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Super Bowl weekend is coming up fast. This week, we’re serving up a marketing story about the big game that relates to where content is going—along with other top plays in B2B content marketing news.

Three Things That Will Sink Your E-book
Does the “e” in your e-book stand for “error”? We review three requirements for any e-book: content relevancy, an attention-grabbing title, and bonus value. You’ll need these items to counter the three things most likely to defeat an e-book.

Super Bowl Viewers Will Check Phones 10 Times During the Game
Sam Laird at Mashable
How are mobile device users going to engage in multitasking as they watch Super Bowl XLVI? Velti’s fun infographic shows all the ways users will be viewing mobile media during the game.

5 easy ways to create killer content for tablets
Frank Salatto at Ragan.com
Almost 30 percent of adults own a tablet and use these devices to consume content. Find out how to leverage news and long-format content and video, as well as content that closes the circle and helps readers make purchasing decisions.

Surprising Findings About Mobile Worker Collaboration
David Lavenda at Fast Company
It’s hard to keep up with the dizzying stats about mobile ownerships, adoption, and usage. David Lavenda sums up the findings of three significant studies on mobile worker collaboration.

IBM doubles down on mobile
Ryan Kim at GigaOM
This week, IBM announced its acquisition of Worklight, an Israeli mobile app provider. This development appears to be part of a larger trend, where large tech companies are meeting market demand by acquiring companies that provide flexible and secure lines of mobile solutions.

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Photo: Larry Wentzel

Savvy marketers know finely crafted e-books are highly effective tools for promoting products and services. For one thing, these design-rich, information-stuffed pieces pack an impressive descriptive punch while explaining the benefits and details of products and services.

But don’t confuse e-books with white papers. While white papers are powerful when explaining complex topics, the best e-books take a very different, lighter-weight approach. Well-constructed e-books educate and inform readers, and even entertain them. They combine text, color, typography, infographics, illustrations, interactive diagrams, audio clips, and video to help readers understand ideas without bogging them down with every last detail.

E-books can be published in a myriad of reader-specific file formats: HTML, interactive PDFs, and more. Which platform is best for your e-book depends on your audiences’ preferences, readers’ habits, media types, and numerous other factors.

When done right, e-books can go viral and can be rapidly shared among a variety of networks.  We’ve seen URLs for great e-books featured on Web sites, tweeted across social networks, posted on bulletin boards, and even referenced in traditional media. Yet many well-intentioned e-books end up collecting digital dust and aren’t shared at all. Why? There are a lot of reasons such efforts fail, three especially common e-book mistakes can doom many an e-book project. If yours isn’t producing the success you envisioned, perhaps it’s because:

1. Your content isn’t relevant for your intended audience
Initially, your e-book idea seemed great, but now that the piece has been published all you hear are crickets. What happened? It’s entirely possible that what you wanted to convey isn’t what your audience wanted to read. In many cases, e-books fail because authors don’t understand the current interests of their audiences, or because the topic has already been covered in other e-books or similar collateral. Without a relevant subject or a new angle on an old topic, bored readers simply move on.

Solution:
Your e-book should help your audience solve their current problems, which means you must understand their current pain points. It’s highly likely your readers are voicing their concerns on social channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, or Quora. Pay attention to these channels to discover what your customers are loving, hating, and talking about, and then make those issues the subject of your e-book. Remember, social media is as much about hearing as it is about speaking. (As a case in point, the idea for this post surfaced after seeing a stream of confused comments regarding e-books that recently appeared on LinkedIn.)

2. Your title doesn’t grab the reader’s attention
Understanding composition is one thing. Getting readers’ attention is another matter. When wading through an ocean of clutter on the web, the first (and sometimes only) thing people see is the title of your e-book. You have only a few seconds to capture your readers’ interest and convince them to look inside. Many great e-books fail because of dry titles that don’t encourage people to read more.

Solution:
Develop a concise, active title that lets readers immediately understand what you are trying to say. Avoid generic, wordy titles, or anything that appears to have been lifted from a technical data sheet. Be lively and engaging; don’t be afraid to use a little humor if it’s appropriate for your audience and subject matter. But get to the point fast with your title.

3. Your e-book doesn’t provide bonus value
No one understands the bonus value principle better than children. There’s a reason why they beg their parents for a particular brand of cereal just to get a lump of plastic at the bottom of the box-and we grown-ups still think the same way. If no one is downloading and sharing your e-book, maybe a little extra incentive will entice them to grab your creation from the online shelf.

Solution:
Fortunately, e-books can be loaded with goodies. While ensuring rock-solid content in the e-book is the best possible incentive (see #1 and #2 above), e-books let you reinforce your content with options such as audio and video that can’t be included with printed material. One effective add-on we’ve seen includes giving customers access to information that isn’t available elsewhere, such as a brand-new customer success story or an interview with a top-notch developer. Other incentives from the world of sales promotions can be effective as well: discounts, coupons, quizzes, instant-win games, sweepstakes entries, prizes, points … e-books can deliver any of these, and including them can help drive more readership.

The trick is that your incentive must be exclusive and appealing enough to motivate people to download and read your e-book.

Avoiding the mistakes listed above will help you produce content that begs to be read and shared. Are your e-books falling flat? Let us know and we’ll tell you how we’d address your e-book challenges.

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Pull up a chair and let us serve you some of the top content marketing headlines of the week.

New Data Reveals Sudden Explosion of Tablet and E-Reader Usage
Corey Eridon at HubSpot.com
Tablet and e-reader ownership has doubled since the 2011 holidays, with growth fueled by the introduction of the modestly priced Kindle Fire and continued strong sales of the Apple iPad. This story examines why B2B executives use these tablets more for researching purchase decisions than B2C executives.

Engage: Apple’s New Tools for Interactive Books on iPad
Tim Carmody at Wired
Apple releases two news tools that may change content marketing: the iBook 2 and iBook Author. These free tools effectively lower the entry barrier for producing and publishing rich, interactive e-books.

The Small Business Social Media Cheat Sheet
Ethan Bloch at Flowtown.com
Consider sending this handy reference guide to anyone just getting started with social media. The infographic summarizes these platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Tumbler, and Digg. Step-by-step instructions help neophytes (and remind others) how to get started with each network. We’re left wondering why they left out LinkedIn, a very popular B2B professional network.

SEO vs. SMO: Why Google May Favor Social Media Optimization
Prescott Shibles at eMediaVitals.com
Gaming search results is getting harder. Google doesn’t like low-quality content, either-and appears to be jettisoning traditional search engine optimization (SEO) in favor of social media optimization (SMO). Find out why new Google search initiatives are redefining the winners and losers in content.

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If your business is similar to most IT companies, success stories are likely to be the most valuable marketing content you can produce. Whether posted on your Web site, highlighted via social media, or printed to support events and sales efforts, these stories overcome skepticism, shorten sales cycles, and help close deals. Done right, this form of sales literature provides real-world evidence of how a product or service makes a difference. The best success stories are convincing testimonials that help prospects identify with and desire to be like your satisfied customers.

But what does an effective success story look like? What should it include? Who should tell the story? How long should it be? Whether you plan to use the story in a case study, magazine article, video testimonial, presentation, social media communication, or as part of some other deliverable, four ingredients are essential for maximizing the impact of a story that promotes your products and services.

1. Let the customer tell the story.

A success story offers a unique opportunity for a satisfied customer to sing your praises. For potential customers, learning about product benefits from a third party that has used the product in the real world can be tremendously influential in their purchasing decisions.

Make sure the voice of your satisfied customer shines through by including a substantial quantity of quoted material. Chances are you’ve already produced Web pages, data sheets, and white papers that allow customers to dig deep into detailed explanations of your unique technologies and product features. A success story should provide a different perspective directly from your customer. Be sure to let your customers tell their real-world stories about your product. This will make the final piece inherently different—and more credible—than a story your marketing department tells.

2. Focus on benefits.

A success story should explain the challenges that led the customer to make a change, describe the solution, and then focus on the benefits. The majority of the content—by far—should center on the benefits. The benefits will help your potential customers understand how the solution can have a real, measurable effect on their business.

3. Quantify.

Whenever possible, include quantifiable benefits. Maybe your customer has saved $2 million, reduced energy consumption by 40 percent, expanded the business into five new countries, or accelerated the time to market from one year to six months. By presenting metrics, you enable your potential customers to quickly grasp the impact of your product, and you may even help them make a stronger business case for the success they’ve already achieved.

4. Keep it crisp.

To capture and maintain your audience’s attention, keep your success stories concise and to the point. Most written success stories can be told in four pages or fewer. Success stories embedded in presentations, social media, or other materials should be much shorter. Focus the story on the most important points, and lose the rest. Remember, readers are busy people, too.

The appearance and organization of the success story should help readers understand the story and the key messages quickly. For written case studies, consider including a short summary paragraph or use bulleted highlights on the first page. Use engaging subheads that draw readers in and allow them to scan the sections for the information they need. With well-written headlines, subheads, bullets, and pull quotes, a reader can get the gist of the story in just a few moments.

These four ingredients are vital for an effective success story, but keep in mind that these items describe only the finished product. To better understand what goes into an effective customer success program, download Customer Success Programs: Tools to Close Deals. This free white paper draws on TDA’s experience producing hundreds of success stories every year, and explains best practices from program setup and customer involvement to repurposing content for multiple channels and metrics to measure effectiveness.

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Imagine you’re a salesperson, and you’ve convinced a C-level exec to pay attention to your solution’s business benefits. Now that person is calling in the techies for due diligence on your claims—and you know your sale depends on your credibility. Further, you know you don’t have the technical chops to go toe-to-toe with these engineers, but you also know you’ll need their buy-in and endorsement to close.

Enter the technical white paper.

Technical white papers are often cited by business people as one of the most credible sources of vendor information. They are consistently ranked within the top five media types for evaluating technology purchases, and there is strong evidence they may be potential customers’ most popular form of B2B collateral

But they need to be done right. In order to make a technical white paper effective, you need to do five things:

1. Be truly educational.

The best white papers do a real service for readers by educating them about the newest technologies. Readers of technical white papers are looking to learn and be informed by unbiased information from subject matter experts. Engineers appreciate products being explained in technical terms without vague claims or exaggeration—what they sneer at as “marketing fluff.”

2. Make your case clearly—and back up claims with multiple sources.

All too often, technical white papers can end up being a series of disconnected technical snippets. To make your case, stake out specific claims about your solution—for example, that it’s more powerful than previous versions. Then back up each claim with convincing proof points. For a performance claim, the proof can be as simple as a processor speed or number of processing cores. Other types of proof points might include benchmarks or test results that you or your customers have discovered.

Then use third-party information to further back up your claims. The more third-party information you can reference, the more credible your white paper will be. And don’t forget the footnotes. Some readers will judge your credibility by the number of references in your paper.

3. Lose the hyperbole.

The solution offers breakthrough performance and unprecedented cost efficiency.

That may be true, but technical readers’ eyes will immediately glaze over when they see adjectives like “breakthrough” and “unprecedented.” Worse, they may feel they’ve been misled into reading what amounts to an advertisement. Such material actually has a negative impact because it erodes your credibility. It’s much better to make your case about high performance and cost efficiency by presenting the factual evidence and trusting readers to reach the right conclusions.

4. Set the right academic tone.

Understand the difference in tone between a marketing white paper and a technical white paper. A marketing paper typically addresses the reader directly: Make the most of your resources with the xyz solution. A technical white paper uses the third person: Organizations can make the most of their resources with the xyz solution.

Using the third person communicates impartiality and sets a tone of calm, scholarly consideration. The reader feels free to evaluate your information without pressure—it’s as if the salesperson has left the room. A technical paper also employs the active voice whenever possible: “Next, the administrator uploads the software,” not “the software is uploaded.” Using the active voice will help maintain the technical reader’s interest.

5. Use all the space you need.

While too much technical detail can kill your deal at the C-level, providing too little technical information is a huge mistake once the handoff to IT occurs. If you need more information (charts, diagrams, sidebars, or text) to fully explain something complicated, by all means include it. There are no set rules for what is an acceptable length for a technical white paper.

But do be careful about focusing on meaningful differentiators. For example, if your solution is all about raw performance, you probably don’t need those extra three pages explaining the subtle nuances of configuration options.

So let’s review. Technical white papers should always:

1)      Be educational.

2)      Make the case clearly, with strong proof.

3)      Avoid hyperbole.

4)      Use an academic, impartial tone (and making sure the paper is well written goes without saying, right?).

5)      Be complete, but remain focused. (Reminds me of the famous John Wooden quote, “Be quick, but don’t hurry.”)

TDA has followed these guidelines for more than two decades, and they’ve helped us earn our reputation for producing effective technical white papers. We continue to see these papers provide tremendous support during the sales cycle because they help prospects understand how and why complex products deliver their promised value. When prospects understand how things work, they become more comfortable with new concepts, and comfort is prerequisite for purchase.

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Our customers tell us that few marketing efforts can match the effectiveness of a good customer success program. Not just this year, but year after year. Why? Because nothing sells your product like a satisfied customer. Customer success stories—used in case studies, video testimonials, presentations, and social media—help close deals.

Yet many companies struggle with these programs. That’s why we’re working with ConferencePlus to take our 20+ years of experience and best practices in this area and roll them into a short (and free) webinar on Tuesday, October 18.

We hope you attend. You’ll learn how to:

• Measure the effectiveness of customer success programs
• Use time-tested best practices that get customers to participate
• Understand the “1 in 10” rule
• Keep program budgets under control
• Apply the proven formula for compelling success stories
• Repurpose content for a range of marketing uses

This webinar has been designed for marketing communications experts who need to support ambitious sales goals. It’s also appropriate for any professional whose work relies upon customer testimonials.

Be sure to register for this event on Tuesday, October 18, at 1:00 PM Eastern time, noon Central time, and 10:00 AM Pacific time.

Questions and interaction will be encouraged throughout the webinar. If you can’t attend the live webinar, sign up anyway—we’ll send you the presentation after the event, and make the recording available.

We hope the information packed into this hour will help you revitalize your customer success plans. Getting the most out of these programs goes a long way in making all your marketing more effective.

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We recently ran across a television advertising classic: a cranky elderly lady played by character actress Clara Peller peers at a miniscule hamburger placed between two disproportionally large buns and demands: “Where’s the beef?”

The catchphrase took off—and was lifted for other uses, including a hotly contested presidential debate.

This Wendy’s ad is still funny because it neatly summarizes situations where a whole lot of nothing gets sandwiched inside the packaging—just like social media programs without much content.

The people you need to reach want meaningful content, not mindless drivel. Social media (or any other type of media) needs to deliver substantial value to satisfy the appetites of your target audiences. In other words, where’s the beef?

Do you have other examples of critical marketing programs where someone’s forgotten the messaging beef? Drop me a line and let me know.

In the meantime, check out the classic ad. It’s worth a look.

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Recently, one of our clients asked TDA to justify the costs of a customer newsletter we produce for them. It’s a modest publication that goes to a house list of people who have purchased a particular product line. The newsletter features stories about best practices, case studies, how-to articles about complex product uses and configurations, and interviews with product managers and architects, along with an occasional sneak-peek story about product features in development.

In short, the newsletter is a great way to keep in touch with a solid customer base. But recently a naysayer asked, “Why should we spend on a newsletter?” This person then went on to say, “We have good documentation on the Web site and we’ve already won these customers. Shouldn’t we redirect this budget to lead gen? We need more leads!”

We encounter this shortsighted mentality far too often. Custom content, in this case a newsletter, is the most cost-effective way a brand can deepen customer relationships. Newsletters, when done well, are read vociferously by customers. Think about it. Customers have an economic stake in your product. They are eager to wring as much value from your product as possible and hold a keen interest in its future. Hey, they have skin in the game.

It should go without saying, but let me say it: deeper customer relationships are tremendously valuable. And by reading a well-produced newsletter, better-informed customers can:

• Discover more reasons to upgrade or purchase more items in a product family.
• Self-identify for cross-sell opportunities.
• Shop the competition less, negotiate less aggressively, and become less price-sensitive.
• Impose fewer demands on your support team, helping you lower those costs.
• Actively participate more often in your brand’s communities and lend more support.
• Transform their view of you as a vendor or supplier, and see your company more as a partner.
• Mature from loyal customer into brand evangelist and become your advocate.

Cultivating these traits within a customer base can transform an entire marketplace. The economic value of such a transformation can be staggering.

Of course, the key to unlocking the full potential of any customer newsletter is quality execution. The newsletter must be timely, informative, and helpful to customers who receive it. If the newsletter starts to smell like schmaltzy PR—or worse, marketing fluff—it will quickly lose effectiveness, while readership dwindles and the brand becomes damaged.

That’s why brands have been turning to TDA for decades for these sorts of publications. We’ve mastered the art of producing enterprise content. Our team of writers and editors is constantly producing content that’s useful for readers and delivers a messaging payload for the brand.

Are your relationships with customers as great as they could be? If not, take a look at your existing forms of outreach to customers and ask yourself, “How does this serve my customers? How do they benefit from it? What will this enable that they otherwise would have struggled to achieve? What failures does this help them avoid?”

As always, let me know

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I recently had a strange conversation with a senior marketer about doing video for the sake of doing video. As I listened, this executive explained he was reacting to analyst feedback about some supposedly cool videos a competitor had posted on YouTube.

I was stunned. Now don’t get me wrong, I think YouTube and video is great, and so do my colleagues here at TDA who create (among other things) videos for our clients. There’s no better medium to deliver an emotional impact than video. Anyone who’s ever cried while watching a movie knows exactly what I’m talking about.

But this exec wasn’t interested in emotional responses or audience specifics. He was interested in getting stuff up on YouTube. End of story. Yet after review, the traffic associated with the competitive videos was miniscule. And then it became apparent the videos weren’t named correctly and had been posted without key words critical to driving traffic. So, with these errors in basic execution, the likelihood of these videos ever being seen by a significant slice of the intended audience (IT managers and software developers) was, well, remote.

Still, the existence of the competitive video worked my client into such a tizzy that he was about to embark on an expensive and unnecessary counterattack. Thankfully, we were able to talk him down, and he adopted a more strategic course of action. Yet the misguided direction he was about to take is increasingly common.

For example, a longtime associate of mine recently audited a Fortune 500 company’s YouTube presence. The audit revealed that for every viewer of videos on the company site, thousands more watched the same videos posted on YouTube. So far, so good. But then the audit discovered that none of the YouTube-posted videos included the correct titles or metadata. Furthermore, the company had no idea that many of its videos were even posted on the site, so there was no way to measure or strategize about the effectiveness of this form of outreach.

It got worse. The audit also discovered that competitors had posted spoofs of the company’s videos on YouTube. And to truly pour salt into the wounds, these parodies attracted many more viewers than the original material. Had it not been for the audit, the company would have been blissfully unaware that its video marketing spend was actually subsidizing the competition.

With any form of marketing, execution is crucial. In the case of the company that supplied parody fodder for the competition, the big takeaway was that the vast majority of users don’t browse Web sites. They click on search results. YouTube and other networks must be part of your messaging distribution strategy, but they must be approached correctly, and this calls for understanding how your target audience will find your videos.

Assuming your target audience will see the video you post, you still must make sure the video delivers. The art of great corporate video is telling an engaging, emotional story while delivering a powerful messaging payload about the product, service, or company. Customer testimonials are often best suited as the basis of these stories because of their immense credibility and human touch.

But even here, execution can be tricky, especially during customer interview shoots. To succeed, the shoot must capture the customer telling his or her story in a way that is both engaging and compelling, while still being on message. If the person conducting the interview doesn’t have an intimate understanding of the branding and the messaging you’re trying to capture, you can blow thousands of production dollars on unusable video.

It happens. One of our clients recently told us the sad story of a video-only production company hired to create a video testimonial. During the shoot, the interview subject exclusively used a derogatory nickname for the product. As a result, the shoot ended without capturing a single usable quote. With the budget exhausted, the project was scrapped.

All this could have been avoided by using a team with deep experience in the industry, able to run interviews that reinforce key messages—and eliminate the learning curve costs.

Sadly, examples to the contrary are easy to find. Some of our competitors engage in professional navel-gazing by starting with the deliverable. They do a lot of visually compelling work, sure, but it’s often based on the latest buzz. And they lead with design or tactics and then try to force-fit content into a shiny wrapper. This is paint-by-numbers marketing. It ultimately looks amateurish and is a great way to blow a marketing budget.

I’m still baffled when marketing people jump on tactics before setting strategy. Or even before deciding what a particular campaign is supposed to cover. I blogged about this a couple weeks ago and described how some organizations implement social media tactics for the sake of doing social media.

The same goes for video. Or print collateral. Or Web content. Or any form of marketing outreach. So, I’ll say it again: don’t confuse strategy with tactics. Figure out who your audience is and what you’re saying before you decide how and where to say it.

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Earlier this week, a client asked, “What part of your business relates to social media?”

My answer: “Everything we produce relates to social media.”

Blame the fad factor, which can make otherwise strategically minded people lose their bearings. Because of the hype around social media, some executives feel pressured to “do something” and push their organizations to be ahead of the curve. Thanks to the fad factor, we’ve seen companies organize marketing resources and budgets by tactic—and frequently, measurable results are hard to gauge. The “web marketing” group is in charge of generating unique visitors and downloads, while the “e-mail marketing” department is tasked with campaigns, conversions, and click-throughs. Another department is in charge of videos while another is in charge of podcasts. Lately, new groups have been established around “social media” to track tweets, blogs, and buzz.

But where, I wonder, is the commitment to the audience? Every post, blog, or tweet must be both relevant and helpful to your target audience. When the content truly serves the audience, customer interaction with your brand skyrockets. But when the medium is the message, the brand can suffer, particularly when companies scramble for subjects that a particular medium is capable of delivering. As I recently coached one client, “Your customers don’t really care what you had for lunch or where you had it.”

That’s why we create articles, blog posts, and tweets for our clients with a commitment to the audience—and then leverage the extraordinary power of social media. For example, one of our clients recently re-posted TDA-produced thought leadership articles on various online bulletin boards and with discussion groups. A few weeks later, this organization discovered these articles had generated more discussions and interactions with customers and partners than anything previously posted. The lesson? Customers and prospects are hungry for helpful information from authorities who are qualified to help, even when such authorities are vendors.

Or take the way celebrity can be leveraged. One of the online newsletters we produce recently featured an interview with a well-known outside subject-matter expert who was chosen for not just his expertise, but for his significant social media involvement. This expert blogged and tweeted about his interview, exposing thousands of his followers to our client’s publication, which boosted subscription rates.

When tactical groups get laser-focused on metrics used to measure their efforts (clicks, tweets, posts, visits, etc.), they can lose sight of the big picture. They generate tweets and blogs that are largely content-free at the expense of more productive efforts. A few months ago, TDA produced several issues of a very successful print publication. Readers (customers) loved the publication because of the content, and salespeople raved about how effective it was in helping them start conversations with prospects. Then, a reorganization transferred control of the publication to a group in charge of “interactive” marketing. A few weeks later, the effort was cancelled because it didn’t deliver enough click-through statistics. Our efforts to point out that it was actually working fell on deaf ears because of the online-only mentality.

Organizing budgets and resources by tactic is a bad idea when individuals control how and when they connect with your brand, and choose the touchpoints on their own schedule. Different audiences have different interests, different values, and different informational needs. You can’t organize by tactic. To be most effective, you have to organize around your audience. Then you can make social media—and other forms of enterprise media—begin to realize their vast potential.

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