Business-to-business ebooks: Spreading your ideas for free

Readers of this blog know that I am a huge fan of ebooks as a way to show the world that you're smart and worthy of doing business with. Ebooks have potential to spread your ideas far and wide. For free. My own most recent ebook, The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free, released in early 2008, has been downloaded a remarkable 250,000 times.

E-books have become a very significant medium, partly because people can instantly see the value of a product that looks like for-purchase content but can actually be downloaded for free. In my opinion, e-books should be material people want to read, compared to the dense and usually boring white paper, which our buyers feel they should read but often don't.

Many of the ebooks I've written about in the past such as Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex are for consumer markets.

For business-to-business companies used to the more traditional white paper, an e-book is a radical departure for one simple yet revolutionary reason: the goal. An e-book is about spreading ideas. But for most companies, a white paper is about generating sales leads.

If you've created and published a white paper for your business before, it's highly likely that you put all sorts of controls over its dissemination. If you offered it online, you probably required readers to fill out a Web form before they could download it. The form required them to supply their name, affiliation, email address, phone number, and perhaps more details like the size of their company. Most companies apply the same "give to get" philosophy to offline white papers, requiring interested readers to supply a business card or fill out a reply form.

An e-book is different, or at least should be. Make the content totally free with no registration requirement at all so people are more likely to download it and share with colleagues.

For example, an e-book called The Taxonomy Folksonomy Cookbook: Finding the Right Recipe for Organizing Enterprise Metadata from Dow Jones Client Solutions, is written for information professionals. It is a creative way to communicate about some complicated concepts like information tagging and metadata use in large organizations.

The ebook has been very popular with the corporate librarian buyer persona - a major target market for Dow Jones Client Solutions - who find the ebook through partner links on Association sites such as the Special Libraries Association, and events such as the Semantic Technology Conference, Taxonomy Boot Camp, Enterprise Search Summit, and KM World.

Disclosure: I've done consulting work for Dow Jones and have spoken at many of their events around the world. However, I did not work on the Taxonomy Folksonomy Cookbook.

Comments

[Justin Levy]

While I haven't written an ebook, I think they are a great medium to spread information. Also, it helps to diversify the information offerings of the person or company.

Even if I don't access every form of media available on a particular site, I think I'm more attracted to a site that displays various forms of media ranging from ebooks, audio, video, podcasts, etc. I enjoy this because it offers the visitor many different ways to interact with that person or company's ideas. Every one learns differently and multi-dimensional sites/blogs allow the visitor to choose the best medium for them.

As I continue to grow my blog I hope to begin involving different media formats.

-Justin Levy

[MarketingTwins-Randy]

Do you think there is a page limit (max) for an e-book? Does it depend on your market? Or other factors? I love your Viral e-book - love the layout of it. It's easy on the eyes and a "quick" read. Is that the point of e-books? Or can it be 25 pages of text with nothing but the producers logo on the front page?

[Bill Gammell]

@ David - I thought you weren't going to give away this secret!

@ Marketing Twins - I am not sure of David's opinion but I think the length may not matter as much as valuable, relevant and engagement content. I still hold on to Seth Godin's 196 page "Unleashing the Ideavirus" and other eBooks that are only 10 pages or less.

[Matthew Scott]

David,

Great post, but I think others have failed to acknowledge the most important aspect of this ebook.

I am pretty sure I will be on the virtual bad-list for saying that the lady avitar on the cookbook is smokin hot, as far as imaginary women wearing aprons in an imaginary kitchen goes...

Matthew

[Cedrick Reese]

This is a great post. I have several ebooks that I would like to give away in order to promote some of my sites. Are there any sites where you can upload these reports for people to download freely?

[John P. Kreiss]

David,

David,

Using free ebooks to share your ideas to prospective clients and provide this information is a great recommendation.

As recruiters for construction and real estate companies, we’ve long advocated providing information of value to prospective clients free of charge.

Our newsletter, for example, is read by thousands. It does not talk about us, however. It’s designed to provide articles around topics that we feel would be of interest to leaders of construction and real estate companies.

Your ebooks, however, takes this concept to a different level. Thanks for sharing.

John P. Kreiss
President & CEO
MorganSullivan, Inc.
www.morgansullivan.com
jpkreiss@morgansullivan.com

[David Meerman Scott]

Thanks for your comments!

Matthew > Holy cow. You're right. I knew there was something there, but you nailed it...

Cedrick > Best way is if you have a great ebook, post it on your site or blog and then tell people about it. If it is good, bloggers will spread the word (like I am doing here).

Bill & MarketingTwins-Randy - Keep in mind that "pages" and "word count" are different than in a white paper or other marketing content. I am a fan of 20-30 page ebooks. Give solid information but finish before people get bored. However, a 20 page ebook, would be just 4 or 5 pages if it were a dense white paper, so it is not a lot of text.

David

[Matt Gentile]

David,

One effective way to share ideas, in addition to e-books is to comment on informative blogs like this one. One selfish reason I'm writing today is to offer your readers a glimpse at what my work day is like as our local FPRA chapter has a "30 Days of Blogging" excercise going on now and I've attempted to capture what my day in the life of a PR and Communication Manager is like.

Also, just to note, I am leaving my cushy job here in Sarasota (so if anyone out there is interested) read the following post which describes my day "Living the Dream" in all of its glory. http://cwcfprablog.typepad.com/weblog/2008/07/living-the-dream---corporate-pr-and-communication-management.html

I'm moving on up...to New Jersey to take on Director of C21 PR and Brand Communication. New challenges, very exciting.

[Terri Seymour]

I have also written several ebooks, free and paid, and they are a remarkable marketing tool. My whole business is based on eboooks and it amazes me how versatile they really are.

Definitely consider using ebooks in your marketing tactics!