In my last post on file properties in Microsoft Word docs, I described ways to interpret some of the metadata that lives in those files. As a marketing manager, you probably read and create PDFs almost as often as you do Microsoft Office docs, so keep your eye on metadata in these files too.

Reading document properties in PDFs

First of all, you realize (don’t you?) that PDF is NOT proprietary to Adobe. It’s a standard format, and there are plenty of non-Adobe products for creating and viewing them. Nevertheless, consider Adobe Acrobat, which is representative of most readers. And free.

When you open a PDF in Acrobat Reader, you can select File > Properties, or hit Ctrl-D to open the Document Properties dialog:

Title, Author, Subject, Keywords: Fortunately, these fields populate themselves from the application in which you created the document. If you don’t like the values, you can change them here before publishing the document to your website or checking it into your content management system.

In particular, you should introduce keywords. To the extent that the bots pay any attention to keywords, they will find them in this field, in the same way that they will find them in the <meta> tags of HTML pages.

Application: If you’ve used a real layout app like Adobe InDesign or Illustrator or Quark XPress to create your brochure, case study or white paper, then this field helps show that you’re a serious marketing professional. But if you’ve done it on the cheap, using Microsoft Word or – heaven forfend – Publisher, this field will rat you out and inquiring minds will see it. Yes, there are a lot of good-looking Word templates around, but they aren’t the ones that most people use.

Location: You have no control over this field. It updates itself with the location of the PDF on the reader’s computer, not on the computer on which the PDF was generated. The field is a hyperlink, by the way, and if you click on it, it will open the handy Temp folder in which your operating system stores jillions of files you view and read on the Web. Throw away some five-year-old PDFs, if you’re in the mood.

Security tab: Did you know you can protect the content in your PDFs?

Unscrupulous people might want to take your work and pass it off as their own. Or, if you want the document to be read only on a screen, they might want to defy your wishes and print it out. They may want to fill it with nasty comments about you and slander your name all over the place. Isn’t it nice to know you can prevent all that?

For this, you need the professional version of a PDF generating application, like Adobe Acrobat Pro or Nitro PDF Professional; you can’t do it with the free reader application. After generating the PDF, visit the Security tab and head off all of those miscreants at the pass by setting restrictions on what they may and may not do with your white paper or eBook. You can also configure your PDF add-in to apply the restrictions when you first generate the file.

Marketing managers, note: There is some cachet to applying at least a few restrictions. It demonstrates that your team knows that these options exist, and that you’re savvy enough to want to protect your work. There are probably plenty of ways for a determined thief to hack into your PDF, but at least you can make it clear that you tried, and that you do place enough value on the content to want to protect it.

So, that’s why I like to hang out in the document properties. Do you? What have you found there?

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. File Properties in Microsoft Word Docs – All Kinds of Dish

The coolest thing about listening to records was the music. The second-coolest thing was the liner notes.

Who wrote this tune? Who played bass? When did they record it? How long is it? Where was it recorded? Who’s on backup vocals? Who designed the cover?

Wrapped around the content was a layer of information that described the music and revealed bits of a story behind it.

Many years later, I came to understand this information for what it was: metadata. Data about data.

File properties

Every file you send and receive today contains metadata, a little story behind the content. In some files, it’s as simple as:

• filename
• size
• date and time last saved

Those metadata don’t tell much you of a story. But most files containing real content – MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and PDF files – can reveal a lot more.

Maybe it’s that I don’t spend enough time perusing record liner notes any more, but I am constitutionally incapable of reviewing an MS Office file or PDF without first poking around in its file properties (or document properties). I just enjoy looking for the story behind the file.

Microsoft Office file properties

Have a look at the dialog box below that contains the metadata in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. I usually go straight to the Summary tab, which contains the most metadata.

First, I should mention that merely locating this dialog box is becoming more difficult. Until Office 2003, a simple Alt-F, I sufficed to pop it open in Windows. Since Office 2007, the key combination is Alt-F, I, Q, S, down-arrow. They’re not making it any easier. (If you know what it is in Office for Mac, please let us know in the comments.)

File properties dialog, Microsoft Office

Title: This field is self-explanatory, but it doesn’t depend on the file name. Usually, the app scoops up the first few words or the document, or any text you’ve formatted with the Title style. You can also make up your own title and place it in this field yourself. There’s probably some way to search on Title in Office, Windows or MacOS.

What’s interesting, though, is the metadata that might be left over from the last time the file was saved. Suppose your company is Macy’s, and Cosmodemonic has sent you a pricing proposal, and the Title field reads “Special Pricing – Gimbels”. So, you’ve just gotten the bit of dish about whom else Cosmodemonic is talking to. Busted!

Author: This field does self-populate, but not very consistently. It’s usually the most interesting bit of metadata to me because it contains the name, as burned into Microsoft Office during installation, of the original author of the file.

Unfortunately, a lot of enterprises burn a boilerplate author name – “Gargoyle Industries Employee” or “Breathlessly Ecstatic Dell Customer” – into Office, so the default entry tells you nothing useful.

However, the Author field can surprise you, too. Like when you get a late revision of a paper you wrote, and somebody else has replaced your name with his/her name in this field. Busted!

Company: Again, this field is populated with data burned in during the installation of Office. Of course, it’s possible to overwrite it, but not everybody knows that. So the next time you receive a legal document like a contract or a non-disclosure agreement from a business partner, have a look at the Company field and find out which law firm they swiped it from. Busted!

Keywords: But enough of the cloak and dagger. The Keywords field contains metadata of some potential business importance, especially when you populate it with the keywords that you want search engines to find.

I’m not sure that the search engines pick up these keywords if you simply hang your Word, Excel or PowerPoint file out on the Web, because these formats are binary. But if you save your Office file as a PDF or – heaven help you – HTML file, and then publish the file where the search engines can find it, you’ll see that the keywords you enter to this field are preserved for the search engines to index.

Comments: This is an excellent place to store comments about the file’s history. Excellent, except that nobody would ever think to look for important information buried all the way down here. Most people pump the file name with version numbers, revision dates and initials of reviewers, all of which should really go here. Again, metadata in this field is probably searchable in Windows or Office.

Statistics tab: Click over to the Statistics tab of this dialog box for one other bit of metadata, which is Last saved by (or Last modified by). This is not always the same as the author, especially if the file has been out for review. So, if Mr. Big sends you back “his” revisions and tells you how carefully he pored over your most recent draft, and you see that the file was Last modified by an intern, you can privately assume that perhaps Mr. Big is exaggerating his involvement in your draft.

Custom tab: Finally, on the Custom tab you can create and set your own variables and properties and use them for document automation and update-fields. When you send the file as an attachment in Outlook, several bits of metadata (e.g., _EmailSubject, _AuthorEmail, _PreviousAdHocReviewCycleID) land here automatically.

Had enough sleuthing for one post? Next time, I’ll walk through the document properties in PDFs. There’s plenty of dish there as well, if you know how to place it.

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

photo credit: Epiclectic

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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:

1. absorb information from topic experts
2. suggest in print how the topic should be explained (a.k.a. write a draft)
3. 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.

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:U.S. Army

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1. Your Marketing Writer Takes One Final Look

When you hire a marketing communications writer, her responsibilities should include a final, pre-publication look at the piece, just before the train leaves the station. Your responsibilities should should include giving her that opportunity.

Marketing writers don’t write; they suggest. You don’t need to apologize for changes you make to drafts, but you owe it to yourself to give your copy – once it has traveled the long and winding road to final format – to your writer for a final scan.

One writer did a rush job for us last week, hammering very rough copy into a product datasheet, FAQ and sales teaser. She also added a lot of good content and figured out how to make the pieces tell our story, much better than it had occurred to us to do.

All of the copy ran the gantlet here, and everybody had revisions to make. A couple of the sales and marketing managers had misgivings about running it past the writer one last time before we sent the pieces to print – “What if her nose gets out of joint over the changes we’ve made?” – but I argued that it would be silly not to let her go over them. “What’s a marketing communications writer for?” I asked rhetorically.

I sent her PDFs with our revisions on Wednesday afternoon, and she had returned embedded comments – don’t forget you need more than just the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to make those – by Thursday morning. Among the things she noted:

• Two sentences with missing words – Somebody was writing too fast.
• Two occurrences of “Best-in-class” in adjoining paragraphs – This was a qualifier we had added. She pointed out, “This phrase adds nothing, and may even detract from the technical value of the piece.”
• Three clunky sentences that she re-plumbed to make more sense.
• A hail of phone numbers in our company information box – “People who have this datasheet in their hand will need just one big, fat toll-free number.”
• Disclaimer language for mentioning other companies’ trademarks – Without a phalanx of lawyers poring over ever sentence we publish, we sometimes forget about fine points like this.

She told me it took her less than a half-hour to review and make comments: thirty minutes our marketing communications writer invested in making us look good. She also mentioned that she always offers her clients a pre-publication review of content, even for projects on which she has not worked.

“Most clients don’t take me up on it,” she noted. “I don’t know why not.”

Do you give your writer this opportunity? You’re leaving money on the table if you don’t.

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Don’t Go Well but Result in a Good White Paper

These are like the basketball games in which you make mistakes, bad passes and poor shots, but you win anyway, mostly in spite of yourself. Warning signs:

• Creeping Review Loop – If it takes you too long to obtain, vet and summarize comments from your reviewers and get the changes back to the writer, you can burn out a lot of people on a project like this. Some conscientious managers worry about taxing the writer’s patience, but that’s the last thing I worry about. The more people you pull into the review loop, the clunkier and less focused the paper can become; then you start to tax the patience of the interviewees, subject matter experts, graphics team, designers and execs through whose inboxes the paper moves over and over.
• Creeping Scope – In a similar situation, the original scope may become obscured by newly suggested topics we want the paper to address. Beware of this if you envision a “thought-leadership” paper, because the project will attract lots of new thoughts in which we want to be considered as leaders. I had one of these projects that went on for six months as execs added more content to it. The result is a splendid paper, but it’s too long. The download numbers have been good, but I doubt that anybody is really reading it.
• Ego – Nobody wants to touch this one with a 10-foot pole, but everybody knows it’s there. Sometimes there’s too much of it, especially when an exec commissions a paper, has Marketing hire a writer, makes life difficult for the writer and the manager, then guts the paper and rebuilds it because the message is wrong. Sometimes it’s the writer’s ego that gets in the way. You can get a good paper out of this, but the process is painful for everybody.
• Deference – If you’re going to have multiple managers involved on a white paper project, somebody needs to be the designated driver. On one project, I had two product managers so concerned about peaceful collaboration that the writer never got clear direction because neither PM wanted to offend the other by taking a stand. The writer was a good sport about it – and was getting paid to keep up with our tergiversation – but we all learned the lesson about too many cooks in the kitchen.

Still, at least you get something out of these projects. I’ll post shortly on the other category, projects that don’t go well and result in a bad white paper (or none at all).

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1. A White Paper Project That Went Well

This is not uncommon (you should pardon the double negative). Most engineers don’t understand that the role of Marketing is to initiate the conversation as a result of which their products will be sold, so when they see a marketing manager coming, they assume we’re there to organize the next company party. They often have trouble giving us the benefit of the doubt when it comes to translating their technology into the plausible, persuasive story that is a white paper. They often prefer either to write it themselves when they get enough time or not to cooperate at all.

So, what would you do in Matilda’s place?

Anticipating the tension, Matilda wisely announced that she was going to offer three levels of service:

1. Full service: Writer interviews engineer, collects data, and writes/illustrates entire paper.
2. Revision Service: Engineer prepares draft of white paper, turns over to writer. Writer updates design and copy, adds or cleans up illustrations.
3. Third Party Review: Engineer prepares white paper in entirety, then submits for specific suggestions from experienced writer.

(We’ve worked at level 1.5 also, in which the engineer prepares an outline with the salient points to be covered in the paper, then the writer fleshes out the outline with interviews, illustrations and other materials.)

That was Matilda’s concession to the engineers. Her concession to the writer is that she planned for this to be an ongoing relationship, in which she offered a relatively steady stream of work at these different levels.

Did this work? We don’t know yet, because it was too nuanced to fly immediately, and it wasn’t the one-way-or-the-other solution that makes decisions easy for upper management. Still, I like it as a compromise, whether you’re a marketing manager trying to harvest content or a writer pitching your skills.

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