What if you removed every trace of self-serving-ness from your marketing content? What if you filled your blog, white papers, newsletters and technical articles with content that completely benefited your readers, with no apparent benefit to you?

Would your boss let you publish it?

Thanks for the content. What’s in it for you?

I happened onto a blog a couple of months ago run by Joe Hage, an expert in medical device marketing. It includes interviews with industry analysts, reviews of social media tools, announcements about conferences, medical device compliance information, and ideas gleaned from other online marketing experts.

I had read his posts for about five minutes when the question popped into my head:

How does this guy make money?

The content was that good, and it was almost completely devoid of apparent self-promotion.

Of course, after a few more minutes, I fell off of the blog and onto his site. His About, Services and Contact pages made it pretty clear how he makes money, but this follows the natural order of valuable content: Let your readers consistently enjoy the full value of what you publish, and when they one day feel an itch, they know whom to call to scratch it.

Other examples:

• Copyblogger – The pre-eminent site for content marketing. Daily posts from Copyblogger staff and contributors embody clear thinking about online marketing, and the site itself embodies very strong content marketing. Follow it for a while and see whether you can tell how they make money: Consulting? Software for WordPress? Instructional products?
• The Grateful Dead – David Meerman Scott has co-authored an entire book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. He often cites the way in which the band encouraged fans to tape and photograph their concerts, then trade tapes and photos with other fans. With fans enjoying this much value, plenty of them were surely asking how the band made money; when fans felt the itch, they scratched it by paying for concert tickets.
• Obsolete TV Support Group video – This Fortune 500 company has an important point to make in this video, but they camouflage it quite artistically behind an entertaining skit. Watch it, and see if you don’t find yourself asking, “Which company made this, and what does it have to do with how they make money?”

A new definition of “valuable content”

This is different from divulging all the secrets of your success. It’s easy to find experts on the Web who are giving away everything you need to know to be as successful as they are. Their content does completely benefit you, but it’s mostly advice. People will keep coming back for good stories and good information, but advice can get tiresome.

It’s a new definition of “valuable content”: Content that benefits your readers, with no apparent benefit to you.

It’s like the content that religions and governments provide, except that you actually want it, and you’re not suspicious of it.

Do you think you could do it? How would your readers react?

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: Beck Tench

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1. How to Make Your Readers Content with Your Content
2. No Time to Create Great Content? Choose Good Content
3. Statistics in Your Content – Make Sure They Stick

Marketing managers: If you’re trying to understand content marketing, you need to follow these three sources:

• Marketing Charts – thought-provoking data and useful factoids served up daily
• Content Marketing Institute – most of what you need to know about the mechanics of using valuable content in your marketing
• MarketingProfs - webinars, forums, lessons and list-posts for anybody with the word “marketing” in his/her title

These three FREE resources sometimes converge to give you gems like this:

In other words:

Six reasons you can’t get your content marketing to work

Which of these do you need to fix in your organization?

1. Producing engaging content – 42%

You put content out, but its boring. Nobody comments on it, nobody is quoting or re-using it, it’s not helping you in the search engines, and it’s not moving the sales-needle. Whether it’s blog posts, case studies, white papers, podcasts or video, it’s just not adding up to an engaging story. It probably isn’t valuable (meaning “valuable to your prospects,” not “valuable to you”).

Try this: Have your marketing communication writers write for a real human being, not for a demographic or market segment. And since nobody cares about your products, have them write about your customers’ problems instead.

2. Producing enough content – 20%

How much content is enough? If you’re serious about getting onto the first search engine results page (SERP), you need to put out valuable content with masterful use of relevant keywords about five times per week. Hey, what marketing manager can’t do that, especially with legal reviews of the content?

Try this: Cross-examine yourself. If you land on page one, will you necessarily attract qualified prospects and the kinds of customers you want to have? Or will you attract tire-kickers, time-wasters and people who wannabe you? If you can’t generate enough content to get above the noise in your keyword-space, then generate enough to look credible to prospects who find you through other means. That’s a different “enough,” but it’s an important “enough.”

3. Budget to produce content – 18%

This goes hand in hand with #2. You ask the VP of marketing or engineering for budget to write a white paper, or to hire a marketing writer for a series of case studies or blog posts, and she tells you “no dice.” It happens a lot in a soft economy.

Try this: Find content other people are already producing about you and ride those waves. Here’s the Yelp listing (B2C) for a nearby restaurant with hundreds of reviews; that represents acres of valuable (because user-generated) content that nobody needed budget to create. Here’s the Facebook page (B2B) of Johnson Controls, with a mixture of free content they want and free content they don’t want. They may not have a white paper budget, but they can use this as a starting point for producing content.

4. Lack of executive buy-in – 12%

Yes, some execs still haven’t gotten the memo, or don’t yet consider it dangerous that their competitors are consistently generating valuable content. Content marketing can be a tough sell, especially if you have to justify return on investment (ROI).

Try this: You may not be able to get attention around producing new content, but nobody in his right mind would ignore things – both good and bad – that other people are saying about your products and services. If you can’t sweet-talk your execs with terms like “content marketing,” then shake them up a bit with “reputation management.”

5. Producing a variety of content – 7%

Limited resources, unlimited possibilities: video, podcasts, white papers, case studies, eBooks, newsletter articles, blog posts and more. But especially on a small team, it’s hard to produce every kind of content you want and do it consistently and well. Or, maybe you’re accustomed to just one or two kinds and haven’t tried any others.

Try this: Do a six-month rotation, generating two types of content per shift. At the end of a couple of years, you’ll know which types are the best match for your organization.

6. Budget to license content – 1%

Instead of generating your own content, you decide to shore up your website with somebody else’s content. Or, maybe you want to license a report with independent (favorable) information about your products. That’s not so much “content marketing” as it is “someone-else’s-content marketing.” Fortunately, not many of you face this predicament.

Try this: Build your own brand with your own content instead. And get your customers to rave about you so that you don’t have to pay industry analysts to do it.

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

photo credit: Toronto History

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2. 3 Ways to Make Small Marketing Pieces Work
3. 3 Ways to Help Your Marketing Writer Put Out Great Content

Pamela Wilson published a report called “8 Incredibly Simple Ways to Get More People to Read Your Content.” It’s not about how to build white papers, case studies, Web pages or articles, but about how to dress them up. Line breaks, subheadings and bullet lists, as Pamela points out, make it easier for readers to get through your content.

There’s a lot of psychology at work in this.

“I want people to listen to me.”

As the publisher, you have a crying need for people to listen to you. Your organization has a story to tell, and you’ve paid a marketing communications writer good money to tell it.

You want attention.

“I want to learn a little and get through this thing.”

The readers in your audience want two things: to get value out of reading your content, and to get your content behind them as quickly as possible. They’ve accepted somebody’s influence to visit your site and find your paper and they’ve awarded you a few minutes of their precious time, so hurry up and get to the point.

They want gratification.

Giving readers their gimme

Nothing gets in the way of making your readers content with your content like subjecting them to a wall of text.

You’ve seen those, haven’t you? Maybe written a few of them? A page of copy that is just paragraph upon paragraph of narrative, devoid of graphics, callouts, white space, subheadings or anything to break up your deathless prose?

Or a paper that begins to buckle under its own weight, because everybody who reviews it wants to add more ideas to it?

You need to give your readers a damned good reason to slog through every page of your content. A graphic, a table, a callout box in the margin, a bullet list…Your reader needs to feel that she has accomplished something by the bottom of every page.

Have a look through some of your content (or the content your predecessor published, if you’re lucky enough to have a scapegoat). Pour it through the two filters described above:

1. Does it tell my story?
2. Can readers learn something useful to them in a hurry?

Go ahead – pick one of your white papers, case studies, newsletter articles or blog posts. It’s easy to tell your story; it’s not so easy to make your readers content with your content.

How do you do it? Let me know in the comments.

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: Marshall Astor

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2. 3 Ways to Make Long Marketing Pieces Work
3. Statistics in Your Content – Make Sure They Stick

“I’m glad you followed up,” said the VP of marketing, once I’d reached him by phone. “Thanks for keeping me on my toes about our technical content. We’ve decided that we need to spend some more time planning so that we can kick off an organized effort. We’re pretty sure we’ll be ready with topics by mid-January.”

As a marketing manager, you can surely hear the good intentions behind that, but you know how many things will happen in the interim, and how fast the time goes between mid-December and mid-January.

A big, master plan is a thing of beauty. We can hardly wait to see it. Can we get a few hundred words of content out while we’re waiting?

Let’s get it started…

I related a scenario for this VP from a recent project with another client.

“That’s quite a bit of work ahead of you,” I explained. “I’ve seen companies become overwhelmed in this process and end up putting out nothing for another two quarters. Why don’t you pick a hot topic right now, and let’s get started turning it into a newsletter article? You’ve got the mailing list ready. It’s easy to put out something light like that. ”

“Well, we don’t want to do anything until our messaging and strategy are in place,” he answered.

At this point, I could tell he was just coming up with new ways of saying “no” and I desisted.

The newsletter article – Tolerant of imperfection

Everybody starts somewhere.

• IBM had a first advertisement.
• Hewlett-Packard had a first version of its website.
• Microsoft had a first blog post.
• Dell had a first banner ad.

I doubt they were certain of their long-term direction – or even their short-term direction – at the time. They put it out knowing it was a work in progress.

Newsletter articles don’t need to embody corporate dogma and strategy, the way white papers, annual reports and even press releases do. They don’t need to get everything right the first time. They’re about news, after all: a customer success, a partnership, an industry commentary that prospects and customers can follow. They’re quick bites to show that, in addition to building motorcycles or remodeling homes, you and your company are people who actually think about your customers’ problems and how to solve them.

A newsletter article can do this in 600 words. More importantly, it can help your marketing managers start the trickle of content that helps to plant your brand in the mind of your audience.

It’s too easy. Don’t wait for mid-December or mid-January or mid-anymonth.

Just get your content thing started.

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: Ed Yourdon

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Resuming from last week’s post on creating an eBook, I had chosen Microsoft PowerPoint as an adequate application with which to build an adequate eBook.

Start with a template…

The usual design guidelines apply to your choice of template: colors that suit your company’s palette, ample white space, dark (preferably black) type on light (preferably white) background, legible font, decent type size. PowerPoint comes with several templates, and there are hundreds more on line.

I used two different templates, or master slides: one for the content pages and a slightly different one for housekeeping pages (cover, intro, closing, about). The color schemes are identical, with the colors in different places. I’m no designer, but I think the reader’s eye welcomes the break.

I didn’t want to simply reformat my content in landscape and call that an eBook (although I’ve seen several authors do that). Landscape is a vehicle, and it puts your reader in a different mindset from portrait, so I assume that somebody reading in landscape is in a slide-deck reading mindset. I chose to take advantage of that by keeping the layout of the main content pages as consistent as possible.

Unfortunately, master slides in PowerPoint are not very clever. You can mistakenly nudge “Click to add text” boxes out of alignment from one page to the next, foiling your attempts at consistent layout. Also, once you’ve created the master slide, it seems to accept updates capriciously and doesn’t make them all retroactive to previously created slides.

I’m sure they’re working on it.

Meanwhile, don’t get frustrated if you decide to update your master slide, then find that you have to manually update all of the pages you’ve already based on it.

…add content…

Remember: you’re navigating between the bullet-soaked slide deck and the wall-of-text white paper. Take advantage of the best of each world.

I would like to say that I “poured” the content into the template from the original Word doc, but it was hardly that painless, mostly because I had so much editing to do.

I was determined to make each page be a unit unto itself, holding a single question and corresponding answer. This obliged me to be far more concise than I had been in the original document, to the overall benefit of the eBook.

Knowing that I was going to make the eBook available as a PDF, I avoided the temptation to fill the content pages with hyperlinks. They would take the reader away from my copy and be useless in a printed version, so I used them on the copyright page and the about-page, but not in between.

I used only one font, Georgia. It’s close to the Times New Roman war-horse, but distinctive. An unsympathetic reader might say that I used italics and bold type too liberally, but I had reasons for using them and I took pains to use them as consistently as possible, so that the same kind of content would be easy to find from one page to the next.

I didn’t number the pages (the PDF takes care of that), but I did number each of the ten questions.

…then summarize and tell them where to find you.

I wrote a summary page with more words than I wanted to, but it contains several incompressible truths I thought it was important to include. The summary page is not as eye-catching as a conclusion should be – something people will gladly read if they don’t want to read the pages in the middle – but the information it contains is useful.

The about-page is rather busy and contains seven hyperlinks, but I tried to ensure that each of them would stand out at a glance:

• a link to my online portfolio
• a link to this blog
• a SurveyMonkey link on which to harvest reader feedback
• my e-mail address
• a RetweetThis link
• a link to my LinkedIn profile
• a link to my Twitter profile

It’s not likely readers will engage me on all seven links, but they can easily find their preferred method of engagement and get there from the page.

The final eBook weighs in at 2040 words, the equivalent of about 2.5 pages of 10-point text. It’s 18 pages long, and I don’t think I could make it any easier for interested readers to find what they’re looking for.

It took me several weeks to decide to use PowerPoint, but once I’d made that decision it took me about 15 hours over 4-5 days to design the templates, edit/rewrite the content, and create the about-page.

So, get started on yours! Feel free to contact me with any questions, and let me know how yours turns out.

Meanwhile, here’s a link to the final product, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer” (alternative titles welcomed).

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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2. 3 Tips on Creating Your eBook
3. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part III

A few months ago I decided I needed to write an eBook.

The term “eBook” (or “e-book”) applies to two very different items:

• an electronic version of a book, for consumption in a reader or eBook device, like the Kindle or the iPad;
• a marketing piece that conveys information in the way that a white paper does, but with a more readable, easy-to-turn-the-pages feel.

There are several different file formats for the former; the latter is usually a PDF, which most devices can accommodate.

Anyway, I wanted to create it for a few reasons:

• to see how much work is involved;
• to have one as a portfolio piece to show clients and prospects;
• to use as incentive content in search engine marketing.

It took me under 20 hours to create (there’s a little fudging in that figure), and I’m pleased with how it turned out. Here’s the story of how I did it.

Starting point

I began with a document I’d cobbled together over the years called “How to Hire Writing Talent.” I’d pecked at it for a long time in a document/PDF format, gradually accumulating a dozen or more issues I though marketing managers should consider in hiring a freelance writer. It was akin to a buyer’s guide.

I was never happy with the layout or feel of the document, but I did want the content published, so I chose it as guinea-pig copy for the eBook. The new format would be enough of a challenge; I didn’t want to complicate matters by having to author brand-new copy as well.

Next, I trolled the Web for tips on writing an eBook. There are good resources on what to do with the eBook once you’ve written it, but few on the mechanics of putting it together.

Good and bad eBooks

I found four or five eBooks and studied them for things I liked and disliked about them.

Good eBooks:

• employ landscape layout, so that each page takes up exactly one screen and spares the reader the scroll-up-scroll-down business common to portrait layout;
• have decent design elements that give the reader a feeling of light yet inormative reading;
• contain some interactivity – embedded audio, video, links – along with the text;
• can fit a topic/chapter/lesson/point on a single page.

Ugly eBooks:

• are obviously just Microsoft Word documents distilled into PDF;
• are glorified slide decks distilled into PDF;
• fail to capitalize on the reader’s expectation of a book;
• don’t print out well.

Which application?

The best eBooks I found were created in Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress. I didn’t want to rent, buy or learn either of these packages, and I didn’t want to hire a designer for a project of indeterminate length and constant experimentation.

This obstacle delayed the start for several weeks, as I considered alternatives and examined more e-books. One day I stumbled onto an e-book from Marketo, and gradually realized that they had used Microsoft PowerPoint to create it. Most pages did not take advantage of the eBook format, but otherwise they had managed to use the application to create an eBook that was more than a PPT warmed over. It struck me that PowerPoint, for all its deficiencies and general overuse, had potential as a modest authoring tool for a modest eBook.

Microsoft Office Online has hundreds of slide templates. I found a free one that provided a good point of departure, tinkered with the color palette and slide masters and came up with something workable.

To be continued…

This is getting long for a single post (although it is becoming the stuff of its own eBook), so I’ll finish it next week.

Meanwhile, here’s a link to the final product, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer” (alternative titles welcomed).

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: brewbooks

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Three weeks ago, when I checked Electric Ladyland out of the public library, it was lost on me that this month was the anniversary of Hendrix’ death. The realization of his 40th death-day popped out of an inscrutable region of my brain that is constantly calculating how much time has gone by since whatever random event, and “All Along the Watchtower” set that engine in motion.

I got around to listening to the album during commutes to and from client sites over the last few days. Parts of it are just…trippy, I guess, and the wild experimentation with guitar licks is…enhanced (to use a common term of the 1960s) by the left-right-left-right bouncing of sound between the speakers. I can imagine the engineer in the control room having had a hair of the dog that bit Hendrix, and improvising accordingly.

When your kids know too much about rock ‘n’ roll

I was much taken by “Voodoo Child,” having forgotten what a good, strong rock song it is. There’s plenty to like in it, whether you’re fond of Hendrix in particular or the rock genre in general:

• nice guitar chirping and wa-wa work in the introduction
• good, solid crash (à la “Purple Haze”) at about bar 5
• eminently memorable – though not really hummable – theme
• AAB lyric structure
• example or two of picking out melody on the guitar that matches the notes he’s singing
• the Hendrix voice – if you want to call it that – that is short on melody and long on attitude

In short, a tune with lots of classic rock characteristics about which my generation is duty-bound to inform the next one.

So as I piled my 15-year-old son into the car this morning for the trip to school, I asked, “Are you awake enough for a Hendrix interlude?” He nodded his assent, and before I could even put my hand on the CD, he asked, “Is it ‘Voodoo Child’?”

“Damn!” I snapped. “How in the world do you know that song?”

“It’s on my iPod.”

So is everything else worth having, I guess. His brother had turned him on to “Foxy Lady,” and when he tried to buy it from the iTunes Store, he mistakenly bought an entire Hendrix anthology. Talk about stealing our generation’s thunder.

I played it anyway, and we bombed down the route to school playing air guitar. Jimi would have wanted it that way. I thought of an anecdote that, iPod or not, I was sure my son didn’t know.

“I heard once that Hendrix appeared on Dick Cavett’s talk show, and Cavett had a habit of pausing in the middle of a question to gather his thoughts before finishing the question. So he asked Hendrix, ‘Do you try to get up in the morning and…’ Pause. Hendrix jumped in: “Yeah, man, I try to get up in the morning.’”

That got the rise out of him that “Voodoo Child” hadn’t. Kicks just keep getting harder to find, but they’re still out there.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager (most of the time, anyway). He can’t imagine a 67-year-old Jimi Hendrix, but seriously doubts there would be much left of him by now.

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Don’t you wish you could be inside your reader’s head as he reads your content? What text could you throw away? What text could you monetize?

Active listening is difficult. In fact, it’s exhausting, especially if you’re new to it.

Do you know people who practice active listening? You’d know if you did. They begin their sentences with clauses like:

• “If I understand what you’re saying, you want me to…”
• “What you’re telling me is…”
• “You’re saying that you…”

Relationship counselors recommend active listening techniques because the most important question in interpersonal communications is:

Do you understand this the way I intend for you to understand it?

But What Are You Thinking About?

There is a similar question, which skeptical people like me wonder about, and which shy people like me rarely pose:

What are you thinking about while I’m talking to you?

Probably not about what I’m saying.

Now think about that dynamic and your content. Don’t you want to ask your prospects:

What are you thinking about while you’re reading my white paper/case study/Web page/collateral?

Maybe your marketing communications writer did a perfect job creating valuable content, and your ideal reader understands your message and your products exactly the way you’d intended. But that still doesn’t guarantee that the reader’s mind isn’t wandering as he reads your paper, does it?

Magical Window in Your Content

What if you could embed some kind of magical, interactive window on page 6 of your document that would connect you to the reader in real time? Your reader turns from page 5 to page 6, and your head pops out of a small frame in the middle of the page.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” you say, “but would you mind telling me what you’re thinking about right now?”

If your marketing writer has really done her job, of course, the reader will look quizzically back at you, surprised you would even pose the question. If it’s a white paper on solar power technology he’d say, “Why, I’m thinking about the solar panels installed on the roof of my company’s parking structure.” If it were the letter to the shareholders in your annual report, he might say, “I’m trying to figure out why your sales were off last year when you spent so much on upgrading your CRM system.”

Most of the time, however, that is not the answer that would come back. Instead, you’d likely hear, “I’m thinking about my daughter’s broken finger,” or “I’m thinking that I forgot to take out the steaks to thaw for dinner tonight.”

You Lose Money When the Reader’s Mind Wanders

Face it: Can you get through one of your own white papers without your mind wandering? What do you think about when you read your company’s Web copy?

This is your new test for readability in your content: Can you get every paragraph to contribute to revenue generation? Are you willing to throw away the paragraphs that don’t contribute?

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: D Sharon Pruitt

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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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Ghost blogging backs up a recognized person with professional writing experience. Marketing communications writers may also need to tune the person’s voice. Is it blogging?

“By the way,” the vice president of product development told me. “I want the posts to have a certain personality. They should sound as if Alec Baldwin wrote them.”

Alec Baldwin? Which Alec Baldwin? Alec Baldwin in “It’s Complicated,” or in “30 Rock,” or in “The Departed,” or in “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends?”

“More or less like ’30 Rock,’” he continued. “Don’t be afraid to use a little bit of irony, a bit of dry humor in the posts.”

Ghost blogging – Pros and Cons

As the term suggests, ghost blogging is like ghostwriting, except for a blog. The rich and famous are well known for hiring ghostwriters to pen their autobiographies, sometimes for partial credit, sometimes for no credit, as in Theodore Sorenson’s work for John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage. (Even Mozart is said to have ghostwritten music for wealthy patrons.)

The vice president in question is keen to build a stream of content and comments around a newly launched product. Someday, a collaborative approach to this blog may arise, with experts on his team contributing alternating posts. Meanwhile, he wants to get the ball rolling, and marketing communications writers doing ghost blogging will work for the time being.

It’s easy to find opposing views on ghost blogging. Proponents believe that it allows impossibly busy people to provide content to a waiting audience, and opponents consider it a treacherous breach of Web 2.0 trust.

But hey, we all know that Barack Obama has people who write his speeches. And, when it boils down to the choice between ghost blogging valuable content and imprisoning it in the head of somebody with no time to write it down, isn’t the Web better served by the former?

“Bring me the voice of Alec Baldwin”

So with that ethical speed bump behind us, we turn to the issue of voice.

The vice president of product development does not look like Alec Baldwin, let alone sound like him. If we study enough video on YouTube, we can come up with a way of drizzling his brand of on-screen wit and personality over the  business and technical problems that underpin the blog. I’m not worried about that, because it’s just another dimension of persuasion, which is the heart and soul of the Web.

However, even if we can assemble valuable content and season it with the actor’s tone, isn’t the result a Web-based double chicane? Is it bogus? Will the blog get flamed? Will digg and reddit pan it? Regardless of our desire to pump out valuable content, vox populi, vox Dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God), and we shall have to live with the consequences.

Frankly, however it pans out, it’s a pretty interesting project. Potentially inflammatory, but interesting nonetheless.

Back to the vice president of product development: “One more thing: Not the voice of Alec Baldwin in his blog. I can’t stand the guy’s writing.”

How would you handle this?

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: David Shankbone (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported)

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