“I’d like to cite some figures in this paper about adoption rates for this technology,” said the marketing communications writer. “Can we find data on how sales are rising from year to year?”

Seemed like a natural question to pose. If readers see that 15% of the market used turbo-synchronized schmedlapps last year and 20% used it this year, a smart manager would see a trend and make a note of it as something to follow.

“Actually, we don’t have much data on this,” replied the client. “I prefer to keep our copy around this figurative and stay away from specific numbers.”

Huh?

“As a company, we try not to get tied to individual figures or sets of data.”

HUH? This time, the writer capitalized it.

“Our preference is to point to trends loosely, as in ‘The trend for asynchronous schmedlapps is down and the trend for turbo-synchronized schmedlapps is up.’”

HUH? Capitalized and italicized it.

Then the client uttered the clincher:

Customers are happy to drag sales conversations down statistical ratholes.

Let’s think about that for a moment.

Marketing believes that statistics enrich a white paper

It’s hard to argue against using data to back up the claims you make in your white paper or marketing communications content. After all, most people base their buying decisions on one of three things:

1. Recommendations from trusted sources
2. Facts and figures
3. Brilliant rhetoric that intimidates or inspires them

The writer has little control over #1, and makes a living crafting copy around #2, but really shouldn’t be relied upon to make #3 work (at least not in B2B).

Research and reports are the mainstay of marcomm content, so when a customer says, in effect, “We don’t use those,” it leaves the writer at a disadvantage to produce good copy.

On the other hand…

Sales believes that statistics cripple the white paper

This is a salesperson’s perspective, and salespeople spend lots of time talking to and hearing from customers.

If you as a salesperson know that, upon reading the persuasive content your marketing manager has created, a prospect is simply going to pick it apart, impugn the data source and turn it into a speed bump on the road to a purchase order, you might argue to keep the statistics out, thankyouverymuch.

Some prospects may look at your set of data as a challenge to cite an opposing set, or search for an opposing set if they have that kind of time to kill.

So, as desperately as Sales wants collateral and content from Marketing, they may at times prefer that it be, shall we say

content unencumbered by research

Since Marketing is in business to help start conversations, and not to gum them up, some content may need to go this way.

So marketing managers, grit your teeth and endure the HUH?s from your marketing communications writer (and prepare to utter a few of your own). There will be plenty of other opportunities for you to quote all those analyst reports you’ve subscribed to.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Editor B

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1. Marketers: Beware the Ides of…August?

Webinars, videos, customer interviews, conference proceedings, panel discussions…marketing managers expend a lot of sweat in setting these events up, and they deserve to reap sweat equity from all that effort.

How can you make these vehicles work harder for you? How can get more mileage out of them? Most important, how can you get real SEO juice out of them?

One of our technology clients has events of this type first transcribed, then has the transcripts edited and converted into full-blown case studies. The resulting text is SEO-rich in customer names, industry terminology, product names and references to their wins in the market.

The procedure we follow on these webinar-to-case-study conversions is simple, and I outline it here:

1. Product managers, field engineers, marketing managers and just about all employees in the field are empowered to record at these events. They use digital audio recorders, Flips and professional video equipment to capture the event, which they then digitize and make available as an audio or video file.
2. Marketing then quickly reviews the footage and vets it for worthiness as a case study. (Sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you get to the fairy princess.)
3. Every month or so, they point us to the online repository of the audio and video files, some of which they place at dropbox.com and others of which they point us to at video sharing sites on the Web. We coordinate priorities and schedule using a GoogleDocs spreadsheet.
4. We then have the audio and video transcribed, which, practically speaking, takes about 1.5 days per hour of footage, including first-pass editing and review in an MS Word document.
5. We then send the transcript back to Marketing for review and approval by the customer who gave the presentation.
6. Once the customer has approved, we edit and massage the transcript from its rough, oral form into a more polished, written form, which takes another day and a half or so per hour of footage. We introduce subheadings to correspond to slide changes in the presentations and questions in the panel discussions. We also add customer logos, pull-out quotations and other tidbits of metadata that go into the finished product.
7. The client then reviews the case study and pours it into an Apple Pages template. In lives as a PDF on the Website, gets crawled by the search engine bots and viewed by customers and prospects.

The result is easier to follow than the rough transcript, and it tells the client’s story more effectively. It is not always perfect prose, but we make sure that it is good English, free of the uh’s and um’s of extemporaneous speech. It is finished enough to be valuable marketing content, yet spontaneous enough to fit our client’s marketing style and strategy very well.

And, of course, the search engines love it.

How do you recycle your webinars?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: cogdogblog

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1. Breathing life into a bag of bullets

The case study or customer success story is to your Website what a recommendation is to your LinkedIn profile: an excellent addition to your trophy case.

But it’s a long road from the point at which you, the marketing manager, say “Hey, let’s write up the Schmedlapps account!” to that trophy case, and the first step is the interview.

Criteria for interviewee

First, not everybody wants to reveal that they’re using your product. “We’d love to do a case study with you, Gus,” you’ll hear, “but you guys are our secret weapon. We don’t want our competitors to know how we’re doing so well.”

And many large customers make it difficult to do a proper business-to-business case study, especially for small companies. You’ll have a marketing communications writer author the piece, then you’ll send it over for review, and it will get raked over the coals by your customer’s Legal department. Drag.

For this reason, you should make an ongoing campaign of case studies, so that you have a pipeline of interviews, drafts, approvals and trophies always in motion.

Set up time with Sales and go through the customer database for ripe candidates. Select interviewees using criteria like:

• is a current customer
• has had a good experience with the product
• can talk about technical and business benefits
• can talk authoritatively
• can talk (this is often overlooked, making for short, fruitless interviews)
• is a manager or above

Setting up the customer interview

As interviewer, you’ll only be able to control 50 or at most 51% of the interview; the rest is in the hands of the customer. Prepare well, but also consider that you cannot predict everything.

1. Have Sales initiate the request. They know the personalities involved and can steer you to the person most likely to give a glowing review of your product. They want to help. Of course, if you go over their head and initiate contact without their knowledge, they’ll consider it a slight.
2. Once Sales has gotten the customer’s approval for the case study, suggest four different one-hour windows and ask the interviewee to select the most convenient one. Plan on a 45-minute question-and-answer session.
3. Set up the conference bridge or online meeting and send the details to the interviewee.
4. Prepare a list of questions and send them to your interviewee ahead of time. He will not likely read them, but you’ve done your part. Ask the questions you need to ask, along with at least 3 great case study questions.

Mechanics of the customer interview

A sufficiently motivated interviewee with a decent story to tell will do most of the work for you. In fact, you may even get in her way with your annoying questions, but as long as you’re getting useful details that your readers will want to learn, you’re still fulfilling your mission. The marketing writer can do the rest.

During the interview:

1. Mention that the interviewee will see and have the opportunity to approve a draft of the case study. Many people ask about this, so take care of it up front.
2. Describe the audience and your goals for the piece. This gives the interviewee context and may determine the general direction of your conversation.
3. Reward good storytelling and juicy details: “This is just what we’re looking for. It’s gratifying to hear such a good story about our product.”
4. On the other hand, some people aren’t comfortable in an interview. If the interviewee is not inclined to talk much, be frank: “I was hoping to get more details on how your company uses our product. Can you think of somebody else I should talk to instead?”
5. Try to get a statement of quantifiable benefits. Customers – especially large ones – are usually reluctant to issue them, but it’s worth a shot for the impact they have on the case study. If you can’t get a good, solid statistic, try something like, “Would it be accurate to say that our product shortened your testing cycle from weeks to days?” If the answer is “yes,” turn it into a quote.
6. Also, be sure to get a clear explanation of how the interviewee did things before using the product and how she does them now that she’s using the product. The before-and-after sequence makes it easier for your readers to follow the story.

Conducting a good interview isn’t the same as writing a robust case study, but it will put you and your marketing writer squarely on the road to it.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: St0rmz

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1. Customer Interviews in the Content Buffet
2. Want Great Case Study Interviews? Ask These 3 Great Questions
3. A Case Study That Didn’t Go Well

Want a great case study? Make sure your marketing communications writer asks great questions.

There’s a bit more to it than that, of course. You need to be sure that you’ve chosen an interviewee who is relatively talkative and who likes your product. It’s no fun being on the phone with a customer who either doesn’t talk much or who spends the time hammering you for improvements and product details.

But assuming you’ve got a live one, what questions should you have your writer ask?

The usual suspects

Be sure these – or similar – questions are on your crib sheet. (I recommend sending them to the interviewee ahead of time, but I don’t recommend assuming that s/he will have read them. They rarely do.)

• How did you find out about our product?
• Tell me about your process of choosing our product.
• What are the three biggest problems it helps you solve? (Hope for two, anyway.)
• How did you solve those problems before?
• How much time/money/blood/sweat/tears are you saving with our product? (Customers rarely go on record with this kind of quantifiable testimonial, but try anyway. Ask twice.)

Those are the war horses, and any professional writer can put together a nice, utilitarian, formulaic case study with the answers. If your marketing writer isn’t coming back with the answers to them, think about looking for a new one.

Don’t forget, though, that people want to read a story.

3 great questions

Is anybody using your product in ways that you hadn’t predicted?

Uncommon, unanticipated uses of your product – even uses for which your product wasn’t really intended – show readers that you’re selling more than a one-trick pony.

One of my clients sells an IT service management product whose buyers are constantly amazed at how co-workers in other departments want to use it as well. HR, testing and product management groups see how versatile Service-now.com is and immediately begin to hatch plots of getting their own licenses and apps.

I used to work for a company with a data compression software product that saved space on your hard drive (back when that was a problem). Because the data are compressed, they’re effectively encrypted as well, and one large customer bought the product, disabled the compression, and used it to transport confidential data.

Have you done anything famous with our product?

Your reader may not know anything about your customer’s company, but if your product was used in a famous context, it’s a big talking point.

“I used your software to design an accelerometer,” said a customer of one of my clients during an interview, “and a Chinese partner built it into a goodie bag item given to all attendees at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.” Cha-ching – instant recognition.

Do you have any stories or anecdotes? Did anything interesting happen while you were installing our product? Any war stories?

This is a real grab-bag, and if the interviewee happens to be a bit of a raconteur, s/he will run with it. These anecdotes make for good reading.

Put yourself in the place of your reader: Your job is to plow through the marketing content from several competing suppliers and narrow the field. Whether you’re shopping for knife blades, blade servers or blades of grass, wouldn’t it be more pleasant to read a decent story or two along the way? What are you more likely to say at lunch with your colleagues: “I read a great brochure today,” or “I came across a good story in a case study”?

And don’t forget…

A couple more things on case studies:

• Remember to confirm the interviewee’s job title. The piece looks silly without it, so you may as well get it early on.

• I find that 45 minutes is the ideal length for an interview. A half-hour is too short and an hour is too long.

What do you have your marketing communications writers look for in a case study interview?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Xurble

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1. A Case Study That Didn’t Go Well
2. A Case Study That Went Well
3. Breaking a Case Study into Two Pieces

My new client’s CTO is bright and busy, and he talks fast. I was on time for my appointment in his office to interview him on server virtualization, and before I’d gotten to my second question, I saw his eyes dart to the clock on the wall behind me.

“You’d better let him do the talking,” my brain told my mouth. Mouth agreed, and we let the CTO tell his story.

“I want this piece to do two things,” he said. “I want it to differentiate us from our competitors in the areas of availability, failover and load balancing, and I want it to describe the benefits of each of those.”

Then he took off like a street fighter on global deployments, payloads and server utilization levels. I had no trouble understanding it, but my brain started nagging me again after a few minutes.

“Whom does he want to read this?” it asked.

“He hasn’t yet told us,” replied my mouth. “Shall I find out?”

“I think you’d better.”

“Excuse me,” I asked the CTO, “Who is the audience for this piece?”

The question seemed to catch him off guard. “Oh, well, I would guess that it would be…well, I suppose the people who would be interested in this are…I’m trying to couch it in terms that would matter to…IT managers and people who need to make equipment work properly in a data center.”

He paused for a moment as I jotted notes. “Yes, that’s right: IT managers.” I think he replayed most of the interview through his head to see whether he had indeed said things that would be meaningful to that audience, then recalibrated himself slightly and continued.

I still find it odd that people find that question odd. It almost always catches my interviewee off balance, but when I get a proper answer, it’s miraculous how much easier it is to write.

I’ve tried posing the question in e-mail ahead of time, but it has no effect on how people talk about the subject. Even when I raise it at the start of the discussion, the interviewee rarely sticks with it.

It is up to the marketing communications writer or content marketer to keep the interviewee focused on the ideal reader. Most people in an interview are simply too absorbed in telling their story to focus on the audience.

How do you keep an interviewee on track with the audience’s needs?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: US Information Agency

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Case studies can be low-hanging fruit for the marketing manager, but it’s easy to get them wrong and end up with ineffective content posing as a case study.

“I’ve got a series of webinars that are recorded interviews with customers,” the director of marketing said. “I want to have the webinars transcribed, then turn the transcripts into case studies.”

Great idea in principle. The customer has said good things about the product, we’ve recorded it, and the recording is ripe for pulling straight into a case study, right?

There are three things wrong with this idea, though:

1. The customer is not necessarily “on message.” Some customers think that the story is really about them, or some kind of “partnership” piece that trumpets their business, but it’s not about their business. It’s about their technology and how your product helps advance it, and your product may not be prominent enough in the transcript. Better: Have your marketing communications writer modify the transcript so that it does support your message. At the very least, use headers and subheads as signposts along the road you want the reader to follow.
2. The content first needs to be tailored to the ideal reader. The webinar audience has a different focus from that of the written case study audience. Your customer could go on for several hundred words about a business or technology situation; dropping that content into a case study is not the best way to tailor it to that would be better summarized in half a written paragraph. Better: Have the writer pour the transcript through the filter of your ideal reader. Separate the points that will appeal to him in writing from those he’d tune out if he were listening to the webinar.
3. Transcription is an inefficient way of doing almost anything in marketing. It might work for court reporting, but in this context, you’re just taking the mix of wheat and chaff from an audio file and putting it into text. It still needs to be distilled to satisfy points 1 and 2 above. Better: Have the writer listen to the webinar and pull out the useful bits himself. It makes for a better built story.

So, if you do have a full transcript, what’s the best thing to do with the eight or ten thousand words it yields? Hire a writer with the expertise to chop them up and use them for SEO bait on your Website. This content is rich in the kind of keywords for which you want to be found, so use it that way. Just don’t expect it to be compelling, attractive content right out of the can.

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: Joe Mabel

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1. A Case Study That Went Well
2. A Case Study That Didn’t Go Well

When you hire a marketing communications writer, you should expect a description of her method. Ask for it, and be sure it makes  sense to you.

You’re evaluating a marketing communications writer to do a white paper or a case study for you. “So, how do you do this?” you ask her. “What’s your writing process? What steps do you follow in writing a piece like this?”

You should get an answer that makes sense to you, and that doesn’t sound like a rambling, off-the-top-of-the-head proposal.

Here are 5 steps a professional may enumerate for your writing project. If the writer includes these, so much the better; if not, at least you’ll know what to ask for.

1. Review existing materials. A good writer is willing to perform some research on your industry and specialty. To save her time and ensure that she avoids material that will muddy the waters, you should point her to the basic information – Web sites, analysis, published reports – she’ll need to know to conduct a fruitful interview.
2. Interview – Assuming the task is to take what’s in somebody’s head and get it into print, the writer will need to conduct an interview with those somebodies. This is not a grilling, broadcast journalist-caliber interview, but one designed to get the subject matter expert talking. Perfect interviews are rare, and few experts are adept at imparting their information flawlessly, but a professional marketing communications writer can always get something writable out of an interview.
3. Outline – For a paper or a report, it’s important that the writer lay out the piece and let you verify that it makes sense to you. While it’s not so important in short pieces like brochures and case studies, long pieces need to guide readers down a path to explain and convince. You need to see the path the writer envisions and ensure that it’s where you want to guide those readers, and the outline is the best way to do that. Extra credit goes to the writer who fleshes out the outline, say, by writing the introduction or conclusion, so that you can see whether she has picked up your messaging correctly.
4. Drafts – Once you’ve approved the outline, the writer hangs text on it and produces a draft. Most of the battle should be in the first draft, which should result in something close to what you had in mind. Circulate this, get comments, reconcile them and get them back to the writer for a second draft. The writer gets extra credit if she introduces ideas and angles you hadn’t seen before. This is one of the big advantages of hiring an outside writer: you breathe your own exhaust day in and day out; a good writer who sinks her teeth into your business provides outside perspective.
5. Final review – After the final draft, there’s not much for the writer to do, but her job isn’t yet over, either. Most content requires layout (Web, print, InDesign, Quark), and that effort begins after the final draft. You should have your writer review the piece once it has emerged from layout to find and resolve any discrepancies between her final draft and the pre-publication piece. (Hint: There will almost always be some, intentional or otherwise.) This is a good chance for the writer to clean up final typo’s and tell you what looks right and wrong before you go live with it. (BTW, as I’ve posted before, most companies omit this step.)

Don’t go into the writing process blind. Good writers have a method and they can explain it in ways that will make sense to you.

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

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1. Your Marketing Writer Takes One Final Look

Je pense, donc j'essuie.

In a customer interview, your marketing communications writer can get more out of interviewees or subject matter experts if she can make them think.

Years ago, my boss at the time, a VP of marketing, gave me the secret to working with our infuriating, inscrutable, mercurial CEO:

You’ve got to make him think.

Frankly, I wasn’t adept at it then – hence, my being laid off some months later – and I’m still not good at it, but I’m working with a marketing communications writer who knows how to make our subject matter experts and even our customers think.

I heartily enjoy seeing them rise to the challenge.

Making the Customer Think in a Customer Interview?

This seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Why would you run the risk of antagonizing a customer or engineer who is doing you a favor by allowing you to pick his brain for a white paper or case study?

This writer is smart enough not to try to impress the interviewee with her knowledge of the business or technology. She doesn’t need to know more in those fields to make the interviewee think.

It’s all in the three questions she poses them to explain it.

1. “How cool is this technology, would you say?” She doesn’t ask about the novelty or even the cost-effectiveness of the technology. She’s looking for The Cool. In fact, she’s not even looking for it, but asking the interviewee to lead her right to it. Is the cool thing about predictive text entry on a cell phone that it only takes up a few KB of phone memory, or that it helps you text faster, or that it can guess which letters you want to enter next? And how cool is it?
2. “What can you tell me about this story that would get readers to want to share it with other people?” This is a big part of writing for social media, which she understands quite well. It’s thinking one step past the ideal readers, to their desire to share the story with their social network.
3. “If you were looking for a story like this on the Web, which search terms would you use?” Not everybody can get away with asking this question – I cannot – but she can. It’s the ultimate search engine optimization question, of course, and while interviewees can’t vouch for every possible keyword, their insight is valuable.

Questions like these might lead you to think that her drafts consist of keyword-stuffed, awkward copy. If she didn’t process the answers to these questions as well as she does, they would be awful copy. But, as a marketing communications writer, she knows what I want out of the piece, and she understands our audience very well, so she knows what to do with the answers.

By making the interviewees and subject matter experts think, she’s done more than tell our story: She’s told it without making our readers have to think.

(Tip of the hat to Steve Krug of Don’t Make Me Think fame).

photo credit: Dionetian

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In its report, “Social Media 10 x 10,” Beeline Labs calls these “the one social strategy with 10x the value of any other social media tactic.”

• An eVoc Insights study found that 48% of consumers need to read reviews before making a purchase decision.
• Neilsen’s research has found that consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising among 78% of study participants.
• Embedded customer reviews are the best social media investment for realizing strong ROI.

The most valuable and under-used social media strategy is embedding customer reviews in your Web site. Not blogs, Twitter, communities or tagging.

Short Form: Customer Feedback Forums

There’s a lot of value in these forums, as noted in “Managing an Online Reputation,” by Kermit Pattison:

Study local search sites like Yelp, Citysearch and Yahoo! Local. Forums for customer feedback have sprung up everywhere — Google Maps, Amazon, Angie’s List, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Epinions and a myriad of online communities and niche sites.

Prospects speed-surfing for your products get a lot of mileage out of these reviews, especially since they tend to have a snowballing effect and they are highly organic.

But not every business gets reviewed. The reviews are valuable, but they skew to gregarious customers. There’s also the fact that the reviewers get credibility points in many of these forums to encourage participation, so they’re not 100% grass-roots reviews. Finally, while nobody would look the gift horse of unsolicited, positive feedback in the mouth, a business owner could look at a year’s worth of reviews and say, “Nobody talked about the strawberry rhubarb flavor we worked so hard to launch,” or “How can we get people to talk about our signal-to-noise ratio? It’s our biggest differentiator.”

For these comments, you need to create your own content with targeted customer interviews.

Customer Interviews and How to Write Them

It’s not hard to get this kind of content onto your buffet line. Set yourself the goal of generating 4-6 case studies or customer success stories over the next 12 months.

Your sales team can help you identify customers with interesting uses of your products. Keep in mind that generally, the larger the customer, the longer each success story will take, because of the approval hoops your content will have to jump through. You’ll probably find as much enthusiasm – maybe more -  with smaller customers, and the resulting text rarely has to get through a phalanx of lawyers before you can use it. (See David Meerman Scott on this topic.)

Hire a marketing writer with at least some experience in your industry to conduct and record the customer interview, which should touch on:

• the customer’s business
• why they need your products
• how they use them
• how your products save them time and money, and how much
• an anecdote or two about their experience with your company and your products

The interview should take 30-45 minutes. It’s important to make it clear to the customer that you want to use her name in the success story, and that she will have the opportunity to review and edit the piece before you publish it.

Using the Customer Success Story

Do you see how the resulting 500- to 1000-word piece has more and longer lives than a Yelp review or an isolated tweet? You can re-use the text from the story at multiple points along your content buffet: callout boxes in other content, sidebars on your Web pages, blog posts, tweets, brochures, e-mail marketing, press releases…

These stories reinforce your relationship with your customers, too. If I told you how much I like your products, and you used my quote on your Website, don’t you think I’d be gratified to see my name in lights?

No wonder customer interviews and the resulting endorsements are so powerful.

photo credit: Garry Knight

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1. The Content Buffet

“But if you want a technical case study, why interview the VP of marketing?”

“He’s the interview we can get. Make it work.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. One of my best friends is a VP of marketing and a very technically knowledgeable guy. He can keep up with engineers, but he knows that writing is the process of taking the cut-up dead chicken parts that engineers use to describe things, and turning them into “finger-lickin’ good” marketing content.

Most VPs of marketing don’t think that way.

So, when we got him on the phone, the VP spent most of his time telling us about Zog Systems and its 24-carat, ironclad commitment to customer satisfaction, instead of how his employees use our products. I gently guided him back to talking about our tools, but it was obvious from his bland remarks that he didn’t know much about them. He also pointed out that he couldn’t tell us much about his customers (“too confidential”) or very much about the applications on which Zog Systems had used our tools (“mostly consumer and high-tech electronics”).

Also, since our product manager was on the call, the VP misinterpreted the interview for a focus group, first by telling the product manager how to make the tools better – to which lecture the product manager studiously listened -  then by educating us on how we should position the tools against competitors.

After the call, I confided to the product manager that the interview had left me with little more than a bag of rocks, but that I was pretty confident I could make something of it. That the conversation had been a flop was lost on the product manager.

“I thought that went pretty well, didn’t you?” he asked.

Nyet.

So I wrote up the case study and the product manager liked it. He asked me to send it to the VP at Zog and to get some graphics from him to include in the piece. That was in September. After several empty assurances via e-mail that he would review it “right away,” I reached the VP by phone in late November. “I’ve got too many things going right now and I can’t focus on that until next month,” he barked.

I told the product manager that I didn’t want to strain a lucrative business relationship over a two-page case study, and that it was his call, since it was his relationship. In February they conversed, and after a few more weeks Zog’s VP gave me approval on the case study along with a graphic.

It wasn’t a disaster, but it certainly didn’t go well.

Morals:

• There’s something about VPs of marketing as subject-matter experts that doesn’t always work to the writer’s advantage.
• Record your interviews, because if you can’t find any meat on the big bones, you need to be able to pick through lots of small ones to salvage a decent story.
• Inform any of your co-workers on the call that the objective is to get a story, not to collect product requirements.

Not only that, but I’m glad there’s apparently no such company as Zog Systems, a name I just concocted. Maybe I’ll buy the domain just so I can use it in future posts…

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1. A Case Study That Went Well