6 Route to Leverage Technical Articles

Technology vendors often contribute bylined articles to trade journals. The articles are great exposure for these companies but they don't move cheap – the trades seldom pay for these articles but the vendors spend time and resources to assign pieces, write them, approve them and submit them. Your PR agency can help your clients leverage their investment by wringing top value out of these articles. Here are several possibilities: Reprints White papers Product briefs Booklets Speech outline and handouts

Reprints

It's pretty annoying to contribute a byline to a publication, only to turn about and spend major bucks for reprint rights. But reprints are nice things: they importantly increase your client’s exposure to the market. Do sure you use the reprints anyplace you can, including press kits, presentation handouts and conference take-aways. Post them on your site too. Even as if you haven’t paid for electronic rights you can probably link to the publication’s URL, assumptive they’ve announce your article online. (It doesn’t hurt to ask.) If you’ve got digital reprint rights and are posting the article on your client’s site, avoid exploitation a scanned hard copy of the written article – the solution is poor and not really readable. Create a .PDF file and use that for posting and downloading.

White Paper

Please don’t use the promulgated article as is for a white paper -- even as if you retain all rights it's unashamedly self-plagiarizing, and if the publication retains all rights it's rather criminal. However, you can use the article text to form the technology section of a white paper. Edit for length as necessary and re-work the text to emphasize your client’s product and technology take. Then add white paper elements like a beginning executive summary and a problem statement. Follow these with your technology section, and then add details on how your client’s product wish solve the problem, a client case study, and a conclusion on how great the product is. (You can always switch the order by writing a white paper first, then redaction the technology section into a bylined trade journal article.)

Product Briefs

The article can serve as a great basis for dilated product briefs – say the front and back of an 8-1/2x11, or a longer technical brochure. Edit the article for length and jazz up the text, and you’ve got a solid technology basis for the marketing document. (Good marcom can explain what a NAS entrance is, but not by yammering just about “enterprise-wide intelligent data management portals.” Puts readers right to sleep.)

Booklets

One of the better press kits I ever saw enclosed a sharp and informative booklet on the vendor’s technology. The booklet explained the general technology’s development and background, bestowed the vendor’s product, and listed clean client advantages. It affected several journalists and customers in a way a press release or even as a white paper wouldn’t have done. Booklets are labor-intensive, so use your trade journal article as the basis for writing your own.

Speech Outline and Handouts

Use existing articles as the basis for client speeches and presentations. Since trade journal articles are normally vendor-neutral, they’ll activity as-is for similar talks. Once the presentation is just about a product you can still use the article outline for the background technology and analysis then add product details, client case studies, and Q&A’s. You can use article reprints as a handout, or turn the outline into speaker’s notes and use that instead.

If your client gulps at the cost of developing a trade journal article, don’t leave them blown for breath – list all the route they can leverage it to increase market exposure and profits.

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Christine Taylor is president of Keyword Copywriting, which helps marketing and PR pros leverage their relationships with technology clients. E-mail her at chris@keywordcopy.com, call her at 760-249-6071, or check out Keyword’s Website at www.keywordcopy.com

About The Author

Christine writes technical marketing communications for data storage, networking and pharmaceutical clients, including: EMC Commvault Quantum Stone fly Networks Sybase Maranti Networks ClariStor Fujitsu AES Obagi Medical Products

She specializes in trade journal articles, white papers, press kits and online content. She serves as a conducive editor to Computer Technology Review and acts as editor-in-chief for Storage Inc. and Storage Management Solutions.

Before moving into technical journalism and marketing she served 20 years in the IT trenches, including systems administration at Avery Dennison's Research and Development division.
chris@keywordcopy.com

This article was announce on Gregorian calendar month 28, 2004