White Paper Pundit

There’s a old saying among software users, “Never buy a 1.0 version“. This expression seems to plague Microsoft each time it releases a new version of their Windows operating system, and most certainly with their most recent release, Microsoft Vista.

Vista is now celebrating its second anniversary after its initial release on July 22, 2005. Unfortunately, after two years Microsoft still has not moved the needle very far in upgrading the installed base of Windows XP users. According to PC World, in an article entitled, “Vista: The New Coke of Tech”, it is estimated that fewer than one in eleven of the PCs being used in large or very large enterprises runs Windows Vista, as compared to 23 percent of Windows users that upgraded to XP at the same two year anniversary.

Microsoft is no stranger to white papers. If you’ve been on any of their sites, especially ones focused on the enterprise business market, you’ll see scores of white papers. But when it comes to promoting Vista, Microsoft has pulled out just about every conceivable marketing stop to convince XP enterprise businesses that Vista is stable enough to use and deploy across their vast user base. Now it has added a white paper to that campaign, called “The Business Value of Windows Vista — Five Reasons to Upgrade Now.”

The white paper is a very good example of how white papers can be used to persuade an otherwise recalcitrant audience to consider another point of view. Instead of packing this white paper with Microsoft’s sole perspectives and internal research, it uses data, polls, and opinions from leading industry experts such as IDC to show that Windows Vista provides significant value for today’s PC users.

It also uses colorful tables, bullet lists, and concept graphics to show off the business advantages with Vista. One is called “The Top Ten Windows Vista Facts”, that attempts to address misperceptions with Vista head on.

Can the exclusive application of a white paper convince a large audience to a perspective they diametrically opposed to? Probably not. But Microsoft DOES know that without a white paper as part of their overall marketing strategy, they are making the process of delivering their message and convincing that audience that much harder.

Microsoft, like many companies today, know that white papers have to be part of an overall marketing strategy to ensure success. We’ll have to see if this white paper helps in that effort.

What is the ideal number of pages for the most effective white paper? Four? Six? Eight? Ten? More?

Truthfully, no one really knows. Until an in-depth poll can be conducted with thousands of current and potential white paper readers, the question will be left up to those that create white papers for a living, based on customer feedback.

A recent article on the subject was published on the WhitePaperSource online forum, by white paper writer and content author, Kevin Gault, entitled “What’s the Ideal Length for a White Paper?”. In the article, three white paper writers give their opinion on the ideal white paper length, including yours truly:

Jonathan Kantor, principal and founder of the Appum Group (www.whitepapercompany.com), feels that a medium-length paper is most effective. “I tell my clients that the minimum is six pages and the absolute maximum is 12 pages,” Kantor advises. “You need a minimum of six to provide enough background information to bring the reader up to speed on the topic.

“Twelve pages, however, can be too much for today’s short-attention-span reader to read in a single deliverable. The ideal length is eight to ten pages, and it seems that eight pages is the most popular length for most clients.”

Of course, the two other writers mentioned in the article also have an opinion on the issue. For example, Gordon Graham sees overall length declining:

“White papers have been steadily getting shorter since I started tracking them in 2001,” says Gordon Graham, veteran white paper writer at ThatWhitePaperGuy.com. “Today they’re usually four to eight pages long for two main reasons. First, everyone is suffering from information overload—we all have too much to read and too much to do. Second, more white papers are aimed at a business audience rather than technical readers. Technical people seem to be able to tolerate a longer document, but a business audience won’t. I recommend no more than six to eight pages for a white paper, and if you can wrap it up in four, so much the better.”

I don’t agree with Gordon on this issue, because I don’t believe you can effectively deliver a four page white paper that will solve your customer’s educational needs with their prospective customers. A four page white paper becomes a product sell sheet, not a white paper that effectively explores all aspects surrounding a specific business issue including existing business challenges.

But having this discussion makes for good discourse. The business marketing industry needs to do this on a regular basis in order to develop a set of guidelines and standards for white papers. To date, we don’t have any, so everything from a one-page to a 20-page document is called a “white paper”.

If you’re an experienced white paper writer, you’ve probably used Wikipedia at one time or another to obtain the definition of a complex term or concept. In fact, the popularity of Wikipedia has spawned the use of the term “Wiki” which refers to a website that contains “a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.”

But wherever you find a successful online business model, you will soon find Google not far away with cash in hand, ready to either buy the site entirely, or develop a similar one of their own. Such is the case with their answer to the Wikipedia craze.

In this case, the Google alternative is called Knol, an online-publishing service that is a potential competitor to Wikipedia, whose articles tend to rank highly in Google search results. You can rest assured that once Google launches Knol, they’ll figure out a way to get their content to rank even higher than Wikipedia’s.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Googles’ service differs from the user-generated Wikipedia online encyclopedia in a number of ways. In particular, rather than stick to one article on a topic, Knol will allow many articles, making it as much a collection of individual blogs as on online encyclopedia.

Users also attach their names to Knol entries. Others can comment on, but not edit their work. (Wikipedia, on the other hand, allows some users to edit others’ entries). Users can also elect to run ads sold by Google on their entries and can share in the revenue from them. Knol entries can include text or photos, but Google hopes to add other media as well. A logic fit here would be YouTube videos.

Will Google Knol make it number one in the area of Wikis as other Google properties have done for the company? Maybe yes, maybe no. After all not everything Google touches turns to gold. For example, if we look at Google’s recent purchases/new entries in the past several years we see mix results:

Google Maps – Hit

Google Apps – Miss

Google GMail – Hit

Google Earth – Hit

Google Youtube – Hit

Google Picasa (photo sharing) – Miss

If Google can do to Wikis as they have done to just about everything else they have touched, then all I can say is “move over Wikipedia, cause there’s a new kid on the block”. I as well as many other white paper writers will certainly give this latest entry in the world of online publishing a trial run to see how she does around the curves.

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