Tips, tools, and best practices for B2B marketers.

Can collateral be social?  Here’s our shot at it.

November 16, 2008 | Posted by: Lee

Last year, when trolling the web for social media posts, I came across Todd Defren's social media press release.  What Todd did was take all the interactive and engaging stuff that was happening on the web and apply it to a press release.  And voila, a traditional static piece of news becomes a more engaging and, I think, helpful piece of content.

So, I got to thinking why should the PR folks have all the fun?  How can us marketing folk create a similar experience with collateral? 

Extreme makeover meets the 2-page collateral slick.

We started with the old marketing stand by, the 2-page data slick.

Whether it's a product slick, a corporate backgrounder, or a service offering, most B2B companies create PDF versions of these for their web sites. 

We threw out our preconceived notions about collateral and concentrated instead on what types of content would better engage the reader and convey what we wanted.

Basically, we tried to answer the question, "How can we make the product, the company, or the service more engaging as well as create a way to lead readers to additional information?" 

The 2-pager on steroids - Collateral 2.0.

After many, many trials, tests, retests, and calls to Adobe we came up with a proof of concept for what we call "Collateral 2.0."  It allows marketers to push out multimedia and social media content via a traditional PDF format.

• We embedded video, a Flash SWF file, and hypertext links to bring the PDF to life. 
  
• You don't have to be connected to the web to view video or Flash, but you do to access hypertext link content. 
  
• We kept it under 3MB so it would be less likely to get rejected by email servers due to size. (We have managed to embed 2 videos and keep it under 4 MB).
  

The viewer does have to answer some default Adobe security dialogs to open the PDF and link to the web via embedded links, but it's pretty seamless.

Tell us what you think.

We'd love your comments, thoughts, and ideas.  Pull it down, check it out and let us know what you think.