David Stockman.

Remember him? He was Ronald Reagan’s budget director, and Atlantic Monthly interviewed him in 1981. He let a cat or two out of the bag, and after the interview ran, RWR had to “take him to the woodshed.”

Could Yammer have prevented that? It might have helped.

Keep it in house

The New York Times ran an article last week on in-house social networks. They cite Yammer – think Twitter, only internal – and an offering from Salesforce.com called Chatter.

I’ve used Yammer with one enterprise client. It elicited a din of exasperation among employees reluctant to have one more place to fish for information besides e-mail, the employee portal, the corporate content management system and several SharePoint installations.

But I saw how employees used Yammer. Most of them were already on Facebook and Twitter, but they knew damned well they ought not to post about business out there, lest it earn them a trip to the woodshed.

Quick subroutine

The more litigious the company – whether actively or reactively – the stronger the culture of carefulness in the executive suite, and the more reluctant the employees are to do what social media was invented for: try something. See David Meerman Scott’s interview of Vivienne Storey in “Is social media worth the risk? A lawyer’s perspective.”

Return to main thread

Yammer let these people post safely about their work, and anybody who was likely to be tempted by social media now had an outlet:

My Lua script keeps dying. Can somebody take a look at it and help me fix the code?

New device from [Huge Telecom Manufacturer] uses our DSP. No formal announcement, so mum’s the word, but good work, team!

Big trench between buildings 2 and 4. Backhoe operator told me they’re laying new fiber.

People want to share these things. Their spouses and kids don’t care, the co-workers right around them already know, they can’t really tell their friends, and they just want to put it out there.

Internal social networks let companies make sure that “out there” is still “in here.”

Take off the training wheels

Once these employees understand the rules – explicit and tacit – about what they can share internally, they begin to realize what they can share externally as well. They can better represent the company on the likes of Quora, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter because they’ve had some time with the training wheels and now have a feeling for what’s acceptable for the outside world.

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: Dawn Endico

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It’s rare that I post on the mechanics of content marketing, but I think this entry is overdue.

Last year in Social Media Guide and Social Media Examiner, I read about a way to embed a retweet button inside a PDF. Since much of my content ends up in PDF, it looked like a good value-add for my marketing communications clients, and I began using it liberally.

It involves placing in the PDF (or even in the source document) a hyperlink to Twitter that populates a tweet with the text you want moving around the twittersphere, passively glorifying your content.

For example (and to glorify my client’s content), this link in your PDF:

can yield this:

It’s an easy way to spread your message via social media and introduce a little bit of reader engagement.

I was happy with it, my clients were happy with it, and readers were indeed retweeting the PDFs.

But then…

…something broke.

On a new project last week, I had cloned the same hyperlink that had worked properly all last year, then spent an hour or more fruitlessly trying to get it to populate the What’s Happening field in Twitter. I went back to PDFs I’d created for other clients and tested them: they, too, had stopped working properly.

My neat hack had become a casualty of the New Twitter. In short, the Old Twitter required

/home/?

in the hyperlink for retweet to work. It had also required plus-signs instead of spaces between words. New Twitter doesn’t like those. It took me another hour searching for this information – frankly, I don’t remember where I found it anymore – so I’m summarizing it here for posterity, and so that I remember how to do it.

So, to get this:

enter this hyperlink in your source file (MS Word .docx file, InDesign, FrameMaker, etc.):

http://twitter.com/?status=Mobile developers - Get Qualcomm Web Technologies white papers - http://developer.qualcomm.com/webtech | (via @qdevnet)

Note that some applications will spontaneously replace the spaces with %20, but it does no harm. Note also that this probably won’t work at all for users stuck on Old Twitter; I assume that they’ll be forced to update eventually and that your retweet links will work for the lion’s share of your readers.

Whew. I can retweet again.

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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When people look at a column of your tweets, can they tell who the intended audience is?

When they land on your Facebook page, can they scan your posts and figure out whether you’re talking to them or to the other half-billion people in the Face-sphere?

We expect that our followers in social media know something about us and our brand, and will be receptive to our tweets. If you’re Souplantation, you can assume that visitors know you’re making offers to hungry people, most of whom have hungry families to feed.

Addressing the envelope

But suppose you’ve been developing and writing to buyer personas, as Michele Linn and David Meerman Scott have enjoined you to do all these years. You put in place a content marketing campaign aimed at your ideal readers, then use tweets and posts to point them to it.

Are you making it drop-dead easy for them to know that you’re talking to them?

Are you addressing the envelope?

Sacrifice a few precious characters in the name of targeting. For example:

• Sysadmins: Security holes in Windows 7; plug ‘em now http://… #hashtag
• MobileAppDevelopers: Still time to register for devconf at http://…
• Mktgmgrs: You tweetin’ to me? Huh? http://… #hashtag1 #hashtag2
• AngryBirders: Two new cheats revealed http://…
• navyseals: Thanks, good job. Don’t tell us – we don’t want to know how you did it

What happens when you don’t address the envelope like this? People assume you’re talking to your “following” – whatever that is – but what about those of us who don’t yet know whether we’re in your following?

Explicitly addressing your tweets and posts is an easy way of qualifying the members of your audience and letting them know whom you’re trying to attract to your following. If I’m not a mktgmgr, sysadmin or navyseal, then I know your message doesn’t apply to me.

And we all appreciate anything you can do to help us cut through the clutter.

*(With apologies to Robert DeNiro as Travis in “Taxi Driver”)

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: sludgegulper

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Marketing managers tread the razor’s edge between sending followers too much content and sending them too little.

Here’s research from Exact Target and CoTweet:

The most frequently cited (44%) reason Facebook users give for “unliking” a brand is that it posts too frequently.

Oops, marketing managers. Better not post too often. It looks like nagging or chest-thumping, and that’s not what we want to see on Facebook.

On the other hand – and we should always be thankful we have one of those – is research from MailChimp and Hubspot on the Science of Email Marketing. It draws conclusions from 9.5 billion (with a “b”) e-mail messages sent in campaigns worldwide:

• The click-through rate at one send per month is 6%, and the click-through rate for everything from 2 to 30 sends per month varies from 5% down to 2%. Not much of a penalty for sending a lot of e-mail. (Slide 40)
• If you send 1-5 e-mail messages per month, your unsubscribe rate will be between .7% and .2%. Any more frequently than that and it drops as low as .1%. This fairly encourages more contact. (Slide 41)

Hubspot’s takeaway:

Don’t be afraid to send too much e-mail.

And, when it comes to blogging, the decisions you make about posting frequency are much more subtle, depending on whether you’re after influence, traffic, comments, pagerank or reader engagement.

Of course, this assumes you’re not posting/sending the same content over and over. If that’s your strategy for wooing followers, you’d better try Twitter instead.

So, don’t worry if you and your marketing team are having doubts as to how much content marketing volume to push in social media, because each channel marches to the beat of its own drum. And even then, it’s as much art as science.

If you wanted hard-and-fast rules, you should have gone into engineering.

This is marketing, and that’s why we call it that.

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: Serge Melki

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Industry colleague Renato Beninatto was improvising the answer to a question posed to him at a live presentation when he uttered the most memorable factoid I’ve ever heard:

Keep in mind that 72.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

I’ve repeated this “statistic” dozens of times since then, and audiences always take 3-4 seconds to digest it.

But, I know that they remember it.

Making statistics memorable

Michele Linn at the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) pointed me to a solid block of statistics on their site the other day. I liked the way in which CMI had summarized and swept these all together in one place, and I plucked this one from the tree:

Large companies are spending 18% of their marketing budget on content and small companies are spending almost 40%, according to a study by Junta42.

I like these statistics, and I want my customers and prospects to remember them. Memorable statistics are persuasive statistics. But what’s the best way to make statistics memorable?

If you’re going to use statistics, make sure they’re statistics that your reader can’t forget.

• Make them absurd. If your content and your audience will put up with it, make your point with absurd statistics, as Beninatto did above. For that matter, make them sarcastic, if you can get away with it:

Mr. Thompson has unfailingly predicted eight of the last four economic recessions.

• Make them authoritative. Face it – most “authoritative sources” are virtual fire hoses of unmemorable statistics. If you can find a sufficiently conspicuous source and cite a single important statistic, you have a chance of making it stick. You need to be sure that your source does not overshadow your stat here, though. For example:

Two years into Barack Obama’s effort to use quit smoking, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs affirmed that the President has not had a cigarette in nine months. Obama has struggled with the habit for three decades, smoking as many as eight cigarettes a day.

• Make them arresting. Arresting statistics catch readers off guard and force them to wrap their head around something astounding. It may be hard to come up with something that arresting in your industry, so use context to help:

69% of B2B marketers are not convinced that they’re using social media effectively.

This means that, of the 10 people in the elevator on your way to the office this morning, seven of them were thinking, “Today I’ve got to figure out how to get more traction for my company on Twitter and Facebook.”

A proof point needs to stay sharp

Keep using statistics in your content as proof points. They boost your persuasiveness and show that you’ve done your homework.

• In blog posts, use them in the title and opening paragraph.
• In white papers and long-format pieces, put them in a “Main Messages” table in the summary and repeat them in the conclusion.
• In tweets, place them near the beginning.
• In case studies and customer success stories, use them in pull quotes and callouts.

Just make sure they’re memorable.

How else do you use statistics in your content marketing?

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: Mykl Roventine

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Jessica Shieh reports in Marketing Profs that recent studies suggest the buzz around Facebook may be in the fast lane to diminuendo.

For many of us, dizzied by the number and variety of social media channels in which to tell our story before our competitors get there and tell theirs, it’s not too soon. “Whew,” we gasp, “now we need to focus only on our Web site, blog, Twitter profile, e-mail campaigns, direct marketing and videos.”

Facebook less popular to whom?

What the decline in popularity of Facebook means – if there really is a decline – is that you need to court prospects elsewhere. If you have engaged followers and paying customers on Facebook, however, they’re probably not ready to throw the towel in by a longshot. They’re still having a good time on your fan page, and you’ll do well to continue giving them one.

I hope you’ve been feeding your website and blog all along though, since unlike Facebook, those are properties you can own. They’re also zones in which you can play by the normal, healthy rules of search.

But maybe you’ve benefited from the information about your followers for which Facebook is taking so much flak lately. If so, personalize while the personalizing is good, and transplant what you learn about your followers into buyer personas to implement on your own site and blog.

So, yes, you should heed Jessica by hoping for the best (the Facebook witch hunt will chug along innocuously) and planning for the worst (you need to depend exclusively on your own site and blog).

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: chadly

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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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