Hand It Over: What to Do Before Your Document Heads Off to Editing

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Marketing Musings

Writing deadlines can be stressful. Editors know this as well as anyone. Often, it’s difficult to know when your document is ready to hand over for editing. It doesn’t matter if the content is a case study, a press release, an article, or a blog; a typical editorial approach doesn’t change wildly by type.

Here, then, are some practical, definitive tips from real, live editors—easy steps to take before you turn work in. While we can’t guarantee that by following them you’ll avoid the red pen entirely, you will likely feel more confident about what you’ve forked over.

Read your work aloud at least once. Avoid optical illusions and read through your content out loud. Your voice won’t be able to ignore issues the way your eyes sometimes will. Listening instead of just reading also helps you to gauge whether your written words captured the pace and dynamics intended.

Run your document through a spell check program. A good practice not just to find and correct typos and other errors, spell checker can also offer a peek at your document through a different lens, and an opportunity to rework if necessary.

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In Praise of Editors

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Marketing Musings

I’ve heard stories about famous writers who refused to have their work edited. Anne Rice, who wrote Interview with the Vampire, is known for a rant on Amazon.com (the original post has been removed, but is preserved on the Internet), in which she writes:

“And no, I have no intention of allowing any editor ever to distort, cut, or otherwise mutilate sentences that I have edited and re-edited, and organized and polished myself. I fought a great battle to achieve a status where I did not have to put up with editors making demands on me, and I will never relinquish that status.”

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Social Media and Vigor of Expression

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Customer Evidence, Marketing Operations, Social Media

I’m a professional writer. After a career spent putting ideas and experiences into words, I have come to believe in what Mark Twain called, “compactness, simplicity, and vigor of expression.” Twain might not seem entirely relevant in an age of social media, but you have to admit—that is an excellent formula for a good tweet.

Economy, clarity, accuracy, and immediacy are always high marketing virtues, no matter how many characters you get. Well-made customer evidence should clearly illustrate an organization’s experience with a product or solution and make it relevant to decision makers at other organizations. Like any good story, an effective case study or impact article should be about people that readers can relate to.

In shorter social media formats, the value of economy is obvious, but without a little vigor of expression, compact can turn out to be just short. Benefit metrics and customer quotes give case studies impact, and they can be easily repurposed into shorter formats to good effect. But good stories are usually more than the sum of their highlights, and on its own, a metric or a quote has a lot of work to do. When an IT manager at Acme Energy says, “I reduced my PC costs by $1 million,” it does have a certain je ne sais quoi, but it’s not the whole story. It begs the reader to ask, “How does Acme Energy compare to my business? How do that manager’s challenges relate to mine? It worked for her, but will it fit my needs?” Specific, concrete details about real business experiences provide genuine credibility and applicability to the quotes we use and the success metrics we cite, and credibility and applicability are exactly what makes good customer evidence so powerful in the first place.

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What is a Beta Program?

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Marketing Musings, Technology Adoption Programs

This is the fourth piece in Projectline’s series on early adoption programs. In this post, Derek Mathis and Eric Mudge move away from the objectives of product validation and evidence gathering to explain what Beta programs are designed to do more generally, and why they also represent an important step in this release readiness management process.

Over the course of this series on early adoption programs, we’ve shared with you some of our thinking on TAPs (Technical Adoption Programs) and RDPs (Rapid Adoption Programs), product evaluation and validation, early adoption and deployment, readiness, and customer evidence—terms you’ll stumble upon time and again in this arena of pre-release software.

Although TAPs, RDPs, and other early adoption programs all fall under the umbrella category of beta programs, let’s turn our attention now to a more specific definition of beta programs.

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Writing Case Studies: The Hard Part

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Content Development, Customer Evidence, Marketing Musings

Writing a case study is kind of like being Santiago, the aging fisherman in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. It takes days to catch an 18-foot marlin, and then once you manage it, the sharks eat it. (That is, your case study goes through a rigorous editing and review process). But you get some sleep and live to write another case study.

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How to Improve Work Performance in Just 18 Minutes a Day

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Careers, Marketing Musings

TIME, sweet, precious, glorious time. I would argue that time is the highest sought commodity on Earth. We are each given 24 hours a day regardless of our age, race, or profession. Between Facebook, the latest TV show, and catching up with friends, we all wish we could have more of it.

A couple of months ago, while browsing the airport bookstore, I came across Peter Bregman’s book 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done. Like most people, I often yearn for more hours in the day, so the title alone immediately pulled me to select it for my long flight. By leveraging his engaging and thought-provoking talent for storytelling (as exhibited regularly in his HBR blog posts), Bregman provides a variety of tools, tips, and techniques intended to help us enhance our productivity and maximize our potential.

Reading this book is like having a personal and professional life coach standing right beside you—providing success tips, keeping you focused, and cheering you on along the way. Here are four of my favorite tips from his book that address how we can achieve our goals and use our time more efficiently:

To accomplish the right things, choosing what to ignore is as important as choosing where to focus. There is an endless supply of information at the touch of our smartphones and computers. The world is moving very fast and will only continue to move faster. How do you keep up with the pace of the action around us? If you are like most of us, you stay awake until 4:00am responding to the 400 email messages in your inbox. “Trying to catch it all is counterproductive. The faster the waves come, the more deliberately we need to navigate,” Bregman describes. Arguably, there hasn’t been a time when it has been more important to choose how to spend your time wisely. For instance, consider declining a meeting if it isn’t aligned with your goals and focus. The other tip Bregman suggests is to create an ignore list. We have to-do lists, but how many of us take the time to decide what should be ignored?

Limit your focus to five areas that will make the most difference in your life. Bregman describes his usual experience with buffets: “A few hours later, I was completely stuffed and couldn’t possibly have fit another thing in me.” Since there are so many choices in life, the secret to surviving is to be strategic about how to spend your time. In his instructions, he directs readers to “focus your year on the five areas that will make the most difference in your life. One way to medicate is to decrease your scope and focus on five areas that you deem the most vital.” What are your five?

Plan ahead so that you can fly through your days, successfully maneuvering and moving toward your intended destination. There are times when we have huge obstacles in our way. They may seem daunting, even insurmountable. Bregman describes a time when he was mountain biking and was attempting to ride over a large rock. His approach to riding over this large obstacle was to focus on the hill itself. After many attempts, he kept hitting the launch and falling off his bike. Then finally, “I decided to focus ahead of me—10 feet in front of where I was at any point of time,” Bregman says. He was able to make it over the rock by planning ahead. What could you accomplish if you were to determine your goals, plan the route, and then follow through?

Spend a few minutes at the end of each day thinking about what you learned and with whom you should connect. These minutes are key to making tomorrow even better than today. The “18 Minutes” in the title refers to Bregman’s suggestion of planning out your day, analyzing throughout, and wrapping up with a review of that day’s events. We often are so entrenched in our world and what we need to get done that we don’t always pay attention to our own development—what are we learning, what is working for us. Bregman suggests taking a few minutes for self-analysis before you leave the office. How valuable could it be to pull out your calendar and compare what you set out to accomplish with what was actually produced?

Ask yourself:
1. How did the day go? What success did I experience? What challenges did I endure?
2. What did I learn today? About myself? About others? What do I plan to do differently or the same tomorrow?
3. With whom did I interact? Anyone I need to update? Thank? Ask a question of? Share feedback with?

By tweaking a few of our actions, routines, and focus points, we can accomplish more than we ever imagined. The author Ted W. Engstrom said it well: “Anything that is wasted effort represents wasted time. The best management of our time thus becomes linked inseparably with the best utilization of our efforts.”

I’ve just begun implementing some of Bregman’s techniques, such as focusing on five areas that will make the biggest difference in my life, and I’ve already seen positive results! So, after reading Bregman’s excellent tips, how will you define your focus, remove distractions, and conquer your goals?

Something to think about…

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Careers, Community

I know each and every person that has ever looked for the next job/career has spent time combing through newspapers (for those of you still old fashioned) or on-line sites for that perfect job description. Searching, reading and knowing that thousands of other people are doing the same thing. Taking extra time working on your cover letter, trying to pick the perfect words to standout from all the others. Knowing in your heart you will land in the middle of a huge pile of resumes that are trying to get in front of that same recruiter who holds your future and happiness in hand.

Always left with ‘What else can I do?’

Here is my suggestion… NETWORK. This is such an under realized and underutilized resource. What better way (or easier way for that matter) than to ask someone who knows you and can help to put your resume on the top of ‘that’ pile. Whether you give them a bullet point version of your experience or your full resume, just make sure you give them enough information and insight about you to talk to your skills and the direction of your career. There is nothing worse than getting a referral that has nothing to do with the company or any of the open positions. So remember, this is not to add work for others, it is to streamline your efforts. So don’t leave anyone guessing about what you are good at. …and for goodness sakes, don’t forget your contact information.

I am telling you this really works. After all, I practice what I preach. How do you think I ended up here at Projectline?