Canright Writers’ Blog

By Collin and Christina Canright

Ebooks have gotten a lot of attention over last the month with the excitement of the Apple iPad. Before that, however, ebooks had proven themselves as business-to-business marketing tools with distinct advantages over the traditional white paper.

Now we are not discussing ebooks as the electronic books read using the Amazon Kindle or Apple iPad. Instead, we are referring to ebooks used for marketing purposes to show thought leadership, explain a subject, or take a position, much like traditional white papers.

Like a white paper, a pertinent and relevant ebook can generate leads, as they attract attention to the author. The marketing ebook is essentially a unique twist on the white paper format, but is different, especially from a design perspective. Generally published in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, marketing ebooks feature lively, educational copy enhanced by engaging graphic design, in a format that works especially well when read online.

A white paper is like a journal article. An ebook is more like a magazine article.

The ebook format provides a more engaging experience for the reader, builds a case, and uses a more design-intensive format. It’s fun, too. You can use the best of visuals developed online and in magazines to attract readers and compel them to read the concepts you are laying out for them. This is definitely not white-paper style.

But like a well-formed white paper, an ebook tells your prospects that you are a credible source of information, giving you that sought-after expert status. The best part about an ebook is that it is distributed widely for free and is intended to educate, generate interest, and inspire action. Ultimately, an ebook is a way you attract people in order to get a relationship.

In “The New Rules of Viral Marketing,” David Meerman Scott goes so far to say, “ebooks have become the stylish younger sister to the nerdy white paper.” He further stresses the importance the ebook serves by stating that, “ebooks have a great deal of importance to readers. People can instantly see the value of a product that looks like for-purchase content but can actually be downloaded for free. In my opinion, ebooks should be material people want to read….”

Although Scott dismisses white papers, we believe that white papers and ebooks each have a place—each are valid tools. White papers, for instance, are still the top source of information for technology buyers, according to the Eccolo Media 2009 B2B Technology Collateral Survey. It all depends upon the specific marketing message and the audience you are trying to reach.

The release of an ebook can also be a web and social media catalyst. People prefer to consume collateral from their computers: Only 1 in 4 surveyed even print out an online document, the Eccolo survey shows. And content is as much a source of social media outreach as conversation and customer service.

For further ideas on marketing ebooks, here are links to get you thinking:

16 Must-Read B2B Marketing Strategy Ebooks
A survey of ebooks from lead generation to case study writing.

10 Must-Read eBooks for Social Media Lovers
A great list of social media and marketing related ebooks.

Tags: B2B marketing, content marketing, David Meerman Scott, ebooks
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Tell your audience how you can solve their problem better than anyone else, and you may well get them to open their wallets. The presentation advice given by two angel investors to companies presenting funding proposals provides a good outline for any basic marketing and sales presentation.

Jeff Carter, co-founder of Hyde Park Angels, and Laurence Hayward, founder and managing partner of VentureLab, spoke as the investors at tonight’s meeting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Enterprise Forum Chicago’s program Bootstrappers and Investors Faceoff. After hearing off-the-cuff elevator pitches from two companies, the two provided this list of questions a presentation should answer:

• What’s the problem in the marketplace that the company solves? Start with that.
• Who else is in the market?
• How does your company and its solution compare to those firms?
• What are the barriers to entry to the marketplace?
• Why is your firm different than competitors?
• What’s the investment opportunity? (What’s the primary benefit?)
• How will the business and the shareholders make money? (How will a buyer receive that benefit?)
• What’s the exit strategy for an investor? (How does that benefit ultimately translate to the buyer’s customers?)

I added my own translations from a business marketing point of view in (). Those are the basics, and any presentation that doesn’t address the basics ultimately fails.

For a more complete discussion of questions investors want answered, buy Hayward’s presentation, “Twenty Questions You’ll Be Asked By Venture Capital & Angel Investors.”

-Collin

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I had a call on our social media strategy and tactics today with Dean DeLisle, CEO of social media and sales consultancy Forward Progress. We were talking about LinkedIn and using it to help generate the holy grail of sales: inbound leads. Good solid inbound leads.

The problem we have—and he put it a bit delicately—is that our profiles (mine and that of firm president Christina Canright) didn’t tell people what we do for them or even what we do. I say he put it delicately because when I looked at my profile later in the day, I’d say that using a cliché like “dry as dust” would be giving too much credit.

Like many people, I took what amounted to the description in a résumé or straight bio and pasted it in LinkedIn with no other thought. “It looks like you put it there because you had to,” Dean said.

Well, yes. Had to fill the space. Just the facts.

So I looked at Dean’s profile, and it’s brilliant. It tells you exactly what he’s done for clients, how he got into the business, and why he likes it. It also integrates a few choice keywords for search optimization purposes. Take a look at it, and see why I used it as a model in rewriting my new LinkedIn profile and Christina’s profile.

I also referred to a book that Christina has been extolling of late, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. On page 71, under the subhead, “The Ultimate Elevator Pitch,” author Carmine Gallo gives the following advice:

The problem need not take long to establish. Jobs generally takes just a few minutes to introduce the antagonist. You can do so in as little as 30 seconds. Simply create a one-sentence answer for the following four questions: (1) What do you do? (2) What problem do you solve? (3) How are you different? (4) Why should I care?

That quote came in the context of high-stakes venture capital pitches, where a presentation may cost $3,000 a minute. But aren’t the stakes just as high for your online profile?

I’d love to have other examples of great LinkedIn or Facebook profiles. Please put them in a comment and let me know what you like about them.

-Collin

Tags: LinkedIn, personal branding
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Although I didn’t realize it at the time I wrote it, my take on today’s employment reports, which showed both a decrease in the unemployment rate and a loss of jobs, may be among the most pessimistic. When our Canright Calendar email comes out on Monday, today’s report will be referred to as a “job-loss report,” in contrast to most-often used tag of “jobless report.”

But then the figures have shown losses for so long, it appears that my brain sees it as a report of losses and not of data. A review of today’s headlines shows that I’m not the only one. In a search for meaning in the data, major media reported today’s seemingly contradictory figures mostly as a mixture of optimism tempered with the frustration of this recession’s long-declining employment data.

My tag may simply have been influenced by the first report I saw, CNNMoney.com’s article “The big jobs hole.”

MSNBC put a little more positive spin on the figures in “A ray of hope clouded by 8.4 million jobless: Mixed January employment data show how far the jobs market needs to go.”

The business media put the most positive spin on the news. “US jobless rate lowest for five months,” reported the Financial Times. “The US unemployment rate fell to a five-month low of 9.7 percent in January, even as the economy shed 20,000 jobs. . .

The Wall Street Journal followed suit in “Signs of Hope as Jobless Rate Dips.” The report, however, noted the “employers continued cutting jobs in January as businesses remained insecure about the economic outlook.” Indeed, though we hope to add to our staff soon.

President Obama tempered his optimism, according to the Journal, by saying that the report is “encouraging” and a “cause for hope but not celebration.”

Taking the just-the-numbers approach was National Public Radio and the Chicago Tribune; both reported “Jobless Rate Drops To 9.7 Percent,” though NPR inserted the word “unexpectedly” in its headline while the Tribune left that information for its article’s lead. The New York Times led in the same way but with the sunny headline “Labor Market Shows Signs of Rebirth in New Data.”

As usual, NPR’s excellent Planet Money team made the most of the situation to explain how reports can show a fall in the unemployment rate with a loss of 20,000 jobs in “Yay!(?) Jobless Rate Under 10 Percent.” The ever skeptical Agora Financial’s 5 Min. Forecast simply tagged it all “Jobs Insanity.”

Finally, my favorite, The Economist, which always seems to provide so much interpretation in its headline decks of so few words:

American jobs figures
Falling flat
More evidence that America is experiencing a jobless recovery

The lead paragraph rounds out the situation with economic context:

A WEEK ago, Americans were told that their economy had expanded for a second consecutive quarter, and rapidly at that: output grew at an annual rate of 5.7%. This week, they are reminded that a return to growth has yet to benefit the jobless. The economy lost 20,000 jobs in January, a decline driven by the loss of 75,000 jobs in the construction sector. Economists had forecast an increase in employment of around 15,000. The unemployment rate, based on household rather than establishment data, showed a slight improvement, dropping from 10% to 9.7%, but nearly 15m Americans remain unemployed. As Larry Summers put it in Davos last week, the American economy is experiencing “a statistical recovery and a human recession”.

For his nice turn of phase, which gives the most accurate and concise summation of the jobs report and economic situation, my business language prize goes to Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council.

-Collin

Tags: business writing, journalism, language, media, public relations
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Case studies are influential marketing tools that help a company spotlight and promote its products or services, and can greatly increase credibility with potential customers. A well-written case study illustrates how a specific problem was identified and resolved. The key is to adequately research your case study topic and make sure to ask, and then answer, the right questions.

Here is an outline and a list of questions we use in drafting case studies. Note that it’s comprehensive to handle long detailed articles and elicit interesting responses. We shorten list of questions to fit story requirements.

• Case Study Subject Background
  • Organization’s name
  • Mission of organization
  • Products or services offered
  • Capsulated history
  • How long a client? (if applicable)
  • Products and services offered by our client used by the case study company
  • Overview of IT environment (for IT case studies)
  • Company website (divisional website, if appropriate)
  • Grabber: Why would I know this company? (example: “ABC Company launched the initial tool to solve this problem or has dominated its business segment for so many years. “)

• Challenges
  • What are the case study’s main challenges? Which can be addressed by our client? Which can be influenced indirectly by working with our client?
  • What goals did the case study company have regarding resolution of challenges?
  • Interviews with client product managers and case study decision makers: why were products or services a good fit?
  • Were challenges noticeable to the public or to end-users, or just internally or financially?
  • If case study had done nothing, what would have happened?

• Solutions
  • What did the case study do? How was it implemented?
  • What are success stories from implementation?
  • What were the problems that client helped the case study overcome?
  • What was the process and time to implement solutions and bring online?
  • Impact on marketing, sales, operations, finance?
  • What was most attractive about the client’s products or services?

• Costs
  • What was the cost of solutions?
  • What people were involved?
  • How long did the project take?

• Benefits
  • What benefits did solutions offer?
  • How easy is the operation with the new product or service in place?
  • Who can tell the difference?

• Results
  • Enhancement of market position, customer retention, customer satisfaction, internal attitudes, cost savings, etc.?
  • How have the client’s products exceeded expectations?
  • What was unexpected surprises? Any “good news” surprises?
  • Data on results? (preferably data that can be charted into a visual)
  • How has the case study’s perception of the client changed?
  • Which of the client’s programs and products did the case study use?
  • Learns, such as, “Are online billing customers more profitable?”
  • Growth, grounded in data, such as change in number of customers or accounts, revenue, profit, market ranking, changes in product line, customer retention rates, etc.
  • Key learns?
  • Which of the client’s products or services worked best?
  • Has client’s product helped to retain clients? Attract new clients?
  • What’s next?

Tags: B2B marketing, copywriting
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Google Reader is an RSS reader–RSS for  really simple syndication. RSS readers make it easy to read and organize blogs, both on the desktop and on mobile devices, and I find the Google Reader to be one of the best and easiest to use.

I have my iGoogle home page set up with Reader widgets with either single publications, like the Financial Times, or multiple blogs grouped under tags like “online-media” or “payments.” I like grouping them in folders, which appear in a list of tags, because I can group multiple blogs together, and I can see the post in a fly-out bubble to read the initial part of the post.

I don’t change these tags all that often. Today I wanted to put my personal blog and our Canright Communications blog under the same tag–or in the same folder in Google Reader–so I can monitor how the RSS feeds look.

It wasn’t all that simple. I couldn’t remember how I had done it, I couldn’t find instructions to read, and I had difficulty reading the application, to wit:

I started out on my main Reader page after adding my blog and clicked on Manage Subscriptions link under the blog name (bottom-left on the screen), figuring that would tell me how to put my newly imported Observations-Engagements blog in a folder.

The next screen shows Settings for all of the blogs I have imported into Reader. I looked around and say I could Change Folders and Add to a Folder. But I was looking to add a new folder, so I moved on. . .

. . . to the Folders and Tags tab, figuring I would be able to add a new folder there.

Nope. It listed all my folders, but I didn’t see any controls to add a new one. I went back to the Settings screen, and then back to the main screen, getting increasingly frustrated.

I even searched Google Reader Help for “folders” and “add folder” but didn’t get what I was looking for. It’s funny because the example search you get when you click Help in Google Reader is “create folder.” But the topic you see is “Sharing content with public pages,” which tells you how to share folders but not create them.

I work a lot with computer instructions in our technical writing business, and when I get lost like this I usually start clicking on stuff. Back on the Settings tab, I clicked on the Add Folders button next to by blog name, and there it was, at the bottom of the drop-down list. . . the elusive “New folder” option.

I late found it again off the

It also appears at the end of the list for the “Change folders” button, which is how it reads when a blog is already in a folder.

I like Google software a lot, especially its speed, but this says a lot about Google software and how it’s designed for people who are good with software.

I think it says even more about RSS, which is really simple and still difficult to figure out. It is not a mass market tool and likely never will be, as Edelman Digital’s Steve Rubel reported in an October 2008 post that RSS adoption was peaking at 11% and likely would stay near that level. Rubel’s post cited a Forrester survey titled, “What’s Holding RSS Back? Consumers Still Don’t Understand This Really Simple Technology.”

Not to say that RSS isn’t useful. It’s extremely useful as a back-end tool. Our home page, for instance, receives information from our blog and other pages through RSS feeds. News moves from site to site through RSS.

It’s really simple. Just not easy to use. Like Google Reader.

-Collin

Tags: email markting, Google, RSS, technical writing
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At the start of the new year, I set my strategies and goals and plan my tactics on how to achieve them. This year, we are positioning our marketing communications services on content marketing: the use of relevant and educational content to engage an audience and generate interest in an organization and its mission.

A good portion of social media is based on sharing content, whether through articles and blog posts distributed on the social-media trinity of Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Or through pay-per-click advertising, website downloads, or good old-fashioned email marketing.

(And if email marketing is old fashioned, what of print? Maybe it’s not wired but certainly not expired. Most of the projects we do happen to be print.)

The first tactic in our own program is a focus on white papers. We’ve updated our white paper report as “White Paper Basics: the Dos, Don’ts, Whys, Whats, and Hows of White Papers.”

The report explains why white papers are written, what they are–and are not–and how to use them to educate an audience and generate leads. We also provide examples of different types of white papers, including a few we’ve written. Our list of white paper and lead-generation resources is excellent.

Feel free to download a copy–no registration required–and pass it on, along with our January Jump Start Offer: 10% off the cost of writing and designing a white paper or report.

Call Collin Canright at 773 426-7000.

Tags: content marketing, email marketing, Social Media, white papers
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My husband and I have declared this to be the Year of Writing—capturing our thoughts, sharing ideas, connecting with old and new friends and acquaintances, and discovering more about what’s going on around us. Collin sent me Steve Rubel’s, “Correspond to Connect,” which seemed to be in line with what we were thinking—with Steve putting it more in terms of a social media perspective.

Here is what he said on writing every day: “This year, vow not to lose sight of the art and importance of daily correspondence. Reach out to new people—even those you don’t agree with or those in other countries. Solicit and share new ideas.” This seems to be what social media is all about: connecting ideas, words, observations, and things I care about that someone else might care about too.

Writing is one of those activities that, when beginning it, I rarely know what is going to pour out. Things flow from my fingers that I didn’t know I cared about. A wonderful way for me to know more about me.

-Christina

Tags: connect, Social Media, writing
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Canright helped GTreasury, a leading provider of treasury management software and services, get published in industry websites and newsletters and increase its search presence by writing and distributing two press releases. The release, written in conjunction with the firm’s participation in the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) 2009 Conference, illuminate recent AFP poll results, the company’s latest treasury workstation product version, and the renewal of a long-term development and support agreement with the General Electric Company (GE). In addition, Canright designed and produced signs for GTreasury’s booth at the AFP conference to highlight the company’s client presentations.

Tags: AFP, AFP conference, Association for Financial Professionals, GTreasury, treasury workstation
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I’ve been equally fascinated and repulsed by the Kindle. I haven’t researched it much because my gut reaction to an electronic book reader is, “No way.” I like books. I like the smell of them, new and old. I like notes written in the margin by previous owners. I like folded corners in place of bookmarks.

The New York Times’ Charles McGrath mostly agrees with me, but he does own a Kindle 2. In “By-the-Book Reader Meets the Kindle,” he details his like, and dislike, for Amazon’s book reader.

Advantages: the Kindle is portable, recalls the last page you read, can read aloud, and wirelessly connects to the web for easy downloads and subscriptions.

Disadvantages: all publications viewable on the Kindle are in the same typeface, poetry and plays don’t always translate well onto the screen,the keyboard and joystick are on the small side, and the Kindle bookstore is far from complete.

Yet, while he believes the Kindle will never be on the same plane as books, and it needs much improvement, McGrath refers to the device as a “seductive white gizmo” and says, “It’s surprising how easily you succumb to convenience, and how little you miss, once they’re gone, all the niceties of typography and design that you used to value so much.”

I don’t know if I’m a convert just yet (the price tag of the Kindle is $359!), but I also never thought I’d adapt to writing online.

-Karen

Tags: Kindle 2, New York Times
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