Au contraire!

Don’t Waste All That White Paper Research!

After all, everyone else does it (Photo courtesy Flickr user Arlington County)

Remember, if your white paper is of good quality, you’ve got a lot of research and information there. You may have test results and case studies too. Whether the paper is five pages long or fifty, you’ve collected a lot of facts on your subject, and made a lot of connections between those facts and the state of your industry or business. Why would you then let that information just sit there?

A white paper is a gold mine for you. Take a cue from the environmental and conservation world, where objects are recycled to new uses once their original use is finished. If the same objects can be re-used in several ways in a recycling program, why can’t the information in your white paper? And you don’t even have to retire the white paper to recycle!

Or, as it’s called more properly in the information world: repurpose.

Repurpose, Repurpose, Repurpose

Some businesses “repurpose” their white papers simply by adding them to an archive on their website, from which customers can download them when needed. Or the business keeps all its white papers on a site from which people can continue to buy them. And all the while, older papers fall down the list, and may not get much notice after the first flurry of purchasing.

But that’s not really repurposing. That’s using different ways to get the exact same white paper into people’s hands. That’s valuable, too, but you can make far more use of your white paper than that.

Case Studies

You may have have used case studies in the white paper. These can be pulled out and used separately as well. Did you use data from your own satisfied customers to demonstrate the good results your product or service can achieve? Collect the data from each separate customer, do more interviews with the customer so you have some good quotations and perhaps further information to use, and write up a case study.

Presentations

If you used graphics in your white paper, you can pull these out and reframe the paper into a presentation. Add just a caption or short line to each graphic, and as each one comes up when you’re doing the presentation, talk to your audience about the rest of the information connected with that graphic. Or you could use that information and find other graphics to use with it.

And remember, the presentation doesn’t necessarily just have to be a repeat of what was said in the white paper. You can make presentations based on some of the information in the paper, but don’t need to use everything. You can pull out different bits of information for presentations in different contexts.

Blogs, Social Media, & Websites

Use the white paper on social media (Photo courtesy Flickr user ryanvanetten)

You can use information or even small sections of the white paper in your business blog posts. Or you could do the process in reverse: serialize your information in several blog posts, and then collect them all into a white paper.

Meanwhile, smaller discrete chunks might be updates in social media like Twitter, Google Plus, or Facebook. You could post bits of information about results, and ask your followers to tell their own stories. As you get a response from your readers and followers, you could end up with even more data about the success of your product or service! And some of what you hear in response to your posts and updates could provide the seeds of other white papers in the future.

And don’t forget that you can pull out material from your white paper to use as separate pages on your own website. They could be information pages, but might also lead to more. If your product has been especially useful in school contexts, even though it’s not explicitly a school-related product, create a separate page that talks about schools. This could open up a whole new marketing niche.

Podcasts & Videos

These might be an extension of the presentations mentioned above. As long as what you said in the presentation will allow a listener to understand what’s going on, recording the presentation for a podcast on your website would work. Or you could videotape the entire presentation.

You might create several shorter videos or podcasts as “how tos,” if the information in your white paper lends itself to that sort of approach. Or you could use different sections of the white paper for other short videos; e.g., if you touch on the safety of your product, you could use the information to create a safety video.

Other Sellable or Marketing Materials

It might be that you’ve just given readers a snapshot of your industry in your white paper. Do you have enough research and extra information to expand into an e-book? Perhaps the white paper was a kind of “survey” of things, and you can go into more detail in a larger work. You could also condense the most interesting points in the white paper and create brochures or ads for your business or individual products.

Give Your White Paper Renewed Life

New projects from old! (Photo courtesy Flickr user ingridtaylar)

When you’ve created a white paper, that doesn’t have to be the end of things. You can repurpose the material in the paper to use in countless different ways. And you won’t necessarily be just handing readers the same information over and over again. Some readers really will want to concentrate on only one aspect of your paper topic, while other topics from your paper can be expanded so readers get even more information.

A white paper is very valuable in its own right. But think of it as the foundation document for a multitude of other creative materials and projects. When used in this way, it can multiply its value many, many times over.

So here’s where you can spice things up a little. Include things that relieve the monotony of big chunks of text on a white page. Present your information with variety. Here are a few suggestions for doing that:

Use Graphics and Charts

A detailed flow chart (Photo courtesy Scott Keatley)

You’ve got so many different ways to present data these days. And you know that graphic displays and images can help people understand how a pile of data relates to something in the real world. There are Venn Diagrams and Spider Maps and Line, Bar, and Pie Charts, Network Trees, Flow Charts…well, you get the picture. So insert that picture into your white paper!

Photographs are another way of making things stick in the reader’s mind. You can spend pages describing how to set up a piece of equipment, but with a couple of photographs that show how the equipment looks when it’s set up properly, you can save a lot of words. So use a few photographs.

Of course, don’t overdo it. Yes, a very long block of text on a white page can get boring. But if the reader has to spend the whole white paper jumping from photo to chart to photo, with only sporadic bits of text between them to tie them together, you won’t have a unified paper at all. You’ll have something more like, oh, a scrapbook.

Case Studies and Partnerships

Help your readers find beneficial partnerships (photo courtesy Flickr user Aidan Jones)

These are sections of text too (though they can also contain graphics), but they add a personal element to your white paper. This is a chance for your readers to learn the stories of others — individuals or companies just like them, perhaps — who have benefited from the information you’re presenting. You tell these stories in as objective and factual a way as you can. And yet you can bring in personal elements, by quoting the people themselves.

This will really draw other potential customers to you. Case studies catch their interest, because they can see themselves in those other shoes. And notice that you’re not doing any pressure marketing here. You don’t need to.

Another way to appeal to your readers is by telling stories of others they can partner with, to solve their particular problem. Sometimes you’re just presenting information, and aren’t trying to push an actual product or service. You can still keep these people on your side by helping them benefit even when you’re not making a sale.

White Paper Formatting

You know the basic sections you need in your white paper, but you can create extra interest by varying your formatting. Is your subject something that lends itself to a two-column format? Do you have “pull quotes” from within your text that you can set apart in a sidebar? How about an extra sidebar itself, containing interesting tidbits or factual trivia connected to your topic?

Have some corner, perhaps the top right or bottom right, where you position a small version of your logo along with the paper page number. You might add a border line, say, down one margin or across the top of each page, in a color related to your logo colors.

As with your graphics and photographs, do not overdo your formatting tweaks. But you can add visual interest, and guide your reader’s eyes to parts of the page that you consider most important, in subtle ways. Once you have all the material you want to include in your white paper, experiment a bit with the layout, to see if you can add a subtle but effective extra touch to spice things up and keep the reader reading.

Next time: How do we use a white paper once we’ve got one?

Whatever the purpose of the paper, these goals mean you’d better produce something that looks absolutely professional. A white paper is not supposed to be an outright sales pitch. The criteria it conforms to are much closer to academic standards than to marketing standards. So let’s have a look at the recommended sections to include in a professional white paper.

1) Title Page

A title perhaps less ...obscure? (Photo Yale Law Library, via Flickr)

Make sure the white paper has an interesting title that indicates your topic. And if you can work a benefit into the title, readers may be more likely to read the paper than they would otherwise. For example, you may be trying to promote the merits of a certain type of engine to run a customer’s processes. You could title your paper, The XYZ Engine, or you could add interest with a title like, Lowering One’s Carbon Footprint with the XYZ Engine. Readers interested in greener production processes will suddenly sit up and take notice.

Some white paper experts recommend that you don’t write a title until after you’ve written the paper itself and drawn your conclusions. As with any writing, you’ll find that the content or even the emphasis of your paper can change as you research and write it. A title written after the paper is done is completely fresh, and will reflect the true contents of the white paper.

2) Abstract or Introduction (optional)

The abstract or introduction may or may not be needed. This section is both a brief introduction to the problem you’re addressing and a summary of your main points and conclusion. You don’t need to go into a lot of detail about those points (that’s what the rest of the paper does), but a reader who doesn’t have time to read the entire white paper can still get your main thrust from scanning an introduction like this. Consider including one, especially if the white paper is long.

If you’re planning to put your white paper in an online repository, these generally require abstracts. People will first see the title and the abstract, and that’s what will be the basis of their decision to buy/read the paper or not. So while having an abstract is optional, it really isn’t, if you’re going to use an online repository.

3) Statement of the Need or Problem

This is where you really get down to work. This statement should probably be about one page in length, or less. It gives a general background for the problem or issue the white paper addresses, and also shows how this issue may be holding back the readers or their work. It also begins to show that you know what you’re talking about, and have some idea of how to solve the problem.

Remember that a white paper doesn’t simply have to address a marketing or sales issue. If you have customers who deal with border crossing (either as people who travel back and forth or those who ship over borders a lot), you could write about laws and requirements. Whatever problem or complex process your readers face, if you know how to help them fix it, you can write a white paper for them.

4) Details About the Problem

Details, Stats, Data, etc. (Photo courtesy Flickr user Cuito Cuanavale)

In this section, you bring in your test results, statistics, facts, and figures. You are not only demonstrating what the problem is, but you’re showing that it really does exist. And you’re showing what impact it really has, and even demonstrating some secondary problems that come up if the primary issue is not dealt with.

Your readers may not even have realized they had this particular problem. Or they might not have felt it had much of an impact on them. But what they read in this section can be very educational, making them want to read more and find out what the solution is.

Notice that you’re not doing any outright marketing. If you’ve got good evidence, you won’t need to. Your readers will be eager and waiting to hear your answers.

5) The General Type of Solution

The word “general” is very important here. You still aren’t marketing yourself at this point, but instead you describe the types of solutions available to help your readers. Again, you are trying to educate and inform, and not just sell. This paper has to be useful to the reader to have any value.

That’s more and more the trend right now: providing value of some sort to people, earning their respect because of it, and having them come to you. It isn’t as necessary as it once was, to yell “Buy mine! Buy mine!” at people. In fact, that strategy turns more and more people off, after they’ve spent years living with that kind of assault. This means that your white paper can not just be one big advertisement, or your potential customers are likely to run the other way in a hurry.

6) Your Own Solution

All right — now you can talk about your own product or other solution that will help your readers address their important issue. Up to this point, you’ve been demonstrating “good faith” by giving the readers some useful information. If they’ve read this far, they are probably feeling pretty mellow toward you, and will be more likely to read about your version of the general solution from the previous section.

So yes, write about your product or service. Point out the benefits the customer would receive, and how your solution will address the problems you talked about in Section 4, above. You still don’t want to yell and create pressure, and undo all that good will. But you certainly can give a one-page summary of how you can help, and then issue a Call to Action by directing them to your website or calling or emailing.

7) Summary/Conclusion

This can be similar to the introduction. Here is where you summarize the problem, and then the general solution. Restate your main points. And again, though perhaps in a milder way than in the previous section, issue a Call to Action.

There are other things you can include in a white paper, but we’ll look at them next time: Spicing Up Your White Paper

So let’s have a look at the three main types of white papers, to see how they differ, and how each one would be used. The type you choose will depend partly on the needs your readers and potential customers have, but it will also depend on your own goals. And remember that you’re never “locked in” to one specific kind of paper. You can use different types at different times.

Technical White Papers

Report test results and statistics (Photo courtesy Flickr user lynetter)

These white papers, not surprisingly, will contain quite a few technical details. If your readers have problems you’re able to solve, back up your claim with this information. Show how the problem can be defined and explained with scientific data and test results, and give technical specifications and further data to support the types of solutions that exist.

This is not a sales pitch for your particular solution, though. You will mention your own product later in the paper, but it’s not the focus. The purpose of a technical white paper is to make sure your reader really understands what’s going on when they encounter their problem or face some obstacle or need.

This type of paper is a general information paper. You don’t simply want customers who buy your product or solution. You will also benefit from readers who are well informed about your entire industry. These are likely to become long-term customers because they’re not focused on a “press this button to solve this problem” answer. They’re looking for what works best in the context of the whole industry, and when they find it, they’ll stick with it.

Marketing White Papers

Don't overdo the advertising (Photo courtesy Flickr user indi.ca)

These are the papers where you get to pitch your own business a lot more. In a paper like this, you would tout your solution to a problem, and would try to persuade the reader why yours is the best solution of all. But use this sort of white paper with care and caution; you still need to maintain at least some attitude of objectivity.

For example, you should still present the whole gamut of available solutions to the reader’s problem or need. You can assess the ones that others offer, perhaps with a “pros” and “cons” type of approach. Naturally, since you’re promoting one solution in particular, you can try to persuade the reader that yours is the most ideal. But if you don’t provide at least some information about alternatives, the paper will turn into a five-page advertisement that is more likely to turn people off than to get them to buy your product.

Technical/Marketing White Paper

If you’re really itching to make a sales pitch, this may be the best type of white paper to use. In fact, even the “Marketing” white paper discussed above should probably be more like this than anything else. Here you can combine the statistics, test results, and scientific data with an effort to persuade.

This will serve to give your readers the wider view of the industry that we mentioned earlier. The white paper will show that you know what you’re talking about, and have looked at things from every angle. It will also demonstrate your respect for the reader, and your belief that they don’t need to be shielded from information. You are treating them as equals, capable of seeing all the facts and making a responsible decision.

A Technical/Marketing white paper doesn’t swing too far toward tech-speak, nor does it try to overpower potential customers with market-speak. It walks a line down the middle, providing valuable information while simultaneously saying, “So this is why we believe our solution or product can meet that need or solve that problem.”

Remember that the reader or potential customer is the primary focus of the white paper. If this reader gets the feeling he or she is being “marketed at” with a vengeance, that could be the end of the relationship. But being given intelligent and useful information, in a respectful and interesting way, does half the marketing legwork for you.

Next time: Structuring a White Paper

There’s a lot of talk lately about how valuable white papers are to businesses. But does everyone even know what this document is? And if you’ve got one — what on earth do you do with it? The basic definition is that a white paper is a report that contains information that is factual, sometimes technical, always well researched, and as objective as possible. The information should be useful and interesting to a company’s customers. And when the business has a white paper, they can use it for marketing and sales purposes.

But really, don’t make the mistake of thinking that a white paper is just a big advertisement, longer than usual. The “marketing and sales” side is only part of the story. In fact, if the white paper gets too “salesy,” it could turn customers off. People already try to avoid being advertised to: nobody will want to read five full pages of sales pitch.

White Papers Geared to Customers

The primary purpose of a white paper should be to think of the needs of a potential customer rather than your own sales and income needs. The two are related, naturally, but in this document, put the customer first. A white paper first of all asks what the customer needs or wants to know, that you can provide (and, by happy coincidence, provide better than anyone else, especially your competitors).

You will first need to ask these sorts of questions:

• what do my potential customers need that I can provide?
• what is a problem my customers have, that I can fix?
• can I improve my customers’ lives, make their own work easier, or resolve a dilemma for them?

So say you have a customer who wants to engage in greener living. Do you provide your service in a way that will help them switch to a greener lifestyle? Or can they buy your product or use your solution knowing that you yourself are using greener, sustainable methods of providing it?

Your white paper, giving the details about your methods in contrast to less sustainable ones, could make your customers say, “I’m so glad I found out about this, and now I can use this solution or product with a clear conscience!” Even keeping any “sales pitch” aspect in the white paper very muted, customers who value the information it contains will feel much less pressure to buy, yet are much more likely to buy anyway.

White Paper as Foundation Document

A white paper can serve almost as a “Frequently Asked Questions” document. If there are things your customers keep asking about, these are things they are obviously interested in. So you might consider providing a report that answers or clears up the questions that are most on your customers’ minds.

And this highlights another immense value of a white paper. When it contains factual, important, and interesting information about certain aspects of your business, it can be “repurposed” and used in countless other ways. Here are just a few ideas:

• reshape the same information into a slideshow on your website, or a presentation you can give to an audience
• set up an information section on your website, with each major point you made in the white paper having its own page
• expand the most interesting parts of the white paper into an e-book or booklet your customers can buy
• use the white paper content as material for blog posts
• adapt parts of the white paper into brochures or other sales materials

Think of a white paper as a multi-purpose foundation document for your business. It primarily serves your customers, but it can provide information you use for your own marketing needs. Creating one or more white papers on just the right topics related to your business can go a long way to showing your customers that you really do understand them, and have worked hard to give them the solution they’ve been looking for.

Next time: What type of white paper works best?

However, I recently created a slide presentation for school kids about different types of essays, and had to be careful to define the word “argue.” No, in the context of a Persuasive Essay, that word does not mean “yell and disagree.” It means, “Make your case with logic and reasoning.” Rather the opposite of the ordinary, everyday type of arguing.

When we are trying to convey important information to someone, we either have to use language that is very clear to our readers or listeners — or we’d better define our terms very explicitly. Science writer Phil Plait makes this point in his article, Scientists are from Mars, the public is from Earth. He uses the following chart (originally used in a Physics Today article entitled Communicating the Science of Climate Change) to illustrate what scientists mean by certain terms, compared to how the general public understands the same terms.

(Table originated by Richard Sommerville at Scripps and Susan Joy Hassol, director of Climate Communication)

In the case of scientific terminology, sometimes the use of a word doesn’t just involve issues of clarity. Sometimes there are political implications too, as Plait points out.  He explains, for example, why he changed to using the word “denier” in certain circumstances, rather than “skeptic.” Skepticism just means you’re not likely to be persuaded without more proof. Denial means you’re not going to listen to any proof, period, if it’s not convenient to you.

So yet again — words matter. We need to think before we write, and choose our words carefully. And, as it happens, this is why people whose main work is not writing shouldn’t assume they can just toss off a written piece on the side when they need to. What they really need is to hire a professional writer to craft that important communication for them and ensure that their readers understand what they actually mean.

Paul Krugman, a great communicator (Photo courtesy Flickr user david_shankbone)

Today, the New York Times economic columnist, Paul Krugman, summarized exactly why language is so important, in his column, But, And, Why. (You may need a subscription to see that NYT article, but check it out just in case.) Krugman talks about why he writes informally at times, even though some of his readers think he should be much more formal.

Right away, I thought of my dislike of specialized jargon that makes its subject completely obscure to anyone who hasn’t been initiated into the high priesthood of that subject. And I saw that Krugman was thinking of a similar idea, even if he’s not talking about jargon directly. Remarking about economics, his subject matter, he says:

the inherent stuffiness of the subject demands, almost as compensation, as conversational a tone as I can manage.

Krugman recognizes that sometimes you just have to keep something conversational, so people can understand it, rather than being all formal and proper. This is why, despite the grammar police who write to chide him for beginning some sentences with “And” or “But,” he keeps doing it. Yes, proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation are very important. In fact, they usually make communication clearer rather than more obscure.

But sometimes they do get in the way, as does the jargon used in a specialized discipline like economics. Or marketing. Or astrophysics. Whether we are writing or speaking, it’s up to us to know our audience. Remember that we’re supposedly trying to tell them something. But if we get so caught up in hearing ourselves use the Big, Special Words that belong to our specialty, the only people we’re talking to are ourselves.

That’s not just insulting to our supposed audience. It’s awfully smug, self-centered, and arrogant of ourselves. So we must pay attention to our audience, and talk to them and not just to ourselves.

Using it isn't hard!

I admit it — I love seeing language punctuated properly. But despite my post title, it’s not simply because I’m an Apostrophe Geek. Oh sure, I did post about this question once before – or, you know, maybe another time or two  – but it really does make a difference, and really does promote clear writing.

That’s why I was amused (and a little disturbed) at this recent article on Ragan.com: An apostrophe ban? Whats next? Much of Eileen Burmeister’s piece is written tongue in cheek, but she does have a great point. Just look at her example from the sign she saw at a local store:

we beat

all competitors

tire prices

Without an apostrophe, Burmeister points, out, you have three possible interpretations of what that word, “competitors,” signifies:

1. The store is saying it actually beats up all competitors (assuming no apostrophe at all);
2. It has only one competitor, and beats that dastardly rival’s prices (assuming an apostrophe before the “s”);
3. It has many competitors and beats them all (assuming an apostrophe after the “s”).

In context, in this fairly simple example, we can guess that the right choice is #3. But think of two important things, about our complex language and such examples:

1. Not everything we write is this simple, and sometimes the context gives no help when we have to guess
2. And why should readers have to guess what the writer meant in the first place?

Why was punctuation invented at all? Why was grammar? It came about because we were getting pretty knowledgeable and were starting to say some pretty complicated things, since the world itself is complex. So if we want to communicate, and not have to keep saying to our readers, “No, that wasn’t what I meant at all,” or, “No, you missed my meaning entirely” — we need punctuation. We need good grammar.

This is not a matter of being old-fashioned or too picky or, heaven forfend, being an Apostrophe Geek. This is a matter of not just talking to the insides of our own heads. This is all about being able to say things to people in ways that will help them understand what we’re saying. What is the point of writing a single word, otherwise?

(And yes, I will not toot my own horn. Most apostrophe rules are pretty simple. So rather than trying to ban the apostrophe, as the town in that article did, why not just learn the simple rules? Download That Darned Apostrophe for free, and you’ll never use an apostrophe wrong again!)

Do your words point in a different direction than you think? (Janus photo courtesy Flickr user Abode of Chaos)

We were taught in English classes that a pronoun is just a stand-in for a noun. So if you’re talking a lot about Susan, rather than repeating her name over and over, you use “her” and “she” a lot, to represent her. So a pronoun was supposedly just a word that pointed to something that you didn’t need to name all the time. Nothing more, right?

Boy was everyone wrong about that.

I noticed something  a long time ago, with a relative who often switched pronouns as she talked. She’d start a sentence with “I”, but by the end of the sentence she’d be using “you,” in the sense of meaning “people in general.” I thought this was a mere curiosity, till I realized that the pronoun shift always took place when the topic was too close to her personally. Even in mid-sentence, she’d switch to a more “general person” pronoun  as though shying away from exposing herself too much. Her pronoun changes became better indicators of her real meaning than the rest of what she said. If you detected the switch, you knew she was veering away from something that had gotten too close.

It turns out I wasn’t imagining the significance of the pronouns. Social Psychologist James Pennebaker, of UT Austin, did an extensive study of what pronouns reveal about their users’ hearts and minds. And he extended the study to include what he called “cognitive words” (because, believe, think), “emotion words” (love, hate, sad, happy), and “social words” (cousin, friend). It turns out that women use both cognitive and social words way more than men, as well as I-words (first person pronouns). Men want the concrete, so they use articles more, while women negotiate the world via relationship, which requires all those other words.

The unnerving thing, Pennebaker said in a recent interview in Scientific American (The Secret Language Code) is that these differences hold true throughout history, with a few extra twists. (For example, suicidal poets used I-words more than non-suicidal poets) So he now thinks these discoveries could be used as tools to understand historical figures a lot better, not to mention modern-day speakers and writers.

And isn’t that unnerving! Does your own language reveal more about you than you thought it did? My relative certainly knew the difference between I-words and more general pronouns, even if her knowledge was subconscious.

This is another example of why words matter. We always need to choose our words carefully, especially when trying to convey important information to someone else. And it’s not just the so-called big, important words that are so crucial. In fact, it’s those small, “throwaway” words like “he,” “our,” and “the” which can lay our hearts and minds open to others in ways we might not even detect.

(James Pennebaker has now written a book about what he’s found: The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say about Us)

Old Navy t-shirt with grammar mistake

Is the correct use of the apostrophe important? Do people really care these days? I asked a similar question in my earlier post this week.

Well, Old Navy has sure learned the hard way that people still notice — and it still matters. In sending out new t-shirts in time for college football, they printed, Lets Go!! at the top of each shirt. Instead of the grammatically correct and properly punctuated Let’s Go!!

Remember — these shirts are for college football teams. College, as in institutes of higher learning and education. Where people supposedly have learned how to use and write the English language properly.

Does the apostrophe matter? Ask all those schools who have been sent t-shirts with this mistake on them. And ask everyone who noticed it immediately, and were horrified about it. And most of all, ask Old Navy, with grammatical egg on its face.

(Want to learn to use the apostrophe properly? Don’t forget to download my ebook, That Darned Apostrophe! and get the rules straight. They are simpler than you think, and learning them will make a big difference to your writing.)