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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What’s in your content: Marketing writing or corporate cheerleading? A parable for the marketing manager.

A dear friend who does a lot of business writing once remarked,

Compact, compelling copy that doesn’t fall into business jargon is tough.  So much of it is fake words strung together with cheerleading.

I’ve mulled that over for a couple of years and can finally weave a parable around it.

In short, my response is:

You say “fake words” and “cheerleading” as if they were bad things.

Here’s why.

Sporting Event = Game + Cheerleading

I’ve taken to attending football and basketball games at my sons’ school of late. It didn’t take me very long to develop a deep appreciation for the role played by the top-flight cheerleading squad in these sporting events: they cheer, kick, jump, form pyramids, turn somersaults, sell raffle tickets and generally spice up the evening. They’re a show unto themselves, really, and I can easily forget about the game I’m supposed to be watching, for all the talent, energy and acrobatic skill they display.

Cheerleaders are unflappable. Regardless of the team’s plight or good fortune, their tone is upbeat, emotionally engaging and designed to make you feel good about being there. It’s a job they do well, and we spectators need them to do it for us. They don’t put points on the board, but it’s great performing nonetheless.

Meanwhile, on the field or the court, the game is in one of three states:

1. It’s a wipeout, and we’re winning.
2. It’s a wipeout, and we’re losing.
3. It’s a close game, and it’s making us nervous.

The marvelous thing about cheerleaders is that, regardless of the state, they’re doing the same thing. Sure, maybe they’re doing the touchdown cheer less often in state 2, but they’re still cheering almost constantly, with smiles on their faces, pom-poms in their hands and high kicks in their legs.

Why?

Because their voice is an important part of the game, too. Other people have the job of scoring points; cheerleaders have a different job.

Writing and Cheerleading

As a marketing manager, you’re responsible for telling your organization’s story and starting the conversations that Sales will continue. But you can’t use the same voice or tone for every story and conversation. (If you do, you must be tired of it.)

What if “fluff” and cheerleading are an important part of your game, too?

Think of the marketing pieces you put out: white papers, press releases, case studies, technology overviews, market research, annual reports, corporate backgrounders, and all of the copy on your Website. Can you honestly look at all that content and say that it’s pure game, pure fact, pure attempts to persuade prospects with may-the-best-company-win objectivity?

Sure, you give your writers access to your executives, to industry analysts, to your internal data and research, and they give you back valuable content that Sales can use to persuade prospects and beat your competitors.

But fess up; you’ve also got some corporate cheerleading in there, haven’t you? A little rah-rah-sis-boom-bah-go-team-go that puts a sunny face on things, even if sales are tanking and your technology is under scrutiny by the European Union?

Can you be that honest with your marketing communications writers? Can you tell them, “That report you wrote last month was dead-on objective, but this needs to be an upbeat piece on how our product is making life better for soccer moms. Don’t mention our ongoing patent litigation; just paint a favorable picture. It’s what we need right now.”

More crucially, when your colleagues start making snide remarks about “fluff pieces,” can you take the heat?

Yes, you can. As a marketing manager you’ve done your job by providing both objective and “soft” content. Just tell the cynics the parable of the football game and the cheerleaders.

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: avinashkunnath

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White paper summaries or abstracts take time to write and to read. Are they worth it? They are if they help answer tough questions in a hurry.

Do you rely on an abstract at the beginning of a white paper to tell you what you’re about to read? Do you think the readers of your own papers rely on your own abstracts? Do you wonder whether it’s worth it to create them?

You can find a lively, ongoing debate on the topic in forums like whitepapersource.com, with experts contending that an “executive summary” (read the scorn I heap on that term elsewhere) takes away from the persuasive essence of a white paper. Other experts contend that the abstract is necessary for packaging, SEO, article submittal, etc.

They frame their debate in the context of a reader with a white paper in hand and ready to read, but a post from Mark McClure of SamuraiWriter.com zooms out for a much broader context.

Personally, I think that an abstract should answer 1 question very quickly:

• Is it worth my time to read this entire paper?

Mark takes a step back, recalling organizations in which “director-level decision makers were preparing a report or presentation for their bosses…where technology directors were in the hot seat over project ‘x’ with various C-level dignitaries.”

Mark points out that the goal of these meetings was to answer 3 questions about the project under discussion:

• Can we delay or cancel it?
• Can we get it cheaper or go elsewhere?
• What if it doesn’t work?

“White papers that helped middle managers address the concerns (nay, fears) of the budget-holders and influence-wielders in such meetings were deemed ‘worth reading’ in the preparation for the meeting.”

What if you could kill these 3 birds with 1 abstract in your white papers? Better yet, cut to the chase: Instead of opening with an “abstract,” call it your “Summary and Recommendation”. Catch your reader unaware by making your recommendation right off the bat:

“The translation/localization industry is not doing enough to help customers develop new pricing models.”

“CEOs should refrain from corporate blogging because it dulls rather than sharpens their influence.”

“Wireless carriers who resist offering personalization and discovery technology to subscribers will have their lunch eaten by new kids on the block.”

Think about it: Isn’t that the answer your readers are after? Give it to them early on, and use the body of the paper to support it. Now, that’s real value in your content.

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: Marshall Astor

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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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A parable: Valuable content and searchability are as important to religion as they are to your marketing communication.

In our parish, believe it or not, we pay a fair amount of attention to Sunday sermons. You can become blasé about sermons pretty easily, but I’ve heard several of my friends begin conversations with “Did you notice how Father mentioned <topic X> in the sermon today?” The audience is listening, and chatting afterwards.

I like Father Chuck. He’s editor of the local Catholic newspaper (a profession he shares with my departed father-in-law, which also ratchets him up a notch in my estimation), so he’s articulate. He’s affable and his sermons are listenable, mostly because of the way he paces his delivery. He’s not at our church every week, so there’s a novelty-factor to his sermons as well.

Father Chuck was talking about Web 2.0 yesterday, although I don’t think he realized it.

“Your giving is important, and it’s one of the most important traditions in the Church, as today’s gospel reminds us,” he preached. “One of my friends is an accountant, and he tells me that he can always tell a Catholic’s tax return because the rate of charitable donations to total income is low compared to the returns of people in other religions.”

Some religions tithe a full 10%, of course, and Father Chuck cited statistics according to which Catholics donate about 1.8%, Baptists donate 2.5% and Jews donate 3.4% of their respective annual incomes. I don’t know whether he was laying a guilt-trip on us and expecting us to give more as a result – “Now that I’m retired as a pastor, I no longer need to worry about money in the parish” – but I’m willing to cede the benefit of the doubt to him and assume that he was just holding up examples for us to approximate. Maybe also trying to make life easier for our pastor.

At this point, the Web 2.0 angle ran through my mind: “Well, Father, if you’re putting valuable content out there that people really want, and making it easy for them to find it, they’ll gladly pay you for it. The Web has shown us that valuable content and searchability are the keys to everything.”

A lot of religious (and pseudo-religious) organizations understand this. Many of them sensationalize the value in the content and blow it out of proportion, but eventually they lose their luster. The same thing happens with marketing efforts and content, when the reality of the product doesn’t support the hype of the content.

About Hiring a Writer

What does this have to do with hiring a writer?

You don’t need to hire a writer who is Catholic, and you don’t need to hire a writer who donates more than 1.8% of her income to charity. However, for success in marketing communications, you do need to hire a writer who understands valuable content and searchability.

Either that, or figure out a way to convince your customers to tithe.

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: shioshvili

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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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Put out great content

Half the art to getting found on the Web involves putting out great content. Your marketing communications writer needs to know this and produce accordingly.

A post at Problogger this week extols the virtues of linking to other content on the Web:  Linking reinforces the relationships – both human and digital – that make the Web go round. A quote at the end of the post from Google’s Matt Cutts:

I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are making great content that will attract links in the first place…

Your writer needs to know that her job is not merely to generate copy to keep up with everybody else. Her job is to create valuable content that will attract eyeballs and prospects and links (“oh, my!”).

Here are three things that will help her succeed in that:

1. Your keyword basket. If you’ve done the research and know the keywords you’re chasing, use them liberally. After you’ve enhanced your Web pages with them, have your marketing communications writer use them in press releases, white papers, case studies, blog posts and industry articles.
2. Your messaging. “Great content” is the right message in front of the right reader, eliciting the right response. If your messaging emphasizes how safe your products are, you don’t want your writer wasting words on how economical they are; that’s off-message. As a marketing manager, you should know your messaging and be able to articulate it to outside writers.
3. Your competitors’ copy. While your competitors zig, you should zag. Whatever they’re doing in their copy, you should be doing something else. A good writer can use competing copy like a bumper on a billiard table to bounce your content into a different direction and help you position yourself differently.

Once you have the great content, you can take it to the Web and social media teams and have them hang it in all the right places.

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Re-purposing content is part of the art of marketing. Have your marketing communications writer convert big-bite content into multiple smaller pieces and put them into different channels.

“We have a white paper, but it’s too long for this day and age.”

Of course, the engineer or executive who wrote the paper doesn’t think that, but you as the marketing manager can see it, as you peruse your content-landscape for pieces that will catch the attention of prospects and influencers in your industry.

Have your writer edit long pieces down to short marketing pieces that take on their own life and tell your story more succinctly. MarketingProfs’ “Get to the Point!” series does this very well for its paying members by distilling marketing-oriented content from a variety of long-winded sources down to regular, five-paragraph e-mail messages.

Source Content

Some obvious candidates for repackaging:

• White papers and thought-leadership papers. Companies place a lot of store by these pieces, so don’t treat them like wedding china and leave them hanging in a cupboard on your Web site for only occasional use. Have your writer pull out individual sections (The Problem, Current Approaches, What the Industry Needs, etc.) and make them self-standing.
• Webinars and podcasts. These are good sources, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that this is a simple matter of transcription. Even trained speakers introduce a lot of non sequiturs and interrupted sentences to live delivery, so your marketing communications writer needs to bend the text back into useful shape and logical flow.
• Slide deck presentations. I’ve posted on this before, and presentations are bagfuls of bullets waiting for an chance to live outside of the projector. Your sales and product teams probably have dozens of them that you’ve never seen before, but that can help you tell your story better and more authoritatively.

3 Ways to Make Them Work

You don’t need to tell your in-house contributors that their content is too long; just tell them that you’re going to give it life in several more important channels.

1. Teasers. Use them like movie trailers to bring visitors back to a landing page with the entire piece. The right five paragraphs in front of the right technical audience will result in clicks, page visits, downloads and conversions.
2. Blog posts. You do have a blog, don’t you? Have a look at Seth Godin and Tom Peters on the power of blogging, and follow Denise Wakeman for tips on making corporate blogging work. When you have ready-made content you can post, you’re halfway there.
3. Article/content marketing. Another important place for shopping your content out is in content repositories like ezinearticles, goarticles, articlecity, buzzle.com, articledashboard.com, amazines.com, ideamarketers.com and others oriented to your industry. Of importance here is the resource box you create to ensure that readers can find and follow you once they like your content. Read Steve Shaw at Creative Article Marketing for more on this channel.

In most organizations it’s easier to find long marketing pieces than short ones, but there’s a lot of value in the content once you’ve re-purposed it for new channels.

Have you tried this in your organization? What results do you see?

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