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Copyright © 2004, SoftwareCEO Inc. Reprinted with permission.
After the smoke cleared, their breakthrough report
"Why Spammers Spam"
had been downloaded more than 2,200 times, sparked major media coverage, and generated an
estimated 21 sales worth $96,500.
Not a bad ROI for a single white paper—especially since the company's marketing team estimates
it cost only $1,700 to create.
"Why Spammers Spam" was clearly a huge hit. But wait, there's more.
Vircom also cleaned up on awards, winning 10 different honors in the past year.
The latest came in mid-September, when Vircom swept the annual Readers' Choice awards for
Windows IT Pro magazine.
"In an unprecedented outcome, one company, Vircom, won three of the five overall awards:
Most Innovative Product, Best Software, and Best Service and Support," says the editorial in the
September 15 issue.
And those were open categories where readers had to write in their choices.
Talk about "top of mind!" Vircom also picked up two more awards in the expected categories for
Best Mail Server and Best Anti-Spam Server Side.
Did their white papers actually help Vircom pick up all these awards?
"I think so, in the sense that white papers provide us with a lot wider coverage than we would get
just from sending out press releases," notes chief marketing manager François Bourdeau.
"There's an obvious benefit in the general recognition of our name, our brand and our technology."
How did Vircom do it? And what tips do they have for other firms seeking the same spectacular
results from their white papers?
SoftwareCEO sat down with the company's three-person marketing team in Montreal to pose these
questions. Their answers may surprise you.
But first, let's start with the million-dollar question: what is a white paper?
Everyone chuckles when I ask that. Rather like pornography, we all know it when we see it;
we just can't define it very well beforehand.
Every writer, analyst and marketing guru has a different answer. These range all the way from
"a manifesto on how to solve a problem" to "a way to freeze-dry your ideas."
One of the best definitions is simply "a technology backgrounder."
Beyond that, there's a strong contingent who say a "pure" white paper should have no hype and
lots of facts, a little sizzle but lots of steak. The vendor's name should be in the background,
with the spotlight on helpful content the reader can use on the job.
That's far from the way everyone does white papers these days, which makes Vircom's success
all the more interesting.
Vircom's white paper story begins at the start of summer 2003.
Bourdeau had just been given more responsibility for Vircom's marketing, and he sat down with
his two colleagues on the marketing team to decide what to do.
"We realized there were two ways to go. Either we could just publish the same stuff as
everyone else, or we could try to do something different and make it more interesting.
If we were going to be experts in anti-spam, we had to create papers that covered the entire scope
of the anti-spam world."
They decided to think different.
Their first project was to redo an existing white paper. The original had been a run-of-the-mill
description of the company's technology, rather like most white papers being published today.
The revised edition, called "The Anti-Spam Buyer's Guide," discussed issues like the economic costs
of spam and the three stages of a spam attack. It was 11 pages long... and only got around to
mentioning any Vircom product on page 10.
Not everyone in the company liked this new approach.
"We transformed it into a rundown of the spam problem and some general descriptions of anti-spam
technologies and where we fit in," says Bourdeau. "Right at the start, it basically said you
don't have to buy anything from us."
Indeed.
The Foreword states, "This document is not a sales pitch, but a series of guidelines to evaluate
your own requirements. We hope you will consider Vircom's solutions, but if another vendor suits
your needs better, then this buyer's guide will have met our expectations..."
Writing that paragraph would be a firing offense at some companies.
But that was just the beginning.
"Can Laws Block Spam?" was their next effort, which examined whether current legislation around
the world could likely stop spam.
"We asked a lot of questions. Were these laws the silver bullet? Is this really the miracle solution?
Will this eliminate spam? We looked at both the positives and negatives in the laws," says
market analyst Michael Spooner, another member of the Vircom marketing team.
That document was another challenge to everyone's assumptions about what a white paper should be.
They managed to criticize almost everything the FTC had done. And there was still no mention of
Vircom's products.
Not everyone understood why not.
"At the beginning, not everybody was happy. We had this argument with management, and we said,
'If you want sales tools, we can do sales tools. But white papers can be also be a sales tool,'"
recalls Bourdeau.
So what's the difference?
A white paper is not supposed to be a thinly veiled sales pitch disguised as something else,
or a brochure slumming as a Word document.
"The term 'white paper' has become synonymous with a 24-page brochure on a product.
You'll see a paper called 'The Anti-Spam Buyer's Guide' by one of our competitors that is
basically 10 pages of hype about their product," says Spooner.
And readers hate it.
In 2000, Computer World and the Tolly Group surveyed 2,000 IT managers to see what they preferred
in white papers. Everyone said to cut the sales pitch and stick to in-depth technical information.
Nothing has changed. If anything, IT managers are even less tolerant of marketing-speak than ever.
Vircom is on the same wavelength. Their team sees a white paper as a chance to gain mindshare,
credibility and name recognition... not to pitch products.
"The nature of white papers has evolved," says Vircom's marketing documentation manager Erin Haller,
the third member of Bourdeau's team. "Initially they were technological papers.
Then more and more people started using them as sales tools, and skewed the definition.
"But there's a difference between a brochure and a white paper. The purpose of a white paper is to
inform, to allow the readers to form their own opinion. I think it's important to present things
in an objective manner, to try to discover who you're writing for and what they really need to know."
They say this indirect approach generates more impact in the long run.
"It gives us a lot of credibility with other entities that we wouldn't normally be involved with,"
says Spooner. For instance, people in the FTC, the governments of Canada and Singapore have all
requested the company's white papers.
And the FTC recently singled Vircom out of the herd to invite them to a conference.
"About three years ago, the first major profile of a spammer appeared. It showed him as this
Porsche-driving, mansion-living playboy in Louisiana making gazillions of dollars," says Bourdeau.
He says that article got him thinking.
"We had never talked to a spammer before, but it just did not feel right. So we started wondering,
'Who are these people?' We have to know who they are and how they try to trick the anti-spam
solutions. That's crucial for us, because it's at the center of what we do."
It turns out that why spammers spam is intriguing to a lot of people.
"Why Spammers Spam" featured unusual content, gathered in an unorthodox way.
"Some people here said you can't talk to spammers," says Bourdeau. "But we wanted to get real
information. It was all done in a very open way. It wasn't an undercover operation or anything.
I don't think we would have gotten a hold of those people if we were trying to trick them."
How did they do it?
"We went to online sites dedicate to spammers," says Hall. "We approached people and said we're
an anti-spam company looking to get some information for a profile of a spammer and how they
operate. So we sent out an invitation."
And they got responses, some nasty and some amusing. After narrowing down the prospects,
they settled on the young woman code-named Victoria and two others in her loose little circle.
Vircom assured all three people they would use their comments verbatim and not edit them to
fit anyone's preconceptions.
The resulting paper was a surprise, with its descriptions of the spammers' minimalist operations.
All three young people said they did it to scare up a little more cash. Their earnings fluctuated
wildly, based on the success of each spam campaign, but the most seasoned among them only grossed
about $60,000 in 2003.
That rocked the preconceptions of many who believe that all spammers live jet-set lifestyles
fuelled by ill-gotten gains.
"We're not saying there is no one who fits the myth of the playboy spammer. But that's not the
reality for most. It might be your son or your neighbor or your nephew who just wants to make
some money," says Bourdeau.
"That's what made this article so interesting. For the first time, we were able to portray our
industry as it really is."
After they work so hard to do their own research, the Vircom team is disgusted by the abuse of
statistics they see in many company publications.
"I'm sitting there reading that 55 percent of this comes from that... but if I actually try to
track it down, I find that number was taken from some press release that said something a little
different, and that this press release is based on someone else's affirmations, which were made
in another context.
"Consequently, that statistic ends up coming from nowhere and being absolutely useless and
meaningless," says Bourdeau.
In other words, don't believe everything you read on the internet. And for God's sake, don't pop
it into your white paper without confirming it.
Use some scholarship to research your evidence and identify your sources.
Your white paper will gain from the effort.
Like any good scientist, you have to follow your data wherever it leads.
"Honesty is very important," notes Spooner. "We could have pretended that these people were
driving around in Porsches making millions, but we have to be honest.
The ones who make a lot of money are the rarities.
"Those three are the quintessential average spammers."
Sticking to what's really in their cardboard box of research provides another key benefit to the
Vircom team: the self-confidence of knowing they truly are spam experts with the numbers to back up
everything they say.
Here's where a lot of white papers fall down. Just saying your solution is the best doesn't prove it.
"Everyone goes around saying their solution is the best, but very few put the proof out there,"
says Hall. "You can fool yourself into buying that message internally, but in a white paper you
have to step outside and compare yourself to your competitors. That's where results speak for
themselves."
A white paper should proceed like a tenacious lawyer, linking indisputable evidence with
sensible arguments to build an unbeatable case. If it doesn't, a sceptical prospect is bound to
dismiss it... exactly the way a judge throws out a case with insufficient evidence.
When I object that "Why Spammers Spam" goes way beyond the traditional definition of a white paper,
the Vircom team says that's why it was so successful.
"The format is different from a traditional white paper, but the information contained in it is
similar," says Hall. "The purpose is to inform, but that doesn't have to be in a traditional way."
It's true. The page design of "Why Spammers Spam" is different from most white papers.
It's mainly quotes from three spammers gathered under various headings, with asides from
industry experts. A special icon identifies each speaker to help tell them apart.
This unique format presents a wealth of detailed information: where these three get their
mailing lists, how they work around anti-spam software, and whether new legislation has any affect
on their operations.
The same information could have been packaged in a more traditional format, but it would probably
have lost some impact along the way.
This may seem self-evident, until you start reading some of the white papers out there:
Some authors never use one word when five will do.
"Tight writing is very important," says Hall, who edits all of Vircom's white papers.
"You don't want a lot of filler. And I'm more of a stickler for grammar than most people.
When I read things that don't sound right, I find it irritating, and it makes me question
the content of what I'm reading."
Consider these words of wisdom from the classic little guide to writing English,
"The Elements of Style": "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary
words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have
no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts."
Amen.
In my vision of the perfect white paper, there is always a one-page executive summary.
And it's right up front, where a busy executive won't miss it.
But Vircom's papers challenge that notion.
"Our white papers are already summaries of all the research we did. If you take a 22-page document
down to one page, it can be meaningless. Where do you stop condensing?" says Bourdeau.
"I would say that if all your white papers need executive summaries, they have too much filler
in them."
It's true: All of Vircom's white papers work perfectly well without summaries.
Their content is so fresh, and their design so browsable, that the summaries are dispensable.
Two other factors reduce the need for executive summaries. Each of the company's white papers
provides a detailed table of contents to help readers zoom in on topics of particular interest.
And they tend to be supremely well organized, with all the material on any topic gathered together
in one spot.
Developers don't always value simplicity. After all, they live in a complex mathematical world.
When they model that world on paper, it's usually a confusing mess of lines, boxes and arrows.
But prospects browsing through your white paper don't want to see all that.
Just draw them a simple picture. "People call our graphics cartoons," chuckles Bourdeau.
But he doesn't mind. "All three of us are allergic to crappy Vision diagrams.
So getting a good graphic is really my thing."
The Vircom team struggles over multiple iterations of each graphic, then tests the results on
people who know nothing about the content. "We put it in front of them and ask what it means,"
says Bourdeau. If they don't get it, it's back to the drawing board.
"You want a good balance of graphics and illustrations to help explain your message," says Hall.
"It's nice to have slick graphics, but if it ends up so cluttered that you don't know what's going
on, there's no point."
Don't expect your product manager or lead developer to be the best choice to write your white paper,
just because they know a lot about your technology.
"The experts have a wealth of technological information, but sometimes find it hard to put it down
on paper," notes Hall. And how!
Deeply immersed in the guts of your product(s), technical people often lack the ability to step back
and start with a big picture, then lead into the details. They may forget to take the time to
define the acronyms they use every day. And they may have no clue how to build a convincing argument.
For all these reasons, it's best to team up your in-house expert with a seasoned communicator
who can extract what they need and write it up effectively. Or partner an expert who can write
passably with an editor who can tighten up their text.
In Vircom's case, their three-person marketing team has a solid mix of research, writing,
editing, illustration and design skills. They pass around drafts, argue over graphics, and
puzzle out the final design until they get it just right.
Anyone in publishing knows that doing good work takes time.
"Don't do white papers if you don't want to invest the time, because it will show," says Bourdeau.
"A good white paper is time-consuming to do properly."
For example, "Why Spammers Spam" took 40 hours to find and interview the spammers.
That couldn't be rushed without spooking them.
The company's white paper called "Facing Consequences" was in some ways even more ambitious.
It involved setting up honey pots to attract spammers, then analyzing all the spam collected over
a six-month period. They looked at what time of day the spam came in, what it was about, and
where it came from, doing a detailed statistical dissection of more than 130,000 spam messages.
Bourdeau says that project took his team 182 hours of overtime: more than an entire person-month.
And that was just the overtime.
Vircom's white papers help it stand out from a sea of 200 anti-spam vendors, and make them the
"go-to guys" for many journalists.
"Our white papers have given us a very solid relationship with journalists who see us as
experts on certain topics," says Bourdeau.
"These people trust our opinion because they read our white papers. Of course, we are here to sell
some software, but we also have a mission to inform. We always try to answer one big question
in every white paper."
Journalists have come to appreciate their efforts and believe their results. Take it from me,
once a journalist has a reliable source, they keep on coming back.
Most software companies are desperate to differentiate themselves from the crowd.
So why do they all publish Me-Too white papers just like everyone else?
"Every time we get a white paper out, some competitor comes out with the exact same thing,"
chuckles Bourdeau. I get the feeling he's not too bothered: He has enough ideas to stay two years
ahead of them all.
"I would say, don't just do what everyone else is doing: You're just going to end up in the same
flood of useless, boring information."
So if you want to get noticed, do something different. Like Vircom does.
"Our white papers generate some interesting exchanges inside the company," says Bourdeau.
"They help us realize that we do have this knowledge. We can articulate this in an understandable
manner. That helps the sales guys in their discussions with potential clients.
It helps the support guys. It helps everybody realize that we are truly the experts, and
we will remain the experts as long as we continue doing this."
"We want people to think, Hey, this is good information! This is entertaining!
And this comes from Vircom. Therefore Vircom is like this white paper: It's clear. It's easy.
I know where I'm going. I can call them, and they won't hassle me," says Bourdeau.
"That's really what we trying to do with the whole communication strategy of the enterprise."
White papers are clearly a part of the marketing mix that pays off handsomely for Vircom.
"Even though we did not intend to use 'Why Spammers Spam' as a direct sales tool, the excitement
it created resulted in significant revenue for Vircom," says Hall.
You won't get any arguments from management these days.
"Today I just tell our management that we have a new white paper coming out, and they're all happy,"
says Bourdeau.
"There's no doubt we're a world-class player in anti-spam. But in terms of our financial resources,
we're small compared to some of them," he says. "There's no way we can do all the traditional types
of marketing."
He points to a four-page insert in a national business magazine that a competitor recently bought.
"If I did that one thing, it would eat up a major chunk of my marketing budget for the whole year.
So we have to do things differently."
Since "Why Spammers Spam" Bourdeau has released another white paper called
"Exposing Email-Borne Fraud." This one dissected their interactions with a Nigerian scam artist
to show the typical patterns in these online frauds. And they have lots more ideas in the pipeline.
Coming up with timely and compelling content keeps Vircom in the limelight.
It doesn't cost much, but it delivers a heck of a punch.
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