Consider Continuous Improvement

"Practitioners of open source are picking up where quality left off to rethink their organizational structures and systems."

-- Andrea Garbor

One of the benefits of writing about trends in different fields and time periods is that you see which business strategies keep paying off and why. If a strategy works across industries, technologies or economic circumstances, you can often re-purpose lessons learned elsewhere to a new set of facts. As a marketing writer, you can also usually exploit various parallels and distinctions to inform your audience why your client's current strategy is the "true" course.

Take the continuous-improvement-for-sustainable-competitive-advantage strategy. That theme works great for clients as diverse as Analytics Operations Engineering (website: process optimization), Innocentive (brochure: open innovation), cumulusIQ (whitepaper: knowledge as a service), and Enigma (whitepaper: integrated service solution).

Only the context changes. For Analytics and Enigma it's more Quality Movement (a la Six Sigma). For Innocentive and cumulusIQ it's more Open Collaboration.

But the Quality Movement and Open Collaboration are really two sides of the same coin according to Andrea Garbor in her excellent article titled, “The Promise (and Perils) of Open Collaboration” (Strategy+Business, Autumn, 2009, Booz & Co.). (Registration required.)

According to Garbor, both rely on a common set of principles (she lists seven) for achieving sustainable competitive advantage. Take, for example, principle #4, her call to "cultivate continuous improvement.” Incremental improvement (in Quality Movement speak) or incremental innovation (in Open Collaboration speak) produces products that are of higher quality, better suited to what the user needs now, and carry less risk.

So if you are looking for a theme worth cultivating in your own context, continuous improvement might be worth a look.

The Web Content Recipe Book

"When an editor asks me include plenty of color in an article, they are asking for descriptive, emotional language. So, I use plenty of adjectives, or describing words."
-- The Web Content Recipe Book, Rachelle Money, Ken McGaffin and Mark Nunney, p. 64,

The authors of this latest color-by-the-numbers book about writing should take their own advice when they say, as they do on page 86, "Mistakes make people think you're sloppy and likely to get things wrong."

Besides leaving out the odd word here and there, an occasional misspelling, and incorrectly punctuating several statements as questions, other examples of where the authors violate their own rules include use of jargon -- sometimes both cultural and professional. At least now I know what an "advert" is. In the colloquial category, my personal favorite is:

"Your readers won't want to know every cough and spit of an installation process but they may appreciate a screenshot." (P. 68)

Speaking of screenshots, who checked to see if the ones in the book match the captions? The image on page 76 that allegedly shows Toptenz (a site of top 10 lists) actually shows a page on a completely different site: ProblemPresents.com.

Other problems go deeper. For example, several times the authors use the word "story," as on page 72: "Tell the real story." But they never define the word and thus miss a great opportunity to show readers the common elements that distinguish a "story" in the various contexts that the word is used here and straight narrative prose. On the other hand, they do feel compelled to define the word "adjective" -- a word taught in primary school.

The real problem with these kinds of books is that they make my profession, marketing writing, seem simpleminded. If you can learn in just a few pages everything you need to do all the things the books say you can, how hard can it be?

But to critique this book at that level would be to take it more seriously than the authors did.

In talking about the importance of observing details when writing, they quote marketing guru Seth Godin and his blog post about the Apple Store in New York's Meatpacking District. Evidently the front doors of this palace on 14th Street did not close automatically -- a fact that Godin admits few people would notice except those who care the most. However, "It's the customers that care who actually have a huge impact on your business."

So if you don't care how you write, why should your readers?

It's Just Business

"First of all, congratulations on 20 years! That’s big."

--Debra Neville, J.D. Associates

It was great hearing from so many current and former clients this week in response to my postcard announcing the upcoming 20th anniversary of my freelance writing practice. Of course, to some people the postcard, the self promotion, and even the client relationships themselves are all "just business."

So why not say it's just pretense?



Of course it is business. What else do you call defining a company's core value proposition and linking it to a market need in a compelling way? That is my business. And what kind of marketing communicator would I be if I did not publicly mark a 20-year milestone? We are all our own clients, after all.

Over the years my clients have written some pretty big checks to me (and many small ones too) that no one forced them to write. All they got back in return were some words. When you think about it that is pretty amazing. It is also impossible if everything about it were just pretense.

But if you feel more comfortable believing that the business of telling (and therefore learning) the truth about colleagues, clients and their customers is just business . . . please feel free.

Klller Content

"Putting in attachments to Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn . . . but why? We can bandy about all these cool things, but whether or not people are really going to use these is another question. And business people just love to learn lots of new tools. Not."

--Marilyn Pratt, SAP Community Evangelist

For those who missed it, there was a gathering of social networking thought leaders in Zurich last week for the SOMESSO conference. One of the speakers, Marilyn Pratt gave an excellent presentation headlined with the provocative slide: "10 Ways to Kill an Online Community." Dennis Howlett of ZDNet recorded the session and put it on YouTube.

The ten ways are:

• Design in a vacuum
• Add very gadget you can think of
• Drag every warm body you can in
• Resist engaging with participants
• Think size not quality
• Think money not quality
• Think noise not quality
• Think pages not access choices
• Think participating not listening
• Think statistics not value

Although the focus was communities, her lessons apply equally well to anyone looking to market online. At the end of the day, it's not about quantity but quality. I particularly like the point about "gadgets," which as Marilyn says, few business people know how to use anyway.



Like all good speakers, she says things that most people already know are true. It's just a lot easier to push quantity when there is so much of it -- and it's cheap -- than quality.

The Official Knowledge as a Service White Paper

"Today’s hot technology trends are hot for a reason. They are the locus of forces around Web 2.0: crowd sourcing, cloud computing, long tail, pull versus push, software as a service, virtualization ... among others. Like vectors on a map, these trends — in their variety, number and alignment — define the dimensions of individual self-enablement in a crowded information space. True, they are oriented toward different needs. But those different orientations allow them to triangulate on a common point. It’s all about how to apply highly dispersed network-based resources in highly scalable numbers in response to a particular individual’s request."

--cumulusIQ white paper

Knowledge as a Service (KaaS) is a trademark-pending concept introduced by my client, cumulusIQ. My task in writing the KaaS white paper was to show that this is not just another made up acronym in search of a definition -- but that it has credible conceptual credentials.


As the rate of change accelerates, people have increasingly less time to find out what they need to know before they need to know it. At some point -- call it the "knowledge singularity" -- it becomes impossible to gain needed knowledge fast enough from either formal training or previously identified knowledge stores. Based on the Internet cloud, KaaS solves that problem, especially in helpdesk and technical support applications.

The white paper makes this case in the face of much bigger players, like salesforce.com, who would like to claim the KaaS mantle for themselves. Having the only white paper that officially says what KaaS is, however, gives my client a big marketing advantage.

Keep Your Audience Wanting More

“Books in 60 seconds.”

--Amazon.com

Amazon is reaching out to traditional media this Holiday season, advertising the Kindle on TV with the tagline: “Books in 60 seconds.” That got me thinking about people who can’t wait to buy a book, but willingly wait hours or even days to see how a story ends.

They actually want to spend more time reading, not less. It’s called a rich user experience.

A lot of websites today talk about it -- with language like: “We create experiences that produce desired perceptions, cognition, and behavior among your users, customers, visitors, audiences.” So what experience does that create?

Just using fewer words doesn’t work. Face it, graphics on most websites still aren’t that immersive -- not even a 1280 x 720 pixel video (unless, of course, there is a great script behind it).

This doesn’t mean bury your value prop. There are lots of techniques to elevate your message and still keep your audience wanting more. The longer you keep them engaged without getting bored, the greater the chance they'll buy something. And writing is still the only way to sustain someone’s interest in your story for more than 60 seconds.

Easier Done than Said

"A strategic acquisition is one where the combination of the assets and activities of the target company increase the value of the acquiring company on a non-linear, upward basis."

-- Charlie Crystle

An advisor to one of my clients happens to be Charlie Crystle, the well-respected serial entrepreneur and advisor to start-ups. (He sold his first company at 32 for $15 million.) Anyway, I was reading a posting to his blog about strategic vs. linear acquisitions and was taken by his comment that:

“. . . for strategic acquisitions, the multiples range from 5 times revenue to up to 100 times revenue — there’s really no cap on strategic value, just the eye of the beholder."

It was that last phrase, the eye of the beholder, that attracted my attention as a communicator.

Charlie’s point is that in a linear acquisition you basically get back what you put in. Assuming a similar cost structure to your own, an acquisition that adds 10% to profit will add 10% to market capitalization and the stock price. In a strategic acquisition the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In combination, the two companies can do something they could not do before -- like create new technology leading to breakthrough products or processes. Charlie lists several elements that make an acquisition strategic -- but the basic idea is that it moves the growth curve rather than just push you up the growth curve. (My paraphrasing.)

So what’s the communications angle? Well, market value is an expectation of the future based on an understanding in the present. So explaining the strategy -- including relevant technology and business issues -- is vital. Don’t expect “the beholder” to automatically get it right and buy your stock. Successful acquisitions (and most successful innovations as well) result from seeing things that most people don’t. If your strategy were self-evident, everyone would have seen it already and there would have been no business opportunity in the first place. Acquisition strategies are hard to communicate for several reasons, among them:

• The target audience is impatient
• You have to disclose enough but not too much
• A certain level of background is required -- which slows you down
  
• The strategy has to be both simple and sophisticated to win points

Strategies are often easier done than said. It may be easier to develop a strategy that explains an acquisition than it is to explain the strategy itself. And if you don’t, you won’t get those 5-100x multiples Charlie’s talking about.