I love January 1^st! The noise of Christmas settles down and life promises to get back to normal— whatever that is! But the New Year brings new possibilities. It brings hope and the promises of new and not so new passions.

Flowers bring hope and promise too. Somehow, every January my flowers push their little buds through the soil once again. They reach out with tender green shoots, testing the air for readiness. Each minute of sunlight brings them more strength to push on, yet they are patient, knowing that it takes time to reach the prize of a beautiful blossom.

Sometimes, they experience setbacks along the way. An early frost, a hungry bug, or a misplaced foot can cripple the tender shoot. But, that doesn’t stop the journey. Never missing a step, the bud heals its injury and keeps growing towards that eventful day when it can explode in full bloom.

What lessons can we learn by watching the flower?

1. Have goals you can reach for. Blossoms come in all sizes and goals do to. Not every goal has to be a stretch goal, sometimes it’s just as important to knock things off the to-do list. How about finally writing that white paper sales has been clamoring for?

2.  Take a risk. It’s easy to talk ourselves into waiting for just the “right” moment. But the flower pushes its new shoot into the crisp January air, braving the possibility of frost. What new marketing tactic will you try?

3.  Start small and grow. If a flower waited until it had a blossom before it broke ground, it would never happen. Don’t put off the journey until you know everything. The joy is in the discovery. Look for simple things you can do to improve the effectiveness of your marketing program.

4.  Announce your journey. Just as the flower pushes through the soil to let us know it will bloom again, a good marketing team will collaborate on the marketing strategy and share in the goals. Announce your team’s intentions by publishing your marketing collateral assignments on a shared calendar.

5.  Plan for setbacks. Sometimes the soil isn’t right, the rains don’t come, the tender shoot gets bumped and broken. Though the growth may be slowed temporarily, it rarely stops. The flower works on healing the wound and getting back on track. Take actionable steps with you lessons learn.

6.  Celebrate accomplishments! The long journey finally produces the ultimate reward – the beautiful blossom. The flower shows off his accomplishment in all its glory with color and fragrance, encouraging other flowers to do the same. Don’t be afraid to share your victory – you just might inspire someone else.

7.  Give something to others. With your cup filled, it’s so much easier to give of yourself to others. Having reached the blossom, the flower produces seeds and fruits that give life to other creatures and spawn new flowers! To date, I have developed eight websites for no cost to some of my favorite non-profits, including Friends of Gold Butte. Some have since generated paid work!

Take a lesson from the flower and set your marketing program in motion now so that it can bloom and bring you rewarding results in 2012. Happy New year readers and be sure to have a little fun while you’re at it!

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

Think you won’t reach IT decision makers with social media? Think again! UBM’s 2011 Social Media and IT Marketing research shows that 69% of IT decision makers use LinkedIn and 44% use Twitter for professional use. And, 84% visit corporate blogs for professional purposes and one-third of those contacted the technology vendor for more information after visiting.

Turns out IT decision makers are social too! The majority use social networking to stay connected to co-workers and maintain their professional relationships, which are down slightly from last year. However, one of the largest and growing reasons is around their desire to make informed technology purchasing decisions.

For B2B marketers in the high-tech/software industry, this information is key in creating a social media strategy that addresses what these IT decision makers are looking for. Unfortunately, many B2B companies are still struggling to embrace social media as a marketing and lead generation tool. Additional studies show that over 60% say they have no staff dedicated to managing social media activities.

Social media activities such as blogging and the use of Twitter require almost daily attention. B2B marketers need to incorporate them into the overall strategy including the editorial calendar, yet be flexible enough to know when to change direction when business or technical trends shift.
Most marketers and content producers have a good understanding of what the IT decision maker needs in order to make influence the purchasing decision. However, many have not fully utilized the social media channel for distributing that content.

For those that don’t yet have the content that the IT decision makers are looking for, like data sheets, case studies, and white papers, social media may take a much lower priority. The IT decision maker is out there, already engaging with vendors, both passively and actively. B2B marketers cannot wait until all of the content is complete before incorporating social media into their marketing activities. They need to start where they are and grow both their social media channel experience and marketing content at the same time. They need to be available and found when IT decision makers go looking.

These geeks have gone social and they’re looking for you. Are you there?

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

This year I had the privilege of attending the Tableau Customer Conference with 1400 other raving fans. This is up from about 300 just a few years ago. Tableau is one of those companies doing it right and they’re being paid back with a growing base of loyal customers.

What Tableau does so well is that they make something so complex seem so simple yet so elegant—a description often bestowed upon Apple. Ted Cuzzillo, writer for Information Management, TDWI, and other publications actually said three years ago that “Tableau is the new Apple” and I wholeheartedly agree.

BI marketers use a lot of the same buzzwords to describe their products, including self service, rich applications, and agile. Most of the time, the difference between BI their products is shades of gray. With Tableau, those words come to life in full color

Tableau’s data visualizations, or “viz” as they are affectionately known as, go far beyond the standard bar and pie charts to include viz that make even the hardened critic, Stephen Few, proud. Some of these include line charts, scatter plots, heat maps, and Gantt bar charts. Where it becomes elegant, but still simple, is when Tableau is used to visualize data with not only shapes (lines, bars, circles), but colors and sizes as well.

A beautiful example of the combination of size, color, and directional lines is in the viz on Tableau Public that tells the story of 20 years worth of named hurricanes. The year’s hurricanes are laid out over a map, showing the start and end points, the path it took, the width of the line indicating wind speeds, and a different color used for each storm. It begins to blur the lines between life and art. In fact, you can find more of these or make your own on Tableau Public, Tableau’s free online version for public-use.

So, while many of the other BI players try to be all things to all users, Tableau continues to do what they do best—telling stories with data.

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

I’ve been seeing QR codes more and more and wondered how I might incorporate them into my own marketing content and activities for B2B companies. After doing much research, testing, and my own brainstorming, I came up with this infographic to help pull it all together. Hope you enjoy it!

You can also download the PDF version here.

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

It used to be that if you were selling technology, you talked to IT. They were the ones who understood and controlled the role of technology, and they knew how to select a product that would support the business needs and still fit within the technical architecture. Technology vendors typically only called on IT with messaging focused mostly on technology and not so much the business value.

Then things began to shift. The “consumerization of IT” put technology in the hands of everyone. Apps and technology crossed the barrier from consumer to enterprise. Employees use their personal devices for work productivity. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps meant for consumers are now being brought into the workplace.

Business users have become savvy about how to meet their own needs. At the same time, they were given budget responsibility for projects that included technology. Business users began to select and implement technology outside of IT—many doing so without even letting their IT department know until they were ready to toss it over to production. Technology vendors were quick to respond to this shift by changing their message to support business value instead of IT integration.

This made the divide between IT and the business grow even further.

While much has been said about closing the gap between the business and IT, not much has been said about creating a marketing message that does so. As proof, I’m writing a white paper right now, geared ONLY to the IT reader that addresses only architecture, data, and security topics. The goal is to get IT on board with a product that the business already wants or even has.

It’s come to the point that the real customer is a blend of business and IT. It’s not an either/or. They should no longer be thought of as separate and in some cases may even be one in the same. The sales force needs to make sure that both teams are at the table together.

It’s not an easy job for marketing. They need to provide sales with information that supports both the business value and functionality, as well as providing the technical assurance that IT needs.  Marketing assets should include content with a combined message and deeper content that provides more specific information, geared specifically towards business function and value or technical features.

IT is not a necessary evil as some say. Nor are business users ignorant about technology. IT is an integral part of making the business successful, yet IT wouldn’t exist if the business didn’t see value in their services. While it may be easier to sell to just one side, technology marketers need to acknowledge that harmony between both will help their product be successful in the organization for the long run.

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

I’m very pleased to have my white paper chosen as the winner of the 2011 Apex Marketing and PR Publications Award. I have written several Verizon white papers for my client Pivot Communications (who is terrific to work with by the way).

The winning white paper is Verizon’s “The Identity and Access Management Imperative.”  The paper speaks to enterprise security issues as organizations expand their boundaries globally, move data and applications outside company walls to the “cloud,” and extend access beyond employees to vendors, partners, and even customers.

APEX 2011 is the 23rd annual awards program put on by Communications Concepts recognizing excellence in publications work by professional communicators. There were over 3300 submissions in 11 categories. Apex handed out both Awards of Excellence and Grand Awards.

You can view the entire award list here. If you want to see the award I won, look under Pivot Communications, page 27, category 124.

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

Websites used to be easy. Just get your site designed, developed, launched, and sit back and wait for visitors to enjoy—right? Well, things have changed quite a bit in the last couple years.

These days, our would-be website visitors have numerous avenues to find information. It’s now our job to make sure they find ours. That means getting your content out there where your visitors can find it. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy – especially if your website uses the WordPress platform.

The simplest way to get started is to connect to the major social media outlets: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Once you get comfortable with these, it’s easy to add additional outlets like YouTube and others.

WordPress makes this very easy with the use of plugins. Here are the plugins I use:

Follow Me – Offers hyperlinked social media icons that your users can click on to follow you.

FT FacePress II – Pushes new blog posts to your Facebook Fan page using Facebook’s mobile e-mail address.

Sociable – Provides a wide variety of social media buttons at the bottom of every post so that users can share your content with others.

Social Media Widget – Similar to Follow Me but let’s you put your social media links in your sidebar or footer so that users can easily connect with you.

TweetMeme Retweet Button – This places a retweet button next to your blog posts so that users can retweet your post.

Twitter Tools – This plugin will automatically push a link to your new blog post to your Twitter feed. It can also create a blog post of your most recent tweets – but I personally don’t use that feature.

Twitter Widget – This is a nice way to share your most recent tweets on your website. It helps users see what you’ve been up to, what you care about, and catch up on info they may  have missed.

RSS – This isn’t a plugin but a feature that comes with WordPress. Users can subscribe via RSS and have new posts pushed to their RSS reader.

LinkedIn – I don’t use a plugin but you can configure your LinkedIn account to accept your latest tweets and Facebook updates.

Subscribe2 – And, for those who still don’t get the whole social media thing but want to stay connected, you can offer to email them when you have new posts. They just have to sign up.

Now you have no excuse not to power your website with social media. It’s easy, quick, free, and will have a huge impact on the reach of your brand and content. If you’re still using a static HTML site, talk to me about converting to a WordPress platform where you will finally be able to truly manage your own site.

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

So there you have it—a nicely-written, neatly-formatted, white paper. You learned how to choose a topic and create an outline in part one, how to research and write the content in part two, and how to dress it up with graphs, quotes, and images in part three. Now, it’s sitting there, all shiny, just begging to be read. Now it’s time to make it available and get the word out.

The first thought is to add it to the resources section of our company website. But, how about adding a small blurb and link on the relevant product page? Even so, the “post it and they will come” method doesn’t work very well. We need to do more. Assuming you have a company blog, write up a blog post. You could format in an executive summary style—but don’t give away the ending! Keep the reader intrigued enough to want to read more.

Now it’s time to use your social media channels. Push your blog post, or at least a link to your white paper, to your company’s Facebook page. Tweet about it. Talk about it in a YouTube video. Write about it in your company newsletter. These are the low-cost/no-cost ways to get the word out, but they only reach the community you’ve created. What about the larger community?

This is where online content aggregators come in. For a fee, they will host your white paper on their site, get the word out to their larger community, provide optimized search methods so that your paper will more likely be found, and collect leads from prospects that download. These aggregators used to be specific sites like Bitpipe and ITtoolbox. However, more industry content providers and online magazines are offering similar services. Be sure to check the pricing and reach for each one.

Bonus Section

Here are some other ways to increase the value and usefulness of your white paper:

Online lead generation – One of the main reasons you may have chosen to write the paper in the first place is to collect leads. To reduce the risk that your prospects will choose not to download when needing to leave personal data, use a simple form to collect a minimal amount of information.

Sales meetings – White papers are great tools to leave behind after a sales demo or meeting. Research shows that most white papers get passed around and are read by more than one person. It’s a perfect way to keep your company and product top of mind.

Trade shows – Another great way to capture leads is by taking contact info in return for handing the prospect your white paper. These days, most attendees will let you scan their badge in return for “swag,” but when you have a more serious prospect, give them your white paper to take home.

Sales training – You’d be surprised what your sales team can learn by reading your white papers. They will gain a clearer understanding of the customer issues and the paper will help them articulate the solution and its value. Having been in IT and been pitched by sales folks, I’ve seen many who understand their product but have no clue how it would be used in the real world.

Repurposing – To get the most out of your white paper efforts, find ways to repurpose the content. Explore the issue in more depth in a blog post. Write more about the solution in a newsletter article. Submit a scaled-down version to your industry trade publications. Any time you can reuse content, you’ve just increased your ROI on that content significantly.

I hope you enjoyed the How to Bake a White Paper from Scratch series. It’s not easy to sum it up in just a few blog posts – just as it’s not easy to write a white paper! Many white paper ideas sit on the shelf waiting for someone who has the time to write them. If you have great ideas and no time, or want the benefit of a white paper and still don’t feel it’s something you can tackle, drop me a line. I’d be happy to help. In just a couple weeks, you can have your very own, shiny new white paper!

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

We’re now half way through the white paper creation process. In part one, you defined your purpose and determined your topic. In part two, you got down to business, starting with the outline and then putting the meat on the bones. Now you have a fully drafted first version of your new white paper. Although you’ve done the bulk of the hard work, you’re not done yet!

Unfortunately, you might have written the greatest white paper, but your readers will not be compelled to read pages of plain text. It just won’t happen. Decision makers today are very busy and now have a much shorter attention span. They are much more likely to read and stay with a paper that has shorter paragraphs that are broken up with visual interest. Personally, I try to add something visual to each page.

Let’s get started.

Formatting your paper – Begin with the easy part – the margins. Because we will use the margins to include additional, interesting content, set you margins at 1” top and bottom, 2.5” on the left side and 1.25” on the right side. Change the line spacing to 1.5 to open up the text even further. I like using arial font type with about 11 for the body and 14 for the subheads. Subheads may be colored to match your company brand, provided they still stand out.

Because white papers are more often read online, I prefer to use a single-column, left justified style to prevent scrolling up and down. Finish off with headers and footers. Add your company logo, white paper title, and the words “white paper” to your header. The footer might include page numbers, publication date, copyright, and web address.

Charts and graphs – In your research and writing, you may have come across data that would help make your point visually. Charts (tables) and graphs are a quick way to display a large amount of information. Make sure they have proper axis labels, they are assigned a number, and are located before they are mentioned in the text. Be sure you do refer to them and quickly describe the point the chart or graph is making.

Pull quotes – Your reader will read your paper in your voice. Additional (credible) voices will make your paper stronger and help validate the points you are making. Look for opportunities to add quotes from other credible sources. These should be just a sentence or two and added to the sidebar of your paper. Highlight the quotes using color, lines, italics and other methods.

Images and diagrams – Pictures are a great way to break up long text areas. You may already have diagrams that show how your product works or pictures of your product in use. Conceptual images can also be used, provided they add value and are not just space fillers.

I think that’s enough to keep you busy till next time where we’ll talk about cover pages, executive summaries, and getting your paper into your reader’s hands.

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

In Part One, we talked about planning for your white paper. You need to understand your purpose. White papers require a fair amount of effort, so you should be clear on what you expect to achieve. You also need a well-defined topic. Did you do your homework from last week? Great, let’s get started.

I find it’s easiest to begin with an outline. The outline I like best is the one I learned from white paper guru—Mike Stelzner, author of the book “Writing White Papers.” It goes like this:

Introduction – Open with a compelling fact, statistic or story that draws the reader in. You want the reader to be quickly interested. This is probably 100-200 words.

Problem statement – Here’s where you get into the meat of the paper and it’s the basis for your topic. You want to delve down into a clearly-defined problem—one that your product or service will solve. Describe it in detail and include examples. Include the impact of the problem, meaning the financial costs, extra resources needed, time wasted, other inefficiencies, harmed reputation, etc. This section will likely be one to two written pages.

Market drivers – Are there changes in the market that have created a new problem. These might be new technologies, social changes, economic changes, or even new regulations. For example, Sarbanes-Oxley created many new challenges for companies when they were introduced. This section is probably about a half page or 200 words.

History – This section is interesting as it gives you a chance to educate the reader on what led up to this problem. Using the same Sarbanes-Oxley example, you might talk about the events that led up to this regulation being introduced. This section can also be about 200 words.

High-level solution – This is the turning point in your paper. You finally get to talk about solving this problem. The only catch is, you’re not going to say a word about your own product just yet. Educate the reader using a generic and high-level solution to the problem. For example, if your paper is targeted towards the supply chain management area, talk about how detailed reporting from supply chain software would help address Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. Include a list of benefits that would result, such as reduced risk, improved accuracy in management reporting, and less manual time needed to pull and format data. This section is also probably two to three written pages.

Your solution – Now it’s time to introduce your company and your product. Do not insert your brochure content here! It’s important that you continue in your educational tone and explain how your product specifically solves the issue. Talk about features only briefly. You just want to whet the appetite and get the reader to take the next step. This may be as short as a half page, but not more than a whole written page.

Conclusion – This is the time to wrap things up. Briefly remind the reader about the problem, perhaps one of the major impacts, and the solution. Again, mention your solution. And, finish with your call to action – which might be reading a case study on your website, downloading an e-book, or even contacting a sales rep for more info.

Gather up your content for each of these areas and we’ll talk next about “shaping the dough.”

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI