The Funnelholic

One of the rules that I have tried to maintain has been not to use the blog as a way to shamelessly promote my company’s services.  With the exception of webinar promotions, I have done that fairly well.  Today I want to talk about Whitepapers.org, which belongs to Tippit’s family of Web sites.  There’s your disclaimer. However, I feel like this post still fits within my ethical rulebook because posting your white papers on that site is free.

1. Join your first revolutionary movement: No one else is out there on the Web trying to take on Whitepapers.org’s big, hairy mission, which is to put “all the white papers in the world in one place”
2. Or just jump on a bandwagon: 1,000 white papers posted in one year with no marketing or advertising.  That is what I like to call organic momentum.
3. It’s doesn’t cost a cent, so ­— duh — why wouldn’t you?
4. You can post anything , well not everything, but close. This is not merely a technology white paper site. Horizontal topics are free game. For example, check out “The World’s Worst Executive Photos” by some dude named Chips O’Toole.

OK, so the “no stumping” rule has now been broken – or let’s say cracked — but I believe it is for a good cause.

If you’re in the dark, by the way, about what a white paper actually is, check out my enlightening comments on the topic.

By the way, if you have any thoughts or recommendations on the site, send ‘em over via email or the comments section.

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.

Image via Wikipedia

Can the B2B lead generation world accept whitepapers without reg forms?

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Believe it or not, some INTERESTING stats on white papers.

I found this great blog that I read ALL the time, Michael Stelzner’s Writing White Papers. As you can imagine, the premise of the blog is about the art of creating and marketing whitepapers which he calls the Educational Marketing Revolution. He is really smart and writes some great stuff. People ask me what I recommend all the time, and I for one still recommend whitepaper syndication. (By the way as part of a marketing mix along with webinars, etc).

One thing about whitepaper marketing is that it is actual a bit ‘old school”, its been around for awhile and whitepapers certainly continue to face new lead generation types such as webinar, video, etc. Nonetheless, marketing spend continues to support whitepapers. Stelzner’s blog excerpted a quote from Don Hawk of TechTarget: “The number of orders for white paper-related programs increased by over 60% in Q1 ‘08 versus the first quarter of last year. “

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