White Paper Pundit

I read an interesting article the other day on the online webazine, Atlantic.com, which is entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid”. In it, the author Nicholas Carr, asserts that online readers have lost the ability to read and absorb long articles on the web or in print. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb for most readers. According to his words:

When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be a voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed.”

Has this change had an impact on white papers? You bet it has!

Years ago, a big part of the attraction to white papers was its writing style. This of course assumed that the reader had the time to patiently read each and every page of the entire paper. While this may have appealed to college professors and academic researchers, it is completely different for today’s harried business executive.

Successful white papers are much more about how critical information is formatted, delivered, and assimilated rather than how well it is written. Of course a good writing style is required, but it isn’t the be all, end all. The inclusion of bulleted text, side bar pull quotes, Executive and Concluding Summaries, Concept Graphics, and highlighted text boxes has proven to be more critical to delivering key business messages. If you’re expecting critical business information to be exclusively delivered via countless pages of well-written, left-flush paragraphs then you will lose today’s “short attention span” reader after about page 3.

If the topic of formatting white papers for today’s business audience interests you, I will be discussing this and several related issues in a upcoming seminar called, “Making Your White Paper Stand Out From the Crowd (Best Practices for Creating White Papers)”.

I will be attending this seminar along with two additional top white paper writers, which is scheduled for August 13th. This session will be hosted by the WhitePaperSource online forum, as part of their monthly white paper seminar curriculum.

For more information or to register for this seminar, please visit this link. Speak to you soon!

Jonathan

Normally, when it comes to writing the business challenge section of your white paper, most solution topics usually have only one challenge to be presented. This could either be a primary competitive solution, or it could be a situation where there is an absence of any solution.

But what happens when you have two or more unique business challenges each with their own set of bullet points that must be spelled out? Do you:

A. Treat each as a separate issue, listing and describing the components of the various business challenges so that the reader can fully grasp them?

Or do you:

B. Create a single list of common issues that pertain to all of the various business challenges, to make it easier and succinct for the reader to comprehend?

The answer?

Treat each business challenge separately. Why? Because the issues that comprise each business challenge may not have any commonality between them.

Let’s say that one challenge has four primary components and another has five? What do you do with the fifth component? Leave it hanging?

Better yet, let’s say that three of five business challenges have some commonality (high cost, long-lead time, extensive materials), but there is some strange issue that is unique to only one of those business challenges (like a lack of environmental friendliness?) What do you do with that last issue? Write about it separately?

Each business challenge has it’s own unique properties and qualities, and must be treated separately for the reader to completely and easily understand it. Attempting to short-cut the process by combining issues into a single set of business challenges might not work and instead, create a formula for white paper disaster, leaving your reader both dazed and confused.

The bottom line: If you want your reader to fully grasp all the issues with business challenges, give each one the individual treatment it deserves.

In light of today’s slower economic growth, many companies are taking a closer look at every aspect of their corporate marketing tools.

One strategic sales organization, Caskey One, in a blog post entitled, “What is Strategy? And why Should you Care?”, advocates a bold new approach to growing sales with deliverables:

Go back to those customers and do a “white paper” on how the solution impacted their business. Have a professional interview several contacts at the client, then get it transcribed and put it into a 3-5 page “study.” Then take that study and offer it on the website (get emails before you let people download it) and it becomes your brochure. Throw out all the brochures that puff about how good you are–and use the white paper to do that for you–in the words of your clients.

For years, the brochure was understood to be a primary staple in the corporate marketing arsenal. No organization in recent memory would even consider the possibility of eliminating the development of a series of brochures to articulate corporate, product, and strategic marketing plans and vision.

In this statement, Caskey feels that the customer testimonial (case study) is an integral part of a white paper, and I wholeheartedly agree. The integration of a case study page, brings the white paper discussion from the realm of the “theoretical” to the “absolute” by providing a proof of concept in the form of an actual customer reference.

But I have to admit, the idea of replacing ALL brochures with white papers is a novel one. The prospect of developing a series of white paper would provide a distinctly superior way to measure ROI than with a brochure. White papers would also generate more sales leads as well.

Is this likely? Probably not. But the growth of the white paper medium over the past several years shows that businesses have finally accepted this deliverable as a legitimate way to sell a complex concept to a professional business audience.

Maybe we’re seeing the tipping point where the use of white papers overcomes that of brochures?

According to web marketer Russell Clark with website erpwhitepapers.net, white papers are needed because they serve a crucial role in helping customers better understand technology:

White papers provide information on a specific software topic. You can never fully understand a product or service, or the extent that they can be used by merely looking at it. The ability to have any of these aspects documented in a white paper is the perfect way to fully understanding new technology. In the 1990s, when the new generation of web-based software products were introduced, significant resources were invested in documenting corresponding application functionality and technologies, and white papers served as an intregal information source during that period.

Russell is correct. Since the 1990s, white papers WERE an exclusive marketing vehicle in the technology sector, especially for both software and hardware products. But since that point in time, the medium has rapidly been accepted as a mainstream marketing component within other industries beyond tech. For example, in the past six months, my organization, the Appum Group/The White Paper Company, has produced white papers for businesses in the following “non-computer or software-related” areas:

- Consumer Electronics

- Videoconferencing Services

- Financial Services

- Temporary Employment Services

- Employee Benefits

- Credit Card Processing Services

- Telecommunications

- Construction

Why is this happening?

After all the hype, publicity, and education, white papers have finally come of age, and are today accepted as a mainstream marketing deliverable, right up there with brochures, websites, blogs, video, and podcasting. In fact, every day I see the term “white paper” included in the list of “must have” marketing items needed to generate leads and new business opportunities.

So no longer do marketing writers have to worry about providing a long-winded answer to that age-old question, “What is a white paper anyway?” It seems that today, just about everyone knows what they are.

Thank God!

According to the well-known marketing blog, Writing White Papers, Mike Stelzner opines on three reasons why the demand for white papers today is so high:

1. Businesses are struggling to stand out in a very fragmented marketing world: Social media alone has added dozens of new marketing channels (think Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, …). This has made it very difficult for marketers to pick any single channel for their efforts. White papers have an appeal across the channels AND can pull someone in from a social media channel.

2. The slowing economy means all eyes on marketing: In the past, marketing could sneeze and prospects would rush in. Now executives are asking and demanding more from marketing. One lead generation tool that has withstood the evolution of the web is the white paper. In fact, as the web expands, free content offers like white papers will become more important to help businesses stand out from the crowd.

3. More industries are starting to use white papers: It used to be that high-tech was the only place you saw white papers. Now white papers are working their way into ALL business-to-business industries. I am seeing more use of white papers in financial services and Internet services in particular. However, they are also growing in manufacturing, real estate and many other industries that sell complex or expensive products and services.

I agree and would add a fourth reason:

4. Cost Savings - With the recent announcements of corporate downsizing, the prospect of the full time marketing writer is going by the wayside in favor of outsourcing these services to external freelancers. With this resource, companies don’t have to pay a salary or benefits, and can use them on a “per need” basis. In total, it’s far more cost-effective to outsource this service than to have a full-time writer on board to accomplish this task.

This fourth issue will result in the death of the full-time internal white paper writer position. Internal writers have far more important things to do as part of their “day-to-day” activities including writing web copy, ad copy, executive speeches, 10K statements, and annual reports, than they have to writing white papers.

With the talent out in the business marketplace, it’s far more cost-effective to farm this service out than to have it done in-house. What’s your perspective?

Tech Republic, one of the web’s predominant providers of professional enterprise-class white papers has announced a new design to their website that makes searching, analyzing, and retrieving white papers much easier that before. It is one of the few sites that provides great content to help IT professionals develop better strategies, make better decisions, and more effectively complete their work.

Among their many new features is a new right-column unit that they refer to as “the scoreboard.” It provides a window into the vast library of resources that they have available from many of the top vendors in the IT industry. At launch, this shows a count of the vendors that have the most white papers in our directory. In the future, they indicate that you’ll also see the scoreboard show the vendors with the most white papers in a specific subject, such as virtualization, storage, networking, etc, as shown in this example below:

The left column of the home page, underneath the main feature box, remains the same. It shows the river of “Most Recent” content published on TechRepublic. The alternate tab, “Community Recommends,” shows the content that TechRepublic members have had the most interaction with during the past week. In other words, it’s a community-powered “Most Popular” feed.

With features like this, the task of finding a specific white paper or the most popular white papers will be significantly enhanced. Techniques like this should also allow for exceptional white papers to clearly stand out, since the ones that make the greatest impact will typically be the ones that are most frequently downloaded.

So check it out. The sites white paper section should be another boomark on your browser’s hit list for all things related to “white papers”.

White papers are great to discuss, but once a year it’s important to dedicate some space and acknowledge the men and women that are serving in our military who sacrifice their personal freedoms every day so that we can enjoy ours.

So in between your burger, brat, or tofu dog, let’s take a moment to recognize their efforts as they fight for our collective freedoms all across the globe.

Happy 4th of July everyone! Please support our troops!

Jonathan Kantor

There are few issues among white paper writers as contentious as the subject of adding an Executive Summary. The issue at stake is whether the addition of this controversial section helps or harms the primary mission statement of a white paper - namely to incent the reader to read the entire document.

The two sides of this argument typically fall out as follows:

1. Pro - Executive Summaries provide a service to the busy executive reader by encapsulating the entire document into one page. In doing so, it quickly establishes whether the featured solution will be of interest to the reader and most importantly - whether the remainder of the white paper will be worth the investment of the reader’s valuable time to read in its entirety.

2. Con - Executive Summaries are a short-cut, that creates a disincentive for the time-crunched executive reader to read the remainder of the white paper. After all, if an executive can get everything they need from a one page Executive Summary, why would they bother to read the rest of the white paper, making the investment of  time, effort, and money that went into creating it, worthless!

Well, I’ve been conducting my own survey recently. In the past 15 projects, I have been asking each of my customers the question, “Do you want an Executive Summary?” In each situation, I also gave them both sides of the argument as mentioned above.

What do you think the majority of this group decided?

In all but two situations, every customer indicated that they wanted an Executive Summary. In the two situations where customers didn’t opt for the Executive Summary, their decision was based on budgetary reasons, where certain sections had to be dropped to meet a particular budget limitation and prioritize other, more important sections of the paper.

What does this mean?

Well, what I have learned is that the decision of whether a customer decides to incorporate an Executive Summary has a lot to do with how it is sold. If you’re a writer that is against Executive Summaries, and you pitch them in a negative light to your customer, chances are they will probably not go with one.

On the other hand, if you are a proponent of Executive Summaries, and you can acurately describe what’s in one, what they do and how they help their customers assimilate information, they will probably ask you to develop one for the white paper project.

Hey, but don’t take my word for it. Go ask your customer! You might be surprised with their response.

One of my favorite white paper elements is the bullet. Of all my blog posts, I probably have devoted more space to bullets than any other single white paper element.

Why?

Bullets are a great way to quickly get the attention of your reader. When a reader sees a list of bullets in the middle of the page, they WILL read all of them, and they WILL also understand the message behind them. Other than sidebar pull quotes (callouts) there is no other single text-oriented element that can quickly get the attention of your reader as effectively.

If you’re a MS-Word user (as most white paper writers are these days) you will notice that you have a choice of several bullet types, such as:

Is there a certain etiquette associated with the use of each bullet? I think so. Here’s are the various situations where I use each of these bullet types. Your mileage can vary.

Solid Bullet - This is the most common bullet, I use this more than any other style. It is typically applied at the first opportunity where bullets are used within a white paper.

Open Bullet - I use this bullet when there is a second group of bulleted information and solid bullets have already been applied in a previous section.

Square Bullet - This is an alternative to the solid round bullet style. It’s merely a matter of preference.

Clover-Leaf Bullet - I use this bullet type in the Concluding Summary. It’s a way to spruce up the final set of bullets and alert the reader to the most important points in document.

Arrow Bullet - I call this bullet the “ingredient” bullet. While other bullets represent individual line items that can stand on their own, I use this bullet when there is a list the components that make up a higher concept or idea. (Examples - ingredients in a recipe, technical components to a solution, steps in a process).

Checkmark Bullet - I use the checkmark bullet to refer to a completed task or steps that need to be completed. In a recent white paper I used checkmark bullets to list the questions that the reader show ask of their solution provider.

Again, this is only my opinion and not a definitive list. I’m sure many writers use each of these bullets in entirely differently ways. Of course, I’m interested in hearing how you use each of these bullets. Do you have a favorite bullet?

We’ve heard a lot recently on the issue of social marketing. Terms like “viral marketing”, “social media”, “word-of-mouth marketing”, have become a new part of the marketing lexicon. The idea behind this verbal tidal wave is to blend the traditional power of networking with more formal marketing mediums in order to gain an upper hand with a target audience.

Now one of the latest buzzwords on the radar is “Social Conversion“. According to the OnlineMediaDaily blog, the term social conversion can be defined as follows:

Take a fresh look at your online marketing and visualize it leading to not one event, but to many events strung together into a relationship. This relationship is much more permanent and pervasive than even the most perfectly honed lead or transaction. With this mutual engagement you establish a new level of branding-based on shared interests and conversations.

Taken to the next level is the idea of socializing the white paper by adding interactive elements that incent greater participation with the reader. Under this concept, white papers change from being a passive medium, one way communication where information is read, to an interactive medium that leapfrogs the reader into established social media such as forums, blogs, and discussions. From their perspective, white paper writers need to think “outside the box“:

Using widgets, it’s become super easy to enhance landing pages with small social features like picture posts, discussions and microblogs. For example, one of the things we’ve begun doing is socializing our white papers. Now, when a respondent receives one of our white papers, it includes buttons (on the pages of the white paper). These buttons allow readers to deepen their engagement with us by posting questions to the author or discussing the white paper with peers. We even track which pages of the white paper stimulate the most interest-which gives us valuable messaging insight.

From my pespective, I’ve seen many attempts over the years to “modernize” the traditional white paper, many of which never get off the ground. This is due to the substantial learning curve and technology enhancements that would make this “new white paper format” a mainstream and accepted marketing medium.

For example, we heard several years ago that podcasting white papers were going to going to be the rage. What happened? The software, hardware, cost, and time requirements needed for the average writer to learn how to produce an audio version of their white paper prohibited most writers from making the idea take off.

Also, if you didn’t have a good “radio voice” who was going to listen to it? Was an enterprise customer going to foot the bill for the voice-over talent to read the white paper and produce the podcast when it’s given away for free? In a time when most businesses were watching every shekel in their marketing budgets, the idea didn’t make much sense.

So while the idea of “enhancing landing pages with small social features like picture posts, discussions and microblogs” may seem like cool and innovative concepts, the reality of these enhancements becoming an accepted, mainstream alternative to the traditional white paper is still a far-off utopian dream.

Don’t get me wrong, dreams are great. But just like Sonny & Cher used to sing, at the end of the day “Love don’t pay the rent!”.