Tag Archives: Anne Janzer

Content marketing, technology and sustainability

Leave a reply

Laptop on stump is charging with help of natureAfter spending many years writing about the role of technology in business, I’m expanding my horizons to explore technology’s role in sustainable development. I’ll keep writing here about content marketing and technology, but I’m also starting a parallel blog on technology and sustainability.

Creating a more sustainable world is the next big challenge of technology, industry, governments and cultures.  I’d love to be part this effort. And as a content marketing professional, I’ve learned a few tricks that can play a role.

Tell stories:  Governments, NGOs, individuals and businesses alike are all taking steps towards a more sustainable future. But their stories are often swamped in today’s news environment. I’d like to amplify some of the positive stories of change – particularly in the area of technology, where I operate every day.

Meet the audience where they are: This is a content marketing premise that can be applied equally well to “marketing”  sustainability. For example, Patagonia dedicated two pages in the middle of its winter catalog to an article by the company’s founder about the “responsible economy.”  The pull-quote for this story was, “I think the simple life really begins with owning less stuff.”  Sure, Patagonia shoppers already love nature, but it was refreshing to see this message happen right at the place where people are looking to buy.

Understand  human psychology: It’s easy to feel a sense of helplessness when confronting the problems of climate and sustainability.  Yikes, the ocean is warming?  What can I do?   Unfortunately, one common response is to turn away and focus on simpler or more pleasant things.

A study by C.J. Hutto and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology found that on Twitter, people who posted positive messages gained the most followers. (Good writing was also a contributing factor, I’m happy to say.)

That’s not to say that we should hold off on the bad news – other studies show that people pay more attention to bad news than good. But if you want to encourage people to take action and to amplify your message, it’s best not to make the case too hopeless. Give people something to move towards, rather than run away from.

If you’re interested in following this journey, visit my new blog, Technology and Sustainability. I welcome comments and suggestions.

Executive ghostwriting strategies

Leave a reply

iStock_000011092102XSmallIn honor of Halloween, I thought I’d write a post about ghosts – more specifically, ghostwriting for corporate executives.

In today’s content marketing world, everyone wants executives to demonstrate “thought leadership” by writing articles and blogs. However, not every brilliant executive is equally brilliant as a writer. And even those who do write well rarely have the time to dedicate to it – writing requires uninterrupted time.

The increase in business blogging is driving a rise in executive ghostwriting.  As with the spectral varieties, there are many types of executive ghostwriters.

The drive-by ghost

Sometimes the executive’s only input adding their name at the end of the process. The executive often has little to do with the creation of the article or blog, other than final approval.

This happens fairly often with corporate blogs – someone in marketing is actually writing for the executive. Bylined or contributed articles on websites or magazines are often ghostwritten in this way.

The collaborative ghost

Much more fun, from a writer’s perspective, is  collaborative ghostwriting, when the  writer and bylined author work together to create something that is better than either of them could do individually.

Using this approach, the finished piece reflects the stated author’s thinking but may be enhanced by the writer’s perspective and by the process of asking questions and delving deeper. And chances are it’s written better and/or faster than the executive could manage alone.

This type of collaborative ghost-writing requires:

  • An executive that is willing to spend a little time thinking about topics and discussing them with a writer, and
  • A writer who is good at listening and flexible enough with tone and style to make the finished piece accurately reflect the bylined author’s thoughts and personality.

How do you collaborate with a ghost?

The answer to this question depends on the personality of the bylined author and the subject matter.

I’ve used many methods for collaborating with executives. Often it’s as simple as a phone call, perhaps with a follow-up question via email. Sometimes collaboration requires meeting face-to-face or face-to-whiteboard. And sometimes people prefer to do a short written ‘brain dump’ of their ideas in an email or a bulleted list.

For the writer, this kind of collaborative ghost-writing can very rewarding. It’s fun to exchange ideas with people who are knowledgeable about technology.  It’s a challenge to create the right tone and style, not only for the author but also for the intended use of the piece.

The only drawback is that you cannot easily tell the world at large about your published work. Since the ghostwriter has no byline, there’s no obvious record of your involvement.  And publishing the fact that you wrote it seems like a betrayal of trust.

Ah, the perils of being a ghost.

The next time you’re reading a pithy article or blog post by a CEO, see if you detect a shiver down your spine at a particularly nice turn of phrase. Maybe you just felt the presence of a ghost.

Create a quick corporate style guide

1 Reply

If multiple people create content for your business, you need a corporate style guide. Otherwise, you risk having a corporate identity with personality disorder.

Style guide

Keep a consistent voice across your content

If you don’t already have a style guide, don’t fear. It doesn’t have to be a huge project. Here’s a case where the perfect is the enemy of the good. It’s better to have a basic, barebones guide that people will actually use, rather than a complete AP Style Guide discourse.

At a minimum, the style guide should cover terminology specific to your company/industry, as well as the most common mistakes you see from writers.

Here are the five basic elements that I include in the ‘quick-and-dirty’ style guides I sometimes create for clients. (Note that logo usage, fonts and color schemes are out of scope – although the style guide is a good place to include them.)

1. Product naming and usage

It seems obvious, but needs saying. The style guide should include:

  • Product names (with correct capitalization)
  • Product name usage – For example, should you “install seven Acme Gizmos” or “install Acme Gizmo on seven servers?”
  • Product category – Be consistent about how you refer to the product.

2. Voice

Share the overall tone and voice, based on the ‘corporate style’ you’ve identified (see my previous post on Finding your corporate style). Considerations include:

  • Second person – Do you write ‘you’ when referring to the reader?
  • First person plural – Do you want to say ‘we’ in your website? In which situations? (For a discussion of using “we”, see Gini Dietrich’s recent post about “eliminating the French” from your website.)
  • Active/passive – Encourage people to avoid excessive use of the passive voice.
  • Authoritative vs. collaborative – Do you want to be perceived as the font of authority, or do you want a more engaging style?
  • Humor – Is it appropriate, and if so, where and how much?

Blog contributors will write in a personal tone and style – that’s appropriate and expected. They have more leeway on sentence structure and the use of first and second person. But blogs should still use the same grammar rules, product naming and terminology as pieces written in the corporate voice.

3. Punctuation

Use the AP style guide or Chicago Manual of Style as a final arbiter for punctuation. However, your style guide can resolve the most common dilemmas for writers, including:

  • Commas – Choose a side in the great serial comma debate and stick with it. (The serial comma is the last comma before the ‘and’ in a list).
  • Dashes – If dashes are consistent with your corporate style, do you use an m-dash or n-dash? Lay out for people exactly how you want dashes to appear, and whether you want a space on either side or not.
  • It’s and its – This is such a common mistake that it’s worth putting in your style guide. The possessive does not have an apostrophe, the contraction does.

4. Capitalization

Which terms/words common should you capitalize? Legitimate candidates include:

  • Product names
  • Terms for which you have trademarks or registered trademarks
  • Terms that make up an acronym (Bring Your Own Device or BYOD)
  • Initial words of headings (depending on your heading styles)
  • Industry terms like “Internet” or “Wi-Fi”

Note that when it comes to capitalization, more is not better. Do not capitalize words within sentences without good reason. Make a strong stand against random capitalization.

5. Blacklisted words

Come up with your personal list of overused or stale words and ban them from your content. Anyone using a blacklisted word should present a convincing business case. My personal blacklist includes:

  • Leading – This word is overused to the point of meaninglessness (I’m a leading provider of content marketing strategy – bleh.)
  • Impactful – Need I say more? Even “impact” is often used incorrectly.
  • Utilize – 90 percent of the time I see the word ‘utilize’, it is an ugly substitute for the simpler ‘use.’

Share and collaborate on your style guide

Now share your barebones style guide with everyone creating content on your behalf – from writers to bloggers, designers and editors. Be sure to put a date on it. An effective style guide will continue to change over time.

Using a style guide will help you create consistency across your content marketing efforts and reinforce your brand image.

Finding your corporate style

2 Replies

If you’re ramping up your content marketing, you need a distinct and consistent corporate style. You want to create a corporate personality that is consistent across all of your communications, starting with your website.

My last post talked about identifying your corporate tone and style. But what if you’re just getting started or trying to reposition the company?

Corporate branding is beyond the scope of this blog. If you’ve done branding work, then that will inform your writing style. Otherwise, here are a few ideas to help find your authentic tone and style.

Find your adjectives

Pick three adjectives to identify the corporate image you’d like to portray. Are you:

  • friendly, responsive and expert?
  • trusted, secure and authoritative?
  • edgy, innovative and fun?

With only three adjectives, you cannot try to be all things to all people.

Make sure that the style will appear to your core customers. What works in the B2C space doesn’t always work in B2B. But B2B doesn’t have to be boring – just look at Box or AppDynamics.

The adjectives should be based in reality – if they don’t reflect the corporate culture, the perception won’t stick. If you’re a company fully of geeks, then embrace your own geekiness.

Try the goldilocks strategy

Once you know what you want, you have to decide how far to take it. Just how edgy do you want to be?  If you’re not sure, use the Goldilocks approach. Look at the websites of other companies to find the extremes, then determine your own comfort level.

Too formal -> just right -> too casual
Too serious -> just right -> Too flippant

Maybe you want to push the boundaries.  Every company will have a different take on what ‘just right’ means for their business.

Once you’ve identified some ‘just right’ websites, share them with your content developers to give them an idea of the tone and style you want to achieve. This will help ensure consistency across all of your content marketing efforts.

What’s your corporate style?

3 Replies

Your corporate website already has a distinct tone and style – is it by design or by accident?

As a writer, I need to understand a company’s tone and style before I start writing.   The corporate website is the first place I look. But it doesn’t always send the messages that companies intend.

Elements of online style

Although I focus on writing style, a website communicates brand personality in many ways, including:

  • The balance of text to graphics
  • Choice of pictures and fonts
  • Navigation (how easy or hard is it to find what you need)
  • Whether you ‘gate’ content or make it freely available

Then, finally, there are the  words and what they say. The combination of all these factors creates an online personality that the site visitor will associate with your business. Once that perception is in their heads, it can be tough to displace.

“Inconsistent” is not the style you want

Sometimes your website communicates a brand personality that you don’t intend to present, such as:

  • Carelessness (multiple grammatical or spelling problems)
  • Lack of consideration (hard to read and navigate)
  • Arrogance (talking about ‘we’ and ‘us’ without considering the visitor)
  • Inconsistency (writing style varies widely between pages)

These probably aren’t the brand images you want to project.

Do a quick ‘style audit’

Take a look at your website. Does it accurately communicate what you perceive to be your business culture and personality – either where you are today or where you want to be shortly?

It’s often best to ask a third party to do this audit for you. You could spring for full usability testing or use an unscientific panel of people in your target market. Just make sure that you get honest responses.

And at the very least, perform this basic tone/style check for the following red flags:

  • Grammar or spelling errors
  • Excessive use of “we” and “us” on your pages.  This belongs on the “About us” section, not everywhere else
  • Large blocks of text – break them up into smaller paragraphs and bullets
  • Long sentences – break them up into smaller sentences if you want people to read online

You can fix most of these problems quickly, without a major site redesign. Usability and design issues will take more work, but are a worthwhile investment.

In upcoming posts, I’ll write about identifying an appropriate tone and style for your business, and then making it stick across your content marketing efforts.

A simple strategy for feeding the corporate blog

2 Replies

The single biggest question most companies have about creating a blog is this one: who has time to create content for the blog? Consistency is important – you need to keep providing fresh (and relevant) content on your blog.

One strategy for populating the blog is to make blogging a byproduct of your other content development efforts.

The “+blog” approach

Think of it as ‘supersizing’ your content development – order a blog on the side with nearly everything you do.

iStock_000015966902XSmall
“You want a blog with that?”

  • Developing a webinar? Create a blog post about it – both before the event (promoting the webinar) and afterwards.
  • Just shoot a great video? Embed it in your blog, with a few comments about interesting points.
  • Published a customer story? Find a point to highlight in the blog.

You get the idea.

Warning: Don’t just shill the content

Focus on delivering real value in the blog post – not just pushing the content asset. Or, in the immortal words of Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman in the book Content Rules, “Share or solve, don’t shill.”

Blog about an interesting fact, lesson learned or best practice from the asset and offer the link at the end as an additional source of content. Make sure that the reader gains something from reading the blog in the first place, even if they go no further.

Consider your timing

You want to create the blog content at the same time you create the initial content asset (the story, video, whatever). This makes it part of the larger task rather than a separate to-do for someone on your blogging team.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to publish the post at that time. It may be more valuable if you wait. You can use it to fill a gap in your editorial calendar or schedule during your vacation. For a time-based event like a webinar, use the blog to drive traffic to the recording well after the initial airing, when you have a fresh set of visitors to your blog who didn’t see the initial promotion.

And remember the SEO benefits

Using the +blog approach can also help you get more results from the original content by driving more traffic from the blog. Because they are updated frequently, blogs often rank highly in organic search –  the other content can be ‘found’ through the blog.

Using webinars in your content strategy

2 Replies

Webinars or webcasts are hardly a new technology, but they’re still hot in technology marketing.  Content marketing as a marketing strategy has breathed new life into the whole idea of webinars and webcasts.

In a new study published by the research organization Silicon Valley Voices, webinars rank highly as a strategy for multiple phases of the content lifecycle:

Webinar graphic SVV

[Source: Silicon Valley Voices, 2013 Marketing Trends report]

Webinars and lead generation

Webinars are great for lead generation because people are willing give you their email address in exchange for the anticipated  value of the webinar.  It’s up to you to make sure that the webinar delivers on that expectation.

For lead generation, you need to reach out to people who aren’t already in your internal database. To promote the webinar, be sure to:

  • Write keyword-rich and relevant blog posts ahead of the webinar
  • Cross-promote with partners if appropriate
  • Reach out to your list with shareable links to the webinar – so people can easily share with others who might be interested

The standard practice used to be to promote webinars weeks in advance. Recently I’ve noticed that people often wait until the last minute to register.  Be sure to send a reminder email a day or two ahead of time to catch procrastinators.

Webinars have longevity

A recorded webinar can continue delivering and nurturing leads for months to come if you make the most of it. Don’t let it gather dust on the Resources page of your website.

Here are a few ideas for getting more content value from your webinar.

  • Create a quick summary of the webinar and offer it to everyone who registered (along with a link to the recorded webinar).
  • Pull an interesting idea or two out of the webinar and create a blog post. The post should be of value on its own, but point people to the recorded webinar at the end. (Bonus: this can happen several months after the webinar, potentially reaching a new  set of followers.)
  • Use the webinar as the basis for a contributed article or white paper.
  • Engage existing prospects by asking them to suggest future topics.

I’d love to hear about other creative ways people are getting more ‘juice’ from their webinar investment.

Content marketing and the new marketing reality

Leave a reply

Is content marketing an over-used term? Probably. Is it over-hyped? Maybe. But make no mistake, it is the new reality for marketing organizations – ignore it at your peril.

Screen Shot 2013-05-16 at 10.14.44 AM

[Google Trends shows recent uptick in search activity for Content Marketing]

The trend has been building for years in the B2B technology area, as buyers have been changing how they research and buy solutions.

Give away the good stuff
When I started in technology marketing, marketing saved its really ‘meaty’ materials for the sales team. Anything that included target audience, potential objections or competitive differentiators was marked with “Confidential” and included as part of sales training. You didn’t want your competitors to see what you were doing or to put potential objections into the minds of your prospects.

Those days are gone. Today people are actively researching solutions long before your sales team ever talks with them. You still need sales training, but you also need ‘prospect training.’ Focus on the customer. That’s where content marketing comes in.

The key is to give people useful, high-value content that helps them solve their business problems. Give it away freely, without waiting for prospects to talk to your salespeople. They can find this information on their own, anyway. You can earn their trust and attention by providing value early in the sales cycle.

There’s no turning back
Maybe you think you can stick to what you’ve always done – business as usual. This only succeeds if all of your competitors have the same idea. Once your competitors start engaging your prospects with useful, valuable content, they’ll gain an edge and you’ll lose the chance to form those relationships yourself.

Here’s a good article from Velocity Partners on content marketing hype and history.

Business blogging pays off

3 Replies

BlogNot sure whether it’s worth your time to create and maintain a blog for your business? HubSpot’s latest survey on inbound marketing answers that question with a resounding YES.

The survey highlights the fact that blogging is a remarkably effective means of inbound marketing:

“Seventy-nine percent of companies who have a blog report a positive ROI for inbound marketing this year, compared with just 20% of those companies that do not have a blog.” [HubSpot 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report]

But blogging requires time and persistence

Business blogging delivers inbound leads for remarkably little capital investment. Frequency makes blogging even more valuable. In the HubSpot survey, the 82% of companies that blog daily report an ROI for their inbound efforts, compared with 57% of those who blog monthly.

Yet keeping a blog ‘fed’ regularly can be a big challenge for companies of any size. (I struggle myself finding time for this blog.) If you want to commit to consistent business blogging, here are a few strategies that might help.

  • Start by building an editorial calendar around your SEO keywords or search objectives, and brainstorm ways to fill those topics.
  • Integrate blogs with other content initiatives. Some of my clients now ask me to prepare a blog posting with every new customer story or white paper I create for them. Have a new video? There’s a blog in that. Make blogging part of all new content development.
  • Share the love. Enlist multiple people to contribute to your blog, each with their own subject matter concentration.
  • Use ghost-bloggers. If you have a visionary executive who doesn’t have the time or inclination to blog, have a writer talk with them and put together blog postings from the conversations. Or create a blog in an interview format to pull content from a reticent contributor.
  • Look beyond writing. A blog can be an infographic, a quote, a video or some photos. Just be sure to include your search keywords in accompanying captions, labels or headlines.
  • Invite guests. Perhaps a valued customer, partner or analyst would like to write a guest post. It doesn’t always have to be your own employees.
  • Always consider what the customer wants to read. Answer common questions. Respond to concerns or criticism. Give people a reason to check your blog.

On a side note…

If you want to look at a company that practices what it preaches when it comes to inbound marketing, look at HubSpot. This report is a classic example of an effective content marketing and inbound marketing strategy: generate useful, relevant and valuable research for your target market and share it freely.

You can download the report from http://offers.hubspot.com/2013-state-of-inbound-marketing.

Curating research as a content strategy

2 Replies

My last blog on research as a content strategy talked about the many content marketing benefits of creating original research. But what if you don’t have the time or resources to create or commission original research? Research may still have a role to play in your content strategy.

If you can’t create, curate. 

Research can be an important part of a ‘content curation’ strategy, in which you collect relevant and interesting content for your followers or customers.

Remember that your own reputation is on the line. Only use research that is relevant and from a legitimate or trusted source. Then make sure you have permission to use it and are attributing it correctly.

If you choose wisely, the research can help support your position as a go-to resource for your prospects and potentially build relationships with the providers of the research.