For those of you familiar with me and my previous work as a consultant and marketer, welcome to Ergo Communications, the new face of The Ergo Group. If you're new to Ergo, welcome!

Why the name change? Starting this year, Ergo has taken a new direction to focus on one specific area: writing compelling customer communications. The emphasis will continue to be on communicating to buyers of IT, networking and other technology products and services, but I have worked successfully with clients in other industries and will continue to do so.

This rest of this article provides some food for thought about what "compelling communications" means in the tech industry, some ideas about the current state of outsourcing services such as business writing, and a summary of Ergo's evolution and current services.

Compelling Customer Communications

To be "compelling", business communication has to 1) be meaningful to its audience and 2) generate results that support a client's business goals. Good written communication in the high tech industry (and perhaps all industries) is relentlessly focused on the end customer and his world, shows a deep and clear understanding of the subject matter being presented and its benefits, and takes advantage of the way in which the message is transmitted.

This last point might require a bit of explanation. In 1964 Marshall McLuhan famously wrote "the medium is the message", pointing out that the way a message is transmitted is at least as important as its content. If we look at the sales cycle for high tech products and services today, we see the ways of reaching and interacting with customers is changing, and companies have many more options at their disposal for getting written communication to their customers. This is a pitfall as well as an opportunity for those who don't understand how McLuhan's point applies.

Just in the last couple of years I've seen a lot of changes in many aspects of high tech business communications. Some examples include: new distribution methods for white papers and their use in lead generation or relationship building; the use of distance education or collaboration tools for webinars and other events that generate awareness and momentum; blogs and social networking tools that provide another avenue for written communication and are becoming increasingly important in engaging prospects and influencing buying processes and preferences.

If a writer doesn't understand the specific medium and how to write for it, the communication won't be effective. And if a company neglects traditional communication vehicles for sales and marketing -- white papers , brochures, websites, sales presentations, print media, and so on -- then they'll also quickly find their sales process is faltering. I find this whole changing dynamic both challenging and exhilarating.

Interesting as the changing face of communication media are, they don't lessen the importance of the basic foundation of good communication: understanding how the audience hears the message being conveyed. Writing compelling communications means knowing what the target audience finds meaningful and will convince them to act. To help customers with this, Ergo is also offering research services that support the creation of effective and on-target communication.

Outsourcing Today

So why is Ergo moving in a new direction? When I started Ergo in 2002, I envisioned it as a broad based marketing consultancy for high tech clients. At the time, the technology industry was in the doldrums across the board. Most companies had gone through heavy reductions and were figuring out how to retrench and start moving forward again. I found that companies were willing to hire consultants like myself to help them build momentum again, which previously had been the work of full time marketing managers and directors. My background as a marketing generalist was very helpful, since most consulting engagements at that time involved a variety of activities rather than a single discrete project.

2008 is very different than 2002. The technology industry is comparatively stable, and is even thriving in some sectors. Many marketing budgets and headcount are back to levels that can drive sustained growth, but not to the unwieldy and dangerous levels reached before the dot-com bust. In this environment, what technology companies need is quite different than when I started Ergo.

Outsourcing today is better integrated into business processes than it was 5 years ago. In many areas the business processes and models have caught up to the technologies that supports outsourcing. The pace of high tech business is still a breakneck one, but it is more controlled than 5-10 years ago, and outsourcing has proven to be more likely to be successful, both a long term strategic choice as well as a tactical option for accomplishing short term goals.

The basic criteria for outsourcing haven't changed, although perhaps they have become easier to measure. More than ever, companies are looking to outsource services that 1) are cheaper, produce results faster and/or produce greater benefit or quality in comparison to what they can accomplish in-house; and 2) don't disrupt their operations or create additional management costs.

Evolving and Reinventing Ergo

In evolving Ergo to keep up with the current environment, I decided on services and ways of working which would meet these criteria, as well as being areas where I could create competitive differentiation and sustainable advantages. The focus on writing accomplishes both of these goals, in addition to being something I love doing and which (in all modesty) I do very well.

Writing and research are to some extent commodity services, in the sense that they can generally be bought "off the shelf" when a company doesn't have the time, resources or specific skillset needed for a specific program or initiative. But that doesn't mean there isn't tremendous variation in quality among freelance writers, editors and researchers, or that the choice of a writer or researcher should be taken lightly.

To sum up, this incarnation of Ergo brings the best of what I have to offer to my clients, structured in ways intended to be relevant and useful to their businesses for at least the next five years, if not longer.

My promise is to provide compelling customer communications. To deliver on this promise I have my unique combination of technology, business and marketing expertise, my industry knowledge and experience, my creativity and skill at conveying complex ideas effectively, and a long career of listening to and communicating with all kinds of customers. As much as this is an evolution and adaptation of my previous work, it is also a reinvention and rebirth of sorts, and I couldn't be more excited!