Posting White Papers as PDFs and Word Files??
October 19th, 2007, by Michael StelznerDo you think it is wise to post your white paper as a PDF file and a Microsoft Word document?
Andy Sernovitz, co-founder of Word of Mouth Marketing Association says yes:
You want people to talk about your organization. So give them something to pass along. Nothing travels faster than an interesting article that you can send to a friend by email. Start with a report or white paper. For three years, WOMMA’s Word of Mouth 101 white paper (7 pages, written in 3 days) has been the #1 source of leads and promotion for the organization, because it gets passed around and reposted every day…
Offer your content in different forms to be handy to anyone who wants to hare it. Offer a fancy PDF download, but also put it up as a word document or people who want to cut and paste it.
What are your thoughts?
Thanks to Debbie Petras for bringing this to my attention.
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October 19th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
“… something to ass along…”
Priceless.
October 19th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
Hey Will - Thanks for catching that
- Mike
October 19th, 2007 at 11:59 pm
Cut&Paste is not a problem anymore - at least for experienced users. But I guess that a PDF signals much more that you can pass it along as Word files often count as a virus carrier.
October 27th, 2007 at 11:06 am
I am a bit concerned about the “security” issue, i.e., someone else “appropriating,” via copy-and-paste, my content and passing it along as their words.
Granted, nothing is ever totally secure, but it appears to be a lot harder to copy and paste a lot of content from a PDF file than a Word.doc.
I can see that direct quotes from a white paper might be desirable for reporters doing an article on the topic of your white paper, but–on the other hand–the Word.doc versions could be made available through your site’s Media or Press portal on an as-needed basis.
Roger C. Parker
November 2nd, 2007 at 5:08 pm
I often send things using PDF, and think distributing a white paper in this form would be a great way to publish it. But I often hesitate to send the same documents in word, even though I used it to create the document.
It’s not just what Roger Parker mentioned… it’s more the sense that word isn’t considered a cross-platform tool, although every word processor in the world can read it. It “feels” like Microsoft.
Now with the new word format, that’s even more the case. If posting word, I’d definitely use DOC and not DOCX format.
But I’m not sure my hesitation to post DOCs is the best approach. Especially more recently, the business community is definitely word-aware, and less anit-microsoft (much to the dismay of my silicon-valley buddies). I’m consistently getting requests to republish in word something people have received in PDF; the “feel” of PDF by my readers seems to be changing into one of “You (publisher) don’t trust me (reader)” where it used to be one of “I want PDF so I can read it with nice formatting”.
So, I’m just as interested in seeing others’ posts about this topic… I hope you get some more on this one.
Bob