I was having a discussion with Brian Knight yesterday about whitepapers and thought I’d share some of it – from my view point of course.  I went to Wikipedia for their definition of whitepapers and they describe it as an authoritative report or guide, but goes on to say that they have evolved into primarily marketing tools of three types; business case, technical, and hybrid.

So first, do we need whitepapers? I think they fill a valuable niche between the blog/article style and size and that of a full fledged book. Its a good way to share some deep domain knowledge with a smaller investment of time and money. For most of us the challenge has become whether the content value of the whitepaper exceeds the marketing noise.

That said, it’s all about the money – someone has to write them and they expect (and deserve) to be paid. Most vendors want to draw traffic to their sites so you’ll at least see their products and services and I have no quibble with that. They invest in having a whitepaper created as a marketing expense, but to what extent should the whitepaper be tailored to their products and services? I guess that depends on how it’s framed – clearly one on SQL statistics implies a requirement to use SQL Server!

I think the problem is that we’ve come to expect a heavy vendor bias in these things, which leads to some interesting behaviors:

• We just don’t bother with them (perhaps short of the technical ones from MS)
• We read them and studiously ignore the marketing message

I vote for one percent marketing, Brian thinks that’s unrealistic – but we agree that it’s a slider, as the person paying for it you can move the slider from gift to the world to totally sales push as you decide is appropriate. Brian says they still work despite my distaste for them and thinks I take a harsher view than most – thus the post today!

Things I’m ok with:

• Putting the vendor logo and info on the cover in large type
• Calling out the author and credentials, perhaps up to half a page
• Starting or ending with a 1 page marketing message
• Requiring my email address to download (and adding me to their mailing list which I can opt out of later if I desire)
• If it’s showing how to solve the problem using your product/service, make sure I can tell that from the title (and don’t be sly about this)

Things I’d prefer:

• Not requiring my email address to download
• Provide a quick preview without any credentials so I can decide if I want to bother
• Vendor commits to one follow up email to see if I would be interested

Things that ain’t happening:

• Not going to provide my phone number or mailing address. Some vendors are great about this, some hound you – I don’t want to waste time, if I’m interested you’ll hear from me

Direct mail and spam works because a small percentage of people think that they really have to order in the next 15 minutes. What about the rest of us? Do they only market to the non-cynical?

I’ll blog more about marketing soon because it’s the weakest point of my game (or one of them anyway) and I probably don’t have a realistic world view of what it takes to sell things, but I still think it can be done in a way that provides value to both sides and ultimately drives paying business without resorting to anything close to a questionable practice.

So what do you think? Am I taking too tough a view? Do you read and value whitepapers? What kind of filter do you apply?