Several of our writers have contacted me recently for endorsements. I don’t mind giving them, even if they take this cookie-cutter form:

“Hi -

I’m sending this to ask you for a brief recommendation of my work that I can include in my LinkedIn profile. If you have any questions, let me know.

-Bert”

LinkedIn makes things easy for even the most inarticulate of networkers, suggesting this banal language for a recommendation request.

Writing recommendations may not scare us as much as public speaking does, but we avoid it with just about the same dread. When writers ask you for an endorsement, they should prepare themselves for these outcomes:

1. No answer at all. Frankly, there’s almost nothing visible in it for you to endorse your writer, so you’re going to let it sink to the bottom of your inbox. Besides, most of us hate to mix business writing with creative writing, which is the essence of a recommendation.
2. A terse, one- or two-sentence endorsement. Do this when you realize that you may soon be in a position to ask the writer to reciprocate. Grind out a couple of mentions that could apply to anybody from your housekeeper to the leader of North Korea. The writer has the option to accept or reject the endorsement, and she will likely decide to take the bird in the hand rather than pester you again.
3. A ridiculous, glowing endorsement. “Congolea is a brilliant tactician and take-charge thinker who never failed to interface strategically on all parameters and operationalize all available variables.” You can carpet-bomb the writer with windy encomium, borrowed mostly from other people’s hollow LinkedIn recommendations. If you’re in a hurry, this may work.

BUT…

…have you thought of asking the writer to draft the recommendation for you?

This serves a number of goals:

• It saves you the precious time and effort of coming up with something sensible.
• It ensures that the writer gets what he needs out of it. Since the text is going to adorn his profile or Web site, it’s important that it underscore the writer’s value proposition, not your idea of his talent.
• It informs you of what the writer thought was most important in your work together. If you thought that the writer’s value lay in collecting supporting data for the white paper she did, and her draft recommendation focuses on how she met your deadlines, you now have new information and perspective on how to hire a writer in general, and how to work with this one in particular.

I should mention, though, that asking the recommendee to draft the text can backfire. I tried it a few weeks ago when a client asked me for an endorsement, but he answered, “I know I couldn’t do it as well as somebody who has your way with words.” So, for auld lang syne, I made the time, wrote up the recommendation and submitted it.

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But it’s not allowed. Your client:

• doesn’t grant endorsements or permit vendors to use its name in success stories;
• won’t do a joint press release with you, or allow you to use its name in a unilateral release;
• is likely to run your copy through a spanking machine of attorneys that will leave it insipid and banal;
• is elusive and won’t give you the interview or quotes you need for a bona fide case study;
• doesn’t want anybody to know it had a $35 jillion hole to plug up;
• wants to keep you and your technology in its back pocket as a “secret weapon.”

This makes your job as marketing manager a bit tougher, doesn’t it?

Try a caselet.

Caselets are brief case studies that describe your service or technology, the problem it solves and the benefits enjoyed by “a worldwide provider of [your customer's industry goes here].” We relied on caselets in the early days with one technology company for a simple reason: We had plenty of technology and target markets, but no customers yet.

Instead of interviewing your customer, you interview your own in-house resources – engineers, product managers, account executives – who have been close to the customer’s business situation and understand how your product has been beneficial. You’ll end up with slightly less detail (and no legitimate quotes) than in a real case study, but a good caselet is longer on sizzle than it is on steak.

And, don’t forget your original intention: you want to tell readers a story about your services, a story in which they can see their own predicament and begin to envision a solution to it. If the caselet is written well, the fact that you can’t mention Pepsi or the Vatican or The New York Yankees does not get in the way of the story.

Interested? You’ll find a few caselets on my site, about halfway down the page. They’re just a few hundred words, less than two pages. The sales team eats them up, and they help you tell your story.

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If I ask you for a recommendation on Claudia, what do I want to hear most of all? I want to hear, “She does good work, and I’ll guarantee it.” You can go on and on with lots of other words, but what I’m listening for is your guarantee that she’s good.

Naturally, you can’t give that guarantee. You can tell me, “I asked her to write a rocking white paper in three weeks, and she did it in two weeks. Our leads have doubled since we put it on our Web site.” But you add either tacitly or explicitly the automotive industry’s well-worn disclaimer, “your mileage may vary.” Or, as they say in the recently excoriated financial services industry, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results. May lose value.”

I once pitched a VP of marketing named Jim, one of my dad’s long-time colleagues. A few days later, Dad told me that Jim had brought up my visit in a subsequent conversation. Referring obliquely to Jim’s request for a recommendation about me, Dad said, “I told him that you do what you say you’ll do.’”

I didn’t mind that, because he put all the responsibility back onto me. When all is said and done, a writer’s word and reputation are really all she has. There are no guarantees about anybody you hire to tell your company’s story. The best you can do is to find out whether she does what she says she’ll do.

What’s the best recommendation you’ve ever received (that you didn’t write yourself)?

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