One - Deliver white paper content in an engaging social media environment Great content is the new way to create interest and inspire a buyer to engage with your company. A white paper can be the best way to start the conversation, but not all of that great content has to come exclusively from the marketer. By delivering white papers in a social delivery platform you can look to include many of the following resources for two-way engagement from your readers: • Commenting - A reader commenting mechanism should be integrated into all your papers along with ability to vote up or down on comment postings • Voting - Allow voting and ranking for the paper and all the comments around it • Surveys - Ask prospects to participate in surveys or “predictions” and share the results with them • Wikis - Consider allowing users to add to a wiki version of your white paper. This will allow users to feel a vested connection to the success of the document and in many cases provide new and better ideas – make it a living document. • Crowd Sourcing - You can even take the wiki idea a step further. Coming up with new content is always a challenge for marketers, why not propose a topic to prospects and see what new ideas they come up with—“crowd sourcing” Dell has had a lot of success with this idea. • Question and Answer Forum - Visitors can ask questions about issues related to the topic of your white paper and products. Anyone with knowledge or interest in the topic can leave answers. The community can vote the best answers up and the worst down. • RSS Feeds - Set up RSS feeds for blog posts, top comments, and other changes to your white paper library to remind people to come visit as the content changes. The general idea is to provide social resources at the same time the reader has taken the time to download your paper. You can engage your readers with not only your content but also other readers content. By doing this, you allow your readers to participate in the paper’s overall value. Buyers expect to do research by reading user comments on your product or service at some point—why not provide that content at the time you deliver the white paper? Two - Move to Persistent White Paper Platforms White papers are constantly on the move. From week to week, they shift among publishers and email campaigns. They are never in one place long enough to be found beyond the first 2 hours of campaign launch, when 90% of the leads are typically generated. In order to be found, you have to stay in one place. The only way to do that is to deliver your white papers inside a platform or microsites. The advantages are:
