Now, if you were hungry and had only one dollar, would you buy this record or a hot dog?

In the early days of Motown Records, Berry Gordy Jr. would pose this question to his employees in their Friday morning product evaluation meetings. With dozens of songs per week competing for promotion, the hot dog test was one of Gordy’s pet criteria.

Suppose you did that for your marketing content. What would it sound like?

• “If you were in a hurry and your inbox was full, would you read this email or skip to something else?”
• “You have 15 minutes for research. Would you read this white paper or a competitor’s?”
• “If you had to make a buying decision before the end of the day, which would you trust: a blog post, an eBook or a customer success story?”

The 20-Second Hook

“Dancing in the Street” by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas was one of Gordy’s personal favorites. Why?

My goal to hook people in the first 20 seconds was never accomplished better.

Think about the songs (or movies or books or poems or blog posts – in short, the kinds of content) that grab you from the very start. Nowadays, 20 seconds is an eternity, but hooking your audience is still what sells.

Here’s how that translates into your content marketing effort:

• “How long will it take a reader to get into this article?”
• “Start this paper off with a compelling question or statistic or quotation – something that will grab me.”
• “Make sure the image appears above the fold in our blog posts.”

Refining your marketing content

Motown didn’t abandon songs that failed the Friday morning tests. Their champions – the artists, writers, promoters or producers – would take them back into the studio for more work.

The Supremes were eager to release “Baby Love,” but Gordy didn’t think it started strong enough, so the group went back to the studio, increased the tempo and added the “Ooo-ooo-ooo” to the beginning. Within two months of its release, the song became the first number-one Motown hit in both the U.S. and Britain.

Here’s how to convey that to your content marketing writers:

• “I get lost in the middle of this paper. Make it easier for me to see the structure.”
• “This case study is too much about us and not enough about the reader. Would you want to read that? Fix it.”
• “You’re burying the lede. Get to the point in your first paragraph.”

Why not pretend you’re in a product evaluation meeting at Motown for a few weeks and whip your content into shape? I can recommend that all you marketing managers read Motown: Money, Music, Sex and Power by Gerald Posner as you’re getting your Berry Gordy on.

The post Get My Attention in 20 Seconds. The Motown Way. appeared first on Content Marketing Blog - By John White.

The day I genuinely got AI was the day I read an article illustrating how a language model, with each round of recursive computing, could clone dialogue from a book by one of my favorite American authors and create new, surprisingly accurate dialogue based on it.

It took only a few years after that for people to start publishing stories written entirely by AI. And even fewer years after that for them to start publishing books written entirely (and not very gracefully) by AI.

As I’ve watched AI come to dominate headlines, literary conversations and the livelihood of writers (including me), I’ve flashed back repeatedly to a book I read many years ago by an Indian author that foretold the advent of the “story-writing machine.”

The Vendor of Sweets by R.K. Narayan

So fragile was my recollection of the book that I couldn’t even find it on the web using phrases like “machine that can write books.” I didn’t feel like asking a chatbot to try to find it, so I found a subreddit on Indian literature and posted an inquiry there.

“Sounds like it could be The Vendor of Sweets by R.K. Narayan,” came the reply a few hours later. (I prefer to think that my correspondent didn’t use AI to come up with that, but deep down I know better.)

My public library had a copy. I skimmed through it and, in an instance of literary gratification, I found the passage describing the story-writing machine.

Narayan was not the only author to prophesy artificial intelligence. Nor was he the first. Nor did he do it the most ingeniously. And he certainly didn’t call it that. In fact, the concept of the story–writing machine is not even at the heart of The Vendor of Sweets.

The book revolves around the strained relationship between Jagan, a religiously orthodox father, and Mali, his restlessly modern son. It’s an excellent primer on village life in the years after India’s independence, with rich references to yoga, Gandhi’s influence, small business and Hindu weddings. Narayan covered a lot of ground in 180 short pages, and the machine is just one of the many sources of tension between father and son. The book doesn’t really need the machine that much.

And yet.

The story-writing machine “works on a transistor and ordinary valves.”

Consumer-level AI abstracts messy particulars like temperature, top-p and weights. But the charming thing about The Vendor of Sweets is that Narayan was willing to go into them – in his own way – with remarkable prescience.

In the spirit of fair use, here are a few representative paragraphs from chapter 6 featuring Jagan, his son Mali, and Mali’s girlfriend Grace (emphasis is mine):

Jagan took the visitor’s chair, looked for a brief moment at his son, and plunged into the subject straight away. “How exactly does the story-machine operate?”
The son looked pityingly at him, rose, opened a packing case, pushed aside a lot of brown paper and thread, and lifted out a small object which looked like a radio cabinet and placed it on the table. . . Now Mali stood beside the cabinet in the attitude of a lecturer; he patted it fondly and said, “With this anyone can write a story. Come nearer, and you will see how it works.”
. . .
“You see these four knobs. . . . One is for characters, one for plot situations, the other one is for climax, and the fourth is built on the basis that a story is made up of character, situations, emotion, and climax, and by the right combination . . .”
He interrupted his oration for a moment to pull a drawer out and glance at a sheet of paper; he shut the drawer and came back to say, “You can work on it like a typewriter. You make up your mind about the number of characters. It works on a transistor and ordinary valves. Absolutely foolproof. Ultimately we are going to add a little fixture by which any existing story could be split up into components and analysed; the next model will incorporate it.”
. . .
Jagan left his seat and went over to examine the machine as if it were something ejected from another planet. He approached it so cautiously that Mali said, “Touch it and see for yourself.” Jagan peered at the apparatus closely and read the headings: “Characters: good, bad, neutral. Emotions: love, hate, revenge, devotion, pity. Complexities: characters, incidents, accidents. Climax: placement and disposal, and conclusion.” It looked pretty; its mahogany veneer was grained; its keys were green, red, and yellow to indicate the different categories.
Jagan had never known his son could talk so fluently; he wished secretly that he would speak differently. He felt the time had come for him to ask his questions. “Do they write all their stories with this in America?” he asked, as if he wished to fill a lacuna in his knowledge of that land and its civilization.
“Mostly, mostly,” said Mali.
“Most magazines,” added Grace, “are nowadays switching over to the machine in their fiction departments, and out of the best sellers last year at least three were a product of it.”

What kind of story will you write with your machine?

In the book, Mali never uses the machine to write a story. Narayan playfully allows his readers to imagine what a story written by a machine would look like.

I was one such reader. For a good, long time I enjoyed imagining what a story-writing machine would generate once it had the chance. I can’t say that it has been worth the wait.

But it is, of course, early days yet.

The post The Story-Writing Machine: AI Long Before It Was Fashionable appeared first on Content Marketing Blog - By John White.

“What do you want them to do after they’ve read the piece?”

One of our content marketing writers systematically asks these questions at the outset of every project. It’s a bit oppressive at times – I can remember when it was refreshing – but it does keep us on our toes. She’s particularly manic about the second question.

Never miss the chance for a call to action

“If you don’t have a clear, specific call to action at the end of the piece, you’ve wasted an opportunity to capitalize on the reader’s attention,”  she intones. She’s right, but we still manage to squander the chance most of the time.

She’ll write a business-to-business case study or white paper, and draft a “For More Information” section at the end with a link to a newsletter sign-up, or a podcast, or a landing page for a demo of the product. None of which exists, but any of which is relatively easy to cobble together.

“Too much work,” moans the Web group.

“We’d have to feed it with new content,” say the folks in Marketing.

“Never mind that; we just want them to buy,” bawls Sales.

Or end up with a call to inaction

So the writer’s 24-karat request for a call to action in the draft degenerates into a link to a verbose product page, which is almost a call to inaction. Worse yet, into a link to the company’s home page. Worst of all, into a phone number.

It’s like a Bridge to Nowhere. Sink time, money and effort into good, persuasive marketing content for the web, then ask readers to follow up the way they did in 1991: by calling a toll-free number.

What kind of call to action do you use? Is a call to action a hard sell in your organization?

photo credit: J. Albert Bowden II

The post Call to Action? Or Inaction? appeared first on Content Marketing Blog - By John White.

#1 – Message.

#2 – Review loop.

Your homework, as a client who has bought yourself a writer, is to ensure you communicate #1 to your writer, and to keep #2 as tight as you can.

I could go on – and I shall do in subsequent posts – but that’s enough homework for now.

photo credit: Anne Worner

The post Happy Writer, Happy Client appeared first on Content Marketing Blog - By John White.

Last week a freelance writer turning her attention to the world of white papers asked:

How important are graphics and diagrams to a white paper? I’m not very good at creating these. Do you think I should check out a few online tutorials on MS Word to learn how to use all those tables and charts?

I think about this a lot. A white paper without diagrams is silly, bordering on the oppressive.

It’s like children’s literature without pictures. In fact, it is children’s literature without pictures, because you run the risk of losing your readers to the demon of the abbreviated attention span.

I suppose that a real genius could tell the entire story with diagrams and use the text as filler. Most of us are not that good, but we realize that diagrams break up the text and make it easy on the reader, and we’re all in the business of making it easy on the reader.

Turning the White Paper Model on Its Head

Whether you’re a marketing manager responsible for providing images to your writer, or a writer responsible for delivering a decent read, diagrams count.

In fact, given that the intent of a white paper is to persuade and inform, consider using images to persuade and narrative text to inform. If writing a white paper is like building a wall, the prevailing wisdom is to use the text as the bricks and to use diagrams as mortar, holding the text together and supporting it.

On your next paper, make the diagrams work as the bricks. See how much of the story you can tell with images:

• applications of your technology
• quantified results from your customers in a chart
• photos of your product in action
• maps with statistics
• flowcharts before and after your product is in place

Then use text as the mortar that binds each image to the next in transition.

You could turn the white paper model on its head, yet still persuade and inform readers.

Have you seen examples of this? Do you think you could pull it off?

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: Elsie esq.

The post Images as Bricks, Text as Mortar – A New Model for White Papers? appeared first on Content Marketing Blog - By John White.

Once you have decided on the message you want your paper to convey, fleshed out your ideal reader, and determined your paper’s call to action, it’s time to find someone to start writing it.

Before you start banging out tweets in a writer cattle-call, stop and think about four factors in selecting your writer:

1. Internal vs. External – “We write our papers in house because we can’t find external people who know enough about what we do.”I hear this often from technology companies who know that the knowledge they want to publish is locked in the heads of key employees, and the only practical way for them to tell their story is with internal talent.This makes sense in some academic and research circles, and when a company is first getting its marketing act together, but who is more likely to notice (and tell you) that the emperor has no clothes: an insider or an outsider?
2. Industry expertise vs. writing skill – “Have you ever written white papers on mobile eCommerce widgets before? Can you send me a sample?” The answer will almost surely be “no.”This is a good question if you’re looking for ways to disqualify a writer, but if you really need the paper written, you had better ask a different one: “Can you describe a project in which the subject matter was new to you, and you delivered a paper that made the customer happy?”We all want both industry expertise and writing skill – and sometimes think that our technical writers are ideal for generating marketing content – but if you can’t have both, buy skill and let the writer learn your industry. (See Will Kenny for more on this.)
3. Content vs. layout – Do you want the writer to deliver the content alone, or the content plus layout?Most of the time, you’ll move white paper outlines and drafts around in a Microsoft Word or Google Docs file because it’s easy for reviewers to edit them. But a paper done in Word usually looks like a paper done in Word, so most companies want the final draft laid out in an application like Quark Xpress or Adobe InDesign. If you want that extra touch, you need to decide whether you or the writer will be responsible for it.
4. Scribe vs. project manager/owner – “This project could go on for a couple of months, so we need somebody who can work independently and stick with it until the very end.”If that’s your case, you want more than just a scribe. A lot of ancillary work will go into the project, and while you may not see it coming, often your writer will. The most sensitive areas are contact with your customers and follow-up with internal reviewers; your comfort-level with letting somebody else handle these will determine whether you need a scribe or a project manager.

What factors do you apply in deciding who will write your white paper?

photo credit: Roger Price

The post Before You Start Your White Paper Project, Ask These Questions (Part 4 of 4) appeared first on Content Marketing Blog - By John White.

A good white paper is like a diving board.

• You promote and preface it so that your ideal readers see the benefit in getting onto it.
• You inform AND persuade, so that readers feel that they are drawing their own conclusions as they move down it.
• You set it up so that those conclusions lead in one specific direction – to your category of product or service.

Once you’ve done all of this, and your readers are at the end of the diving board, what do you need to do next?

Tell Them How to Jump In

The last step in a strong white paper is a strong call to action. Just as it’s obvious what you need to do when you’re standing on the end of a diving board, you need to make it obvious to your readers what their next steps are. Since these can vary widely, the question to answer before you begin the project is:

What do we want readers to do once they’ve read the white paper?

Examples:

• Click here to register for our webinar on IT service management
• Forward to a colleague via e-mail
• Subscribe to our green energy newsletter or blog
• Tweet/Digg this
• Use our template to write to your congressman
• Disagree vehemently with the author and post a comment
• Agree vehemently with the author and post a comment
• Rate the white paper with 1-5 stars
• Do your own research on telemedicine reimbursement at these links

An Integral Part of the White Paper

Don’t just regurgitate your press release boilerplate on the last page of the white paper or give an info@ e-mail address. This is an opportunity to use your valuable content to cultivate a following and generate momentum.

Also, this call to action should be integrated to the white paper and to the rest of your marketing landscape. It should reflect your messaging platform or creative brief, and it should hitch the white paper firmly to the surrounding campaign.

“For more information, contact Sales” need not apply. Tell your readers how and why to follow you, and give them a good reason to do so.

How do you get your readers to dive in?

Next: Is the writer up to it?

photo credit: Andrew Magill / CC BY 2.0

The post Before You Start Your White Paper Project, Ask These Questions (Part 3 of 4) appeared first on Content Marketing Blog - By John White.

Too many companies underestimate the importance of this step in the white paper process—determining the ideal reader. When this step is skipped, the result is a white paper that tries to do too much for too many people and ends up boring most of them. Don’t let that fate befall your white paper project.

Do some homework on your ideal readers and be sure that your paper floats their boat. This kind of homework is akin to developing a buyer persona, which David Meerman Scott describes as

a distinct group of potential customers, an archetypal person whom you want your marketing to reach. Creating [content] based on buyer personas gets you away from an egotistical site based on your products and services (which nobody really cares about, after all). What people do care about are themselves and answers to their problems, which is why buyer personas are so critical for marketing success.

Your white paper needs to be valuable content. For that to happen, you need to think about what’s valuable to your reader. You can’t just publish a few thousand words of text that make you feel good and assume it will be read.

Characteristics of Your Ideal Reader

You can dissect your notion of the ideal reader with a few different knives:

Which hat are they wearing? Your company always has a variety of audiences with a range of priorities you may not be able to accommodate in a single paper:

• Investors want to see that you have studied, understood and addressed the business problems in your industry.
• Engineers need to integrate your product, so you need to convince them that it won’t blow up in their face.
• Prospective buyers want to know what you’re promising them, and how you’ll make good on that promise.
• Existing customers will buy more from you if you’re demonstrating technical advances.
• Journalists race against deadlines and appreciate content that fits their publications.
• Analysts want to know how your products fit in the industry landscape so they can describe it to their own audiences.

Where are they in the sales cycle? A white paper, or similar non-promotional content, is a good tool at any given point in the sales cycle, but it’s hard to write a paper that will work at all points in the sales cycle. Papers that comprehensive tend to buckle under their own weight, so consider different flavors of white paper:

• Market introduction – I’ve spent jillions of dollars on travel for my sales managers, and now I’m thinking about moving more customer contact to the Web. The right paper will arm me with the vocabulary and concepts I need to figure out whether it’s a sensible move.
• Business benefits – I’m ready to make a business case to my execs and to my customers, and this paper will arm me with a cogent rationale.
• Technical benefits – My IT department needs to weigh in on the security and infrastructure around this change, and they have an entire set of their own questions that need answers.
• Thought leadership – I want to work (and keep working) with smart people, so that I look smart. Tell me what your crystal ball tells you.

Which questions are they asking? This is your stepping stone into the meat of the white paper, because the paper must offer some kind of answer.

• “You mean that’s possible?” In the early 1990s, I worked for a software company that doubled disk capacity using software. We spent a lot of time answering exactly this question, as people were trying to get another year out of their 30MB hard drives and didn’t want to have to upgrade hardware.
• “How much will it cost/save me?” The paper that answers this question is probably the most useful sales tool. Help your ideal readers make their own calculations. And don’t fib.
• “How did you do it?” Once I interviewed a room full of engineers about a project to convert a hydraulic application to an electromechanical one. “If you were reading a paper like this,” I asked, “what would you want to know?” Without missing a beat, the lead engineer replied, “I’d want to know how we did it.” While you have to be careful of what you put into such a paper, it goes a long way toward your technical credibility.
• “What’s the Next Big Thing?” Speaking of credibility, a good thought-leadership paper answers this question and gives readers insight they can use to impress their boss.

Weld the Ideal Reader to the Paper

Once you have identified your ideal readers, put their job title into the title of your paper. For example:

• 5 Things Non-Profit Marketing Managers Need to Know about Social Media
• 3 Ways Wireless Operators Can Use Personalization to Give Customers What They Want on the Mobile Internet
• How Translation Managers in Retail Keep Up

How do you profile your ideal reader? Next: What do we want readers to do once they’ve read the white paper?

photo credit: kristofme / CC BY 2.0

The post Before You Start Your White Paper Project, Ask These Questions (Part 2 of 4) appeared first on Content Marketing Blog - By John White.

Have you ever painted anything: a door, a bedroom, a house? Did you keep track of your time? Did you notice that you spent most of your time in preparation, and that the process of applying paint actually went pretty quickly?

White papers are not much different. Organizations that have done all the prep work and established a rhythm and process for marketing content can keep white paper projects rolling without much ado.

But companies still getting their feet wet with this type of persuasive, informative content should do the prep work so that the process of writing, reviewing and approving the paper goes smoothly.

This is a series on the questions to pose and the answers to get when starting a white paper project.

1. Do we agree on what we want the white paper to convey?

Not “What will the white paper convey?” but “Do we agree on what we want it to convey?”

In the case of a technical benefits paper, this is usually easy. Our paper needs to:

• describe our new approach to trapping spam at e-mail gateways.
• explain the advantages of electro-hydraulic over electro-mechanical motion control.
• show our technique for evaluating both bond and derivative strategies in a single framework.

Even if three of us are reviewing the drafts, it will be obvious to us whether the paper accomplishes that goal.

With a business benefits paper, however, this is not always so clear, because the writer must align the paper with other landmarks around the company (some of which we haven’t gotten around to putting in place yet):

• What’s our unique value proposition: that we’re cheap or that we’re effective?
• Do we have messaging in place that the paper will support? Which shall we emphasize: our benefits to franchisors or to franchisees?
• Is our sales team trained in the kind of sell that will make the best use of a white paper? Or are we just going to hang it out on the Website and hope people grab it?

Finally, in the case of a white paper designed to convey an organizational transformation or demonstrate thought-leadership (see my scoffing about that elsewhere), all bets are off. Opinions will vary from one end of our C-suite to the other:

• How much should we tell people? Do we show them warts and all?
• What do we want the moral of the story to be?
• Who is the final arbiter of what goes into the paper (i.e., who’s the boss)?

Reaching agreement will take some time and work, but it helps ensure that the paper meets the needs of the greatest number of stakeholders. You don’t usually need to undertake this soul-search every time you want to start a paper, but you should weather it at least once the first time, and canonize your answers for future projects.

What are your thoughts?

Next: Who is the ideal reader for this white paper?

The post Before You Start Your White Paper Project, Ask These Questions (Part 1 of 4) appeared first on Content Marketing Blog - By John White.

“Gail, do you get social media?” I asked her, italicizing the verb.

“Sort of,” she replied, “but I think it’s worthless. Or at least, I hope it is.”

“I know what you mean. A lot of us don’t know quite what to do with it. Anyway, wanna go listen to another young person try to explain it to us?”

Gail was up for that, so we drove across town to attend Melodie Tao‘s presentation here in San Diego, “Social Media Design Techniques to Engage your Customer.”

Melodie gave a breathlessly energetic performance describing Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and even Foursquare, outlining design ideas for your presence in social media.  She described using social tools to enhance traveling, studying, spending time with friends, and accomplishing work tasks. I figured I must have done a lot of the same things at her age, but without recourse to social media. In fact, I traveled the world for four years and made only two phone calls home in all that time (one was a wrong number because my parents had moved).

It got me thinking about my blogs and my newsletter and my LinkedIn profile and the time I spend wrapped around the Twitter axle when suddenly I had …

My Social Media Epiphany

I figured out why my social media efforts include so much head-scratching after all this time:  I’m in Category 4!

While Melodie paused for a hurried gulp of water during her speech, I managed to wrap my brain around the factors that go into social media winning and losing. Four categories occurred to me in the space of about 2.5 seconds, and whenever I can think that fast, I’m usually right.

Category 1: The Natural Networkers. We all know people like this, people with a seemingly boundless circle of friends. Attracting and retaining this circle is second nature to them. They don’t even call it “interaction;” it’s just what happens when they’re awake. They’re drawn to polls, giveaways, contests, coupons, comments and retweeting in their offline life, so doing it in a browser or on a phone provides an extra channel of exhilaration.

Social media is an online extension of their innate ability to connect to and build relationships with other people.

Category 2: The Geeks. Not strictly geeks, but left-brain, analytical personalities who see the patterns in keywords, practice SEO copywriting to apply them and understand the science behind building an audience and moving it from one point of engagement to the next. The tools of social media resonate with and challenge them. They figure out how to make money using these tools to build and distribute the right content.

Social media is an online extension of their innate ability to figure out how the lawn mower works, then turn it into a mini-bike, then a go-cart, then a fishing boat. (And get us to pay a nickel to ride along.)

Category 3: The Hemingways. These people are the ultimate raconteurs. It doesn’t matter what we’re doing online; if we stumble onto something they’ve written, we drop everything and read it. They write crisply, then infuse their writing with the story of their own interesting life, they make us stop and think and actually click on the link to the story they refer to. They write the posts that make the young girls cry… They don’t need SEO techniques; people retweet and forward their stuff because it’s just such damned valuable content.

Social media is an online extension of their innate ability to tell a story that resonates with us, the kind nobody interrupts with, “Yeah, well that’s just like the time I…”

Adrift in the Long Tail …

Now, if you’re fortunate enough to live in more than one of the preceding categories, you knock the cover off the ball. Long may you run. But let’s not forget the rest of us in …

Category 4: Social Media Purgatory. We start a blog, stick with it, and do as much as we can to promote it, considering we’re not in the other three categories. We have a Facebook and LinkedIn profile, we tweet from time to time, we have between a few dozen and a few hundred followers, and we’re adrift in the long tail. We read the advice and attend the webinars of people in the other three categories. We see how people turn tweets into interaction, and interaction into relationships, and some relationships into a career, but it’s a long way off for us, and besides, we have our day job.

Social media is an online extension of our innate ability to lean out on the carousel and reach for the brass ring. We don’t quite grab it, but we congratulate ourselves for staying on the painted pony and trying hard.

Of course, it’s entirely up to us to spend the rest of this life (and maybe a couple more) in social-media purgatory. But social media and its tools will nudge some of us out of Category 4 and into one of the other categories, in the same way that the Harry Potter series inspired hardened non-readers to get through 3400 pages, or that Microsoft PowerPoint has instilled in timid people the nerve to present in front of an audience.

So, on the way home from Melodie’s presentation I bounced my newly found taxonomy off of Gail. In doing so, I recalled a line uttered by the hapless Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, scratching his head at the difficulty that rich people find in connecting to one another:

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

Pick whichever set of categories makes the most sense to you, and stop being a social media loser.

This guest post originally appeared on Mark Schaefer’s businessesgrow.com blog.

The post This is why you’re a social media loser appeared first on Content Marketing Blog - By John White.