The Content Buffet - By John White » rapport with writer

Feelings and White Papers – A Deadly Combination

John White — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 22:37:58 +0000

Marketing communication managers shouldn’t worry about hurting their writers’ feelings. This is business.

Stop and think: Have you ever said to a marketing communications writer,

“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

If so, it’s very nice of you, but it shouldn’t be necessary. Marcomm writers don’t have feelings. That’s why they’re writers.

A writer with a fragile ego?

Maybe you haven’t put it quite that way. Maybe you’ve said, “The team and I went over the white paper you wrote, and we made a few small changes here and there – nothing big, really, just some minor tweaks,” or “Have a look at our comments. They’re pretty straightforward,” which means you made a zillion changes. Or maybe you didn’t say anything and just made all the changes yourself because you didn’t want to cause a fuss.

If you’re trying to trivialize the changes so that you don’t trigger additional charges for a rewrite of the white paper, that’s one thing. That’s business.

But if you’re trying to avoid bruising your writer’s fragile ego, you should probably adopt a different mindset. Or a different writer.

This isn’t personal; it’s about a work product that is either adequate or inadequate. You don’t need to be rude, but you should be ruthless with your writer, because you’re the one on the hook for copy that falls short.

As I’ve mentioned before,

Writers don’t write. They suggest.

Part of your job as a marketing manager is to reconcile their suggestions to realities your writers do not see: technology changes, market dynamics, layout, tone, fit, office politics and so on.

Don’t worry about hurting their feelings simply because the white paper needs more work.

Good writers can deal with it. Good writers are made of fire.

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: ncanup

How to Give Feedback on Marketing Content

John White — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 12:28:51 +0000

Give your marketing communications writers feedback they can use. The more useful your input, the shorter the turnaround. And the smoother the dance.

Consider the dance of the review loop. Please.

For you, the marketing manager, the review loop is usually just a speed bump on the road to getting the piece published. You build it into your schedule, you circulate the drafts, you nag the reviewers, but most of the time you don’t stop to think about what’s really going on in a review loop:

You’re making sure that the marketing communications writer heard what you said and captured it correctly.

That’s important, and you’ve got a big stake in it.

Last week, Mark Nichol posted 10 tips for critiquing other people’s writing. I think his list applies more to friends reviewing one another’s work than to the client-vendor relationship, so I’ll supplement his 10 with four more.

Don’t be shy. If the writer missed the point, let him know that he missed it. Use a sentence like “You’ve missed the point,” or “This paragraph misses the point.” That’s what happened, so just say it. Then tell him what the point is.
Do it in writing, if you can; in a phone call, if you cannot. I vastly prefer written feedback to oral feedback. It means that the reviewer sees that something is wrong and wants to change it, and that she has made the mental effort to put it into words. Real-time, over-the-phone feedback sessions are a pain I endure when it looks like the only way to break a logjam in the schedule and get the project rolling again. They invariably go all over the map, so I record them and take copious notes.
Use the words you want to see in print. If a sentence is wrong, change it yourself to more accurate language. Don’t worry about grammar, flow and consistency; the writer will clean it up if need be. This is your chance to pluck out of the writer’s head the incorrect language and replace it with the language you want. It’s easier on the entire process if you use the words you want
Change actual text rather inserting comments. Assuming you’re using software like Microsoft Word with change tracking enabled, it’s easy to cross out actual text and write your own. In fact, it’s better than inserting comments, which are not always easy to see. Writers do better with “~~Gradual, incremental investment~~Dollar-cost averaging is more suited to the long-term investor than is market timing…” than with an inserted comment like “This isn’t right. Please fix.”

The review loop is a dance between the marketing manager and the marketing communications writer. The more clearly you express the next steps, the smoother the dance.

photo credit: Eric Ward

2 Ways that Writer’s Block Is Your Problem

John White — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:48:09 +0000

Marketing managers depend on copywriters. Writer’s block is the bane of copywriters. What if marketing managers have something to do with writer’s block?

I don’t like to make a lot of writer’s block, or whatever name you want to give to hitting a productivity wall.

It isn’t that I don’t believe in it. It’s more that it doesn’t really help me as a construct. Like the Garden of Eden or the Tooth Fairy, it’s a name for something that I honor in other people’s belief systems but don’t really accept in my own.

So here’s writer Melissa Karnaze posting on writer’s block as your secret weapon, with a six-step guide to unblocking yourself. Use it in good health.

As a marketing manager, do you think you have anything to do with writer’s block in the people who generate your content for you?

Maybe you do.

1. Writer’s block and the audience

While I don’t want to call it writer’s block, there are plenty of times when I’m staring at the blank page or the unfinished paragraph, then staring at the clock, then back at the page.

“Funny,” I think, “I don’t have this problem when I’m writing e-mail to my high school friends.”

“It’s the audience,” I reply. “You know what to write to your friends, and it’s interesting to you and you know that it’s interesting to them. That is not going on here, so you’re stuck.”

Dave Navarro posted a couple of years ago on ending writer’s block forever:

If you put your focus on what your audience wants to read (rather than what you want to write), the whole game changes — and the shift is in your favor.

Professional writers don’t usually call up their clients and moan, “I have writer’s block, and I can’t finish this piece for you.” However, you may get a call that goes, “You know, Claudine, I need to understand the audience for this article better. Can you connect me to somebody who knows the intended reader very well?”

Part of your job in assigning a piece to writers is to tell them what you want written. The other part is to tell them whatever you can about the ideal reader. The folks at Savvy B2B Marketing write extensively about the role of defining the buyer persona in creating content, and they’re right.

2. Writer’s block and the drone

I call it the drone because that’s what how it would sound if I didn’t bust my chops trying to fix it (and succeeding).

The drone arises when you tell the writer to give you six different pieces on the same topic, and about the only difference among them is the channel or medium.

“I need copy on childhood obesity in grades K-8,” you tell the writer. “The audience consists of social workers. I need a 4-page paper, a newsletter feature, a page for the Web site, a print article and a blog post. And I need to link them together so that they reinforce one another.”

You’re asking for writer’s block, because there are only so many ways to say the same thing and have it resonate with the same audience, no matter how much you spread it out. You’ll do better to work with the writer on different angles to the childhood obesity issue.

It’s easier for a good writer to search for and vet different angles on a topic than to try to say the same thing in different – but not too different – ways.

Help your writer avoid writer’s block

Are you surprised that there are things you can do to keep your writer’s pen moving smoothly? Has your writer ever mentioned writer’s block to you?

photo credit: Brian Tomlinson

3 Ways to Help Your Writer Over the Hump

A Mr Kite Kind of Piece

John White — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 23:21:46 +0000

News item: “Apple finally adds the Beatles music to iTunes.” A post about fantastic content that “just happens” to your writer.

Every now and then, you look in awe at something your marketing communications writer has delivered.

“This is fantastic,” you say.

Your writer doesn’t disagree. She also doesn’t tell you that it took almost no effort. After all, she can’t make it look too easy, or else you’ll think that anybody can do it.

A writer told me about being in this situation when she delivered one of these pieces last week. Mr. Casey had asked her to write up an interview with two teachers for the annual report that her son’s high school publishes. She and the teachers spoke for about a half-hour, then she went home with her notes and recording. A few days later, she put their exact words into print, edited them for brevity and readability, had another look at it the following day, and sent it off.

Mr. Casey loved it, saying that it fit well with the theme of the report and that he was extremely grateful for the talent she brought to it.

“I didn’t bother telling him that the article had written itself, by and large,” she admitted. “Good thing it was pro bono; I’d have had pangs of conscience billing him for it.”

“There was no real work.”

“Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite,” on Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, came about in similar fashion. The remarkably splashy, memorable tune nearly wrote itself, almost all of the lyrics coming from a 19th-century circus poster John Lennon found in an antique shop while filming a TV piece to go with “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

There was a break and I went into this shop and bought an old poster advertising a variety show which starred Mr Kite.

It said the Hendersons would also be there, late of Pablo Fanques Fair…The band would start at ten to six. All at Bishopsgate. I hardly made up a word, just connecting the lists together. Word for word, really.

I wasn’t very proud of that. There was no real work. I was just going through the motions because we needed a new song for Sgt. Pepper at that moment.

(from The Beatles Anthology)

Should it cost the same?

So, if you think the piece is brilliant, but the writer considers it a throwaway, should you pay less for it?

Of course not. Whether your writer sweated bullets or just peeled it off, it solved your business problem equally, and that’s what’s important.

If you don’t think so, then tell Apple that “Mr Kite” should cost $.69 in iTunes instead of $1.29 because John didn’t put much effort into it. And let me know how that works out for you.

photo credit: http2007

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That New Writer? Don’t Be Afraid to Start Out Small

John White — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 19:53:10 +0000

Even when your content needs are enormous, you don’t need to start by taking a huge bite out of them. Start out small with a new writer.

What happens when you take over the marketing reins in a mid-sized technology company?

“There were a jillion case studies, blog posts, newsletter articles, white papers and collateral pieces in various stages of completion, from dream state to staging server,” one marketing manager moaned to me. “I needed a marketing communications writer to help me get through everything, but I didn’t want to dive in too deep with an unknown entity and run the risk of having to do most of the work myself.”

She was tempted by the retainer model of, say, $3,000 per month for an all-you-can-eat writer, so that she could simply queue up work and start seeing progress in short order.

Instead of embarking on an ambitious editorial calendar from top to bottom, she found a writer and picked three discrete, small projects for him to work on. She made progress, albeit incremental, on her to-do list and became more comfortable with the writer.

This approach can even work for big-ticket items like white papers. Break these projects into two deliverables: outline and draft. If the outline is a train wreck, you pull the plug and find a different writer. You make progress on the project, without incurring too much of the risk of working with a writer who is an unknown quantity.

I’d recommend that especially for PR and marketing agencies whose clients ask, “Can you write a white paper for us?” and who say, “Of course,” even if they know they’re going to have to outsource it. The clients are the ones with final say on the paper, and if the agency dives in with the wrong writer, it gets stuck in the middle between the two ends. Breaking a project like a white paper into smaller milestones just makes sense for them.

How do you start out with new marketing communications writers?

P.S. I’m also pleased to point to my guest-post this week on new realities for the beginning writer at Make a Living Writing. Drop by and have a look.

photo credit: Radhika Bhagwat

5 Business Instruments Your Marketing Writer Should Have

Your Writer Is In Over His Head. Good.

John White — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 19:03:56 +0000

Marketing communications writing involves risk, and your writer works on the edge of it. Your content is the big winner.

When you assign a piece to your marketing communications writer – even a writer with whom you’ve worked before – are you certain she can do it?

No, I mean really certain?

Be honest with yourself and you’ll acknowledge that of course you’re not certain.

Good for you, marketing manager.

The Wisdom of Insecurity

Philosopher Alan Watts wrote a book called The Wisdom of Insecurity. I’ve read it three times and still can’t remember anything except the title, but that’s all I really need to remember. And, although people all around you scream for figures on ROI, there’s a wisdom about the unquantifiable parts of your job that make you insecure, one of which is assigning a challenging piece to a writer.

I had a lively chat last week with local colleague Joseph White, who told me about marketing pieces he’s done for a manufacturer of ruggedized equipment in nuclear containment facilities.

“How did you know you could write about it?” I asked.

“Well,” he replied, “I had a university professor from Texas who once told me, ‘Back home in Texas we say that if you’re not in over your head, you’re probably not having much fun.’ I’ve always remembered that. I think it’s at the heart of good writing.”

Your writer faces some in-over-her-head on most of the pieces you assign, believe it or not. And, when she’s having the fun that comes from it, your content is the winner.

It’s Risky Because It’s Natural

We all try to avoid risk, of course, forgetting that it’s nature’s way of reminding us that we’re alive. But assigning a tough piece to a writer is just an extension of the risk and peril you incurred when you got out of bed that morning.

And don’t forget that the writer, too, incurs risk. You both have plenty to lose and plenty to gain. I think it’s a strong argument for working closely together, which is another way of saying “managed risk.”

A new client underwent rigorous ISO-certification with the express goal of turning it into a part of their unique value proposition. “Most of our customers develop very specialized products,” one of the partners explained to me, “so they ask us a lot about the quality and accuracy of our consulting services. After 30 years of doing this, we know that their real concern is that they can’t afford risk. It’s against nature to try to eliminate all risk – nobody can do that – but the ISO-certification shows them that we’re serious about managing it.”

So let your writer get in over his head. Manage the risk by working closely with him and ride that risk to new content. You’ll be the better marketing manager for it.

photo credit: Paul Sapiano

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3 Lessons on Cleaning Up Copy

John White — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 17:28:35 +0000

“Cleaning up” copy is harder and more nebulous than it sounds. When you want your marketing communications writer to go over existing text, keep a few lessons in mind.

Jean, a marketing manager for a new client, sent me a creative brief for some Web copy. As I was finishing the copy, she sent another short paragraph for review.

“I tried to update the existing copy myself,” she explained, “but it doesn’t feel quite right to me. Can you have a look and send me any suggestions?” I agreed and she sent me the copy with her changes.

The original text must have been written by a comatose monk. Jean’s version was an improvement, but it wasn’t as catchy as Web copy could and should be. I started in on it and learned (re-learned, really) Lesson 1.

Lesson 1: Editing is harder than writing from scratch.

This is understandable, but it bears repeating, because many marketing managers lose sight of it. To edit your text, I have to suppress the way it makes sense to me to express the same idea. This is like simultaneously pushing air into a bottle of soda and sealing it with a cap; a single-function machine can do it very well, but most writers are not single-function machines.

So, I decided I’d do Jean one better: I’d clean up the copy she sent me, and then I’d also rewrite it from scratch and let her choose between the two. I know the subject matter well and couldn’t resist the temptation to impress a new client.

Enter Lesson 2.

Lesson 2: No good re-write goes unpunished.

“Why did you rewrite it?” Jean asked me on the phone. “I just wanted you to look at my text and make suggestions.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I cleaned up yours, the way I thought you wanted, then tried a completely different take on it, given what I know.”

“The problem is that there’s a lot you don’t know about this topic,” she said rather sternly. “Besides, there are political strings attached to the original copy, and I have to live with them. I can’t drop a re-write on them as if it were a birthday present. Don’t do this anymore, because it frustrates me.”

This drove home Lesson 3.

Lesson 3: Writers don’t write. They suggest.

Everybody likes options, right? Well, not really.

It takes time and mental energy for marketing managers to weed through options. It’s unlikely they’ll prefer A over B and C just like that; more likely, they’ll prefer A, but can we take a little bit of B and the last point in C and put them into A, then take out the sentence in A that doesn’t fit now, then…

Sometimes the marketing communications writer is a one-stroke wonder, who nails the concept succinctly and delivers copy that yields only a few requests for change. More often, the writer’s job is to:

absorb information from topic experts
suggest in print how the topic should be explained (a.k.a. write a draft)
incorporate seismic changes from the experts

It’s easier for marketing managers to decide how to add, edit or delete when they are dealing with a single draft (or suggestion).

Writers are better off impressing a new client by doing their homework and suggesting something solidly consistent with how they understand the product or service. Launching multiple arrows at the target may seem more artistic or generous, but it burdens the client with an unwanted decision.

It also punishes your hourly average.

photo credit:U.S. Army

Your Marketing Writer Takes One Final Look

Walk Down Your Marketing Writer’s Content Buffet

John White — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:27:11 +0000

What else does your marketing communication writer write? You can learn plenty from it.

Your Content Buffet is the smorgasbord of content you use to tell your organization’s story: case studies, white papers, newsletter content, blog posts, technical overviews, brochures and so forth.

Consider that your marketing communication writers have their own Content Buffet. You value your writers for their ability to describe your top-of-class spar varnish or 35-micron integrated circuits, but scratch a little deeper and see what else they write, and for whom. Their portfolio is their Content Buffet, and you should take a walk down it.

Some writers are frustrated novelists; some are just good at writing in a variety of ways. Some – I’m not naming any names – need to write other kinds of content because if they wrote about your stuff day in and day out, they’d go batty. Just sayin’.

Three things to keep in mind about your marketing writer’s Content Buffet:

They work in other industries besides yours. I’m still wary of people who claim they can write anything (Oh, yeah? How well?), but good writers attract clients in different verticals. The clients realize that it’s more important to hire a good writer than to hire somebody who knows their business. You may find valuable overlap (read: connections) to other industries in your writer’s portfolio.
They’re competent in other formats besides the ones they deliver to you. They do blog posts for you, but they do white papers for other clients; does it surprise you that they can work in both formats? You can broaden your own Content Buffet from your customary data sheets and brochures into a library of pieces that tell your story more compellingly.
They build other kinds of sentences besides the ones you use. (They may even use humor.) What does their work look like when they’re not cramming your SEO keywords into every paragraph? John Yunker, a well-known writer in the field of translation/localization, has a night job in creative writing. You wouldn’t know it to read his posts on multi-language service providers, but his novel, The Tourist Trail, is about penguin colonies in Argentina. Wise are the marketing managers who can harness that diversity of writing style for use in telling their own organization’s story.

My experience is that marketing managers know too little about their marketing communication writers. It’s not difficult to tour their portfolio for a profitable look at the variety inside, and start using it to the organization’s advantage.

How well do you know your writers?

photo credit: Karen Blumberg

Why Messaging Matters to Your Writers

John White — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 19:55:17 +0000

Have you worked out your company’s messaging yet? How many different messages do you have? Have you shared them with your marketing communication writers? Better get on it.

I was at lunch with three execs of a prospective client the other day. They want me to help them tell their story with new content, so we spent the first part of the hour talking about white papers, Web content, case studies, brochures, blog posts and Facebook.

“Hold on,” I interrupted. “That’s all about format. We need to talk about messaging first. What is it that you want to say to people? How are you going to demonstrate to them what makes you unique?”

I need to understand how their company is different from the competition, and messaging is a big part of that. Otherwise, we’ll end up with a lot of me-too content.

This company operates in what is commonly thought of as a commodity industry: the average customer buys on price and (if the company is lucky) grows to discover and value unique differentiators. So the goal of the marketing content is to describe those differentiators from the start so that the initial sale is not strictly about price.

Here’s what they said, and how it struck me:

The business development manager said, “That’s easy. We’re quite simply the best at what we do.” Well, that’s pretty heartfelt, and it may even be true, but it makes for pretty lousy copy. I can’t go anywhere with it .
The CEO said, “We’re small and we’re private, and we plan to stay that way. Some of our competitors are focused too much on being acquired, so they take their eye off the ball and quality suffers. We don’t have that problem.” That’s worth being proud of, and it may even add up to a message, but most customers don’t care who owns your stock; they care about their problems, and a vendor’s ownership structure rarely matters to resolving those problems.
The director of sales says, “We’re able to help our customers align our services with their business objectives.” It sounds pretty dull and hollow when you put it like that, but it’s better than the other two. It’s the kind of thing a customer might say after a few years of working with the company. We might be able to take it somewhere as a theme.

The Point: This company is in need of content, but they have yet to decide on a message. There’s no harm in using each of these disparate ideas as talking points, but:

they need to add up to something;
they need to add up to something that customers care about; and
they need to make sense to me so that I can use 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. He also publishes a newsletter with more tips on working with your writers.

photo credit: Wilfrid CC3.0

4 Places to Lead Your Writers

4 Reasons Why Written Comments Beat Oral Ones

John White — Wed, 12 May 2010 23:56:48 +0000

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

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

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

No ambiguity. That’s pretty obvious. If you strike the word “approach” and replace it with “solution,” then I know your preference and I can propagate it through all of the work I do for you. If you write, “Title needs to convey automakers’ sense of urgency,” then I know what you want me to change and how you want me to change it. When you put your comments and changes in writing, it shows me how you would like the piece to look if you were writing it, and that goes a longer way toward helping me get you what you want than if you just talk about it.

You have to do some of the work. It may seem a bit perverse, given that you’re paying me to write, but I like it when you put some work into this, too. The fact of the matter is that most writers don’t write; we suggest. The combination of our suggestions and your reactions results in a better finished product.

Makes things go faster. I’m for anything that accelerates the process of getting from project-start to project-end successfully. To the extent that written feedback gets your point across to me more efficiently, it helps ensure that you too want to keep things moving. As Alvy Singer (in “Annie Hall”) might have put it, the writer-client “relationship is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.” We don’t want that fate to befall your project.

It shows that you care. When you take the time to go through a draft with a red pen or revision marks, it shows me that I’m not working in complete isolation. When I see you working on the piece, it makes me want to put more work into it to match yours. Conversely, when you complain vaguely over the phone, it suggests to me that what I’m working on is not very high on your list of priorities.

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

artwork credit: Charles Napier Hemy

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