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

Related posts:

1. “Be Ruthless. I’m a Writer.”
2. When White Papers Get Poisoned (and 3 Antidotes)

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

No related posts.

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

Part 2 in a continuing series of white paper outlines, each with a different structure and focus. Here, an outline for white papers that guide readers through revolutionary change.

This white paper outline is about The Revolution that your new ideas and technologies ignite in your customers’ organization.

Suppose you want your prospects to:

• replace a zillion spreadsheets with a customer relationship management (CRM) package
• move from a central headquarters to a virtual structure
• switch from Microsoft Office to Google Docs
• change from a traditional phone system to one based on the Internet (VoIP)

When your product or service causes a seismic shift in how your buyers do something as business-integral as place a phone call, you should create a story around it that tells them what they’re in for. A revolutionary change is going to affect People, Process and Technology, and this is the structure on which you’ll base your white paper.

Title

Summary

The same things that apply to the white paper outline for the educational white paper apply here. Establish the people-process-technology theme in the summary and maintain it in your structure throughout the paper.

IMPORTANT: Avoid talking about your product or service by name. This white paper outline is about The Revolution that you occasion, but it’s not specifically about your features and functionality. Leave those for your brochures.

Then dive in. Assume your readers already know what has their hair on fire, are familiar with The Revolution, and want to know how it is going to affect their…

People

First talk about people. Describe how to sell the revolution to different groups in the organization, because if this doesn’t happen smoothly, then process and technology won’t matter very much.

Use a series of quotations – real and imagined – to give a voice to objections, warnings, praises, recommendations and water-cooler talk about The Revolution:

• “We don’t need agile development because our release cycles are so long.”
• “Our QA staff is stretched too thin as it is. The added workload of migration would break us.”
• “We want to spend less on trade shows but aren’t sure that social media is where we should put those dollars.”
• “We’ve already switched to authoring in DITA/XML tools, but our team is still doing things pretty much the same as before, only more slowly.”
• “We need to get our overseas offices on board with buying postage off the Web.”

You’ll build the People section around these quotations, ending with a brief segue into…

Process

The Revolution will introduce new vocabulary and new workflow to your readers’ organization. In this section, define that vocabulary in your own terms (this is stealth branding) and outline that workflow as you’ve seen it play out with your other customers.

For example, client Service-now.com reinforces the message that the most successful implementations of its IT service management platform rely on putting processes in place first. Outline these processes in this section as a series of easy-to-read steps.

Technology

Assuming The Revolution has a technology component, it comes last in the white paper outline. Now that you’ve addressed the People’s fears and the novelty of Processes, describe the software, hardware, machinery, materials and capital expansion required:

• cooling towers
• data center equipment
• earth-moving equipment
• gas turbines
• rubber bands and staplers
• Linux servers

If The Revolution is a service, explain the steps for implementing it:

• 30-minute interviews with executive staff
• recorded depositions
• subterranean termite inspections

This isn’t the place for the bill of materials, but you should list anything required to get The Revolution going successfully in terms that make both business and technical sense.

What Can We Expect from The Revolution?

List some of the business and technical benefits customers have experienced. Use pull-quotes. Refer and hyperlink to case studies and success stories, but soft-pedal mention of your product or service, because the essence of the paper is still The Revolution. Don’t worry: your readers know where to find you.

Conclusion and Follow Us

Use these sections to briefly tie up the white paper outline and invite readers to follow you. Your “Follow Us” section should be boilerplate, with the usual pointers: social media, phone, Web, e-mail.

Again, let other marketing pieces specifically describe your product or service. The goal of this white paper is to convince readers that nobody knows more about The Revolution than you do.

How about that? The result is a white paper outline you can circulate. Your reviewers will be able to see the path down which you intend to take the readers of your revolutionary white paper. Once you have their feedback, you can start on the draft.

Next: The Vindication White Paper: Seven Myths Outline

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.

Related posts:

1. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Educational White Paper
2. Steal This White Paper Outline!
3. 4 Elements of a White Paper Outline

If you’re writing a white paper for yourself, you can get away without writing an outline first, but if other people will approve the paper, you need a white paper outline. Period.

In other posts about white paper outlines, I’ve explained this. The outline is to your white paper project what blueprints are to a construction project: they demonstrate how you understand the objective of the project, and they act like a skeleton that you flesh out with content.

‘Nuff said.

It’s All in the Structure

Readers crave structure. It’s how they follow along. If they can’t figure out the structure in your paper, they think you’re rambling. Literary authors (and some sportswriters) can get away without structure, but don’t try it in marketing communications.

Also, focus on the structure that makes the most sense to your ideal readers – depending on what they’ve come to expect in a white paper – more so than on the structure that appeals most to you.

• You want to inform and persuade, so your structure needs to support those goals.
• Your readers want you to solve their business problem, not tell them how smart you are, so show them how you can solve it.

The structure in your white paper outline is an important part of this.

A White Paper for Educating

Suppose your product or service does something completely new (or does something old in a completely new way). The kind of thing that causes your prospects to ask, for example,

You mean I can make phone calls anywhere for free?

You mean I can have my DNA mapped?

You mean I can double the capacity of my hard drive?

You’ve got some educating to do, and your first white papers should follow the Background-Trends-Emerging outline:

Title

Your title answers the reader’s first question: “Is this worth my attention?” Don’t spoil a good white paper with a lousy title; this kind of paper needs a title that grabs attention without straining credibility. Reinforce it with a good subtitle as well:

The Doctor is In…Your Phone – Testing and Transmitting Blood-Sugar Levels over Wireless

Starting the entire project with your title is not a bad idea, but don’t weld yourself to it, because the paper may evolve in a different direction.

Summary

Start with a couple of paragraphs on what the paper covers, to answer the reader’s second question: “What am I going to get out of this?”

Many marketing communications writers wait until the end of the project to do the summary, but I suggest sending a tentative one with the outline. It helps avoid misunderstandings about message and direction.

If you plan to discuss your own products in the paper – not the ideal course in an educational white paper – mention that in the summary instead of springing it on the reader on page 8.

Background and Problem

Sketch out a few bullets on how the business problem came to be. Write only about things you’ll need later in the paper, not about every conceivable market condition.

By the way, if you’re not careful, you’ll lose your readers in this section. They’re scanning to avoid things they already know and don’t care about, so sketch the background in a way that makes it easy for them.

Finally, phrase the problem in a way that meshes with your title:

IT managers are stuck in an Optimization Triangle, spreading scarce improvement-resources among business process, infrastructure and users.

If that’s the problem you want to emphasize, and if it doesn’t support your title, then change your title.

The problem statement, a pivotal point in the paper, is where you move toward conflict-driven business writing and depart from brochure copy.

Existing Products and Market Trends

Next, list 3-4 ways the industry usually deals with the problem, and the relative dis-/advantages of each:

• More deep-water drilling
• Cap-and-trade
• Tax-based conservation incentives

Then, mention market trends that threaten to make these existing solutions obsolete in the long run:

• Sooner or later, oil will run out.

This puts your readers on notice that they cannot afford to stand still. It’s another pivotal point in the paper.

Emerging Technology

Something new is on the landscape, though, and here you describe the technology behind your product.

Educating readers about a new category is not the same thing as telling readers about your products, so stay away from self-promotion. Outline a few bullets that describe how the new technology addresses the old problems better than the existing products do, while accommodating market trends.

If you really need to mention your product, couch it in terms that suggest, “We’ve seen this coming and here’s what we’re putting in place. It may not be ideal for every organization, but this is how we think the market is evolving.”

For More Information, Follow Us

Invite readers who have made it this far to follow you. That says, “We know that you may not buy from us (yet), but keep an eye on us for the day when you do.” The marketing writer who understands “following” is your biggest asset here.

Emphasize social ways for your readers to keep tabs on you: blog, Facebook, Twitter, discussion groups. Add your phone and URL for good measure, but remember that few people use an 800-number or a Website for serious following.

The result of this process is a white paper outline you can circulate. Your reviewers will be able to see the path down which you intend to take the readers of your educational white paper. Once you have their feedback, you can start on the draft.

Next: The Revolution White Paper: People-Process-Technology Outline

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: justiNYC

Related posts:

1. 4 Elements of a White Paper Outline
2. Steal This White Paper Outline!
3. “It’s a Good Outline, But I Hate It.” – Making Outlines Work

In its report, “Social Media 10 x 10,” Beeline Labs calls these “the one social strategy with 10x the value of any other social media tactic.”

• An eVoc Insights study found that 48% of consumers need to read reviews before making a purchase decision.
• Neilsen’s research has found that consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising among 78% of study participants.
• Embedded customer reviews are the best social media investment for realizing strong ROI.

The most valuable and under-used social media strategy is embedding customer reviews in your Web site. Not blogs, Twitter, communities or tagging.

Short Form: Customer Feedback Forums

There’s a lot of value in these forums, as noted in “Managing an Online Reputation,” by Kermit Pattison:

Study local search sites like Yelp, Citysearch and Yahoo! Local. Forums for customer feedback have sprung up everywhere — Google Maps, Amazon, Angie’s List, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Epinions and a myriad of online communities and niche sites.

Prospects speed-surfing for your products get a lot of mileage out of these reviews, especially since they tend to have a snowballing effect and they are highly organic.

But not every business gets reviewed. The reviews are valuable, but they skew to gregarious customers. There’s also the fact that the reviewers get credibility points in many of these forums to encourage participation, so they’re not 100% grass-roots reviews. Finally, while nobody would look the gift horse of unsolicited, positive feedback in the mouth, a business owner could look at a year’s worth of reviews and say, “Nobody talked about the strawberry rhubarb flavor we worked so hard to launch,” or “How can we get people to talk about our signal-to-noise ratio? It’s our biggest differentiator.”

For these comments, you need to create your own content with targeted customer interviews.

Customer Interviews and How to Write Them

It’s not hard to get this kind of content onto your buffet line. Set yourself the goal of generating 4-6 case studies or customer success stories over the next 12 months.

Your sales team can help you identify customers with interesting uses of your products. Keep in mind that generally, the larger the customer, the longer each success story will take, because of the approval hoops your content will have to jump through. You’ll probably find as much enthusiasm – maybe more -  with smaller customers, and the resulting text rarely has to get through a phalanx of lawyers before you can use it. (See David Meerman Scott on this topic.)

Hire a marketing writer with at least some experience in your industry to conduct and record the customer interview, which should touch on:

• the customer’s business
• why they need your products
• how they use them
• how your products save them time and money, and how much
• an anecdote or two about their experience with your company and your products

The interview should take 30-45 minutes. It’s important to make it clear to the customer that you want to use her name in the success story, and that she will have the opportunity to review and edit the piece before you publish it.

Using the Customer Success Story

Do you see how the resulting 500- to 1000-word piece has more and longer lives than a Yelp review or an isolated tweet? You can re-use the text from the story at multiple points along your content buffet: callout boxes in other content, sidebars on your Web pages, blog posts, tweets, brochures, e-mail marketing, press releases…

These stories reinforce your relationship with your customers, too. If I told you how much I like your products, and you used my quote on your Website, don’t you think I’d be gratified to see my name in lights?

No wonder customer interviews and the resulting endorsements are so powerful.

photo credit: Garry Knight

Related posts:

1. The Content Buffet

This paper starts out awful and goes downhill from there.

I’ve never said that to a marketing writer, but it has a funny, ironical ring to it. I would chuckle as I clicked on “Send” to deliver news like that, fancying myself a proud successor to H.L. Mencken or Winston Churchill.

But even if your editor or writer can hose off the sarcasm, what will he do with the remark? It’s not very actionable  (another term to avoid) and your business goal should really be to give the copywriter the information necessary to write the piece you want.

Writing criticism we see

Is the first sentence (“Jack is a power architect”) needed?

An engineer asked this about the opening sentence to a case study. The interview with Jack had yielded very little interesting content, and so the writer took a chance on a this opening. Unfortunately, he bet wrong, and the engineer had no choice but to hate the rest of it.

I didn’t send it to the writer, but instead told the engineer to do one of three things:

• Explain the rationale for not liking the sentence.
• Suggest a better one.
• Simply strike the line in the draft and ask for a different opening.

None of those options is complex, and each of them gives a marketing writer a point of departure.

First page was oppressive, second page picked up and gave me a slew of ideas…

I knew the writer wouldn’t know what to repair in an “oppressive first page,” so I had the product manager briefly outline what she wanted to see on the first page, given the slew of ideas that the second page generated. It took a re-write of the page and most of the technology essay, but the result was worth it.

It’s not what I had in mind.

This is nearly useless feedback. It’s like defending Nixon: “I don’t know what you can say, but you can’t say that. Try something else.”

If the writer had his way, you’d return edits in red so that all he had to do was accept the changes and tighten up the grammar a bit. It’s not necessarily your job to hit that mark, but try to meet the writer in the middle somewhere.

Give your editor-writer clear criticism

As a marketing manager hiring a writer, you need to keep your eye on the business goal of delivering useful content in your review loop. Clear, unambiguous statements about what you want to change and how you want to change it trump sarcasm and support the business goal of writing. Whether you’re acting as the gatekeeper and reconciling your company’s feedback for the writer (the preferred way) or coaching reviewers on how to give useful feedback, make your wishes clear.

No related posts.

Sometimes it’s not just you and the writer and the subject matter expert working on your content. Sometimes an outside force like a PR agency or another marketing manager gets involved in the process as well. Your writer shouldn’t have the last word in the piece, but frankly, the more cooks there are in the kitchen, the less the writer feels ownership, and the more difficult it is for you to get what you need from her.

Several problems develop as the kitchen gets crowded:

1. People become proprietary about their ideas and text. Your writer should be more professional than that, but some of the other participants may resent attempts to tinker with their perfection.
2. With each round of revisions, people have a bit less patience for the process and wish it were over. Their comments and changes often reflect this.
3. After a while, it becomes difficult to see who owns the piece and, therefore, who is responsible for cleaning up the final product.

Here’s an example:

A marketing manager hires a PR firm to interview clients and capture information on an emerging technology trend – objective: white paper. The PR firm then hires a writer for the paper.

Two weeks later, the PR firm and the writer have a solid draft based on the information from the interviews. The firm shows it to the client, who changes it six ways from Tuesday and returns it to the PR firm.

Are you setting your writer up for failure, or should the writer edit this new draft?

In spite of the fact that the writer doesn’t really “own” it anymore, and that it little resembles the first draft, a professional writer will suck it up and keep working on it. If the client is making changes this radical, somebody upstream must have misunderstood the original intent, and everybody needs to help get the final version out the door.

Moral: Unless you have access to a dedicated editor, you should make it an explicit requirement that the writer you hire will see the project through – regardless of who makes changes – and not worry about having her perfection tinkered with.

photo credit: xmacex

No related posts.

More to the point: How can you be ruthless in your feedback on a draft?

I consider the line a good ice breaker. I’ve used it with marketing managers and engineers who appear uneasy about the process of judging my writing. It’s not really that I want them to tell me that my work is a great heap of useless nonsense, but I don’t want politeness to get in the way of information, because that will slow down the business at hand.

Here are a few ways of interpreting it:

1. “I don’t deserve your praise, so lower the boom.” If you’ve hired a writer with an inferiority complex – or worse yet, somebody incompetent – you’ve probably hired the wrong writer. If you get ruthless with this person, you’re going to ruin the relationship and the document.
2. “Let me put you at ease: You’re not going to hurt my feelings.” This writer is a “pleaser.” It’s hard to know whether pleasers are really working with you, or just satisfying their urge to please. They’re generally honest when they tell you that you won’t hurt their feelings, though, so don’t be afraid to criticize their work roundly.
3. “Look, you’re the one with the information, I’m the one with the keyboard, and we both need this piece to tell your story properly. Let’s not allow politeness to interfere with the job we both have to do.” This is a pretty businesslike way of looking at the matter; “be ruthless” doesn’t really do it justice, but this is what it boils down to.

As on the Web, people usually find it easier to be ruthless when they’re not sitting across the desk from you and looking you in the eye. So, if you’re still new to the concept of being ruthless with your writer, you’ll find it easier when you’re not reviewing a draft in real time. Tell the writer you need some time to go through the piece on your own and then get back with comments.

You can be much more ruthless and businesslike when the only personality you’re dealing with is that of a red pen or a blinking cursor. Let the writer deal with it afterwards.

No related posts.

1. The VP of Marketing wanted a white paper and told the marketing manager what he wanted the title to be.
2. The marketing manager called his regular copywriter and told him about the project.
3. The writer said, “I can write a white paper,” and quoted a price.
4. The manager accepted.
5. The writer attended the interviews, then wrote a draft and sent it to us.
6. The manager reviewed the draft and forwarded it to the VP of Marketing.
7. The VP hated it, saying, “This is dull. Nobody’s going to read past the first page.”
8. The manager bailed on the first writer and hired a second writer from the Web.
9. The second writer looked at the draft and said, “This isn’t a white paper. It’s a magazine article. A good magazine article, but a lousy white paper.”

After that, the errors stopped, even though everybody had lost a lot of time and tempers were getting short. Ultimately, the second writer did a good job, the VP was satisfied and the paper was well received.

Errors:

Event #1 – Starting with the title is a bad idea. It’s better to start with a theme and a goal, then write the paper, and let the title rise from the paper. Sometimes you get painted into a title because of a print ad campaign, but avoid this whenever possible. Having your hands tied on the title is a bad place to be.

Event #2 – Your regular copywriter may not be the right person for a white paper. White papers don’t just go away after a couple of hours; they can take weeks of grinding, then reviews, then more grinding. A writer accustomed to brochures or Web copy may not have the white paper experience you need. Don’t assume that because a white paper involves writing, all writers can do one.

Event #5 – After the interviews, there should be an outline, not a draft. The first writer skipped that step because she had a magazine article in mind all along, and that doesn’t require an outline. Without the outline, the writer went too far down the wrong path and the result disappointed everyone.

Event #6 – The marketing manager should have known it was a bad white paper and kept it from getting to the VP.

The biggest error of all, though, was in mistaking a good magazine article for something that would work as a white paper. They rarely flow in the same way, people are reading them for different reasons and they serve different audiences.

Moral: When your organization needs a chainsaw, don’t come back with a Cuisinart, and vice versa.

No related posts.