Yawning for a white paper

Your white papers are good incentive content. If you think nobody’s reading them, maybe it’s because the ideal readers cannot find them.

It’s hard not to feel good about having a white paper to give prospects, even harder when you have an entire library of them. If well done, they demonstrate the willingness to align your products with real-world problems and the internal discipline to build/publish a body of knowledge about your technology.

But does anybody read your white papers? Are they useful?

A former colleague posts in a security bloggers forum on LinkedIn and recently wrote me:

We have a new term in usage here in my group: “YAWNER”.

yet

another

white paper

nobody

ever

reads

I think he’s exaggerating. I think the greater danger lies in people not being able to find your white papers; take care of that first. If people can find your white papers, eventually they will read them, if only to decide, “No, this isn’t what I’m looking for,” and keep looking for the answer in some other paper.

Of course, your job as marketing manager is to ensure you’ve hired a marketing communications writer who has told your story well – whether it involves customer interviews or a technical white paper – and that it looks like valuable content to your ideal readers.

Meanwhile, your organization has used the white paper to get information out of its collective head and into print, and there’s value inherent to that.

Stop yawning and keep the valuable content moving.

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: Jambako the Jaguar

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1. A White (Paper) Elephant

“Write a series of technical articles to help evangelize the technology,” we said, “two to three pages each. They should introduce developers and customers to the new features they can use in programming on the platform. We need to get the word out about this, so we’ll put the articles on the developer Web site. We’ll give you the topics, and you do the rest: interview the engineers, talk to the product managers, write it up, circulate drafts, edit it and submit it to the Web team.”

That was about all we told him, and he did all of that, for several months. He delivered reliably and on time.

Turns out that what we told him to do is not what we wanted him to do.

“There’s too much fluff in the articles,” observed the VP of Engineering. “We need more meat instead of muffins.”

The writer was perplexed. “I’m doing what you told me to do, but if you want me to turn up the technical heat, I will. But I assume that, if you just wanted pages of technical language, you’d have the Documentation group do this. You hired a technical marketing writer to help persuade people to work on the platform, right?” He underlined it.

Right.

“Can you give us something more technical, yet not turn the content into a user guide?” we asked.

“Sure. I just need to know whether you want meat, muffins, or meaty muffins,” he said. A good way to put it. Must be why he’s in marketing.

The articles got deeper and the VP of Engineering became more pleased. People started reading them more, and spending more time on them, according to our Web logs.

Moral: When you hire a writer, be sure to explain how shallow or deep you want the content to be. Meat or muffins. Corporate cheerleading (I always enjoy envisioning that) or something that a developer will pass on to a colleague, maybe even retweet.

Related posts:

1. To persuade or not to persuade…