Listen up businesses!  The white paper is here to stay and it’s only getting more important.  Or so says a brand new study by Eccolo Media.

I covered the main take-home message of their last report earlier this year.  But this new study has some amazing findings covering everything from the influence of white papers compared to other marketing tools, how they are shared, their ideal length and when they are used in the purchase cycle.

I outline the key findings below.

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Are you scratching your head trying to come up with current trends on a particular white paper topic? Why not tap into Twitter? By using applications that harness the power of this vast network, you can selectively search the Twittersphere for trends in your industry.

Set up alerts around key phrases

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LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter… To some they’re social media. But for those in the know, they’re free marketing tools that can attract thousands of customers and make millions of dollars for businesses willing to get in the game.

That’s according to the “The Social Media Dream Team,” four powerhouse social media professionals (Mari Smith, Jason Falls, Chris Garrett and Denise Wakeman), who will be fielding live viewer questions on finding customers and making money online with social media. The group will appear in free real-time video streams on Monday, October 12, 2009 for the premiere of the new online magazine SocialMediaExaminer.com.

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An interesting thing happened while collaborating on some sales letter work recently. While sitting in on the initial client interviews, I found myself going back to Mike’s white paper interview template to “fill in” some gaps while we were talking to the client.

Mike’s white paper process is much more interview-heavy than other types of marketing writing, but it’s also much more comprehensive. The “Stelzner method” is more of a guided discussion than an in-depth creative brief filled out over the phone, and I’ve found it much more efficient for gathering information than your typical client discovery questionnaire. This is especially true when talking to technical experts, as they can tend to run off on tangents or even miss the point of a question entirely unless it is asked of them in several different ways.

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