52 Bicycles

Mike Volpe (brother of my occasional squash partner) has a post on Small Business Marketing 2.0 discussing a 3-30-3 Rule for Whitepapers:

• 3 seconds to grab your readers attention, leading to
• 30 seconds to be engaged, such that they allocate
• 3 minutes to read the paper.

Neat. I think the 3 minutes is about right - white papers are approximately at the level of executive summaries, such that a <1000 word count is appropriate (two typewritten pages seem about right). The 3 second bit for the initial click is about right as well, but should be taken in the context that someone who is going to read a thought leadership piece is looking for thought leadership pieces to read, so one need not sell on the importance of the problem, but rather make a promise of interesting insight (which is in turn usually either diagnostic, prognostic, or prescriptive).

The length rule we’ve followed relative to our white papers, I think we could do better on the 3/30 part.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Technology Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Reddit This