White Paper Pundit

After almost eight months in development, my book “Crafting White Paper 2.0″: Designing Information for Today’s Time and Attention Challenged Business Reader, is finally available.

The question that is probably most on your minds is, “Why did I write it?” Let me attempt to answer this question for you.

Since I started creating white papers for enterprise businesses almost 12 years ago, I have seen many changes taking place in this marketing space. Most notably, are the changes I have seen over this past year are taking the white paper medium into uncertain waters. There are three aspects that are dramatically changing today’s white paper medium:

1. The Business Environment: The recession has caused businesses to seek cheaper white paper solutions, resulting in shorter, more text-oriented documents. Shorter white papers also have become more sales oriented, and businesses are demanding that they must now generate leads and ROI. The white paper marketplace has also become crowded. Every business has them and they no longer have the unique competitive advantage they provided just a few years ago.

2. The Business Reader: Overworked, stressed out, lots of distractions with little time for reading tomes of complex information, especially large blocks of standard paragraph-oriented text. Today’s reader is also turned off to white papers that have overt ’sales-messages’.

3. Social Media: Short, quick, colorful, rich information has become a new norm, changing the face of business communications and what many online users have grown accustomed to. Short attention spans are fueling new forms of information.

The result: Cheap, short, sales-oriented, stark, all-text white papers that disconnect with today’s social media aware business reader.

Crafting White Paper 2.0 is about changing this downward spiral for the white paper medium. My book advocates a new generation of visually stimulating white papers that connects with today’s social media aware reader. CWP2 promotes the use of a variety of text, graphic, and page design elements so that key business solution messages can be assimilated by today’s short attention reader much more effectively. This is what I refer to in the book as developing a, “White Paper 2.0 Strategy for Short Attention Marketing”.

For business marketers, Crafting White Paper 2.0 provides the guidance to stand out about a crowded field of plain, text-oriented white papers to gain a new level of differentiation and a competitive advantage.

For white paper writers, Crafting White Paper 2.0 provides the information necessary to transform commodity-oriented, all-text white papers into more engaging, effective, and profitable white papers for their clients.

I hope you enjoy the read. To pick up a copy, please follow this link to my publishers website. The book will be available via major book retailers such as Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble very soon.

As always, I welcome your feedback.

Thank you!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 15th, 2009 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Design & Format, Social Media, WP Marketing, White Paper Writing, short attention marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.