeks, looking for interesting titles. They are few and far between. (Mind you, these are not papers that Jonathan himself has written.)

Have a look at this list from last week and tell me what you think of them:

1. Hosting a hybrid online conference
2. Enrollment Marketing Predictions for 2010
3. Lessons Learned From Windows 7 Early Adopters
4. Real World Predictive Analytics
5. Protecting Your Constituents’ Personal Information
6. Collections Lawsuit
7. Engagement: Understanding It, Achieving It, Measuring It
8. Enterprise Microsharing: Nineteen Applications to Revolutionize Employee Effectiveness
9. The Empowered RIM Manager
10. The Predictive Enterprise
11. Social Media and the 401(k) – The Time Is Now
12. The ROI of Backup Redesign Using Deduplication
13. An Unfortunate Surprise: Why Predictive Response Models Decrease Marketing ROI
14. Do Fortune 100 companies need a twittervention?
15. Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy
16. SQL Server Consolidation Guidance
17. The Lisbon Treaty
18. Why Vyatta is Better than Cisco
19. Understanding Web Accessibility: Why Universal Web Design Will Be Good for Your Organization
20. HP_UX 11i v3: Congestion Control Management
21. The Road Traveled
22. How Industrial Equipment Manufacturers Can Grow and Protect Customer Loyalty
23. Transloading Efficiency
24. Sustainable Agriculture

Did any of those grab you? Even if you were in the position of needing to read up on these topics, did any of these titles raise its hand and squeal, “Oh, pick me, pick me!”?

White Paper Titles – Good and Bad

Let’s examine a few of these.

• Collections Lawsuit
• The Lisbon Treaty
• Sustainable Agriculture

This seems like search engine optimization gone wrong; the titles are perfect for SEO, but when they show up in the results, they’re not very tempting, are they?

Whose point of view does each paper examine? What aspect of each topic does the paper cover? Who is in the intended audience? What will they get out of reading the paper?

Consider another group:

• Real World Predictive Analytics
• SQL Server Consolidation Guidance
• The ROI of Backup Redesign Using Deduplication

These titles give us a bit more information and help us qualify them better. “I don’t need to consolidate my SQL Server implementation; I need to build it up. Guess this paper’s not for me, thanks.” Or, “Maybe duplication is what’s bogging down our backups. This might be worth a read.” And, they’re SEO-ready.

These titles give us steak, but not much sizzle. Your paper deserves both.

One final group:

• How Industrial Equipment Manufacturers Can Grow and Protect Customer Loyalty
• Understanding Web Accessibility: Why Universal Web Design Will Be Good for Your Organization
• Enterprise Microsharing: Nineteen Applications to Revolutionize Employee Effectiveness

These are pretty well evolved titles. They demonstrate that the paper is not for everybody, and they save me time by giving me enough information to qualify them.

They’re long, but there’s nothing wrong with that, especially with SEO-ready keywords at the beginning.

3 Steps to Good White Paper Titles

1. Include the job title of the intended reader. This is part 1 of the steak; it tells me you have done homework to find out who I am.
2. Include the business problem the paper addresses. This is part 2 of the steak, in which you focus NOT on your expertise, but on the thing that has my hair on fire. (See David Meerman Scott on the single most important pitching tip.)
3. Include verbs. This helps the sizzle.

So, how about:

• Literacy Instructors Scramble – Get the Most Out of No Child Left Behind before It’s Left Behind
• Let the Casual Bloggers Decide: WordPress or Blogger.com over the Long Haul
• What Is My Pancreas, and What Did I Do to It to Deserve Cancer?
• Rubbing the Buffalo off the Nickel – 5 Ways Deans Can Increase Revenue and Lower Expenses

And, since you’re front-loading the title with SEO keywords, you can consider publishing the paper under two different titles (A/B testing), with each one focusing on either 1 or 2:

• Translation and Manufacturing – How Managers Can Successfully Mix the Two
• Manufacturing Managers Take on Translation and Make It Work

What are you doing with titles to get your customers to read your content?

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: Doug Coldwell

Related posts:

1. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part III
2. Q: When is a White Paper Not a White Paper?

I was pleased to see that client Xiam Technologies was making excellent (re-)use of their white paper, “Make It Easy on Me – 3 Ways Operators Can Use Personalization To Give Customers What They Want On The Mobile Internet,” the fruit of our collaboration this past summer.

Xiam is using the white paper as a content-lead into msearchgroove, a knowledge portal on mobile search, mobile advertising and social media.

Personalization is also a topic Colm Healy — CEO of Xiam Technologies, a Qualcomm subsidiary providing discovery and recommendations solutions to mobile operators — will examine in a series of thought leadership contributions on MSG beginning later this week.

The first in the series will outline the key takeaways of the company’s white paper, titled “Make It Easy For Me: 3 Ways Operators Can Use Personalization To Give Customers What They Want On The Mobile Internet.”

Content like white papers, case studies and technical articles is rich in SEO-potential and industry authority. Why restrict it to the corral of your Website when you can give it away and get it to roam the plains of the Web, seeding your brand? (Tip of the hat also to msearchgroove, who obviously sees the potential for leverage.)

Never forget the Content Buffet. Xiam is one of those laying out a rich spread.

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: KVDP

Related posts:

1. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part III
2. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part I

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

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.

Related posts:

1. Your Marketing Writer Takes One Final Look

• Let it die on the vine – There is always a bit more work you need to do once the authors, reviewers and artists are finished. As marketing manager, you need to give birth to the paper and ensure it sees the light of day. Pushing it those last few inches can take a lot of effort – like the effort to send that last e-mail message of the day when you’d rather close your laptop and go to bed – but do it.
• Hide it under a rock – You need to put the paper where target readers will find it. You probably know that already, but perhaps your organization doesn’t know how to capitalize on what good bait your white paper can be. Many companies bury this kind of content several levels down in their Website, on a product- or solution-page. Surfers are looking for this kind of paper, so don’t make them work for it; link to it from your home page, or create an easily visible page on which your white papers, case studies and published articles all live.
• Give it to the wrong stakeholder - Who is the best custodian of your new white paper? Sales? Business Development? Channel Marketing? Engineering? I’ve had good, rich content – news articles, which have time-value – slide into obscurity because it went to a Website owner who stuck it wherever it would fit, instead of to the champion who really promoted it on the site.
• Put a big form-fill in front of it – If you really want to waste time and money, put your white paper behind a long form. No reader wants to put up with that in this day and age. Naturally, you want to capture the lead, but people would rather buy without being sold to. I posted before on the idea of giving away your content, which is a good idea if you have mountains of it, but if you’re not ready to make it so freely available, just ask for an e-mail address (be prepared for it to be a throwaway address) and an optional comment on what the visitor is looking for. Whenever I’ve done that, I’ve been surprised at the uptake.

This series has described white paper projects that don’t go well, and how you can avoid this situation. Of course, they sometimes go quite well, and as a marketing manager, that’s where you’ll want to focus.

Related posts:

1. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part I
2. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part II