Are Blogs the New White Papers?
November 20th, 2006, by Michael StelznerHmmm. It seems blogs may be the “new white papers” according to a marketing professional.
A recent WebProNews article “Will Blogs Replace White Papers?” stated:
At the recent Chicago DM Days & Expo ‘06 organized by the Chicago Association of Direct Market, Dana VanDen Heuvel, director of RSS and Blog advertising at Pheedo explained:
“RSS is the new e-mail, blogs are the new whitepapers and podcasting is the new webinar. [Anywhere] from 10-30% of Internet users are using blogs”.
What do you think? Are blogs actually replacing white papers?
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November 20th, 2006 at 8:37 pm
Not a chance. A white paper summarizes a topic and makes difficult and complex material easier to understand.
As much as I love writing my blog, http://dynamiccopywriting.blogspot.com, I can only deal with a topic in small doses. It is not designed to provide complete coverage the way a white paper is.
Charles Brown
November 21st, 2006 at 9:39 am
Hey Charles;
Do you think blog content can be multi-purposed into a white paper?
Mike
November 24th, 2006 at 11:22 am
Hey Michael, nice to see a link to my article on your blog. My personal take on this is that blogs are a great way to generate buzz and work as a lead in to white papers, especially when the target is more in tune with casual and non-technical aspects.
-Shalini
November 24th, 2006 at 11:52 am
Boy, I hope blogs aren’t the new white papers. You’d have to have pretty long blog postings to come close to what’s in a white paper — or a single section in a white paper — and few readers will have the patience to take in that much online.
Blog content could surely be multipurposed into white papers. It stands to reason that blogs would be a good way to test material, using comments, trackbacks, and traffic statistics to glean some understanding of how the material may (or may not) have resonated with readers.
Writers would have to consider carefully what white-paper-bound material is suitable for a blog. Not all of it will be. Ill-conceived blog postings will deter visitors from downloading the white paper that appears to be (at least partially) derived from them. Writers also would need to walk the fine line between providing too much information on the blog (thus leaving visitors with little incentive to download the white paper) and providing just enough to entice visitors.
A certain amount of redundancy in information would be acceptable, I think, to blog readers who download the subsequent white paper; good content is worth reading a couple of times…especially if the blog’s author has proven time and again (on their blog, in newsletters, etc.) that they can consistently deliver and are likely to take the content one or two steps further in a white paper.
November 27th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
Whitney;
Great points about how blogs can be used to rest future content for white papers.
I like to say the white paper is the longest tool in the marketing warchest. And blogs are most certainly not the long as far as content goes.
Mike
November 28th, 2006 at 7:25 am
Michael,
It’s great how reporters at conferences get one soundbite and it becomes your de facto position on something as far as the press is concerned!
In stating “blogs are the new whitepaper”, I was actually summarizing some of the commentary that’s been logged about blogs, as I’m surely not the first person to utter those words. That being said, and having nothing but respect (I use them too) for whitepapers, some of the goals that whitepapers accomplish (customer education, thought leadership, sales process assistance, competitive positioning, etc.) can, in some ways, be accomplished through blogs.
When you think of how technology companies have written whitepapers to explain their technologies and position themselves in front of customers in the past, and how certain “web 2.0″ companies with equally complex technology have taken to blogs, screencasting and other new tools to accomplish the same ends, some do get the impression that “the blog is the new whitepaper”…
Personally, I don’t feel that blogs are on a trajectory to replace whitepapers in wholesale fashion. No way. Whitepapers are too valueable and have a solid value proposition. Nevertheless, anything that’s bidding for the customer’s slice of attention that they’re going to give a company is ‘competitive to the whitepaper’, and one has to admit that blogs are getting a bit of attention from many potential business buyers.