Have you been with an organization long enough to remember:

• when things were a mess, and what everybody had to go through to make things run as smoothly as they do now?
• how you used to be known for your parts, and how your customers came to know you as partners?
• when the market associated you with low price, and how you got it to associate you with high quality?

These represent Transformations, seismic shifts in the organization that set a new course. Almost every organization goes through these sooner or later, some more painfully than others.

Maybe you’re the last buggy whip company, and the sun is setting on your addressable market. Or maybe a management consultant has your CEO’s ear and puts in place a new direction and policy. Maybe you get hip to the fact that in five years nobody is going to pay you to do what you’re doing today.

Once you’re through the tunnel, you’re ready to tell the world about the crucible you’ve been through, and how much stronger you are as a result. You’re ready for a white paper outline that explains How We Rescued Ourselves.

Title and Summary

A Transformation white paper is a different kind of content.

You need to make readers feel as if they’re getting a peek in the kitchen at the best restaurant in town. If you pull this off, you’ll have a paper that makes for excellent social media content. Readers see past the façade of ordinary marketing and have the chance for a deeper conversation with you. Tip them off to this in the title and summary; for example:

• What Goes Down Can Come Up – Amalgamated Fuzz Transforms Its Sales Process
• How Acme Paper Took ISO 9001′s Benefits from Production to the C-Suite and Back
• Customer Input Takes Over, and Skater Industries is the Better for It

The Landscape

Count on a varied audience for this paper: customers, prospects, investors, journalists, and certainly competitors will read it, so devote a few paragraphs to the state of the industry and the problems faced by most organizations in your position.

• Tell this as a story, not as a datasheet or a newspaper article. Use conflict-driven business writing to draw readers in, and get to the conflict as soon as practical.
• Avoid using terms like “challenges” and “pain points.” Everybody knows you’re talking about business problems, so call them as much.
• Charts, diagrams, images and even quotations work well as complements to the main body of text.

Precipitating Event or Watershed

Who or what introduced the plan for changing things? Did somebody become fed up? Did somebody raise Cain at a shareholder meeting?

It’s important to describe this as economically yet smoothly as possible, because it’s the pivotal point in the story. Remember, your readers want to know what’s happening backstage, so give them what they want. (It may require some dancing to get this past your execs, but it really is important. Besides, any embarrassment is in the past, and you can anonymize anything too uncomfortable.)

How We Rescued Ourselves – The Transformation Process

How did you get this all done? What did it take? What processes did the organization put in place? Who had to be accommodated? What compromises were needed?

You spend this section telling readers, “Here’s how we did it. It wasn’t easy, but we got through it.” You may even give them enough information so that they too can do it.

Stay in story-telling mode.

Other End of the Tunnel

Here’s the point of the Transformation – indeed, of the entire paper: Yours is a new and improved organization now. List the reasons why.

Using as much subtlety as possible, you want readers to understand that you’re now a better company with which to do business. You’ve done the hard, internal work to purge inefficiencies and the things that separated you from your customers. You itemize the data points that support this:

• 28% fewer customer support calls
• 93% on-time arrivals
• 7% annual growth for the last three years
• a stock price that outperforms competitors by 4%
• Malcolm Baldrige awards

Conclusion and Follow Us

Still resisting the temptation to pat yourself on the back, draw some conclusions about what comes next: More Transformation? Additional phases? New business units?

You’ve taken them through the kitchen in our restaurant. It’s easy to blow it here and efface your good story with nonsense about how great your organization is; keep in mind that nobody cares about your company or products, because they’re preoccupied with their business problems and how you can help solve them. Your well-told Transformation story leaves them no doubt.

Be sure to invite readers to follow your blog, newsletter, video and webinars. If you’ve done a good job, readers will want to keep an eye on you for more insight.

The result is a first-pass white paper outline you can circulate. Your reviewers will be able to see where you’re taking the readers of your Transformation white paper. Once you have their feedback, you can start on the draft.

Next, the Kitchen-Sink 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: Richard Moross CC2.0

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“White paper” covers a multitude of formats, and it’s rare to find two people who take it to mean the same thing. Poisoned white papers harm the publisher more than the reader, but there are antidotes.

I’ve looked at a half-dozen documents called “white papers” in the last few days and marveled at the variety among them. It’s a maligned term, really, and I think it has come to represent a type of marketing communications content that:

1. is long;
2. is different from a brochure, a case study or an advertisement.

That covers a lot of ground. I’ll leave it to folks like Jonathan Kantor to describe what a white paper is and isn’t, but whatever you or your marketing communications writers have produced, you should make sure that you don’t poison it – let alone your readers or your reputation – with it.

4 Ways to Poison Your White Paper…

1. Wall of text – This can more resemble a rant than a white paper. If you go on for more than a page or two with nothing but text, you’re probably poisoning your readers, no matter how engaging your content.
2. Aimlessness – This is more like a blog post (and a poor, long one at that) than a white paper. It is usually a sign that the author is enthusiastic about the product but does not know how to tell a story about it.
3. Leading the reader by the nose to your product – This is more like a brochure than a white paper, because the goal of a white paper is for readers to sense that they are drawing their own conclusions – at least, some of them. If you’re not leaving them with that feeling, then it’s a brochure.
4. Hiding it under a bushel – This is more like a diary entry. White papers are the main course at The Content Buffet, and they should be prominently posted, tweeted, Facebooked, excerpted and blogged about. If you’re not thinking “Write once, use many,” you’re missing most of the social media wave.

…and 3 Antidotes

1. Break up the text in your paper with diagrams, charts, callout boxes, photographs, quotations and anything else graphical that gives the reader’s eye a much deserved rest. It’s easy to go overboard on this, but if you can give your readers a vacation once per page, it will be easier for them to get through the entire paper, and they’ll remember you more fondly for it.
2. Maintain a balance among sections. For example:
   • 5% summary
   • 25% introduction and presentation of problem
   • 30% current approaches and why something new is needed
   • 30% details and advantages of new solution (ours)
   • 10% conclusion and follow-us.

   This is the antidote for aimlessness because it gives readers a mental pace to keep.

3. Focus on your ideal readers. If you really know them well enough to aim a white paper at them, you should be able to include miniature case studies that tie applications of your product back to real-world people and companies. This is a very powerful antidote because it introduces relevance.

So, whether you’ve produced a pure-land, bona fide white paper, or just something that is long and is not a brochure, take care to remove the poison from it before handing it on to your customers and prospects.

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.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/-cavin-/ / CC BY 2.0

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Thousands of blogs are born each day, but it’s not all sweetness and light. A summary of the downside of blogging, whether for yourself or for your organization.

Even back in 2006, Technorati was estimating that 175,000 new blogs were born each day, or one every half-second. Even if only one-tenth of them made it past five posts, and even if many of those same keystrokes are now being pumped into other social networking platforms, a lot of people are still maintaining blogs and a lot of us are still reading them.

“What’s Wrong with Blogging?” ProBlogger Asks

In a recent post, A-class blogger Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net asks us, “What’s wrong with blogging?” Darren’s following is colossal, and he had over 120 comments within 24 hours, covering a gamut of complaints about blogging in general. A digest of some of what’s wrong with blogging:

• English is the dominant language in blogging (so far), and other cultures/languages are missing out on valuable content.
• Journalists deride blogging.
• Journalists thrive on blogging.
• Blogging has become a form of advertising.
• Many bloggers are reluctant to link to other blogs in the same niche.
• It’s hard to generate valuable content regularly that will get a blog noticed.
• Generally, the quality of writing is low on blogs.
• Too many posts are merely about content on other blogs (like this one, I presume).
• Only bloggers read blogs.
• The get-rich-quick crowd and affiliate marketing are polluting blogging.
• Upstart bloggers are displacing experts in their field.
• Desire for popularity trumps quality in content.

This is a cautionary tale for marketing communications writers working on corporate (and personal) blogs. It is tough work. It probably won’t pay off in the short run. You may not experience instant gratification or a huge following. So why do it?

To tell your story. Passionately.

Use Your Blog to Show Your Passion

Your organization is a going concern, which means that things are constantly changing in it. There’s a story in that, and your followers (newspeak for customers, vendors, friends, investors, journalists, competitors) want to know it.

And, if it’s a good story, you should be passionate about telling it.

Those press releases you publish a couple of times a month? Not much passion in those, is there?

Use your blog to tell people the why behind the news, in a way that shows what your organization is passionate about: child literacy, green power, military hegemony, helping people get rich. Readers won’t magically flock to it, but when they take a close look at you, they’ll see passion, and that’s where followers come from.

Change your objective from boosting blog readership to telling your organization’s story passionately, and you’ll subtract a lot of the stress from the process.

Blogging will still be tough, of course, but it will be much more bearable.

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: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pingnews/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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Try to think of your ideal reader as a child. Have you ever met a child who preferred an explanation over a story?

Explaining makes for lousy marketing.

Dan Heath, Fast Company

Writing for a Child

As a marketing manager, have you ever thought of your ideal reader as a child?

We learn not to talk down to prospects, and we scold our marketing communications writers when they use terms that are too simple. But there’s an argument (which I’m about to make) for thinking of the ideal reader of our marketing pieces as a child. In short,

• They both like pictures.
• Neither one has much time to give you, so you have to take full advantage of a short attention span.
• Explanations bore both of them, but tell them a story and they’ll follow you anywhere.

Can you build a marcom credo around these points, and get your writers to follow it?

Mind you, this is not the same thing as treating your customers like children. If you underestimate their intelligence or their collective ability to wreak havoc with your company’s sales figures and reputation, you are treating them like children, and you’ll regret it.

Explanation or Story?

So, to return to the Dan Heath quote, telling a good story about your product or service is better than explaining it, particularly if it’s a short story that gets to the point quickly. Content like case studies, blog posts, podcasts and video can do this effectively when it’s well written, and even better when you think of your ideal reader as a child.

There are times, usually late in the sales cycle, at which you need to explain rather than to tell a story, and content like white papers, technical articles and application notes is better suited to this.

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.

photocredit: Patrishe

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Rescue your marketing communications content from the tar pit. Your readers can find it more easily and it will tell your story better.

Around 1900, a few men standing near the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California, realized that there were animal bones in the tar.

“What a find!” exclaimed the first. “We could do research for decades on the fossils in this tar. It’s an archeological treasure.”

“Yes,” said the second, “but we need to figure out how to get that treasure out of the tar.”

Getting Your Content Treasure Out of the Tar

As a marketing manager, what do you do when you inherit a tar pit of content?

Maybe your company acquires another company and you need to bring its marketing content in line with your own. Maybe you’re hired into a company that has been desperately trying to tell its story, but whose efforts have never yet amounted to anything interesting. Maybe you’ve been breathing your own exhaust for a long time, and you wake up one day and decide to change what you’ve done.

Here are four ways to get your story out of the content tar pit:

1. Break up walls of text. Can you even bear to read your own stuff anymore? Is it just a forbidding collection of long sentences and paragraphs? Can you break it into smaller pieces of value that tell the story without snowing the reader under?
2. Rewrite your text in terms of customer needs. Visitors don’t want to know how many transistors you can pack onto a single chip; they want to know how all those transistors can help them get their work done better, cheaper and faster. It’s easy for your content to fall into this tar pit, but you can rescue it by changing “chicken pieces fried and battered at 145 degrees” to “finger lickin’ good.”
3. Bucket the text better. Are you sure that your ideal readers can find your content? If your entire Website is a tar pit, and the white papers, webinars, case studies and product data are all mixed together, it becomes difficult to locate your story, let alone tell it. Rearrange the text into buckets according to what visitors want to see, instead of what the writers wanted to describe.
4. Give examples and make them interesting to read. Examples make the best stories. Start out with “You know how…” or “In the same way that…” and start telling your story orally. Once you have it sketched out, fill it in with your products and services and how your customers use them.

The treasures are in the tar pit. You just need to find them. Eventually, you can create content that never gets trapped there in the first place.

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: David Berkowitz

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Hire marketing communications writers who can tell a good story. Then have them tell yours.

The biggest problems around creating new, interesting content are:

1. Finding time to do it consistently.
2. Finding talent to do it “magnetically.”
3. Finding an angle to do it “engagingly.”

These problems go away if you think in terms of stories. Prospects won’t listen to you, but they’ll listen to your stories.

So, What’s a Story?

“Tell the truth and make it rhyme.”

A songwriter named Terry Black tells me that that line comes from a Pirates of the Mississippi song in the 1990s. I once saw it ascribed to John Lennon (or maybe Bob Dylan talking to John Lennon), but I can’t recall where.¹

This is how Homer conveyed The Iliad and The Odyssey. He told the truth and made it rhyme.

All the poets in all the languages do it.

Why? Because it’s:

1. consistent, as Steve Shaw points out on his Article Marketing Blog
2. magnetic, as Jason Cohen describes on Copyblogger (point #9)
3. engaging, as in the Chris Baggott Guide to Blogging

But most of all, it’s the way we want to hear things, and the way in which we best remember them almost from the beginning of our lives.

As a marketing manager, you need to set the tone and message for your content. Can you keep it coming back to stories? The same format you’ve known since you were a toddler?

Case Studies: Stories out of Whack?

Think about the last case study you read. Wasn’t it a story gone wrong? Some writer took all the fun out of a perfectly good story by shoehorning it into a problem-solution-result structure. “It makes for better reading,” he said.

What if he had simply told the truth and made it rhyme? Wouldn’t it have been more interesting? For that matter, why bother publishing the case study if there’s no story to it?

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.

¹After posting, I stumbled onto a Linked Answer from Tim Lemire that referred to this same topic. Lennon-minded readers may enjoy the detour: “John Lennon once said: ‘Write what you’re feeling, make it rhyme, and put it to music — there’s your song.’”

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The marketable story is always there. It’s easy for us to lose sight of the best way to tell our story, though. And if we lose sight of it, our ideal reader will certainly never be able to find it.

Hire a marketing communications writer who can tell you to cut out all the bull and get to the point.

One marketing manager needed a writer to help tell a sales transformation story. Here is how he described the project to the writer:

We have a 100-slide presentation on our sales transformation process. We need you to help us do the following:

• Understand the key elements of the company’s Sales & Marketing Transformation
• Confirm that we have captured the right information relative to your participation in the transformation
• Brainstorm ways that we could best disseminate the story to its client and internal audiences
• Outline possible roles that we each can play in further tailoring this content for differentiated audiences

“Who put that together?” I asked. “A management consultant? It’s ghastly.”

It isn’t that a good writer doesn’t understand all the fancy words. It’s that nobody will read about a sales transformation, and absolutely nobody will read a 100-slide presentation about a sales transformation. However, a lot of people will read a story about a sales transformation. And a good writer will deliver a story.

“Instead of sending that to the writer,” I suggested, “tell her you need her to fix more than sentences and paragraphs. Tell her you need her to fix the way we tell our story.”

Have you ever told a writer, “Help us tell our story better”? Did you find a writer who could do it?

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: Seattle Municipal Archives

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The blank page is a big obstacle almost every writer faces on almost every piece. You can play an important role in helping your writer over the hump, and get better writing in the bargain.

Every piece that your marketing communications writer sends you started out as a cursor blinking on a completely empty screen.

Whether he had an idea of what he was going to write or not, he stared at the blank page for a while and tried to come up with something good for you, something that would impress you and show that he understood your business. Most of all, he tried to figure out the best way to start so that the rest would be easy.

This isn’t writer’s block or any other writer’s disease. It’s just the hump that most writers need to overcome on almost every piece they write for you.

Although the hump is not your problem, getting good content from your writer is your problem.

Getting Over the Writing Hump

Without interfering in the process of writing, you can give the writer more of what he needs to get over the hump:

1. More details about the ideal readers. Why is it so much easier to write valuable content for a loved one than for a stranger? It’s because you know what is important to her, how to phrase it and how she’ll react to it. The more information you give your writer about your ideal readers, the better he understands how to make your point. If you know the profile of your ideal readers well enough, and convey that profile to your writer, he can turn a white paper or case study into a love letter to them.
2. A decent story. Which is more interesting: a new product announcement or the story behind the new product? Most marketing managers make the mistake of telling their writers, “We need a paper on our new cosmodemonic flubgrubbers. It should be about 1500 words long. I’ll send you background information and the engineer’s phone number.” What kind of story will come of that? You want people to read and remember the “once upon a time…” that they’ll tell their friends. If you give your writer the story that you want back, he’ll know how to start telling it.
3. The call to action. What do you want the ideal readers to do at the end of the paper? Pick up the phone? Go to a Website? Click on a link? Pass it on? Send you money? Most marketing managers don’t even think about the call to action, which is why most marcomm pieces don’t even have a For More Information section at the end. If you don’t have anything to tell your readers to do at the end, then that’s exactly what they’ll do. If you tell your writer where you want your readers to go, it will be easier for him to start building the road that takes them there.

Remember: Overcoming this hump is not your problem; a professional writer knows how to overcome it himself. But you can play a role in helping him overcome it, and get better writing in the process.

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: The U.S. Army

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Let them snack on your content

Are you convinced that you need a white paper, because everybody has them? Don’t weld yourself to a single format for your story; think about other ways of telling it.

Jay Baer has an excellent post this week on Info-Snacks, based on the notion of “atomizing” content, in the words of Todd Defren of Shift Communications. (I suppose that makes this a post on a post on a post, doesn’t it?)

It’s another take on the Content Buffet, in which you tell the story of a single idea, a single change in your organization, through multiple vehicles: blog posts, social media, case studies, Web content, videos, and yes, white papers.

Does your marketing communications writer think in these terms? Instead of calling him up and saying, “We need you to write a white paper,” suppose you called him up and said, “Here’s the story we want to tell; what do you think are the best ways to do it?”

A versatile writer will suggest alternative formats for different parts of the story. Why shoehorn everything into a single paper, when you can appeal to different audiences with different formats? Your job isn’t to crank out a paper; your job is to give people valuable content and get them to follow you.

Can you rely on a writer for that? Or do you talk to your marketing agency?

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: armigeress

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Writing for diagrams

Graphics and diagrams are at the heart of good marketing communications, but your writer can’t always make them work for a written piece.

The deadline loomed, and still I had no more than an outline from the writer. “What’s taking so long?” I asked.

“I think I have writer’s block,” replied the writer.

“You don’t believe in writer’s block,” I said. “Your Website says so.”

“I’m having trouble wrapping the business-benefits message and the graphical overviews and everything you want me to cover into a single package that somebody will bother to read,” she said. “There are several ideas you want me to describe, and the presentation diagrams from the engineers are not conceptual enough. They dive into platform repositories and toolsets without explaining overall workflow, let alone business advantages.”

I hate it when that happens.

“So, what is slowing you down?” I asked.

“The diagrams describe only the front of the elephant,” she answered. “This paper has to describe the front, back, top, bottom and middle of the elephant. I’m trying to do that with the diagrams I have, but it doesn’t work.”

“Do you know how you want the diagrams to look in order to fit with your text?” I asked.

“I need some time to flesh them out.”

The writer took about 4 hours to redesign the diagrams on pencil and paper, then met with the engineers who had designed the graphics. “I’m telling a different story from the one you told,” she explained to them, “but I need to make sure that I’m getting it right. It won’t match your story, but it needs to be consistent with it.”

The engineers dutifully looked at the drawings. “That’s not how we would explain the workflow,” they commented, “but it’s not wrong.”

While the writer modified the draft around the updated diagrams, we had a designer polish them up. The mixture of the two was a better fit for the ideal readers: technically advanced people to whom we were introducing mid-stream changes (and trying to convince them to get off the dime and adopt).

The moral: Hire a writer who is not afraid to pull out a pencil and paper and say, “I can’t explain it to fit your drawing. Let me show you how I can explain it.”

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: gigile

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