In the 1968 comedy The Odd Couple, Jack Lemmon plays Felix Ungar. At a dinner party, he mentions that he writes for TV news broadcasts. Doe-eyed neighbor Cecily Pigeon replies, “That sounds like a fascinating profession. Tell me, where do you get your ideas about what to write?”

Boirrrrrr.

When you’re building out your company’s blog, where will you get ideas for content?

Mistakes – regardless of who committed them – are rich material. You can weave a post around a mistake and turn it into valuable content with a title that reads something like “4 Ways to Avoid…” or “13 Things Not to Do When You’re…” Your readers will enjoy and learn from these lists, and chime in with comments.

But Will They Respect You in the Morning?

Suppose you decide to post on mistakes that your customers have made. What do you do when you know that your customers are in the audience, and when they may recognize themselves in the post? Will they leave you a snarky comment? Will they Facebook-fire you, on your own blog, yet?

Helen Popkin summarized the balance between the temptation to post and the urge to stay alive:

Never post anything you wouldn’t say to your mom, boss and significant other…And thanks to Twitter further eroding the wall between your big mouth and a moment required to download some good sense, the Internet is now empowered to get you fired faster than ever.

Still, you’re convinced that it’s a good story, and so you decide to post on it. You can anonymize it the way Henry Miller did with the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company in Tropic of Cancer, but if your customers are in your audience, they’ll recognize themselves. Worse yet, if you’re describing a mistake they don’t even know they made, you’ll be in double the trouble.

“That Won’t Happen to Me”

Maybe you think that your customers won’t ever subscribe to your blog or find out what you’re posting. Or maybe you think you’re indispensable, so even if they do read your post, they’ll just slap you on the back and let bygones be, as they buy  more of your goods and services.

Prudent bloggers think twice about that.

Joel Spolsky ran a blog called “Joel on Software,” which has a long, broad following among software developers. Last month, Joel announced he would cease posting to the blog. Among the reasons he gave:

We have so many customers that I can’t always write freely without inadvertently insulting one of them.

Getting Out of the Pickle

So you want to keep your blog going, and you want to write (nicely) about the mistakes your customers make, and you want your customers to read your blog. How do you reconcile all of these?

1. Don’t post the mistake as a rant. The lesson you’re trying to impart will dissolve in the vitriol and you’ll have two problems: an insulted customer and an alienated following.
2. When you describe the mistake, describe the solution. If the company hasn’t gotten to the solution yet, WAIT to post until there’s more closure to the story. It will make for a better lesson anyway.
3. Don’t name names. If your readers can see their own company in the business situation you’re describing and think, “How did they deal with it?” then what will they care whether the company was Exxon or a hot dog stand?

And if my customers are reading this, I promise I’m not posting about you.

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 and would be honored if you subscribed.

photo credit: Jeffrey Beall (CC2.0)

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Online marketing campaigns may be obvious to marketers at one end and to customers at the other, but don’t forget to inform the employees in the middle as well.

Companies are guiding what their employees are doing on line. How about letting employees know what the companies themselves are doing on line?

Many organizations are establishing social media policies to guide their employees’ use of channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blog comments and posts. In most cases, they’re trying avert legal problems, save face and keep things from getting out of hand when employees take to the keyboards in search of Web-fame, whether for themselves or the organization.

It doesn’t always occur to them that this goes in both directions. Herewith a cautionary tale.

“We Didn’t Know about the Online Promotion”

We had to wait 10 minutes for a table at Souplantation (sister company to Green Tomatoes) the other night. In the past, I’ve never had to wait longer than two minutes.

The hostess was in her early 20s, and I asked her how business had been lately.

“It’s been really busy all month long. We’d all rather be busy than idle, but it’s a little bit surprising.”

I mentioned the Facebook page and coupons and offers Souplantation makes to its following of over 40,000 fans.

“Yes, they put a lot of things up there: coupons, special menu items, raves from customers. We all know about the newspaper ads that customers use, but we don’t find out about e-mail and Web promotions until people start bringing the coupons through. We’re like, ‘OMG, they’re doing this promotion or that special?’ We’re glad to be busy, but we don’t always see this coming.”

“You’re an Important Part of Our Online Marketing Strategy”

This struck me as an oversight. If you’re developing advocates in your online world of customers, shouldn’t you also develop them among your employees, even the ones who don’t sit in front of a Web browser all day long?

Of course, if all you want employees to do is execute – heat up the soup, take the coupons, seat the customers, clean the tables, repeat – there’s no reason to educate them in what you’re doing on line. You can measure customer uptake and response six ways from Tuesday, and refine your offering based on the data alone, so why tax your employees with one more thing to juggle?

But if you see ways to give your employees a heads-up – notices at the time clock, quick daily or weekly briefings of shift managers – on your online marketing promotions, you can send the message that they’re an important part of the organization’s online strategy.

Which they are. Social business goes beyond just the Marketing department, as David Meerman Scott points out. Be careful not to become so distracted by Web 2.0, click-through, conversion and data warehousing – where you find customers – that you lose sight of the trenches – where your employees win and retain 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.

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The first step in writing a white paper is an outline, which acts as a skeleton that you flesh out with evidence and persuasion.

My post last October, 4 Elements of a White Paper Outline, resulted in a large number of visits, so I’ll go into more detail in this post. As a matter of fact, I’ll give you an outline, right in this post.

It’s the outline for a technical benefits white paper I wrote some years ago; the client has given me permission to use it. You may go ahead and steal it. After all, I stole the title for this post from Abbie Hoffman’s famous Steal This Book, so it seems only fair.

Your company’s hardware acceleration technology relieves system bottlenecks by offloading compute-intensive algorithms from software running on host processors to dedicated hardware. The task is to create a paper that interests engineers in your technology and convinces them that your approach makes sense.

Summary

This is 1-3 paragraphs on what the paper covers. It answers the reader’s question, “Why should I bother reading this?”

Many marketing communications writers defer writing the summary until after the body of the paper is finished. I prefer to take a stab at one at the outline stage. It shows my reviewers what I understand they want to convey and gives them the opportunity to straighten me out if need be.

Since you plan to discuss your own technology in the paper, mention it in the summary. Don’t be coy and spring it on the reader at the end.

Acceleration Opportunity

The Market and Competitive Threat
The Application
The Algorithm

In this section and subsections, you describe the landscape and trends around acceleration technology: who’s buying it (citations of recent market data help to make this more credible), how they’re using it (e.g., for speeding up anti-virus scanning at enterprise e-mail gateways), and the mathematics behind the algorithm.

It’s a good idea to put some buckshot in the air and point out to readers the necessity of their doing something different. The essence of a white paper is persuasion, and the subtle suggestion that obsolescence awaits readers who do nothing, goes a long way toward convincing them to act.

Your Design

State of the Industry
Your Solution

You’ve led the reader to the point in the paper at which you describe your own approach to acceleration technology.

It’s useful to describe existing approaches to acceleration – e.g., sacrifice network throughput in the interest of security, throw more boxes at the problem, create a custom chip, rewrite the software more efficiently – but for the sake of balance, the reader needs to understand that there are downsides associated with each one. Each approach also meets several different factors with varying degrees of satisfaction: cost, time to market, maintainability, performance, standards-maturity, and so on.

Your acceleration technology is not the fastest hardware and not the fastest software, but it combines and optimizes the mix of the two for a new approach, and it most nearly satisfies all of the selection factors. You may also leave an out for the next generation of your accelerator, which will indeed satisfy all of today’s factors.

Case Studies/Use Cases

XML Processing
Network Security
Cryptography

If you’ve kept your readers this far, it’s a good idea to trot out instances where your acceleration technology is in use, preferably with statistics to demonstrate that it’s better, cheaper and faster than what was in place before.

Case studies within a white paper are a relief to a reader. “I’m interested only in cryptography, so I get to skip the other two. That will help me get through this paper faster.” Don’t try to make all of your case studies fascinating to all readers; just ensure that each one will resonate for its particular audience.

If you can drop names of customers, it’s a huge benefit.

Hardware Acceleration-Main Messages

Conclusion
Follow Us

Now, you tell them what you’ve told them. This is useful because some readers will cut right to the chase and read the end, then go back for the body of the paper only if the conclusion convinces them that they’ve missed something.

The main messages are a series of bullet points (preferably three) that skim the highlights of your paper’s argument. Again, these help the impatient reader qualify the paper as worthy of his/her time and effort.

Your conclusion picks up where the Summary left off, adding more detail about your technology and its real-world applications and savings.

“Follow Us” used to be “For More Information.” If your paper has accomplished its goal, readers don’t need more information from you. They want to go out to the Web and follow you to see what other information they can find about you. Sure, you give them a phone number and a landing page, but point them to your presence in social media and on blogs.

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.

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Social media has been front and center for most marketing managers this year. Don’t overlook basics, though: You still need decent marketing communications writing on your Web site.

The folks at MarketingProfs do a magnificent job of conducting webinars and providing material for marketing managers. For about $200/year, you can have your fill of very good content that makes you think and helps you support your business cases with upper management.

They hosted a webinar today called “Rewrite Your Website to Engage Customers and Inspire Their Trust” with Erin Anderson of Brain Traffic.

About 20 minutes into the presentation, I realized that I hadn’t heard “social media,” “Twitter,” “Facebook,” “reddit,” or anything related to the category. It was like coming up for air after being underwater for 90 seconds. I’ve become so inured to hearing about social media over the last year that it actually seemed anomalous NOT to hear about it in a marketing presentation.

Good Writing for Websites

When you hire a marketing communications writer, you expect him to know and implement the kinds of things Erin emphasized in her back-to-the-barre presentation.

• Base your content on the right questions.

• • “What do I want to tell you?” becomes “What do you want to know?”
  • “What do I want you to understand about me?” becomes “What are you trying to accomplish?”
  • “What do I want you to do?” becomes “What do you need to feel comfortable and smart?”
  • “How can I make you care?” becomes “What do you care about…really?”
• Make your content useful, usable, findable and engaging.
• Top ten tips for good Web writing, including:
  • Get out of your reader’s way.
  • Give them the information they came for. Quickly.
  • Make your pages easy to scan; don’t worry about making them easy to read.
  • Read your text aloud.
  • Set up a review process, and make sure you’re not your own editor.

It’s easy to overlook guidelines like these in your headlong rush to dominate the blogosphere or monetize your SEO campaign or out-tweet your competitors.

Make sure your marketing communications writer isn’t overlooking them.

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: Lambtron

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Lead, and your writers will follow.

Most of your followers in social media are external, but don’t forget to build a following among your writers as well.

As a marketing manager, your social media efforts are mostly outward-facing: start conversations with prospects, curry favor with journalists, keep existing customers engaged and inform investors.

Have you tried using social media for internal followers? How about your marketing communications writers? Even if they’re freelancers – even if they’re not your writers – you can build a base of followers among them.

Today, I saw a post in Yammer – a kind of internal Twitter – from a marketing manager in another division:

I’m building a mail list and a Yammer group of writers. If you’re involved in writing PR, marcom or technical materials, and would be interested in info-exchange with others on the front line, please reply with your contact info.

I liked the post (by clicking “Like”), and I like the idea as a way of building an internal following among technology marketing writers. What can this manager do with this following?

1. He can grow it into a forum in which marketing communications writers bounce ideas and questions off of one another.
2. He can put it in his pocket and call it a successful proof of concept for internal social media.
3. He can mine it for writing talent when he needs some.
4. He can lead it, to make sure that its members know corporate messaging and direction.

If you could get your writers to follow you – instead of just taking instructions from you and delivering copy – where would you lead them?

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.

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Attention + conversation = following

At its core, the goal of a marketing effort these days is to create a following and start conversations that include you. Hire a writer who understands how you want to go about it.

My friend and colleague John Bromhead is fond of saying,

Marketing is the process of starting a conversation.

David Meerman Scott is more specific:

Marketers, PR pros, advertisers, and salespeople are on the payroll for one reason: To generate attention.

In short, we’re all trying to generate attention in order to start conversations. For a long time, we’ve assumed that the conversations would be between our prospects and us, but the big lesson of social media is that the most powerful attention and conversations take place in this “following” that we’re creating in our wake.

Your marketing communications writers need to understand that, and they need to deliver content that fits the way your organization is creating its following.

Don’t most of your marketing pieces contain a section titled, “For More Information”? Why?

Your ideal readers have just met you, and you’ve just shoved a few hundred or thousand words of copy down their throats. Do you really think that most of them want more information? Do you think that they are ready to mail you a check now?

Instead of “For More Information,” say “To Follow Us.” That’s what they’re ready to do now. They want to tune in to the conversations going on about you, to see how/whether you’re engaged with the audience. They want to see what kind of attention you’re generating, and what you’re doing with it.

Do your white papers, case studies, Web content and copy still pump information at your readers so that they’ll buy from you? Or, does your content give readers enough value for them to want to follow you, then decide whether they want to buy from you when the time is ripe?

How have you made that change? Have your marketing communications writers made it with 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.

photo credit: Brianforbes37

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Social media marketing seems like smoke and mirrors, but when the smoke blows away and you take down the mirrors, you still need to hire a writer who can deliver valuable content.

Social media marketing is an exercise in riding the tiger.

The buzz is that the traditional, prescriptive notions of marketing don’t fit very well in social media, and so marketing managers need to cede some control to the crowd. Let your customers tell you what they like about you and want from you, then give it to them in short, quick bursts and hope that you’re building relationships and spreading the word.

Some ad agencies like Crispin Porter & Bogusky have turned their home pages into “part Website, part digital fishing net.” In the last century, the equivalent might have been to offer free beer all day long in the lobby of your corporate office, or to let complete strangers answer the phone.

So you’re trying to convince your traditional-minded boss to let you run the company through this social media thingee. You know that “Because it’s fun” and “Everybody’s doing it” won’t fly as cornerstones of a social media strategy, so you have to explain tweets, back-links, followings and a Squidoo lens in classical marketing terms.

(Mind you, we are probably the last generation that will need to do this. In the future, people are just going to understand it without explanation.)

A Social Media Program for Traditional Marketers

Pete Caputa of Hubspot writes:

Based on my daily interactions with marketing agencies, I believe we’ve finally reached the point where convincing companies that they need to be using social media to build awareness, audiences, traffic and leads is almost over.

Now it’s about being able to speak to them in terms they understand (rather than in terms our social media peers understand), to explain why a social media strategy is absolutely necessary.

Pete describes a new e-book from Channel V Media that bridges the voodoo of the vehicles (remember that Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit and the others are only vehicles) and the traditional approach to marketing. Its goal is to help companies and marketers develop a social media plan with a foot in both camps.

-Audience Identification
-Platform Development and Design
-Brand Campaign Integration
-Content Creation/Coordination
-Goal Mapping
-Brand Identity
-Audience Attraction
-Social Media Listening
-Community and Social Responsibility
-Internal/External Community Engagement
-Brand Advocacy
-Customer Service

Marketing Writers and Social Media

In particular, the fourth bullet concerns your writers. Are they thinking too traditionally to fit in with your social media marketing plan? Do they know what to do with your keyword basket? Can they develop the content you need for these social media channels, and the brave new expectations of the people at the other end of them?

• You still need content. Whether you opt for a white paper or a free sample, you need to tell your story somehow.
• That content will still come from marketing writers you hire. Managing your social media strategy will be plenty of work for you already.
• The marketing writers have to write in new ways so that the content is valuable. Every sentence has to answer the reader’s question, “Why should I care?”
• Not valuable to you; valuable to your customers and the people with whom they share. They don’t want to share your brochure. They want to share something that will make people follow them.

The essence of social media is that somebody will read your story and share it.

Your marketing writers need to get that.

photo credit: L. Lew

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Je pense, donc j'essuie.

In a customer interview, your marketing communications writer can get more out of interviewees or subject matter experts if she can make them think.

Years ago, my boss at the time, a VP of marketing, gave me the secret to working with our infuriating, inscrutable, mercurial CEO:

You’ve got to make him think.

Frankly, I wasn’t adept at it then – hence, my being laid off some months later – and I’m still not good at it, but I’m working with a marketing communications writer who knows how to make our subject matter experts and even our customers think.

I heartily enjoy seeing them rise to the challenge.

Making the Customer Think in a Customer Interview?

This seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Why would you run the risk of antagonizing a customer or engineer who is doing you a favor by allowing you to pick his brain for a white paper or case study?

This writer is smart enough not to try to impress the interviewee with her knowledge of the business or technology. She doesn’t need to know more in those fields to make the interviewee think.

It’s all in the three questions she poses them to explain it.

1. “How cool is this technology, would you say?” She doesn’t ask about the novelty or even the cost-effectiveness of the technology. She’s looking for The Cool. In fact, she’s not even looking for it, but asking the interviewee to lead her right to it. Is the cool thing about predictive text entry on a cell phone that it only takes up a few KB of phone memory, or that it helps you text faster, or that it can guess which letters you want to enter next? And how cool is it?
2. “What can you tell me about this story that would get readers to want to share it with other people?” This is a big part of writing for social media, which she understands quite well. It’s thinking one step past the ideal readers, to their desire to share the story with their social network.
3. “If you were looking for a story like this on the Web, which search terms would you use?” Not everybody can get away with asking this question – I cannot – but she can. It’s the ultimate search engine optimization question, of course, and while interviewees can’t vouch for every possible keyword, their insight is valuable.

Questions like these might lead you to think that her drafts consist of keyword-stuffed, awkward copy. If she didn’t process the answers to these questions as well as she does, they would be awful copy. But, as a marketing communications writer, she knows what I want out of the piece, and she understands our audience very well, so she knows what to do with the answers.

By making the interviewees and subject matter experts think, she’s done more than tell our story: She’s told it without making our readers have to think.

(Tip of the hat to Steve Krug of Don’t Make Me Think fame).

photo credit: Dionetian

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6 new channels!

Hire a writer who understands that the social media business story is still warming up, and that it consists of several different channels.

How is your business using social media in all its channels? More importantly, how are the people inside your business using them?

I hope you are past the notion that this is all about a bunch of teenagers exchanging gossip, or that this is just “the new t.v.”? There are plenty of social media business success stories, including these compiled about Twitter by MarketingProfs.

There’s a strangely inverse relationship between business and social media:

• Business starts out as being about money, but ends up being about relationships.
• Social media channels starts out as being about relationships, and end up being about money (if you play them right).

Your Social Media Business in 6 Channels

So, what is your business in social media? Can you tell the players? Do you even have a program yet?

Heather Lutze of the Findability Group summarized social media for business as being in 6 main channels (as of this summer, anyway). With a tip of the hat to Heather, here’s my supplement to her summary:

1. LinkedIn – ranks well in search engines, strong focus on business and professional content, good place to describe your company.
2. Facebook – not as useful for search engine marketing because the personal pages are not indexed (group pages, however, are indexed). Facebook started out as strong in personal networking (think colleges and margaritas) and has gained a lot of momentum by facilitating business-to-consumer relationships.
3. MySpace – The social media darling of yesteryear, its reputation has not benefited much from news items detailing bad behavior among its users. Hey, it’s what we had first, so we all saw what we could get away with. Got a band? Be on MySpace.
4. YouTube – Yes, you too can market yourself with video; just ask Blendtec. You can also screw it up if you’re not careful; just ask Bank of America. Well indexed for search engines. Not as easy as updating a LinkedIn profile, but you may as well try something new in your organization. It’s the 21st century, after all.
5. Blogging – Search engines love blogs (constantly updated content), your customers love blogs (if you’re really creating a relationship with them and not just breathing your own exhaust) and your search engine marketing effort loves blogs (new ways to explore the keywords prospects use to find you). Blogging is a lot of work. So is business. Remember?
6. Twitter – Zen meets the Internet. Don’t try to control Twitter; just ride it as best you can. It’s its own best search engine, and you can find information, trends and opinions there as they arise.

Tell Your Story in Social Media Terms

Once you’ve decided on the channel(s) you want to approach, you’ll need content, because whatever you may do in social media, you need to tell your story eventually. Your marketing communication writers need to get your message out consistently and to a variety of audiences.

You cannot fill your Social Media channels with brochure copy. Nobody on the Web cares about you, your company or your products; they care about what you can do for them and their problems.

When you hire a writer for social media in business, you need to start and maintain a conversation in a new language, and not just re-hash your strengths. Your Web content writer needs to understand your message and tailor it to as many different channels as you select.

What do you think about these social media business channels? Where and how are you casting your lot?

photo credit: avlxyz

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It starts with The Event. Maybe you’ve undergone an internal transformation, and you now have a secret sauce that will help you leave your rivals in the dust. Perhaps you’ve survived a hostile takeover bid that has left you stronger. Or you’ve just received approval for your patent on a better mousetrap.

You have the noble goal of writing up The Event and putting the story into people’s hands so that they’ll admire you, seek to emulate you and want to buy your products.

Good luck.

Thought Leadership Hubris

It’s a bit cheeky, saying that you’re going to lead thought. It reminds me of resolving to get somebody to fall in love with you. In fact, that’s what it is, and that’s why there are several obstacles to your thought leadership effort:

1. I’ve worked on thought-leadership white paper projects. They’re devastating. They are more taxing than The Event. Everybody has a different perspective on the project and it will almost surely take you longer and cost you more than you bargain for. It’s too big a bite.
2. In your own experience, have you ever read anything and suddenly noticed that your thought was now being led in a different direction? What makes you think your paper – or entire content campaign – will have this effect on anybody else? Probably the biggest popular force leading thought these days is Apple Inc., and they’re doing it with the impact of their products on consumers, not with their content.
3. In the era of social media, it’s almost silly to think you can lead thought, because thought is more mercurial and fickle than ever. People want to follow, but they don’t want their thought led. If your content does result in new customers, how are you going to greet them: “Thank you for letting us lead your thought,” or “Thank you for following us”?
4. As a marketing manager, your goal is to start conversations. What kind of conversation are you trying to have if you attempt to lead people’s thought?

Don’t Lead Thought; Develop a Following

Smart marketing managers will look at this differently: Instead of trying to lead thought, they devote the energy to building a following.

This is an important nuance because you can’t measure how much thought you’re leading, but you can measure the development of your following. This is the true value for business of platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Mind you, people like David Meerman Scott lump blogs, podcasts, case studies and all other sorts of marketing communication into the category of “thought leadership,” and maybe they are able to lead thought with campaigns like that. But most of us are just struggling to get our content ducks in a row, and “thought leadership” is shooting for the moon to us.

The Moral: You can lead eyes to your story, but you can’t lead thought.

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