The Funnelholic

So I was watching the movie Tropical Thunder and a random thought popped into my head. Where did the term white paper come from?  I wish there was some clever analogy I could draw between the term and the movie that led me to such philosophical noodling, but no such luck.

The phrase white paper is part of my daily vernacular, and I realized I don’t even really know what it means. So I went to the font of all thing obscure — Google — which in turn led me to, of course, Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, the definition is:

A white paper is an authoritative report or guide that often addresses problems and how to solve them. White papers are used to educate readers and help people make decisions. They are used in politics and business. They can also be a government report outlining policy.

As you can see in the definition above, the government bandies about the term as well, and while I’m not explicitly pointing my finger at the government as the source, I believe we can credit them in this case.

It seems the British actually dubbed the term white paper, but it’s the informal variant of the more common “command paper,” which is used to lay out government policy. Interesting, the British also publish “green papers” (a.k.a. “consultation documents”), which propose strategy and even, on occasion, take public opinion into consideration. That’s a novel concept and a possible precursor to social media, but that’s a topic for another day.

Heck, Churchill even produced a couple white papers. Because they proposed topics of international importance that are still controversial today, I think it may be untoward to compare them to those that have become common parlance in the business world.

In fact, according to Wikipedia, business folks didn’t start dubbing their marketing treatises as white papers until the 1990s.

So while the industry uses the phrase “white paper,” many of whom without knowing the origin of the phrase, I may start using “command paper” in reference to my writing. That should garner me some more respect.

OK, not everything in my life can be about B2B lead generation and sales and marketing. I also live and breathe on the internet so every once in awhile I get something that I think is fun to post on. I am pretty sure this link has gone viral, so you may have seen it…if not, enjoy. Click here to do it.

Ok, call it a comeback. One thing I will admit is that I have been very inconsistent in updating the funnelholic. That is not good. (considering I claim to be an expert in b2b marketing, )

The long of the short of it is that the funnelholic is making a comeback. The goal for the rest of 2008 will be to update the funnlholic 1-2x a week. As I gear up for some prolific blogging, I finally started to read all the posts and watched all the webcasts I had been putting in my queue over the last couple months. This Saturday, I looked at every blog on Jon Miller’s Big list of b2b marketing blogs. Check out his post, that was a big task///138 blogs. By the way, great linkbait by Jon there but nonetheless a great list of the B2B marketing blogosphere.

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Unless you’re in a cave, thanks the credit markets the global economy is on the rocks. I have always marveled at the carefully chosen words of our politicians or economists. BTW, not just in trying times but all the time. Right now, my most uncomfortable laughs are coming from the pundits regarding the current financial mess. I especially enjoyed this, so this pundit Martin Feldman from Harvard is the first one to declare a recession. Here is my favorite though:
Martin Feldman on Bloomberg.com (read article here):

Harvard University economist Martin Feldstein, a member of the group that dates business cycles in the U.S., said the nation has entered a recession that could be the worst since World War II.

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