Microsoft Office file properties are juicy bits of metadata. Content marketing managers do well to poke around in these file properties.
The coolest thing about listening to records was the music. The second-coolest thing was the liner notes.
Who wrote this tune? Who played bass? When did they record it? How long is it? Where was it recorded? Who’s on backup vocals? Who designed the cover?
Wrapped around the content was a layer of information that described the music and revealed bits of a story behind it.
Many years later, I came to understand this information for what it was: metadata. Data about data.
File properties
Every file you send and receive today contains metadata, a little story behind the content. In some files, it’s as simple as:
- filename
- size
- date and time last saved
Those metadata don’t tell much you of a story. But most files containing real content – MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and PDF files – can reveal a lot more.
Maybe it’s that I don’t spend enough time perusing record liner notes any more, but I am constitutionally incapable of reviewing an MS Office file or PDF without first poking around in its file properties (or document properties). I just enjoy looking for the story behind the file.
Microsoft Office file properties
Have a look at the dialog box below that contains the metadata in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. I usually go straight to the Summary tab, which contains the most metadata.
First, I should mention that merely locating this dialog box is becoming more difficult. Until Office 2003, a simple Alt-F, I sufficed to pop it open in Windows. Since Office 2007, the key combination is Alt-F, I, Q, S, down-arrow. They’re not making it any easier. (If you know what it is in Office for Mac, please let us know in the comments.)
File properties dialog, Microsoft Office
Title: This field is self-explanatory, but it doesn’t depend on the file name. Usually, the app scoops up the first few words or the document, or any text you’ve formatted with the Title style. You can also make up your own title and place it in this field yourself. There’s probably some way to search on Title in Office, Windows or MacOS.
What’s interesting, though, is the metadata that might be left over from the last time the file was saved. Suppose your company is Macy’s, and Cosmodemonic has sent you a pricing proposal, and the Title field reads “Special Pricing – Gimbels”. So, you’ve just gotten the bit of dish about whom else Cosmodemonic is talking to. Busted!
Author: This field does self-populate, but not very consistently. It’s usually the most interesting bit of metadata to me because it contains the name, as burned into Microsoft Office during installation, of the original author of the file.
Unfortunately, a lot of enterprises burn a boilerplate author name – “Gargoyle Industries Employee” or “Breathlessly Ecstatic Dell Customer” – into Office, so the default entry tells you nothing useful.
However, the Author field can surprise you, too. Like when you get a late revision of a paper you wrote, and somebody else has replaced your name with his/her name in this field. Busted!
Company: Again, this field is populated with data burned in during the installation of Office. Of course, it’s possible to overwrite it, but not everybody knows that. So the next time you receive a legal document like a contract or a non-disclosure agreement from a business partner, have a look at the Company field and find out which law firm they swiped it from. Busted!
Keywords: But enough of the cloak and dagger. The Keywords field contains metadata of some potential business importance, especially when you populate it with the keywords that you want search engines to find.
I’m not sure that the search engines pick up these keywords if you simply hang your Word, Excel or PowerPoint file out on the Web, because these formats are binary. But if you save your Office file as a PDF or – heaven help you – HTML file, and then publish the file where the search engines can find it, you’ll see that the keywords you enter to this field are preserved for the search engines to index.
Comments: This is an excellent place to store comments about the file’s history. Excellent, except that nobody would ever think to look for important information buried all the way down here. Most people pump the file name with version numbers, revision dates and initials of reviewers, all of which should really go here. Again, metadata in this field is probably searchable in Windows or Office.
Statistics tab: Click over to the Statistics tab of this dialog box for one other bit of metadata, which is Last saved by (or Last modified by). This is not always the same as the author, especially if the file has been out for review. So, if Mr. Big sends you back “his” revisions and tells you how carefully he pored over your most recent draft, and you see that the file was Last modified by an intern, you can privately assume that perhaps Mr. Big is exaggerating his involvement in your draft.
Custom tab: Finally, on the Custom tab you can create and set your own variables and properties and use them for document automation and update-fields. When you send the file as an attachment in Outlook, several bits of metadata (e.g., _EmailSubject, _AuthorEmail, _PreviousAdHocReviewCycleID) land here automatically.
Had enough sleuthing for one post? Next time, I’ll walk through the document properties in PDFs. There’s plenty of dish there as well, if you know how to place 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: Epiclectic
Of all the pages on your organization’s site, About Us is probably the windiest. If you really want visitors to know something about you, be smarter than that.
Do you ever look at the About Us pages of other organizations? Have you ever seen a good one? What if you put some real thought into yours?
Stop and think about the chance you have for intimacy and a personal connection to your visitors on an About Us page. Amid the blizzard of pages grouped around Products, Solutions, Services, Pricing, Support and Contact, it can be a window into your company’s soul.
It can be a lone page crying in the wilderness, “Never mind all of the commerce and hyperventilation. Here’s a look at who we are, how we got this way and what we want to do with the company.”
First, personalize your email campaigns
With one client, I was working on a email campaign to both prospects and existing customers. In the closing, I included the text
As usual, please get in touch with me at hermione@zengen.com or simply reply to this message if you want to discuss this with me some more.
Then I appended a signature block with Hermione’s name and title.
“What’s that for?” Hermione asked when we reviewed the draft over the phone.
“This is email. When you receive email, you expect to see the sender’s name at the bottom, don’t you?”
“Yes, but this is different. I see no reason to personalize an email campaign.”
“Why not? Are you afraid that they don’t really want to hear from you?”
“It just seems a bit odd to use personalization in an email campaign.”
And, of course, personalizing your About Us page is even more odd.
Then, personalize your About Us page
This is a taller order, but consider these three steps:
- Remove all of the existing nonsense about who you are and how great your products are. Nobody cares anyway; they care about their business problems and whether they can rely on you to solve them. This means you have to get rid of lots of meaningless words that just fill up space – words like “flexible,” “robust,” “world-class,” “scalable,” “cutting-edge,” “mission-critical,” “market-leading,” “industry-standard,” “groundbreaking” and “innovative” – and the sentences that contain those words.
- Have your marketing communications writer come up with a SHORT description of what your organization does, or what you want your website/blog to communicate to visitors. Believe it or not, there are millions of people who don’t know what you do, and your About Us text has to make it clear to them.
- Use the words “you” and “I”. Sure, every organization is a team effort, but your visitors and customers deal with only one person at a time. Instead of hiding behind a corporate veil, put somebody – the CEO, the bizdev manager, the customer advocate, the receptionist – out in front of the castle gates by putting his/her name at the bottom of the About Us page.
To some degree, of course, your company should agree on the description of its soul embodied in your About Us page. The shorter it is, the less there will be to quibble about and disagree over in review loops. And you can always change it in two months; it’s only HTML. Have a look at what no less than The Blog Tyrant considers the 12 best About Us pages in the known galaxy.
I drafted another client’s About Us page touting four goals of most of the site’s likely visitors and describing (in you-oriented language) how the client’s software tools helped achieve those goals. I added a personalized signature block. It wasn’t bad, but it was a reach.
The feedback?
I really like what you’ve done here. While I think the personalized idea is a good one, I am just not sure how it will work in practicality since there are so many stakeholders to this site. There are quite a few groups that touch developers, and nothing internally holds these groups together. So I fear our internal dysfunction makes your good idea hard to implement.
So it goes. The result, after client edits, was about 65% of what I’d hoped to achieve, and the rest landed on the cutting room floor.
Marketing managers: Have you managed to nudge your company toward personalization? How is it going?
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: Wootang01
Don’t you get tired of fretting about content marketing? Don’t you envy businesses that can somehow do without it?
I’ve spent a decade or more in content marketing, helping clients refine and tell their story with case studies, white papers, newsletter articles and Web content. I’ve been helping them demonstrate that they understand their customers’ problems and can be trusted to help solve them.
For that matter, I’ve put out acres of my own content to build trust with my prospects.
For that matter, you have, too. We’ve published jillions of words to attract prospects and help move them down the sales funnel.
Doesn’t it get tiring sometimes? What if we didn’t have to work that hard at it?
Some businesses don’t need content marketing
I spent 24 years looking for a decent barber and finally found one in Bruce, the husband of one of my wife’s friends.
You want to hear the sum total of Bruce’s content marketing?
“Hi. This is Bruce. At 281-5026. Leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you.”
Bruce’s shop has been reviewed twice on Yelp, but he isn’t named in the reviews and I doubt he even knows the reviews are there. He has no website, no blog, doesn’t know what a white paper is, has no use for case studies or a newsletter.
But he’s made a successful living cutting hair for ages, and he has a steady flow of new and returning customers.
Obviously, Bruce’s business depends on referrals and word of mouth, not on his ability to land high on the SERPs. In the world of business-to-consumer (B2C), sometimes you can get away with that.
Referrals and word of mouth are important to your business as well, but it’s only part of the mix. That’s why you, as marketing manager, spend your day pumping out audio, video and text to create conversations with prospects and preserve relationships with customers.
Bruce manages to create those conversations and preserve those relationships one-on-one, and the sum total of his marketing presence is a cell phone greeting.
Must be nice…
Of course, business-to-business (B2B) content marketing is a long way from B2C content marketing. But still, it must be nice to compress it into “leave a message at the tone.”
By the way, what do people hear when they phone your organization? What kind of relationships are you building while your callers are on hold or navigating your directory?
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: aroid
Your readers need to see themselves in the marketing content you publish. Otherwise, you’re a marketing manager just writing to hear yourself shout.
You know those year-end letters you receive around the holidays from your friends and family members? The ones filled with all the valuable content and important details that pop into your Uncle Willy’s head as he’s leafing through the calendar, looking for things to write about?
“…Felix fell off the stepladder while pruning the snail vines and twisted his ankle, so there went his bowling season…”
“…Kristin’s front tooth was loose for what seemed like ages until it finally fell out, and the Tooth Fairy brought her 5 dollars…”
“…and then Noodles, our Pekingese, got the mumps. I told the vet I’d never heard of a dog getting the mumps, and he said…”
“…our second trip to Branson with Alice and Bernie, but we never did find the other waffle…”
and on and on and on.
You know what? Like it or not, those year-end letters are content. Think about them the next time you publish a white paper, case study, newsletter, blog post or technical article.
“My white paper isn’t that dull.”
What makes you so sure of that?
Think about those year-end letters: what makes them so banal? Why do their recipients complain about them so consistently? Why would you rather drink battery acid than read Aunt Rose’s letter?
Because those people are writing right past you.
Your eyes glaze over as you move from one paragraph to the next. You’re hoping against hope that Cousin Bess will remember that live people of her own flesh and blood receive these things and actually form an audience. You want Grandma Perkins to wake up and realize that she has your attention for a few precious minutes and that she should take advantage of them to tell you something meaningful to you.
But alas, Maudie plods along from Florida vacation to lower back pain to school play, blissfully ignorant of the fact that readers are dying to see themselves in the letter.
Are you doing that to your readers in your marketing content? Are you writing right past them in your zeal to beat your messaging drum?
Put your readers into your white paper
Stop asking the question, “What do I want to write about?” It’s more important to ask, “What do my readers want to read about?”
When your readers can see themselves in your content, you score with them. They notice that you’re out to do more than just talk about yourself and they begin to trust you to give them valuable content.
James Chartrand posted on Copyblogger recently about “giving yourself a real person to write for.” The people who send you ghastly year-end letters are doing that, except that they themselves are that real person. Your marketing content needs to be for a real person in your audience.
Before you publish that white paper, case study, newsletter, blog post or technical article this week, run these two litmus tests on it:
- Can your readers see themselves in the title? What did you call your paper: “An Exploration of Cloud-based Policy Management for the Public Sector” or “Five Things Government IT Managers Need to Know about Policies in the Cloud?” In which title are your target readers more likely to see themselves?
- Can your readers immediately see whether the content is relevant to them? Are you going to make them read half the document before they can figure out what’s in it for them? Why don’t you summarize the main messages of the piece in a few bullets and put them in a box near the top? Help readers decide quickly whether it’s worth their time or not.
Even if you still need work on pulling your readers in, these quick fixes will give them a break.
And if you’re in doubt about your marketing content, just keep Cousin Ralph’s year-end letter near your keyboard. Every marketing manager needs an occasional reminder of what not to do.
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: legends2k
Make your marketing content so valuable and so good that readers can’t tell how you make money. Here are three examples of a new kind of valuable content.
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
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
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
Excuses, reasons, challenges, obstacles…call them what you will, they’re mosquitoes at your Content Buffet that hamper marketing efforts.
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
When your marketing copy ends up in unintended places, make sure it doesn’t embarrass you. If it’s not good enough to be caught anywhere, it shouldn’t be your copy.
I subscribe to Fierce Wireless. Every day, they send me a free newsletter with wireless industry news. Big names – Cisco, Ericsson, AT&T, Nokia – sponsor the newsletter, so every week or so I get email with an ad.
I don’t mind an ad, but I do mind lousy copy in an ad.
And I really mind a datasheet that somebody mistakenly used as an ad.
The wrong copy for email
Twice in a week I received a sponsored email through Fierce Wireless from the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company (not its real name), an outfit that certainly knows a thing or two about marketing.
The email reads something like a product announcement, with lots of jargon-crammed bullets describing capabilities, features and benefits. It tells me all about active network abstraction and an XML-based Broadband Query Language (BQL) API.
I don’t care about this stuff.
I might care, if the copy talked about the problems that afflict people who need it. But the copy doesn’t even give me that chance.
The copy does mention (twice) that service providers and other network operators can now upgrade. But it doesn’t tell them why they should care.
The wrong email for the audience
Obviously, I’m not a network operator, so I shouldn’t have received this message. It was the wrong email for such a broad audience. It was wasted on me.
But it really didn’t have to be.
People are going to see your marketing communications – white papers, case studies, Web content, newsletters, blog – whether you intend those people as the audience or not.
At the very least, a poorly targeted impression should still help you as a marketing manager to build your brand. Your copy shouldn’t turn potential acquaintances off in a hailstorm of features and benefits.
Don’t put out dull copy. You never know where it’s going to land. Or whom you’re going to turn off when it does land.
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: foxypar4
Marketing communication managers grow long-lived bodies of content like white papers, case studies and blog posts. What if time didn’t matter in content marketing?
Consider a Japanese approach to content marketing in which the content disappears after about a day. What can you learn from that?
American content marketer extraordinaire David Meerman Scott wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, which is now available in Japanese and enjoying brisk sales.
Scott has partnered with Shigesato Itoi on the localization and publication of the book, and saluted the real-time nature of the content on Itoi’s site, Hobonichi. In an interview with Itoi, Scott comments:
A particularly interesting aspect is that daily content is available for only 24 hours, and then disappears. There is no archive of the daily information. This unusual content strategy is exactly the opposite of what SEO experts would tell you to do and therefore, because it is unique, is a very Grateful Dead approach.
Whether you’re Japanese or not, transitory content feels more like a conversation with your readers. As Itoi says,
Maybe it’s because it allows me to discuss the same theme over and over again. It’s natural: don’t we do that every day? Perhaps I wanted to replicate this behavior.
It’s not important to show people what you and your organization were thinking six months ago, or even last week. The important thing is to take what you’re thinking TODAY and turn it into engaging content. That would be easy, except that today becomes yesterday (then last Tuesday, then last month, then last quarter…) awfully fast.
This Japanese take on content marketing spans both this Content Buffet blog and my Localization Project Management blog, which focuses on international product marketing. Isn’t it surprising how people in other parts of the world think about and relate to content? What if it’s only in the West that time matters to content marketing?
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.”
