How to attract audiences to your company's content

Marketers, every business is now a media company. New distribution platforms make it easy for you to speak directly to the right audiences. But is your content ready for prime time?

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Content marketing, as defined by the Langley Center for New Media, is "a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action."

Here are 10 of my own tips for companies that want to think and act like publishers.

1. Tell the story “out of order.” Start with why, not with background or with "how," especially when telling a science or technology story. Even more specifically, show "why it matters" and "why now."
2. Turn standard marketing collateral into a narrative. This post of mine is explicitly about PR people writing award submissions, but the advice fits other situations, too.
3. Think like a business news reporter. Here’s how to package your company’s story as a business news article. This post, too, was written for PR people pitching business journalists, but the advice applies to your direct communications, too.
4. Here’s more on thinking like a business journalist. Know the magic question.
5. How to write a contributed article. That’s PR-speak for an article in a magazine or trade publication that is written in part by an expert within your company, with improvements suggested by PR people who understand the news media’s needs.
6. Learn to ask better questions in an interview by listening for fruitful moments that will yield better than average storytelling details.
7. Start with low-hanging fruit. The easiest way to make a low-risk but effective change is to rethink your company’s case studies to turn them into compelling content.
8. Write about your audience, not just yourself.
9. Check out this great advice from Radian 6. It describes the different types of content your company could produce and how to integrate it into overall strategy. The emphasis is on social media, but the principles apply more broadly. I add my radical two cents at the top.
10. Attend a content marketing boot camp sponsored by the Langley Center for New Media. Take lessons in person from “the” expert, Joe Pulizzi of Junta 42 and his Content Marketing Institute. He’s speaking at the Langley Center's seminar-retreat on beautiful Whidbey Island near Seattle on Jan. 13 & 14. Here’s Joe’s blog.

P.S. I just discovered BlueCava's Facebook posts and really like the way they're written.

How to gain relevance with your target audience

The old joke from my days as a science writer was that the photo was too often the same: a man in a plaid shirt presiding over a metal box filled with wires.

That's how I came up with the mantra "Write about people with problems, not boxes with wires." As writing coach in technology PR for the past 10 years, I asked professional writers to think about the group of people that both journalists and marketing directors share an interest in, and write about them.

Customer, reader -- one and the same

Marketing directors care about the customer; journalists care about the reader. And guess what? That's the same person. Write about that person -- his problems, decisions and actions -- and the technology and messaging come along for a free ride.

But write about the technology or the messaging and ... zzzzz. MEGO sets in.

Keep eyes from glazing over

MEGO stands for My Eyes Glaze Over. (I got that phrase from a Los Angeles Times New Delhi bureau chief. )

This is how to gain relevance with your target audience: Write about the audience.

Why so little success with corporate storytelling? Here’s what to do instead.

Executive Summary:

Marketers interested in experimenting with storytelling can start with a low-risk, low-cost piece of collateral: the customer case study. Use narrative structure to engage prospective customers. Add resonance to your value proposition.

Key Points:

1. Social media is inviting marketing executives to take a second look at narrative structure, which is standard in top-tier business press but missing from most marketing collateral.
2. A customer case study can be repackaged to show a hero (your customer) overcoming obstacles (with your products and services) and achieving market success (your customer's aspiration).

Sound Bite:

"Your social media guru and PR team usually are not equipped to write in narrative form. Senior PR people -- in the VP, SVP and EVP levels -- may have the skills, but they don't write case studies. An ex-journalist on your team is your best bet."

*****

Read the whole article:

With little success, I’ve been trying for 10 years to teach storytelling principles to PR practitioners. Workshop and class attendees understand it and enjoy it, but the few who try to apply a narrative structure to their work get bogged down in the approval process.

I rarely recommend it these days as a workshop component or class. My own PPTs and handouts are dusty.

The only time I teach it now is within the context of a class on writing award submissions. This seems to be the one type of document where the marketing department is willing to let go.

I wonder if this will change.

Scary for old-school marketers: audience that "talks back"

If you read trade press for the advertising industry, you’ll recall that the sudden rise of social media and the audience’s new ability to “talk back” in public prompted substantial fear. This was about five years ago.

Generation gap

Since then, I’ve noticed a generation gap in marketing approaches. In my own mind, I’ve come to divide marketing executives into two groups – new school and old school. For a while, the old-school guys were in positions of authority and making decisions that struck me as anachronistic. Meanwhile, the new-school guys were too low-ranking to exert influence and lacked necessary business insight.

Humpty Dumpty

In 2010, it appears to me that a balance is being struck within some companies. I picture the old-school guys as Humpty Dumpty, fallen and cracked but alive and powerful. Their strength: They understand business. But they’ve lost their creative mojo and know it, so they yield to new-school concepts and hire people whose skills are unfamiliar to them.

Twitter, FB, etc.

But will storytelling become part of the new mix? Will videos, websites, blog posts and short-form posts (Twitter, Facebook) adopt the narrative structure that turns novelists and movie-makers into millionaires?

Sam Whitmore of Sam Whitmore Mediasurvey, who gives media advice to the tech PR industry, last week sent his clients a report raising a similar question. He pointed out significant obstacles. The details are proprietary, so I can’t share, but I can say that I concur, for reasons of my own.

Start with case studies: affordable way to break the mold

Nonetheless, if companies are interested in a small, affordable way to begin breaking the mold, I can offer one highly do-able suggestion: Start with case studies.

This is the easiest ground to give and likely to produce immediate results.

Here are my contrarian teachings:

(1) Give away the punchline in the opening paragraph. Tell the end of the story at the very beginning. In other words, take a sentence or two from what would have been the results section at the end, and move it into the lead.

(2) Don’t keep the “situation,” “problem” and “solution” in separate sections. Mix them. Instead use this framework: a heroic figure whom we care about overcomes obstacles and gets what he wants, learning lessons along the way.

In a case study, the heroic figure is your customer. The obstacles he overcomes are common to prospective customers, some of whom didn’t recognize the problem as clearly you have articulated it or didn’t know it could be solved.

In the course of overcoming obstacles, the customer uses your company’s tools. But picture the customer as MacGyver, the resourceful TV show character who could engineer his way out of any jam with scotch tape and a tin can. This means the emphasis is on the customer (MacGyver), not particularly on your tools – although the story cannot be told without your tools. Go light. Don’t sell. Just tell.

Your subheads could like like this:

Executive summary – Here you mix the “problem” (beginning) and “results” (end) in one or two sentences – briefly -- just enough to tell “a story of transformation.”

• Show change, not the “situation analysis” or “background.” Customer X had a problem common to your prospective customers; now he has business success. Ignore the middle of the story for now. That comes in the next section.
• Use your best stats in the executive summary. Don’t save them for the “conclusion” at the end, especially since most readers won’t get that far, anyway. Even if all they do is skim the first graf, the readers will walk away with the most important idea.

Problem/solution – Here you tell the middle part of the story. This is your customer overcoming obstacles they have in common with your prospective customers, with your tools in hand.

By juxtaposing problem and solution, you gain tension. When you separate them, you have static facts. Tension keeps readers reading.

Ideally, the customer is learning along the way. What lessons can he share? What would he have done differently from the start, knowing what he now knows? What can other businesses learn from his experience? What’s replicable about his success?

When you mix the problem and solution, you are telling a story. When you separate them, you are writing a conventional case study. Which do you think will get higher readership?

Results – Here you amplify the phrase or sentence you pulled out for use in the executive summary. You list business results, if possible, that were outgrowths of the problem’s being solved. You give more stats, while reminding the reader of that super-great one stat you included in the executive summary.

Why adopt this storytelling framework for case studies?

1. An image of business success will now be associated with your company's products or services, even if the reader was a skimmer who quit reading after the first graf.
2. A skimmer is less likely to stop after the first graf because you’ve added an element of suspense (the missing middle), and rewarded him from the start. It’s silly to think that a reader will patiently wade through static facts in hope of a possible reward at the end. Give him confidence from the start that you aren’t wasting his time.
3. People remember stories more readily than they remember facts.
4. Your reason for writing isn’t to tell the world about your customer; it’s to draw in prospective customers who will recognize themselves and their problems in the story. Your customer is a stand-in for your prospective customer, who can now visualize himself succeeding, thanks to the concrete specifics of your story.

Breaking the mold takes courage. You might consider trying it a couple of times and watching the response. If it works, keep it. If it doesn't, toss it. It's a just a case study, right? A tiny piece of your marketing collateral. No big deal. Case studies are not costly in time or money. They aren't high-profile. There's little to lose and readership to gain.

Caveat: Your social media guru and PR team usually are not equipped to write in narrative form. Senior PR people -- in the VP, SVP and EVP levels -- may have the skills, but they don't write case studies.

An ex-journalist on your team is your best bet. Or, if you've got a member of junior staff who successfully pitches top-tier business press, give them a crash course (30 mins) and let them learn from experience. Top-tier business press often write in narrative form.

The advent of social media and questions about the rise of business storytelling give you soft ground for experimentation. The conventional powers that be as well as the audience are now in a forgiving mood. Risk for this type of experiment has never been lower.

***

For more how-to posts, check out:

• contributed articles
• making leap from trade press to business press
• key question asked by business press
• how to listen for storytelling details

News releases: Fix your broken approval process

The worst thing about news releases is the approval process. Too many cooks, as the saying goes, right? After too many iterations, what comes out in the end often looks like something that's been through a trash compactor.

Does it have to be so painful and unproductive? Can we fix the broken process?

The solution, my friends, is discipline. Or baseball, if you prefer. By that I mean each player needs to play his assigned position in accordance with his strengths -- and no one else's. You can't have the shortstop sprinting to first base or the pitcher standing in center field.

Here are some guidelines to help each approver play to his strengths:

(1) Choose one person to write. Everyone else should be hands-off. Hands-off people should comment and give direction but not write, re-write or edit.

(2) Set parameters for each approver's contribution. Here are the roles I suggest for marketing managers, product managers and lawyers.

Marketing managers should ask, "Does it support the brand and long-term business objectives?" They should comment on messaging and emphasis.

Common overstep by marketing managers: Reciting messaging verbatim in the headline, subhead, lead or quotes. Instead, consider messaging an indirect takeaway.

Some explicit recitation of messaging may be OK, but only if blended with vocabulary and scenarios that are familiar and compelling to the audience. Try to balance messaging with empathy and authenticity, as seen through the audience's eyes. Otherwise, you lose credibility and induce the MEGO effect (My Eyes Glaze Over).

Product managers should ask, "Is it accurate?" They should comment on the technology, features and benefits.

Common overstep by marketing managers: Deleting or moving down social context. Instead, let the top half of the press release answer "why" and the bottom half answer "how." In other words, first establish relevance in the lives of the audience, then explain how it works.

Lawyers should ask, "Could we be sued or penalized?" They should comment on potentially negative consequences related to the SEC and other regulators, intellectual property (trademarks, patents, copyrights) and whether the company can deliver on promises.

Common overstep by lawyers: Changing punctuation and capitalization to meet style standards for legal contracts, and deleting social context for the announcement. Instead, let internal experts use AP style, the industry standard for news media and PR. Look for compromises that prevent legal problems while allowing social context.

The best way to avoid problems is to pay more attention to the pre-writing process. There should be substantive input before creating a first rough draft.

Don't even bother to write a "shell." It's a futile time-waster that creates needless frustration for all.

Instead, ask the approvers to do these tasks in advance:

Marketing managers should:
-prioritize target audiences and messaging
-weigh in on correct emphasis
-explicitly state what long-term business objectives are being served

Product managers should:
-demo the technology for the writer
-provide detail on specs, features and benefits
-weigh in on correct emphasis

A VP- or higher-level PR person on the agency side should "frontload" the writer. By that I mean provide context for the assignment. This should take less than 10 minutes and cover:

-news release's role in overall strategy
-detailed description of intended audiences and problems the product or service solves
-intended effect on audience (including actions to be invoked)
-competitive differentiators and indirect takeaways about the industry or audience, not just the product/service or company
-desired emphasis

Who writes? Usually a mid-level PR person, often an AE or SAE, who understands the task is to balance competing interests while appealing to external audiences. This person is more of a relationship broker than a writer because he won't be using his own voice or acting on his own priorities. The writer is really a mediator.

The writer/mediator does the following:
-receives content and other inputs
-looks for holes and asks questions
-consults with PR team members for frontloading, to find out what's been done in the past and for a mid-point check-in on content and structure (but not wordsmithing)

Ideally, the writer/mediator has access to:
-the sales department’s internal PowerPoints on customers and competitors to better understand the overall business and how to dovetail with parallel campaigns
-internal company and agency research, including Search Engine Optimization, aka SEO, and key initial findings that informed the PR plan in the first place

In many cases, the writer/mediator must develop the context that hooks the immediate announcement into the ongoing conversations of key influencers (while remaining within the parameters of branding and business objectives). A good way to do this is an audience analysis technique I call PDAs (Problems, Decisions and Actions). More on that in a future post.

Why add context? That's what makes it a "news" release. News is info that surprises people or helps them make decisions.

News = announcement + context

If you want to write solely about your product, that's OK, too, but -- technically speaking -- that's more of a backgrounder or fact sheet. Journalists do appreciate those and the SEC may require them, so have at it. You don't have to include context if you are talking primarily to beat reporters who already know your company well.

Throw out 95%

Now the writer has a big pile of inputs and must select the most compelling and relevant 5%, looking for intersections between disparate topics and resources.

Notice I said 5%. Writing is really a matter of deciding what to leave out. The writer should plan on deleting 95% or more of his source material.

Sometimes people ask me if it isn't more efficient to just collect only what matters in the first place. The answer is no because your final product will be shallow if you do. It will lack resonance. It won't have a shelf-life. And it will falter in the approval process.

Good writing comes from good content. First get the best ideas, then simplify and package them for easy absorption by strangers.

OK, getting back to process ...

The writer's unique contribution (separate from that of the others who gave early input) includes appropriate vocabulary and scenarios that will be familiar to audiences.

This last part -- audience vocabulary and scenarios -- is extraneous to what the marketing and product team may have had in mind. It also might feel superfluous and imprecise to lawyers.

However, it's the link to the audience, so please let the PR person proceed with this small contribution. When approving these few phrases, keep in mind your position and expertise. If you're the first baseman, stick to playing first base. Comment and compromise, but don't delete and re-write.

Ideal situation: Get PR, marketing, product and legal to agree in advance on appropriate vocabulary and scenarios. Key point: Look for language your audience really uses and delve into problems they actually talk about among themselves.

This is the same logic behind search engine optimization. But it has always been true, even before there were search engines. Know your audience and speak their language. Be useful to them, from their perspective.

Does the writer have to work alone? No, preferably not. Others on the PR team can help by providing:

-a speedy midpoint check-in to approve content and structure (not wordsmithing, which can still be rough and wrong at this stage) Time: 5 minutes
-a hands-off look by someone who didn’t draft the release and can provide outside eyes as to whether the information is clear to outsiders and mechanically sound (grammar, etc.), and to say what indirect takeaways they picked up on
-a hands-on look by a senior person who can finesse the small stuff while keeping in mind the big stuff (but please read my other blog posts for advice on this)
-proofreading
-submission to the person who will oversee the approval process, perhaps with a note explaining reasons for certain decisions and listing possible alternatives

Questions the writer should ask:
1. What are my client’s hot buttons, preferred vocabulary and customs?
2. What approved language from previous releases should be included to provide continuity and help beat reporters and analysts distinguish new info from background?
3. Have I added context that connects the client to the outside world without becoming distracting or irrelevant (and while remaining within parameters of brand and business objectives)?
4. Is the “why” at the top and the “how” at the bottom of the release?
5. Will the first paragraph appeal to relevant outsiders and make them lean in to listen?
6. Have I blended messaging with news value?
7. Have I met both the client’s and audience’s needs?
8. Are customer types specifically named in the release and generally in the fronts rather than middles or backs of sentences? (not users; instead educators, physicians, Web designers, network architects, business professionals, families …)
9. If I delete the quote, will I have to rewrite the release to fill in the missing content? (If not, then rewrite the quote. The speaker should add substance or remain silent.)
10. Have I added white space through effective use of subheads, bullets and short paragraphs? (White space is inviting.)
11. Do my subheads have verbs in them? (If not, consider rewriting. Drill down deeper. Be more specific.)
12. What is my gut saying that I’m ignoring? (Don’t ignore it. Honor your instincts.)

Discipline and self-restraint are make-or-break factors in fixing your broken approval process. Everyone needs to know their position and respect their teammates.

Bad Editors Are Bad for Business -- How to Cope

Your bosses or clients might in fact be the problem. If they are re-writing, sending you a lot of tracked changes, or making vague demands like "make it more punchy" or "make it less like a brochure," you are in the majority.

If I could wave a wand and fix the world in one graceful sweep, I'd make everyone a better editor. Poof! Now people are respectful, appreciative, nurturing and specific. If that's not how you'd describe your boss or client, it's a good thing you met me.

Bad editors are not only bad for morale, they're bad for business. First, there's the immediate waste inherent in over-editing that takes up time on deadline without altering the eventual business outcome. Second, an insidious dynamic develops within the team and poisons efforts yet to come. All kinds of weirdness ensue: blame, apathy, polarization, ineptitude ... don't get me started. For perspective, ask: "Will this edit alter our business outcome?"

So, how to cope with bad editors?

First, don't take it personally. I'm a mercenery myself. I do this for a living, not for my ego.

Second, don't join in the over-reacting.

Third, OK, now it's going to get a little messy. To go on, I need to know more about your situation. Please tell me your specifics, but mask the names of people and companies, of course.

Before getting too far into this, I need to let you know that I only coach smart people. My clients are professional writers at companies that are famously smart. So this blog is not a confessional or ghetto for writing washouts.

Know that your problem is many people's problem. You are just the one with the guts to speak up about it. Take a stand. Be a leader. Articulate the problem. I guarantee you won't be alone in experiencing it.

That qualifier aside, here's a bit of generic editing advice, in case you are able to suggest something like this to your taskmaster of the moment.

1. Try side-by-side editing. This means the writer sits beside the editor as he reviews the document. The editor thinks out loud, so you can hear his thoughts immediately rather than try to guess later what he was trying to get at when he made the entire page bleed.

It also takes no extra time. The editor doesn't have to make an appointment with you to "walk you through the changes," as so many bad editors tend to put it. Instead, you just sit there in real time, observing while it happens. Both parties will learn from this exercise, painlessly.

2. Step back and look for patterns. Rather than fixing every little thing, reacting one by one to each micro-episode of mental discomfort, the editor distances himself from the document. He looks for repetitive choices or a missing perspective.

He sends you a note with two or three questions that get you to think differently about the content. He sits back and waits, then gets a pleasant surprise. The quality ratchets up about 200 percent. And he didn't do a thing.

3. Decide what really matters and let the rest go. Sometimes your editor is horrid simply because he's gifted -- at writing, not editing. It may be that you will never be as good as he is.

Your editor needs to accept this reality, even if it hurts. He needs to make a list of two to five things that are really important to him and let the rest go (crying or gnashing his teeth, fine, but he needs unloose those white knuckes).

Once you can do everything on his list, he can add other items, one at a time. He needs to let you evolve over time. You can't be him. You'll never be him.

Editors with this problem always say to me, "Yes, but I need to uphold quality standards for the client's sake." Yes, but some quality standards matter more than others. Choose.

4. Proofreading is a separate issue. It's something to be done at the very end and done surgically. That is, the editor removes only the tumor while leaving all healthy flesh intact.

Yes, your grammar and punctuation need to be impeccable. That's a credibility issue. And yes, your business needs to convey credibility.

But senior people shouldn't be doing this particular task, so I'm not counting it as editing in this particular blog, which is about edits by bosses and clients.

Change is hard, I know. A mantra that can help you keep this advice in mind while under duress on deadline is the question I posed earlier: "Will this edit alter our business outcome?"

If you are the writer, this question can help you steady your emotions. If you are the editor, it can help you keep your eye on the ball. A red sea of tracked changes helps no one.