White Paper Pundit

The introduction page is probably the single, most important section of a white paper.

Similar to the first impression you get when you walk into someone’s home, the introduction sets the tone for the rest of the paper. If the introduction is hard to read or uses complex jargon, chances are that many will not venture beyond that first page. Likewise if it is easy to understand, and includes a variety of interesting tibits, you have a good chance the reader will turn to page two and beyond.

There are several components that you should include in your introduction that will increase the chances that the rest of the white paper will get read:

1. Quickly Establish the Problem - Many white papers often take several paragraphs in the introduction to establish the crux of the problem. In many ways it reminds me of someone telling you a long-winded story when you are thinking to yourself, “just get to the point!”. The reader should be able to quickly understand the business problem within the first paragraph.

2. Validate with Recent Statistics – Let’s face it, we’re all skeptical. We need credible validation to believe that a problem really exists. You can validate your business problem by using recent statistics from a reputable and recognizable information source. This can include analysts, industry magazines, and recent news stories. Make sure the stats are within the past three years. The rate of change in most industries is so fast today that using a statistic that is more than three years old will lead to greater skepticism.

3. Use a Callout – The callout (or pull quote) is a block of text that has been highlighted and set aside from the rest of the text on the page to draw reader attention. Callouts will typically be the first thing that your audience will see on the page so choose it wisely. Ask yourself the question, “If I were to pick the most important sentence that summarizes the entire page, which one would it be?”.

4. Include a “Teaser” paragraph – The teaser paragraph informs the reader how the problem can be solved in a generic fashion without giving away the farm by naming the solution. For example:

“To address the scope of these business issues, a new generation of retail project management solutions is needed.  Today’s solutions must be able to adequately manage all the pre and post issues involved with store openings so that efficiencies can be gained and time-sensitive business goals can be met.”

5. Finish with a “Purpose” Statement – The purpose statement is the last paragraph in the introduction that establishes a contract with the reader. It names the sponsor and promises the reader that they will gain both insight and a resolution to the problem by reading the rest of the paper. A typicaly purpose statement might look like this:

“This white paper examines the challenges that enterprise organizations face with existing asset management solutions, and introduces the advantages with the advanced Acme Company approach that allows enterprise customers to effectively maintain asset management on a real-time basis.”

6. Only One Page - Finally, make sure your introduction is no more than one page. You want to provide enough information to entice the reader, but you don’t want to overwhelm them with too much. If you do, you will be providing information that belongs in another section of the paper and risk repeating yourself later on.

Is your introduction an inviting welcome mat to the rest of your white paper?

In my blog post last week, I talked about procrastination and how it can kill a white paper by minimizing its marketability.

Well now it seems that someone has come up with a formula to measure your degree of procrastination, which appeared in the January 11th edition of Business Week magazine, entitled “Procrastination is getting worse“.

In the article, Professor Piers Steel (no relation to Remington), of the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business has concluded that about 95% of ous procrastinate at times, with 15% to 20% being chronic offenders.

The reasons range from a lack of confidence about finishing the job, boredom with the task, to a human tendency to go for immediate reward over long-term gain. Steel came up with the following equation to measure procrastination:

Utility = E x V/A x D

In the formula, “Utility” stands for attraction to the task, which depends on a combination of one’s expectation of finishing it (E), the value in completing it (V), the task’s immediacy (A) and one’s distractability (D). As Steel indicates:

“Anything that offers a distant reward for immediate effort, especially if we find the effort boring, we will put off”.

A common ploy for avoiding work at the office, he says – reading each e-mail as it comes in.

Maybe that explains what’s going on when the first draft of the white paper hits the clients’ desk. Many are choosing to read their e-mails than critique the paper.

How about you? Are you a procrastinator? What things do you procrastinate over?

Mine: cleaning around the house.

Still need proof that white papers are being used in other industries beyond the tech sector? How about law firms and advertising agencies?

In his blog, Low Cost Marketing – Don’t Go Broke While You’re Getting Rich!, blogger Darrell Berg-Smith provides some valuable marketing insight for lawyers, entitled “Twenty Low Cost Marketing Tips for Lawyers“.

One of his tips includes the suggestion to make white papers part of a law firm’s web marketing plan:

“Get a Web site. A new study by Touchpoint Metrics of San Rafael, CA, proved that law firms are getting new business from their Web sites. The report found that articles and white papers written by the firms’ lawyers generate visitors who become new clients.”

It appears that advertising agencies are also getting into the act of using white papers to broadcast critical information for their industry. In an article published in the Rocky Mountain News, entitled “Not-so-Super ad buy?”, group media director, Noelle Botti, with the Denver ad agency McClain Finlon Advertising, created a white paper on the subject of Super Bowl ad spending.

The document’s key point: The day after the game, there’s just as much conversation over who won the battle of the ads as there is about who won the game.

Since it costs approximately $2.6 million for each 30 second Super Bowl spot, many wonder if the commercial will be remembered the following morning. Any definitive research on the subject is critical since about 40 million viewers are expected to tune into the game Feb. 4, and between 10 percent and 20 percent say they watch for the commercials. So essentially, it’s just as much a Super Bowl for the advertising industry as it is for the NFL its fans.

Personally, if the brief web page that’s posted on McClain Finlon’s website is their idea of a white paper then they have a lot to learn about the medium, but that’s a discussion for another day.

The bottom line is that these two examples demonstrate how white papers are being accepted as mainstream marketing vehicles in industries beyond the technology sector. Their frequent use can only spell good news for the businesses that use them, as well as those of who produce them.

What’s your view?

Edelman Research, known as ‘the world’s largest independent PR firm’, has recently released a new white paper on blogging. Their assessment suggests that, although the number of blogs might be peaking, their influence on mindsets is still growing.

Some of its key points include:

● Blog readers are young males who are action orientated and are influencers in their field.

● 23% survey respondents read blogs regularly.

● 28% of readers take action in response to a blog post.

● Blogs were influential in breaking stories such as the exploding laptop batteries and Google’s acquisition of YouTube.

● The most popular blogs are political, tech or business focused – people read them for information and insight, not purely entertainment.

● Businesses need to engage the blogosphere to find their advocates and detractors and to start a dialogue to enable the influencers amongst their readership to be more effective.

● Corporate thinking of the last 50 years, to control the message and communicate one way, is inappropriate for a two way dialogue.

● If businesses want their viewpoints to be heard they need to engage in a transparent manner.

● Blogging is part of the “evolutionary process”, from control to conversation, because effective public relations depends ultimately on earning trust every day.

While this is great information for anyone who may still need validation of the importance of blogs in today’s new media enviornment, the paper weighs in at a robust 40 pages. Unfortunately this size is about par for most industry research groups. What’s even more unfortunate is that few business executives will read a document of this size cover to cover. In fact, I have to admit that I glanced through this paper and went straight to the business charts and graphics first.

What Edelman Research needs is a condensed version of the report, about 10-12 pages with an Executive Summary that spells out the most important points in the research. If someone is interested in looking at all of the data behind the key messages, they could be directed to the parent document from a hotlink in the summary version.

I think such a plan would result in a greater number of readers, not merely the small population of industry pundits and media spokespeople that read them cover to cover and report on its findings. Maybe this could be a new model for research white papers. One long version for industry researchers. Another for business people with short attention spans. 

After all, isn’t the purpose of a white paper getting your point across to as wide an audience as possible?

There’s a old urban legend about painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Because of its massive length and the time it takes to complete the project, once its finished it’s time to start painting it all over again. Job security indeed.

All too often I am confronted with clients who after receiving the first draft of their white paper, will take several weeks, and in some cases months to complete the review process and submit their modifications. When asked, the reasons are usually the demands of the business, back-to-back meetings, and constant travel.

Michael Stelzner mentioned the problem of review delays in a post to his, Writing White Papers blog, entitled “Pushing Words Into a Black Hole”, a sentiment that is echoed by many fellow business writers. What’s the problem with allowing procrastination to delay the publication of your white paper? Let me first make an important analogy.

As many analysts have indicated, time has become compressed in today’s fast-paced business environment. The luxury of taking loads of time to complete critical business tasks is no longer an option. Your business will suffer as a result. Just ask UPS how Fed-Ex has changed their business model in the past twenty years.

Likewise, the luxury of waiting weeks or months before you publish the strategic business concepts in your white papers is a part of the past that no longer fits today. There are two reasons why delaying publication ultimately impacts the viability of your white paper:

1. Competition - If your business is in a very competitive industry (and who isn’t these days), the longer it takes to publish your white paper increases the likelihood that your competition will find out about it and respond in kind with their own spin. Once this occurs, the opportunity of having a pre-emptive, advantage message has been lost. If that happens the tables are turned. Your white paper then becomes a response to your competitor rather than a surprise shot across their bow.After all, if the White House can’t control national security leaks, what makes you think your business is completely leak-proof from the idle chatter of your employees over a few friendly drinks with a competitor?

2. Product Development Cycle – With any complex solution that involves product evolution (software development comes to mind here), product development is an ongoing process. White papers are designed to leverage solution advantage messages into short-term business gains. The longer you wait to publish your paper, the greater the likelihood that the information within it will become stale. If you wait too long, it becomes hopelessly out of date by the time it hits your website. At that point, you will have to spend more money re-writing your white paper so it will reflect your current development initiatives. Think Golden Gate Bridge analogy here.

The bottom line is this: The longer you wait, the less valuable your white paper becomes. Find the time within your busy schedule to review that first draft as soon as you can. The quicker that it can reviewed, completed and published, the faster it will generate new business opportunities for you.

Your white paper writer will thank you as well.

One of things that you will notice in today’s business white papers is the absense of the Table of Contents, also known as the TOC.

Why has this happened? There are several reasons:

1. Document Size – Today’s commercial white papers fall between 6 and 12 pages, due primarily to the short attention span of the reader. Given this compact size, it makes little sense to waste a page with a Table of Contents, especially for one that ends up being a half of a page.

2. History – TOCs were originally created for very long documents of 20 pages in length and above. In academic, government, biotech, research, or scientific circles documents of this size are fairly common. In these circumstances, a TOC makes sense. Below this length they don’t.

3. Relevance - The purpose of a TOC is to provide an easy way to find specific sections of information in a lengthly document, especially when that document is used over and over again. When you need to find the section telling you how to add transmission fluid from your automobile user’s manual it makes sense. For a short white paper it doesn’t.

So unless you’re writing a long reference document, leave out the TOC. Your readers will thank you.

Back in the good ol’ days of the 80s and 90s, when Apple marketing dollars flowed like the waters of the Jordan River, corporate evangelism was a key part of their marketing strategy to bring in newcomers and blunt the counterweight of the PC/Wintel marketplace.

The most famous evangelist of his day was Guy Kawasaki, who was part of the original Macintosh team, and has now confined his evangelical rantings to his weblog as well as the various books he has published drawing on his lengthly experiences at Apple in the 1980s.

This form, referred to as evangelism 1.0, relied on “one-to-many” communication mediums such as live product rollouts, massively attended seminars, tradeshows, television, and later, live online webcasts. This practice continues to this day and was recently employed with the Apple keynote presentation introducing the much heralded Apple iPhone.

In his weblog, Marketing Nirvana, Mario Sundar compares this “old style” of marketing evangelism to the hierarchy of traditional religious evangelism, anotherwords God -> prophet -> masses:

“This is about the power of miracles that is announced by prophets. Life changing commandments or the iPhone that you better believe in for your own good. Here the non-believers are converted en-masse before even trying the service (I can’t tell you how many of my friends & myself are already raving about the iPhone service and the products is still not released) and we in turn go about spreading the message converting other non-users by sheer enthusiasm.”

Contrasted to this is the “new-form“ of marketing evangelism, called 2.0, that is part of today’s viral communication mediums, specifically weblogs, podcasts, webinars, etc. The analogy here is user -> user  -> user. As Mario continues:

“This (new form) focuses on the community and considers all as equal members of the viral marketing message that each user takes from one to the other. What’s key here is that users are more rational, interested in trying out the service and they in turn evangelize the benefits of the product/service to people they care about a.k.a the community via the blogosphere and other tools at their disposal.”

So are white papers part of evangelism 1.0 or 2.0? Does it depend on whether they are posted, printed or podcasted?

The correct answer is “all of the above“. White papers can be posted on a website as part of an online library to satisfy the “one-to-many” evangelism 1.0. In addition, they also be printed or transformed into a podcast to satisfy the definition of a “one-to-one” form of evangelism as found in v2.0.

But no matter what form of evangelism is ultimately proven to be the most effective way to preach the marketing gospel (sorry it’s just an analogy, folks), you can rest assured that white papers will certainly be part of both of them now and well into the future.

And you can take that one to the online bank.

Have you ever seen a commercial on the TV and wondered what the name of the background song is? I happens to me quite often.

When the tune has lyrics, it hasn’t been too difficult to find out. Just Google the words “lyrics” and a few of the words and chances are you can usually find out.

But what do you do when it’s an instrumental song? In my case I wanted to find out the name of the background music that I heard in a commercial about Fidelity Investments.

After a few minutes of Googling the words “Fidelity” “commercial” and “music”, I found a site called TV Commercial Music Forum. The forum is similar in concept to Michael Stelzner’s WhitePaperSource Forum for white paper writers, of which I am one of the moderators.

In this forum, you can post a question about a commercial you’ve seen and the participants will offer their answers, as well as link you to the song. The forum has commercials broken down in a wide variety of groups such as “Car and Truck commercials”, “Sports commercials”, etc.

So what’s the tune I was looking for? It’s called Der Kommissar by Falco from the 1980s.

Also, if you’re ever wondered what the top commercial songs for 2006 were, yup, there’s a website for that too. It’s called Adtunes.com. And the winner is…

The Geico commercial featuring the caveman at the airport. The track is “Remind Me” by a Norwegian group named Röyksopp, and Adtunes.com indicates that is easily has became one of the most popular song ID requests in their forum.

Yes, it’s true. Not only can find anything on the Internet, but you can also find a large group of people who are probably looking for the same thing.

Every once in a while I’ll have a client who will ask me to re-write an existing first draft of a white paper.

When they get the inevitable question about cost, they are surprised to learn that it cost as much to “make-up” their existing white paper as it does to create a new one from scratch. “How can this be?”, they ask.

Here’s the skinny.

Rewriting an existing white paper is akin to completely redesigning a new starter home, but being forced to work with a concrete foundation that has already been poured.

The first issue is time, and in many cases it takes more time than writing a new white paper. Having to re-read what has already been written and figure out whether that text accurately represents what needs to be in the white paper takes a lot of time. Time that could have gone into listening to a content interview and writing the paper from the beginning.

Secondly is the issue of reorganization. In a previous post, I discussed the importance of organization as a valuable skill in white paper writing since organization leads to a good content flow.

Many inexperienced writers suffer from what I like to refer to as “schizophrenic writing“. In other words, they will jump from one thought to another in the same section rather than staying on topic and finishing all aspects of it from beginning to end. When it comes to rewriting an existing draft, the process of separating out the applicable portions from the those that aren’t applicable, is a very tedious task.

In the end, I’m able to get the paper where it needs to be, but it would have been nice to have poured that concrete foundation myself.

Has this situation ever happened to you?

Two white papers were published yesterday on the topic of identity theft. The first white paper was produced by McAfee, and was featured in an article on eWeek.com, a leading news source for enterprise information professionals. 

In the white paper, McAfee states a couple of eye-opening statistics:

The number of keyloggers—malicious software code that tracks typing activity to capture passwords and other private information—increased by 250 percent between January 2004 and May 2006.

The number of phishing alerts tracked by the Anti-Phishing Working Group multiplied 100-fold from January 2004 to May 2006.

The findings come on the heels of similar reports decrying the increase of spam and instant messaging attacks in 2006, including a study by San Diego-based Akonix Systems that uncovered nearly 20 percent more new IM-borne attacks last year than it did in 2005.

The second white paper, entitled “I Am Who I Say I Am“, was published by the Center for Digital Government. The paper disclosed that public sector organizations are spending a significant portion of their IT budgets on information security to combat identity theft. In some cases these expenditures are running as high as 10 percent of their total budgets to protect such items as drivers licenses and social security numbers.

The timely publication of these two papers also demonstrates an important point. White papers are playing an increasing important role as validators of industry claims and current trends that are described in press releases and news stories.

So there is a “chicken and egg” question related to the release of these two papers. Do the findings in a white paper create the news story, or is a white paper created after the fact to validate a news story or major situation such as identity theft?

You decide.