Who'll Win the Convergence Battle?

If the battle for the desktop was the story of the 90s, the story now is without question the battle for convergence. It's a far bigger battle, obviously, because this just isn't about productivity apps anymore or portals or stove pipe ERP-style integration. This is about everything, from what you watch on TV at night, to how you spend time while you're driving to work, to what you do once you get there.

CIOs are therefore much more likely to view IT firms, not networks suppliers, as trusted solution partners

So, I'm sitting here reading another telecom business plan about attacking yet another aspect of the convergence challenge -- in this case how to provide managed security of all those disparate online assets. I'm also thinking that telecom (as in carriers) may not be the best place to place your bets. Here's why:

CIOs traditionally get their IT outsourcing from IT outsourcers, not carriers -- who, by the way, are probably ranked somewhere below cable companies in the area of customer service. IT outsources already run the data centers, supply the business applications, and manage the desktops. CIOs are therefore much more likely to view IT firms, not networks suppliers, as trusted solution partners whose input and support is valued.

It's also probably easier for IT outsourcers to move into the carriers' traditional markets than it is for carriers to move into the IT space. This is particulars true because CIOs and IT managers consider traditional network services as utilities. Little differentiates suppliers, except price; and as long as manager's get a great price, they are indifferent about which company supplies them. As a result, carriers have more to lose if they do not achieve share in high-value applications markets. They will face further commoditization and some will not survive. On the other hand, few believe IBM risks its survival should it fail to achieve a share of network services (although perhaps they should).

My Wife's On TV Again

For those of you who don't know, my wife, Arlene, and I met at the Hill and Knowlton PR agency -- although we didn't start dating (honest) until I left for Regis McKenna. At H&K, I ran a piece of the United Airlines account and she was one of my account supervisors. So now, even though she sells wedding invitations for a living and I am strictly high-tech marketing writing, we still like to do a little PR every now and then. Her Bridal Survival Club (my idea) gets a lot of press. I think she looks great on TV. You can see her latest "hit" -- a recent Inside Edition segment. Just click here.

"What's Your Process?"

In a world of "suits," how do you stand apart? One way companies find differentiation -- especially in professional services -- is in their methodology or process. How a company works with you is certainly part of the overall brand experience. Process also has the advantage of being very difficult for competitors to replicate. In the world of instant information transfer, everyone reads the same books and uses the same software. It's very possible that most of what makes you "you" is the experience of working with you.

"We're very pleased with your work. We've received a lot of very good feedback on the paper and I'm confident it will help distinguish us in the marketplace."

Customers ask "What's your process?" because the answer (if there is an answer) indicates you've thought through how you do what you say you do. They can evaluate both your thinking, and your process. And it sounds better than, "Do you know your stuff?"

But how do you answer the question if most of "the process" is what goes on inside your own head? That's how it is in high tech marketing writing. People ask me all the time what my process is and the answer is embarrassingly brief: I read source material; I interview content experts with a recorder going; I write a first draft; It gets reviewed; I make edits; and it's done. Not exactly the stuff of a PowerPoint presentation, is it? And unfortunately (for me) I think one of the ways people assign value is by how complex something is.

Well, trust me, there is a lot of complexity in this very "simple" writing process. But rather than try to explain it -- I think it's to the customer's advantage to keep the process somewhat opaque. It's kind of like object oriented programming. In a complex system, different software processes don't have knowledge of how the other processes work with which they cooperate. If everything needed to know the details of how everything else worked, in order to cooperate, big systems would quickly become overwhelmingly complicated. Instead, one process only needs to know how to hand data and instructions off to another process and get results back -- a two-way interchange called an application programming interface, or API. The key is having clearly defined APIs.

In professional services, the API equivalent would be: "How do I know if I have an effective interchange with you?" And, as with an API, it's a question to which you can apply a set of standards. In high-tech marketing writing, those standards would include: The process is a true collaboration; the result is something people want to read; and that there is an even bigger outcome that flows from both the writing and the collaboration -- which is that there is now a much clearer understanding of how the client is truly exceptional in its marketplace.

Or, as one of my clients said in an email to me yesterday: "We're very pleased with your work. We've received a lot of very good feedback on the paper and I'm confident it will help distinguish us in the marketplace." In other words, the paper works; the positioning works -- and the collaboration was good, which I think you can tell from the tone.

The client was Centage. They make financial management software for small and mid-size companies. They used to make only budgeting software but that changed as a result of the writing process. The functionality didn't get bigger, but the marketing claims did. This wasn't something that was just tacked on because it sounded good. It really is what they do. They needed to try on new words, but they (and I) also needed to collaborate to make the words fit. That's the sign of a good process: a good API. The result is predictable and easily reproducible, even if the underlying process is hard to replicate elsewhere.

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Creating We

Hi . . . Just back from my monthly 28 hour New York trip in my role as secretary to The New York Wedding Group. What is a high-tech marketing writer doing as secretary to a wedding group? As explained in earlier posts, my wife founded the NY and Boston Wedding Groups and brings me along to NY as sort of marketing consultant and all-around support person. (The NY Wedding Group was actually my idea, but don't let that get out.)



Anyway, the speaker this month was Judith Glaser, author of the soon-to-be-published book, Creating We. The publication date is April 12th, but all of you reading this blog can pre-order on Amazon by clicking here. Her premise is that there are basically two kinds of people in the world: I-Thinkers and We-Thinkers, and that the latter makes for a much stronger organization (probably not a huge surprise since We, after all, is another word for group). The interesting part is that We-Thinking also makes us stronger individually. What do you think? Here are five examples of I- versus We-Thinking:

"Fear it wont' work" VS. "Believe it will"
"Been there done that" VS. "How can we make it happen"
"I can't get any support" VS. "Rally support"
"Fear of mistakes" VS. "Learn from mistakes"
"Don't get your hopes up" VS. "Share your hopes"

I can't wait to dig into my autographed copy. But after listening to her speak, I think I know kind of where Judith is coming from. There is a practical edge to what she is saying that can get lost if readers simply dismiss this as just a lot of idealistic cheer leading.

A really good practical example is an affinity pool, where companies each contribute leads to a common pool with some sort of overriding activity or interest that ties the members of the pool together. If each company contributes 5 of their hard-won business leads to the pool, and there are a hundred companies, that's potentially 99 x 5 = 495 new leads each company can "withdraw" from the pool. Yet, where affinity pools break down usually is getting everyone to really believe they can benefit individually by making what looks like a sacrifice. Instead of stepping forward with ways to make the pool better for the members, they cynically sit back, take whatever new business they can get, and feel gratified if enough cynics bring down the pool.

There are actually all kinds of ways We-Thinking can help marketing strategy, not just organizational development. And that's not idealistic at all.

It's Saturday. It's snowing. It's Boston.

Click here to enlarge. Click here to switch to summer.

I hope SeaChange will forgive me, but I left their brochure unfinished on my screen while I went outside for a walk. The heavens opened this afternoon about 1:00 and some incredibly gigantic snowflakes started falling outside my window. The urge to walk over to the Public Garden and take some pictures was simply too much to resist. I only reached 538 in today's word count, but the walk was exhilarating, and I think the pictures turned out pretty well too.

Today is snowstorm number 22 (a record) so this may very well have been my last opportunity to do this until next winter. Click here to see a slide show.

The Problem Space

 
Click here to enlarge.

You are looking at what I am looking at while I write this. (Besides the place where I work it's also one of my screensavers.) The picture is one interpretation of a term I use in my writing and in my presentations to clients: the problem space. I haven't heard anyone else use the phrase and I'd like to see it get some traction out there in marketing land.

What most companies are marketing, of course, are solutions -- which begs the question: solution to what? By saying the problem space, we are expressing the idea that problems don't come in one size or that they are one-dimensional. That means solutions must also be multi-dimensional and must be contoured to the problem -- in size, shape, etc. As I said to a client this morning, it's sort of like a key fitting a lock.

A space signifies context, which implies awareness of the underlying issues.

The term also sounds better than just the word problem. A problem is like a product, a single instance of a solution (or its application). A space signifies context, which implies awareness of the underlying issues. It's not just a phrase; it's also an idea which I think needs to be expressed more often.

Extra Curricular Writing

Last week I received an email from a new-business prospect asking whether I write non-technical copy. Yes, I said, I do. In fact, if you want to see a couple of example websites, go to Contract Decor International or The New York Wedding Group. The first is a company in the hotel drapery and bed covering business. The second is a NYC-based professional association of wedding vendors.

Writing non-technical copy is actually good exercise, and fun too.

I bring these up to make a couple of points. First, I am always intrigued by people who ask me if I can write non-technical copy. Good marketing copy is good marketing copy -- yes? If anything, writing for technical audiences is harder. It adds another layer of complexity, but doesn't take anything away that a "regular" copywriter has to do.

In technical marketing, you can no longer get by with just explaining how something works (which is hard enough and is what technical writing does). That may often be necessary, but it is almost always insufficient. You also have to do all the things good marketing writers do -- like convey a value difference in a compelling way. In fact, the requirement to do that is greater now than ever, since a lot of what used to be considered high tech, is now part of everyday vocabulary.

The second point I want to make is that I think writing non-technical copy is actually good exercise, and fun too. It employs a different part of the brain, and gets the writer involved with people who have different interests. In the case of The New York Wedding Group, I help my wife by playing marketing consultant, web designer, consumer ad copywriter, data base administrator, and a bunch of other roles -- some of which I would not get to do if all I did was write white papers, brochures and case studies all day for tech companies. In the long run that simply is not healthy for me or my tech clients either. The NYWG also lets me do things (like design databases) that actually let me get more hands-on with the technology in a way I would not if I just wrote about technology. That is definitely good for my tech clients.

Find the comfort zone

The last three weeks I've had the opportunity to work on a great project. A major government contractor in the homeland security field asked me to rewrite their corporate fact sheet. That might not seem like a big project, and my final product will probably be around 400 words (plus a diagram). But it's actually a very big project and priced accordingly -- several thousand dollars -- about as much as a full-blown brochure or technical article.

"Language that stays completely inside the comfort zone will be ignored."

The implications are obvious -- and were thankfully not lost on the senior VP of marketing, my client. Rewrite the fact sheet and you rewrite the corporate positioning. You give words to executives who in a few seconds can clearly and succinctly cut through the acronyms and the jargon and the generic language everybody else uses.

Digression: There's a great book that's been recently published, Why Business People Speak Like Idiots, with vivid examples of exactly what scares this marketing VP. Here's a gem: "Technological innovation, globalization, complex regulation and increased accountability at the senior management and board level have all combined to significantly change the landscape of risk management today."

I suspect the reason companies make their language generic is the same reason some people wear suits. They feel comfortable if they look like everyone else -- and like they have always looked. But being comfortable misses the point (just like customers will probably miss a company if it doesn't stand out).

Language that stays completely inside the comfort zone will be ignored. Language that goes too far outside the comfort zone will be dismissed. The challenge is to go just far enough -- challenge the reader, but not too much.
When the client read my first draft she said, "It hit me like a two-by-four. But the more I read it the more I loved it. This is what we do!" Now her challenge is to get buy-in from her colleagues. If you haven't done a good fact sheet, you probably won't get that kind of reaction.

The challenges of a fact sheet are both formidable and subtle. Not many clients will pay thousands of dollars for four or five hundred words. And most clients won't take the risks of testing the comfort zone of their senior executives, or the process of getting consensus. It's easier just to walk away with something so watered down it just doesn't matter. But think of the upside -- a single page that in less than 30 seconds tells people why you are really someone they should do business with. That's rare.

Hi, and welcome to my Blog!

First some introductions.
My cat Emmy . . .
My wife Arlene

Emmy helps me write. An American short hair, she is a constant resident on the couch in my office. We found her in a shelter about nine years ago. Sometimes when I interview a client for an article, she misses the exclusive attention. Later when I play back the recording, you can hear her in the background crying. Clients, thankfully, don't seem to notice.

Arlene runs an invitations business (mostly weddings). She also is the founder of The Boston Wedding Group, The New York Wedding Group and a support group for brides in both cities called The Bridal Survival Club. An MSW, she is on TV a lot as a wedding stress expert.

We live, happily, in a highrise in downtown Boston. There's a sign out front that says: If you lived here you'd be home now.