The Content Buffet - By John White

Marketing Mangers: Make Up Your Own Job Title

John White — Thu, 17 May 2012 20:03:00 +0000

What’s in a marketing manager’s job title? Did you invent your title? Which title would you pick, if you could?

From PR Web comes a thought-provoking post, “Newest Member of Marketing Team Tasked with Creating Her Own Job Title.” Marketing new-hire Meg Strobel monitors DiamondNexus’ social media presence and creates new content for the company’s channels. She was hired without a title, and has yet to arrive at one, which became a problem when she had to order business cards.

Current candidates for her title include: Social Media Strategist, Web Communications Architect, or Facebooker Extraordinaire. “I’m kind of leaning towards Web Communications Architect, because how cool would it be to actually be an architect?”

How cool indeed?

The not-so-new hire reached out to the director of marketing, Kyle Blades, for help. Blades, unavailable for comment, reportedly told Strobel, “I don’t know. It’s really not that important – just make it up.”

I don’t agree that it’s not important, but making it up could be a very good idea.

The marketing manager’s title

After all, “marketing manager” is rather long in the tooth as a title, isn’t it? Is it your title? Are you still happy with it? Consider a few others:

Content manager – Yes, you probably do manage content, but so does a content management system (CMS). Your website and blog involve content management, but you actively work at creating the content, not just at organizing it. It’s too close to Technical Publications.
Community manager – This title is becoming much more current, even in enterprises, and it describes the important function of keeping your online plates spinning. But it smacks of herding cats and handing out the new toys to keep them interested, rather than building those toys.
Content wrangler – You do wrangle content from its source to its target, don’t you? It’s a pretty accurate title, but it’s taken.
Conversation manager – At its heart, marketing is the process of starting and maintaining conversations. That’s what all the fuss is about, and it’s what really leads to sales. I wish “conversation manager” didn’t sound so much like a euphemism, because it would help people better understand the role of marketing.

One marketing manager for a technology company told me how difficult it is to explain the role and value of marketing in an engineering-heavy organization: “They think we throw parties.”

That’s why your job title is so important. It needs to be concrete enough for others (even co-workers) to understand, yet with a hint of the figurative.

So, I wish Ms. Strobel luck in coming up with her title. The article suggests she’s willing to crowdsource the process:

Strobel welcomes further suggestions from the general public. She can be reached via facebook.com/diamondnexus.

But as of this posting, the communication that she’s architecting there focuses more on the product than on her title.

That’s a better conversation.

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: Katherina London

Write Your White Paper the Way Perry Mason Would

John White — Thu, 10 May 2012 20:02:22 +0000

In every organization there are competing forces shaping your content. Beware of trying to make too many of them happy at the same time.

I can’t stand “The Good Wife.” There’s too much skulduggery and backstabbing, but what’s worse is that there are always about four different plots and subplots competing for my attention span.

“NCIS” isn’t much better in this regard, but the characters are so much more engaging that I tend to forgive banal plot diversions into Tony’s fractured love life, or Ziva’s dysfunctional Mossad family.

I’m not 22 anymore. Maybe I never was.

I’m more of a “Perry Mason” kind of guy: one plot taking up the same number of minutes in every show, making it easy for me to figure out where it’s taking me. No red herrings about Della’s home life or Paul’s drinking problem. Perry and Mr. Berger always faced off near the end, and that was the point of the whole thing.

Everything but the kitchen sink in your white paper

Now, what about that white paper you’re writing? Is it all over the map? Have you pushed everything into it but the proverbial kitchen sink?

Are you dragging in subplots that muddy the water and make things hard for your readers, just because people all over the company sent you material and research that they said absolutely had to go into the paper?

Dianna Huff posted recently on instilling some quiet in your work life; how about instilling some in your white paper?

If you have too many stories to tell in one paper – say, technology, business, regulatory, social – don’t be afraid to plan for four papers. It’s easier to write them that way, and it’s easier on your readers.

Your three-part main message

What if you put a Main Messages box like this at the beginning of your white paper?

If you regard these bullets as the line in the sand that defines what the reader is going to learn from the paper and stick to them, it becomes easy to see what does and does not need to be in the paper.

Perry, Della and Paul would like it that way. So will your audience.

photo credit: Wonderlane via photopin cc

Is Sales Running the White Paper Project? 3 Cautions

John White — Thu, 03 May 2012 20:01:09 +0000

Some marketing teams let others in the organization run their own content projects. Here are three tips to keep them from getting out of hand.

If your organization is large enough to have a Web content manager or a content editor, you’re probably moving a lot of copy around. Maybe your content policy allows people outside of marketing – sales, finance, operations, technical support – to generate their own pieces and send them to an internal editor for review.

Good for you. Mostly.

I’m thinking in particular about Sales. A lot of ideas for content originate in Sales:

“We need a white paper to leave behind with prospects.”
“Trade show coming up. What kind of brochures and case studies are we handing out?”
“Are we going to blog about this technology? It gives us some visibility.”

They’re almost invariably good ideas, because salespeople are in front of the customer all the time, picking up on the themes of importance to them.

Let Sales run your content projects?

Don’t get me wrong: I like salespeople, and their naturally infectious enthusiasm. But good salespeople are chronically busy, they usually travel a lot, and that killer white paper idea they came up with is one of fifteen plates they’re spinning.

So, marketing managers, mind these three tips for managing Sales when they are the lead on content:

Don’t take your eye off the ball entirely. Ensure there’s some review/oversight from marketing. The white paper or customer success story should have a marketing – not salesy – feel to it, and you’re the cop. Salespeople tend to value product features and benefits, which poison the paper; it’s your job to push back and emphasize the reader’s problem.
Get all feedback in writing. Your marketing communications writer is the muscle in this project, and you should run interference for her. Since most salespeople are working conceptually rather than concretely, insist that they summarize their feedback in writing and not just orally; it will help the project move much more smoothly. They can supplement their written revisions with a phone call, but written feedback needs to be the primary channel.
Establish guidelines for the review cycle. “We’re working on a white paper around a similar problem,” salespeople will tell prospects and customers. “Would you like to have a sneak peek?” That’s an excellent way to engage a serious prospect or reward a good customer, but don’t take on the burden – much less leave it up to the writer – to vet and reconcile everybody’s comments and changes. Your salespeople should take care of that, then forward a single markup to the writer.

You can argue that letting Sales run their own projects – to the extent that they’re willing to do so – results in content that’s closer to what they have in mind. Of course, your job is to ensure fidelity between that and the company message. Sales doesn’t need to be Marketing to put out good content; it just needs to observe a few simple marketing tips like these.

photo credit: lissalou66

Your Marketing Writer Is Working on Other People’s Content. Find Out What It Is.

John White — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:00:44 +0000

Your marketing writers are valuable nodes in your network. Thinking about them that way pays off in making your own content broader and richer.

On Monday, you phone your marketing communications writer to kick off a white paper on mobile game pricing. On Thursday, a marketing manager with a different company asks your writer to work on a paper about translating mobile games.

Your writer is no world-renowned expert in mobile gaming. It just happens that these two clients need content on that topic at about the same time.

Both of these corporate marketers have a common connection to the writer. What they don’t know is how much common value in mobile gaming lies just the other side of that connection.

Have you ever asked your marketing communications writers about the other topics they cover, besides your products and services?

An overlooked link

You probably value your writers (and keep giving them work) for a few reasons.

They write effectively.
They’re a quick study.
They understand your business and its audiences.
They do research and write about it in ways that reflect well on your organization.

How about this reason?

They know useful stuff you don’t know.

Last year, in separate pieces for clients in completely different industries, I cited the statistic that the human race had recently crossed the threshold of five billion telephone connections. I don’t remember for which project I first came across it, but it didn’t matter because it supported both arguments very well.

When an analyst with a research firm re-purposes information like that, clients expect it. They take for granted that it’s her business to know such things and they gladly pay her to impart them.

But when a marketing communications writer does it, it’s serendipity.

And, you can get in on it.

Either your marketing writers tell you…

I’ve often wished I could introduce all of my clients to one another – say, in a large restaurant on Maui – and see what came of it. Almost all of them are marketing managers or directors, and I think it would be easy for them to find value in connecting. In fact, it would probably be easier for them to find that value talking to one another in that Maui restaurant than networking through me.

Your writers may not have such lofty designs, but they may have ways of letting you know what they work on, starting with the Clients page on their Website.

Do your writers tweet, post or put out a newsletter on current projects? Do you follow them?

What other kinds of work besides yours is in their portfolio? What can you learn from it? More importantly, what does your writer learn from it that can make your content bigger, deeper and wider?

Consider your writers more than just writers: they’re resources.

…or you ask them

You can do this without being nosy, without intruding and without running afoul of anybody’s non-disclosure agreement. It sounds like this:

So, what else are you working on these days (that you can tell me about)?

or like this:

We need a series of case studies on how pharma’s use our services. Do you work with any companies in that field?

It’s really not that different from “Say, Marie, I really need a good electrician. What do you know about finding one in this town?” which is a conversation that takes place about 50 times per second all over the world, as people make casual use of their networks.

If we learn anything from our collective investment of time in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other networking vehicles, it should be that our circles of acquaintance are like crabgrass: most of their connections (and value) are invisible, waiting for us stumble onto and benefit from them through normal curiosity.

The only thing more important than your network is your network’s network.

When you ask your writers about other work they’re doing, you’re making good use of these nodes in your network.

So, corporate marketers: The hidden value is there. You just need to sharpen your curiosity and start finding out what other content your marketing communications writers are working on.

And stop waiting for an invitation to a restaurant on Maui.

John White is a marketing communications writer who 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,” then take your best shot at hiring him.

photo credit: faungg

4 Tips for Contributed Articles

John White — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:06:53 +0000

Writing a contributed article, or byline: easy. Getting it to look in print the way you intended: not so easy. A few tips for marketing managers getting from A to Z.

It’s like a bucket brigade, really – the path between the marketing communications writer and the finally posted content. The bucket starts out full, but by the time it’s gone through a dozen or so hands, there’s quite a bit missing.

So the client’s marketing manager said, “We have the opportunity to contribute an article to a publication. Our PR firm set it up, and the editors like the pitch. Interview the product manager and write it up.”

The publication had some guidelines for writing, mostly about style rather than mechanics. It offered even fewer about what to expect once the article ran.

So we got to work: interview, drafts, contributor’s bio, images, carefully selected links, approvals, ready. That took about two weeks.

The marketing manager handed the finished copy (~1900 words) off to the PR agency, who passed it to the publication. It ran on the Web the next morning, and the eye is never so able to find problems as just a little after it’s too late.

Fixing problems with your contributed articles

Maybe some of our problems stemmed from working in Microsoft Word. Fortunately, it’s lingua franca for moving copy around during review cycles. Unfortunately, it’s not like HTML, and it’s really not like Drupal or WordPress or Joomla or any of the other content management systems online publications use.

Mostly, though, it’s a few questions we didn’t ask. We’re smarter now, and I want you to be that much smarter as well.

1. Images and sidebar

Problem: We included two images and a sidebar in a text box. Knowing how fussy people get about images, we shipped them as colossal, high-resolution JPEG files and let the publication crunch them down as much as they needed to. The images included captions (Figure 1, Figure 2) and the copy referred to them.

The problem was the sidebar, which the magazine had recommended we include. It supplemented a paragraph near the middle of the article, but the magazine dumped it at the bottom, just before the author bio. It was useless down there, but the moral of the story (which I had forgotten – my bad) is that sidebars don’t get along well with these pages.

Fix: Use a sidebar, but create it as an image near the text you want to emphasize.

2. Links

Problem: We embedded several hyperlinks in the article, mostly to webinars and pages on the client’s site. Not all publications like that, because you’re using their real estate to promote your content. In fact, the author bio contained four links; the publication scrubbed them all on the main page, but allowed them on a separate About the Author page.

Fix: Find out the publication’s policy on hyperlinks. They may have a limit of one link per 500 or so words, and they may have a policy that favors authoritative links (e.g., to Wikipedia or Reuters) over linking to your own assets. For that matter, include links to other content in the publication; they’ll probably like that even more than links to Wikipedia. Is there a more sincere form of journalistic flattery?

3. Numbered lists

Problem: It’s hard enough in MS Word to list four numbered items, then enter some non-numbered text, then resume the numbered list. It’s even harder on the Web.

Fix: Don’t clown around with this kind of formatting if your article is destined for the Web. It just annoys the people who have to tear it apart and disrupt the structure of your article. Or, hard-number the items into the text instead of using automatic numbering and list items (

4. URL

Problem: To the extent that a keyword-rich URL gives your content an SEO boost, it’s a nice thing to hope for. Unfortunately, the CMS assigned the article a lame URL: http://www.sys-con.com/node/2207848. Not much SEO juice from that, and no benefit to the publication, either.

Fix: Ask for a decent link. All they can say is “no.” The CMS should be able to accommodate this.

These four fixes should ensure that more of your water survives the bucket brigade.

What else have you found out about submitting contributed articles to Web publications? It’s a different world from paper-based press, isn’t it?

photo credit: mcoughlin

3 Tips on Creating Your eBook

Your Email Address Is Not Good Enough for Us.

John White — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:00:06 +0000

Low-brow email addressees need not apply? What’s up with that? Some content owners have started getting fussy about the addresses their prospects give.

My colleague, Merle Tenney, announced his upcoming presentation in a webinar some weeks back. It was sponsored by a content quality software company I’ll call Katzenjammer, just because I’ve been itching to use that as a pseudonym lately.

Merle says important things, and I want to hear them. I went to the registration form on the Katzenjammer site.

I sign up for several of these events each month, so it was with considerable surprise that I beheld the response after I clicked the Submit button:

Requiring an email address from a “non-free provider” struck me as a bit cheeky. I felt like Johnny Halladay singing “Quoi ma gueule ? Qu’est-ce qu’elle a ma gueule ?” So, what’s wrong with my email address? So what if it’s free?

The marketing managers at Katzenjammer have probably worked out that people who use a Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail or otherwise unpaid email address are not very serious prospects. If you have a free email address, you probably cannot afford Katzenjammer’s products, and if you can afford them and use a free email address anyway, then you’re probably still not a good prospect.

I suppose it works for them.

Free email users are lousy prospects

I thought it uncool of Katzenjammer to decline my email address so brusquely. Am I a lousy prospect for them? Sure, but if all you want are prospects with a high probability of conversion, why issue a cattle call for attendees? Many are called, but few are desirable, I guess.

Besides, Katzenjammer wasn’t the draw; Merle was. “Merle, we want you to headline our webinar, but we’re not going to allow people to register with a crummy email address, because it doesn’t serve our purposes.” Is that how they pitched it to him?

I guess Katzenjammer knows that most people flick in a throwaway address that they rarely check. On the one hand, I understand Katzenjammer’s thinking; on the other, if they provided only valuable content – like Merle’s webinar – and focused more on what’s in it for attendees than what’s in it for Katzenjammer, they wouldn’t have to worry about what they consider sub-standard email addresses.

Blame it on the email provider

Some weeks later I tried to sign up for a free webinar from MarketingProfs, that venerable fount of marketing wisdom. They too are tired of cheap email addresses, but they’re using a perfectly Teflon pretext and blaming their email provider:

MarketingProfs complains, “Sorry, your email address is being blocked by our email provider.” Of all the nerve.

I could be wrong about this. Maybe there are spam issues at work here. Maybe the script kiddies soak up all the available seats in the webinar and cause admin headaches. But if that were the problem, wouldn’t you use a simple Captcha?

On the other hand, if I want the webinar badly enough, isn’t it worth giving up my non-free address, then just unsubscribing if I don’t like whatever else they send me?

If it’s free, then you’re the product.

…says Chris Dancy, and he’s right.

There’s a tacit understanding that, if the webinar is free, then I’m the product. But if I pollute my value as the product by using a free email address, the deal is off now. What does that bode for deviously clever sites like GuerrillaMail.com, which obligingly give you an address for an hour, and even let you play a game while you wait for your reply?

Are you dissing prospects with free email addresses? Is it working out for you? How many hours have you spent tinkering with that, instead of just generating arrestingly valuable content?

Nobody Cares About Your Products. Really.

John White — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 19:30:46 +0000

Marketing managers are supposed to keep their heads on straight. Let other people drink the Kool-Aid; your job is to converse with customers, not bomb them with features and benefits.

Nobody cares about your products or how cool they’ll be if they buy them. They care about their problems and whether they can trust you to help fix them.

Sorry, but that’s the deal.

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: Ed Yourdon

No related posts.

Marketing Writer + All Your Mailing Lists = Groupie

John White — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 22:30:23 +0000

What do you use to prepare your marketing communications writers for a project? A creative brief? A phone call? Put them on your mailing lists and throw everything at them.

If your writers were groupies – your groupies – would you like them less?

If they’re delivering good content on time, then their groupie-hood should be the least of your worries.

“Put me on all your mailing lists.”

Have your marketing writers ever said that to you? If they did, would you know how to do it?

“How many email lists do you have?” one writer asked her client. “I want to subscribe to all of them.”

Now that’s a groupie.

Have you ever had a writer so voraciously interested in your company and its valuable content that she asked to subscribe to everything you put out, whether she wrote it or not?

“I don’t want to send you comments and suggestions on the content,” the writer explained, “I want to learn from it and do a better job of writing for you.”

Huh?

After you’d picked yourself up off the floor and regained your composure, you might start to mentally enumerate all of the channels and places in which somebody who really wanted to follow you, could follow you:

email lists
newsletters
blog and vlog
direct mail
podcasts
RSS feeds
Twitter followers
LinkedIn group
YouTube channel
Facebook page
Google +
Pinterest
reddit
StumbleUpon
all the blogs in which your managers routinely guest-post

(Note to future readers: Disregard channels that have long since become extinct. There was a time when all of these were popular.)

Do you know all of your channels?

Do you yourself track all of this content? Probably not, because the channels change so quickly.

So, while you’re scratching your writer’s itch to know everything possible about your company and its marketing content, you can secretly thank her for making you stop to count all of the ways you get your message out.

And don’t forget to tell your groupie that the list is likely to change tomorrow.

photo credit: Tawny Rockerazzi

Embedding a “Retweet This” Inside a PDF – More News

John White — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:40:12 +0000

Embedding a “Retweet This” inside a PDF is a neat hack. Recent Twitter changes have affected it, though – yet again. If your Old Twitter retweet links aren’t working, here’s a solution.

Have you embedded “Retweet This” in your PDFs? Perhaps you’d better go back and make sure that they’re still working. I’ve had to.

In June 2011, I posted “Embedding a ‘Retweet This’ Inside a PDF,” mostly so that I would remember how to do it. When I referred to the post last month for a retweet I suggested for a client’s PDF, I found that the link syntax doesn’t work anymore; browsers complain about a reset connection.

Retweet this – The new way

No doubt this will change again, but for now, the way to get this:

is by embedding this:

https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Hiring a MarComm writer? Ask these 10
questions - http://eepurl.com/ieIv (via @johnwhitepaper)

Of course you know this means that you’ll have to root through any valuable PDFs you’ve published with “Retweet this” links and modify them for the new syntax. Set a flag for them in your content management system or start placing “retweet” in the document properties of the PDF (also known as metadata) so that you’ll know where to find them when Twitter’s API changes again.

Aren’t we all getting too old for this? How have you used “Retweet this” links in your content?

Embedding a “Retweet This” Inside a PDF

Document Properties in PDFs – More Dish

John White — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 12:40:10 +0000

Continuing last week’s post, there’s dish to be found in the PDFs you receive from partners, customers, vendors and prospects. Here are some ideas on what to look for.

In my last post on file properties in Microsoft Word docs, I described ways to interpret some of the metadata that lives in those files. As a marketing manager, you probably read and create PDFs almost as often as you do Microsoft Office docs, so keep your eye on metadata in these files too.

Reading document properties in PDFs

First of all, you realize (don’t you?) that PDF is NOT proprietary to Adobe. It’s a standard format, and there are plenty of non-Adobe products for creating and viewing them. Nevertheless, consider Adobe Acrobat, which is representative of most readers. And free.

When you open a PDF in Acrobat Reader, you can select File > Properties, or hit Ctrl-D to open the Document Properties dialog:

Title, Author, Subject, Keywords: Fortunately, these fields populate themselves from the application in which you created the document. If you don’t like the values, you can change them here before publishing the document to your website or checking it into your content management system.

In particular, you should introduce keywords. To the extent that the bots pay any attention to keywords, they will find them in this field, in the same way that they will find them in the tags of HTML pages.

Application: If you’ve used a real layout app like Adobe InDesign or Illustrator or Quark XPress to create your brochure, case study or white paper, then this field helps show that you’re a serious marketing professional. But if you’ve done it on the cheap, using Microsoft Word or – heaven forfend – Publisher, this field will rat you out and inquiring minds will see it. Yes, there are a lot of good-looking Word templates around, but they aren’t the ones that most people use.

Location: You have no control over this field. It updates itself with the location of the PDF on the reader’s computer, not on the computer on which the PDF was generated. The field is a hyperlink, by the way, and if you click on it, it will open the handy Temp folder in which your operating system stores jillions of files you view and read on the Web. Throw away some five-year-old PDFs, if you’re in the mood.

Security tab: Did you know you can protect the content in your PDFs?

Unscrupulous people might want to take your work and pass it off as their own. Or, if you want the document to be read only on a screen, they might want to defy your wishes and print it out. They may want to fill it with nasty comments about you and slander your name all over the place. Isn’t it nice to know you can prevent all that?

For this, you need the professional version of a PDF generating application, like Adobe Acrobat Pro or Nitro PDF Professional; you can’t do it with the free reader application. After generating the PDF, visit the Security tab and head off all of those miscreants at the pass by setting restrictions on what they may and may not do with your white paper or eBook. You can also configure your PDF add-in to apply the restrictions when you first generate the file.

Marketing managers, note: There is some cachet to applying at least a few restrictions. It demonstrates that your team knows that these options exist, and that you’re savvy enough to want to protect your work. There are probably plenty of ways for a determined thief to hack into your PDF, but at least you can make it clear that you tried, and that you do place enough value on the content to want to protect it.

So, that’s why I like to hang out in the document properties. Do you? What have you found there?

File Properties in Microsoft Word Docs – All Kinds of Dish