The Content Buffet - By John White » white papers

B2B White Paper Interviews – 7 Questions (Part 2)

John White — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:30:37 +0000

Subject matter experts (SMEs) have the story in their heads. White papers help make that story readable, and these questions help build the paper.

Continuing from the previous post on interviews and how to write them up into a white paper, here are 4 more customer interview questions for generating the information readers want to see.

4. What are some current approaches to solving this business problem? Why are they inadequate?

Your readers are already making do, but they’re not very happy with what they have in place because:

it’s a chewing-gum-and-baling-wire hack
it’s too slow/expensive/low-performing
time is not on their side

That’s why they want to read your paper. This is also the opportunity to shake them out of their inertia by pointing out threats you’ve identified that haven’t yet occurred to them; e.g., “If another, less understood scenario of universal health care plays out, providers will also be on the hook for…”

5. Why/how can the approach you’ve chosen overcome these inadequacies?

This information forms the turning point for the paper, as discussion changes from listing problems to solving them. The SME’s time on this question is best spent relating how s/he has seen the approach work in the real world, in a variety of situations. Don’t soak up valuable interview time with a detailed discussion of the approach that already exists in other documentation, slide decks, technical content, etc.

Arm your readers with information and let them draw their own conclusions.

A true white paper will describe the approach rather than your product or service itself, then let readers figure things out on their own. If the paper needs to include a discussion of your product, label it a “technology overview,” “buyer’s guide” or similar. link to rant on mislabeling white papers>.

6. Which particular advantages do they get with your company’s implementation of the approach?

Again, in a true white paper, the goal is not to flog a product, but to build trust and educate. Describing a potential advantage to readers is more proof that you’re in their shoes, thinking of things that have not yet occurred to them.

For example, if the technology you’ve chosen for compressing digital movies also includes the advantage of encrypting them for protection against privacy, mention this in a clinical manner as a potential benefit, without naming it as a feature of your product.

7. Describe a few steps in adopting and integrating this approach in environments familiar to readers.

The white paper is not an implementation guide or a user manual, but this information anticipates the technology questions that will arise at the next level of scrutiny. The people responsible for installing, maintaining and living with the product or service have an itch that the white paper needs to at least begin to scratch, so don’t ignore that itch.

With the answer to this question, you can demonstrate your technical chops to all readers, even those with a business focus. Tell them about replacing the carburetor with fuel injection, but don’t go into which hoses to switch or bolts to loosen.

Once you see how to write customer interview questions that focus on real customer problems, you’ll begin to draw out the kind of information that builds trust with readers.

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: DeepCwind

B2B White Paper Interviews – 7 Questions (Part 1)

John White — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:07:18 +0000

Subject matter experts (SMEs) have the story in their heads. White papers make that story readable, and customer interview questions help build the paper.

“We want you to interview our SME, then write up the result into a paper we can use in our content marketing effort,” you say to the marketing communications writer.

Sounds easy enough. But most SMEs don’t think like a writer. They think like a businessman or exec or technologist or financier. And if they simply improvise their way through the interview, the content will suffer for it.

Not all writers understand interviews or how to write them up into a white paper. And not all SMEs give good interview. Send your writer in with concrete customer interview questions designed to tease out the information you need.

7 interview questions

Here (and in the next post) are questions whose answers make a balanced white paper easier to write.

1. Who are your ideal readers for this paper?

The better you understand this, but more readily you can make the jillions of small decisions that will go into the paper: word choice, technical depth, amount of background information to include, hypothetical scenarios and examples to cite. It’s easy to answer this question incorrectly – or to think you know the answer, yet be wrong – and end up with a white paper that misses the mark.

2. What do you want them to do once they’ve read it?

The short answer is, “Move along in the sales funnel,” which can mean a lot of things:

click on a link
pick up the phone and call you for more information
think that you’re cool
pull out their credit card
discuss it with their boss
Tweet/Like/share it

Make your expectation clear in the opening summary; e.g., “This paper will equip readers with a business case for integrating baseball card database management in their own companies.”

3. What keeps these readers awake at night? What are some of the biggest problems they face (that your product/service can solve)?

Readers will devote about 2/73rds of their attention to your product and the other 71/73rds of it to their business problems. If they’re thinking about your product at all, they’re trying to figure out how it would fit in with whatever is causing those problems and envisioning life afterwards. Given that, shouldn’t you write from their perspective?

Information about customer problems is what you and your marketing communications writer need from the SME to demonstrate to readers that you understand their predicament and, in fact, have been dealing with it in lots of variations. When readers see that you you’re thinking more about their problems than you are about your own products, they begin to trust you.

In Part 2, we’ll see customer interview questions that touch on your products, but only obliquely. Remember, nobody really cares about your products. They care about their problems and whether they can trust you to help solve them.

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

photo credit: eren

“Why Should We Keep Putting Out White Papers?” Influence.

John White — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 04:31:58 +0000

Veteran marketers may tend to become jaded about the value of white papers, but that’s unwise. For one thing, they’re still influential. For another, not everybody knows what they are.

Eccolo Media has released its 2011 B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report, covering 501 executives of US companies with influence on technology decisions. I want to mention two findings in particular.

White paper consumption down, influence up

White paper consumption decreased 14 percentage points since 2010, from 76 percent to 62 percent.

However, white paper influence increased from 41 percent to 65 percent, as measured by the number of respondents who found white papers influential or very influential.

So, marketing managers may encounter internal resistance to white paper campaigns because “fewer people read them,” but those who do read them, rely on them more.

So, write better papers and assume that they’ll be of greater impact.

Not everybody knows about white papers

This one really threw me.

Twenty-eight percent reported that they began consulting white papers for the first time in the last six months.

Huh?

So there you are, a marketing manager assuming that most decision-makers will instinctively reach for a white paper, when in fact 28 percent of your audience had never used one until recently.

Have that many people been promoted from the shop floor to management in the last six months? Unlikely in a – can we talk? – double-dip recession.

So, no matter how big the intended audience of your white paper, assume that it could handily be about one third larger.

Have a look at the entire report (free download) from Eccolo Media. It’s a good arrow to have in your marketing manager’s quiver.

photo credit: Jesse757

Beware the Statistical Rathole

John White — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 04:24:27 +0000

Marketing communications copy lives and breathes statistics, the life-blood of persuasion. What if your client doesn’t want anything to do with them?

“I’d like to cite some figures in this paper about adoption rates for this technology,” said the marketing communications writer. “Can we find data on how sales are rising from year to year?”

Seemed like a natural question to pose. If readers see that 15% of the market used turbo-synchronized schmedlapps last year and 20% used it this year, a smart manager would see a trend and make a note of it as something to follow.

“Actually, we don’t have much data on this,” replied the client. “I prefer to keep our copy around this figurative and stay away from specific numbers.”

Huh?

“As a company, we try not to get tied to individual figures or sets of data.”

HUH? This time, the writer capitalized it.

“Our preference is to point to trends loosely, as in ‘The trend for asynchronous schmedlapps is down and the trend for turbo-synchronized schmedlapps is up.’”

HUH? Capitalized and italicized it.

Then the client uttered the clincher:

Customers are happy to drag sales conversations down statistical ratholes.

Let’s think about that for a moment.

Marketing believes that statistics enrich a white paper

It’s hard to argue against using data to back up the claims you make in your white paper or marketing communications content. After all, most people base their buying decisions on one of three things:

Recommendations from trusted sources
Facts and figures
Brilliant rhetoric that intimidates or inspires them

The writer has little control over #1, and makes a living crafting copy around #2, but really shouldn’t be relied upon to make #3 work (at least not in B2B).

Research and reports are the mainstay of marcomm content, so when a customer says, in effect, “We don’t use those,” it leaves the writer at a disadvantage to produce good copy.

On the other hand…

Sales believes that statistics cripple the white paper

This is a salesperson’s perspective, and salespeople spend lots of time talking to and hearing from customers.

If you as a salesperson know that, upon reading the persuasive content your marketing manager has created, a prospect is simply going to pick it apart, impugn the data source and turn it into a speed bump on the road to a purchase order, you might argue to keep the statistics out, thankyouverymuch.

Some prospects may look at your set of data as a challenge to cite an opposing set, or search for an opposing set if they have that kind of time to kill.

So, as desperately as Sales wants collateral and content from Marketing, they may at times prefer that it be, shall we say

content unencumbered by research

Since Marketing is in business to help start conversations, and not to gum them up, some content may need to go this way.

So marketing managers, grit your teeth and endure the HUH?s from your marketing communications writer (and prepare to utter a few of your own). There will be plenty of other opportunities for you to quote all those analyst reports you’ve subscribed to.

photo credit: Editor B

Marketers: Beware the Ides of…August?

Show Your White Paper to an Industry Analyst

John White — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:16:29 +0000

How many dozens of hours did you, your writer and your reviewers just pour into that white paper? One word from an analyst can pay big dividends.

“There’s an industry analyst who knows our company and competitors very well,” said the marketing manager. “He’s pretty accessible, and he has the reputation for calling b.s. whenever we put it in front of him. Shall we show him the white paper you’re writing?”

Uhh…maybe not so much.

Early on, I wasn’t in favor of that. “We’re not writing the paper for analysts,” I countered. “We’re writing it for prospects. It might be valuable to brief him on the paper and make sure we’re not leaving anything out, but it wouldn’t be like testing the paper on an ideal reader.”

Then we went through two months of edits, rewrites, reviews, put-this-in, take-that-out, back, forth and sideways. The marketing manager brought up the topic of the analyst again. I had begun to come around.

The analyst’s perspective

Why show your white paper to an analyst? After all, they’re known for writing, but they’re not know for writing very interesting stuff.

Don’t expect an analyst to say, “You need better transitions from this section to the next one,” or “I think you need a catchier introduction.” Those things are important to ensure you engage your readers and leave them wanting more, but analysts aren’t looking at it that way.

In the short run, you want the analyst to say, “Mommy bloggers are increasing in clout, and you should broaden this first section to include them,” or “Don’t put the words ‘cloud computing‘ in the title. It’s worn out.”

In the long run, you want the analyst to tell her other clients about you. “Why are you doing this in software?” you want her to say. “Tchotchke Technologies wrote a paper on how they do it in hardware that’s ten times faster. You could triple your sales.” Or, “Take a look at Tchotchke. They’ve just put out a paper on what they’re doing, but they’re not in Europe yet. I think you could find ways to complement each other.”

Don’t show your white paper to analysts because of how they write. Show it to them because of the people they talk to.

Does it affect your content?

Should your marketing communications writer create the paper any differently, knowing that you’re going to show it to an analyst?

Yes.

He should write it better.

The analyst becomes the ideal reader. The message has to be crisp, well delivered and memorable. You were going to have your writer do that anyway, but now that you can describe your ideal reader and the conversation you want her to have, you can double-down on clarity and message.

And whatever you do, don’t give an analyst a brochure disguised as a white paper. It wastes your time and annoys the analyst.

photo credit: San Jose Library

The White Paper Outline – Discover, Consider, Decide

John White — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:22:21 +0000

Breaking your white paper into these three parts can help you build a campaign around it. Start with your white paper outline.

It was supposed to be a simple, short paper:

We’re looking for 4-6 pages of copy. It’s for a lead generation campaign. It’s about our new line of wireless schmedlapps.

That’s all they knew. I knew a little about schmedlapps myself, so they were comfortable with me. We signed the agreement and scheduled the interview.

The schmedlapp subject matter expert is a senior marketing manager. He briefed us because he knew how he wanted the campaign to go, and because he had enough exposure to customers to understand the audience for the paper. It was a jolly, upbeat interview, resulting in a decent helping of grist for the writing mill.

So I started the white paper outline

as I always do: I reviewed my notes, listened to the recording (you do record your interviews, don’t you?) and began moving bits around into a decent flow. Then, suddenly, I got a wild idea from an Alinean webinar I attended featuring Tom Pisello & Jim Novy.

The webinar was titled “Mapping Your Interactive White Papers to the Buyer’s Journey” and it emphasized three steps on that journey:

Discovery
Consideration
Decision

Ker-ching!

I’ve never been shy about using a good idea – especially if it wasn’t mine to begin with – so I started rearranging the white paper outline into exactly those sections.

Discover – Why are Schmedlapps Becoming So Important?
Consider – Are Schmedlapps Right for My Organization?
Decide – How Do I Make the Case for Schmedlapps in my Department?

Readers crave structure in white papers, and this seemed perfect. Betting on the come, I wound out the 4-6 pages of copy to an outline worth 9-11 pages and submitted it.

Double ker-ching – The client’s reaction

We held a conference call to review the outline – they had given me lamentably few actionable changes in writing – and most of the marketing manager’s comments were run of the mill until he said:

I think we should take this structure and break it out into three separate white papers.

To repeat, I’ve never been shy about using a good idea – especially if it wasn’t mine to begin with, and could result in additional business – so I let the manager continue down that road. He had sold himself on the idea of developing three separate white papers and telling the schmedlapp story over a three-month campaign.

Works for me. And, I didn’t have to convince anybody of anything.

So, we’re full speed ahead in building the discover-consider-decide series of papers. The client understands that this represents a change of scope, which affects the original estimate. It’s a better-rounded series of papers for the client, and new work for me.

Caveat writor

While I think this is a good structure for the schmedlapps story and campaign, I don’t want to encourage marketing communications writers to impose it on every white paper you ever write. There are times where it won’t apply, and even when it does apply, you should not use it for every paper.

Why not?

Because your writing will become formulaic and staid, and your white papers will start to look like those ghastly boring case studies that everybody posts on their website, with the invariable Challenge-Solution-Result flow.

If the only tool you have is Discover-Consider-Decide, you’ll start bending every client’s story to fit.

Keep this in mind as one way to tell the story, but not the only way.

photo credit: joguldi

What Should and Shouldn’t Go into Your White Paper

John White — Thu, 26 May 2011 10:59:49 +0000

What are you going to put into that white paper you’re planning? Don’t fill it with garbage or you’ll annoy your readers and lose their trust.

It’s easy to confuse “we need to write a white paper” with “we need to tell more people about us.”

Wise marketing managers are able to discriminate between these needs and keep the chest-pounding out of the white paper. Cooler heads keep in mind that people don’t buy features; they buy benefits.

Eventually, wise marketers can convince those who want to fill white papers with the company’s fabulous technical advances that that kind of material belongs in a brochure or advertisement. That works for a given audience in a given context, but expectations are higher for something you want to call a white paper, so you need to be more subtle.

Still, that only tells you what shouldn’t go into your white paper. What should go into it?

What should and shouldn’t go into a white paper

First, consider a few simple guidelines:

It should be easy for me to learn something useful from your white paper.
I should be able to see my problem, or my customers’ problem, properly described in your white paper.
The structure of your white paper should be obvious to me, so that I can skip any uninteresting part and resume at the next meaty bit.
I should feel that I’m drawing my own conclusions from your white paper, instead of drinking your Kool-Aid.
When I finish the white paper, I should feel that I could probably trust – or at least not distrust – your organization to help me with my problem.

In general, then, here are some should’s and shouldn’ts about what goes into a white paper:

White papers should contain:

industry data from reputable sources
quantifiable trends
a credible explanation of a real-world problem
broad strokes about your category of technology or approach to the problem (but don’t describe it as your technology)
sensible arguments in favor of this technology, weighted heavily toward solving the real-world problem explained earlier

White papers should not contain:

your opinions about where the industry is headed (call that an industry overview instead)
details about which competing products have which features across your category (call that a buyer’s guide instead)
a list of feature-benefit pairs, even if they are customer-oriented (call that a brochure instead)
details of a customer engagement or use case (call that a case study instead)
customer quotations about your company or technology (call that a testimonial instead)

“Am I ready to write now?”

Well, not really. You also need to know what motivates the ideal reader of your white paper. I’ve posted on that in the past and shall surely do so again in the future. The more information about your audience that you can give to your marketing communications writer, the better the resulting white paper.

Keep in mind this post from Jonathan Farrington on negotiating with the four personality types. Marketing managers need to understand these types – drivers, expressives, amiables and analyticals – as much as salespeople do, and publish content that floats everybody’s boat.

It may take more than a single white paper to do that.

photo credit: swanksalot

How to Create an eBook in Less Than 20 Hours (Part 2 of 2)

John White — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 13:03:18 +0000

More on writing an eBook, a relatively painless content vehicle that lies somewhere between a presentation and a white paper.

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).

7 Marketing Questions and Formats for Answering Them

John White — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 05:32:25 +0000

If the role of marketing is to start a conversation, then the role of the marketing manager is to come up with new answers to a handful of questions from prospects.

Consider everything you have your marketing communications writers do for you in light of a few life-or-death questions that your prospects pose:

1. “Who are you and what the heck do you do?” This is pretty elementary. What piece of marketing do you have in place to present yourself to prospects? Is it easy to digest? Are you convinced that people understand who you are and what you do when you explain it?

Melinda Brennan wrote about business mistakes around targeting a niche. If your niche is annihilating termites, it’s pretty easy to tell people who the heck you are. But if you also kill rats and remove beehives, you need to figure out how you’re going to introduce yourself when you wear multiple hats.

Have a look at how JDSU does it.

Format of choice: Website

2. “Why should we buy from you?” This is a trick question. The prospect is really asking, “What’s in it for me to buy from you?” Security? An end-to-end, well thought-out system? Warm fuzzies?

Answer this question with a question: “What has your hair on fire, Ms. Prospect? What nagging problems are you dealing with?”

You’ll do two things by asking a question here: prove that you are willing to listen and help both you and the prospect qualify each other. These are perfect business goals for a marketing manager.

Format of choice: Prospect questionnaire

3. “What makes you different from everybody else?” To answer this, you reflexively contrast yourself with your competitors, but that’s not as important as aligning yourself with your prospects and figuring out what they want that is different from what is already out there.

Inebriated by the potential of wireless and brisk consumer uptake, carriers out-cooled one another for years – more devices, more services, lower rates, better plans – until they got hip to the fact that subscribers (that’s us) really just wanted their calls not to drop. That realization has brought AT&T and Verizon to their current mine’s-bigger-than-yours campaigns, with billboards claiming coverage for “97% of Americans” versus hundreds of technicians walking behind the guy with glasses.

Formats of choice: Surveys, primary research

4. “How will that help me with my business problems?” I constantly paraphrase David Meerman Scott on the issue of figuring out which problems you solve for your customers. They don’t care that your technology is a neat hack, or that you can manage agile development among 100 software developers in your sleep. In fact, they probably can’t even hear your explanation because they’re distracted by problems they’re trying to solve.

If you can show them how it solves their business problem, it will be easier for them to envision paying you.

Format of choice: Business-benefit white papers

5. “Interesting. How does your product/service work?” Do you have materials that explain how your product or service works under the hood? Sooner or later, somebody technical needs to see and be convinced of the merits of your approach.

If you’re selling a car that improves mileage by disabling one spark plug above 65mph, plan on telling prospects how you do it. If you help filthy rich people stay filthy rich, get ready to explain how you do it.

Mind you, not everybody asks this question. It’s the hallmark of the analytical buyer personality type, which is about 25% of the population. Can you afford to not have a story for 25% of your prospects? I thought not.

Format of choice: Technical white papers

6. “Interesting. How much does your product/service cost?” You knew they were going to ask this sooner or later. Note that it doesn’t prove that they want to buy; some people ask just to have the information, or to disqualify themselves.

You’re better off making absolutely certain that you understand all of their needs before you name a price.

Format of choice: More questions

7. “How do I know I can trust you?” There’s an easy answer to this, which finally landed in a memorable movie this year: Inception.

Cobb: How do I know I can trust you?

Saito: You don’t.

And that’s about what it boils down to. Prospects don’t really know whether they can trust you, but until they have at least some glimmer of confidence that you’ll do what you say you’ll do, they won’t buy from you.

Formats of choice: case studies, customer success stories, blog, real-time media

What are the questions you face, and the formats you use to answer them?

photo credit: Hamed Saber

3 Unexpected Places to Find New Content Sources

John White — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 01:57:09 +0000

Not all content sources are as obvious as your boss’ meeting notes. Smart marketing managers look for content ideas in other places as well.

It’s the beginning of the week, and time to round up some meat to feed the content beast in your organization. Do you keep sending your marketing communications writers back to the same sources for ideas, like industry reports from MarketingCharts and articles on iMedia Connection?

Try looking under a few new rocks.

Trip reports as content sources

I’m reading a fat book on General Douglas MacArthur: American Caesar by William Manchester. If you know anything about the General, it’s probably that he wasn’t encumbered by modesty. He enjoyed language and wasn’t afraid to use it.

With a sudden vacancy in their ranks, the members of the 1928 American Olympic Committee asked MacArthur if he wanted to be their president. Facing a dismal paucity of war opportunities, MacArthur seized on this and ended up inspiring U.S. athletes to set 17 records and win more contests in Amsterdam than the next two countries combined. He turned his trip report for President Coolidge into a blustering missive into which any marketing manager would gladly sink his or her teeth:

In undertaking this difficult task, I recall the passage in Plutarch wherein Themistocles, being asked whether he would rather be Achilles or Homer, replied, ‘Which would you rather be: a conqueror in the Olympic Games, or the crier who proclaims who are the conquerors?’ And indeed to portray adequately the vividness and brilliance of that great spectacle would be worthy even of the pen of Homer himself. No words of mine can even remotely portray such great moments as the reisistless onrush of that matchless California eight as it swirled and crashed down the placid waters of the Sloten; that indomitable will for victory which marked the deathless rush of Barbuti; that sparkling combination of speed and grace by Elizabeth Robinson which might have rivaled even Artemis herself on the heights of Olympus…

Obviously, MacArthur had his reader’s attention and opportunely hammed it up, but look at how clever he was in interweaving his own trip report with the Hellenic character of the games themselves.

Even if the people your company is shuttling around the world are not as eloquent as the General, they do have stories. Whether they survive to see the light of your blog is up to you.

Status reports as content sources

When it comes to this category of business writing, most managers probably paraphrase Groucho Marx:

I thought my razor was dull until I read that report.

The writer tries to avoid admitting mistakes and schedule slips, and the reader scans the report for red flags, as well as content for his/her own status report, which another manager will in turn decry as boring.

Still, a clever marketing manager will spot details in the status reports that may add up to trends:

Why are we working so much on our Oracle implementation?
Why is there such a scramble for talent in the Shanghai office?
What did we learn from the Romanian partners who visited?

Naturally, you can’t publish everything, but censorship is part of your job anyway, and it’s the source of ideas that’s important. What if you pulled this into a weekly blog post called

Here’s What the Hell We Did this Week

You may – ahem – season to taste.

CRM logs as content sources

This one is bound to make you friends. Take the elevator down to the third level of the Inferno, where your nameless, faceless colleagues with headsets and cush balls listen to what real people say about your products and services all day long. If you can’t get content ideas from them, then you’re really not trying.

Read between the lines of what prospects are asking you and customers are telling you. Search for stories they’re trying to tell you. Look at how long the logs are: is that a story about lengthened sales cycles? Are they using your products in unexpected ways? Mine those for customer success stories.

Keep the “R” (relationship) in “CRM” (customer relationship management). Your relationships with your customers are the stuff of marketing communications and content, so don’t lose sight of them.

Those are a few unexpected places in which to find ideas for new content. The enterprising marketing manager will figure out incentives by which to turn this effort into a contest for employees.

Where are you looking for new content ideas?

photo credit: Klearchos Kaputsis