The Content Buffet - By John White » process of writing

Write Your White Paper the Way Perry Mason Would

John White — Thu, 10 May 2012 20:02:22 +0000

In every organization there are competing forces shaping your content. Beware of trying to make too many of them happy at the same time.

I can’t stand “The Good Wife.” There’s too much skulduggery and backstabbing, but what’s worse is that there are always about four different plots and subplots competing for my attention span.

“NCIS” isn’t much better in this regard, but the characters are so much more engaging that I tend to forgive banal plot diversions into Tony’s fractured love life, or Ziva’s dysfunctional Mossad family.

I’m not 22 anymore. Maybe I never was.

I’m more of a “Perry Mason” kind of guy: one plot taking up the same number of minutes in every show, making it easy for me to figure out where it’s taking me. No red herrings about Della’s home life or Paul’s drinking problem. Perry and Mr. Berger always faced off near the end, and that was the point of the whole thing.

Everything but the kitchen sink in your white paper

Now, what about that white paper you’re writing? Is it all over the map? Have you pushed everything into it but the proverbial kitchen sink?

Are you dragging in subplots that muddy the water and make things hard for your readers, just because people all over the company sent you material and research that they said absolutely had to go into the paper?

Dianna Huff posted recently on instilling some quiet in your work life; how about instilling some in your white paper?

If you have too many stories to tell in one paper – say, technology, business, regulatory, social – don’t be afraid to plan for four papers. It’s easier to write them that way, and it’s easier on your readers.

Your three-part main message

What if you put a Main Messages box like this at the beginning of your white paper?

If you regard these bullets as the line in the sand that defines what the reader is going to learn from the paper and stick to them, it becomes easy to see what does and does not need to be in the paper.

Perry, Della and Paul would like it that way. So will your audience.

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: Wonderlane via photopin cc

3 Ways to Personalize Your “About Us” Page

John White — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:34:48 +0000

Of all the pages on your organization’s site, About Us is probably the windiest. If you really want visitors to know something about you, be smarter than that.

Do you ever look at the About Us pages of other organizations? Have you ever seen a good one? What if you put some real thought into yours?

Stop and think about the chance you have for intimacy and a personal connection to your visitors on an About Us page. Amid the blizzard of pages grouped around Products, Solutions, Services, Pricing, Support and Contact, it can be a window into your company’s soul.

It can be a lone page crying in the wilderness, “Never mind all of the commerce and hyperventilation. Here’s a look at who we are, how we got this way and what we want to do with the company.”

First, personalize your email campaigns

With one client, I was working on a email campaign to both prospects and existing customers. In the closing, I included the text

As usual, please get in touch with me at hermione@zengen.com or simply reply to this message if you want to discuss this with me some more.

Then I appended a signature block with Hermione’s name and title.

“What’s that for?” Hermione asked when we reviewed the draft over the phone.

“This is email. When you receive email, you expect to see the sender’s name at the bottom, don’t you?”

“Yes, but this is different. I see no reason to personalize an email campaign.”

“Why not? Are you afraid that they don’t really want to hear from you?”

“It just seems a bit odd to use personalization in an email campaign.”

And, of course, personalizing your About Us page is even more odd.

Then, personalize your About Us page

This is a taller order, but consider these three steps:

Remove all of the existing nonsense about who you are and how great your products are. Nobody cares anyway; they care about their business problems and whether they can rely on you to solve them. This means you have to get rid of lots of meaningless words that just fill up space – words like “flexible,” “robust,” “world-class,” “scalable,” “cutting-edge,” “mission-critical,” “market-leading,” “industry-standard,” “groundbreaking” and “innovative” – and the sentences that contain those words.
Have your marketing communications writer come up with a SHORT description of what your organization does, or what you want your website/blog to communicate to visitors. Believe it or not, there are millions of people who don’t know what you do, and your About Us text has to make it clear to them.
Use the words “you” and “I”. Sure, every organization is a team effort, but your visitors and customers deal with only one person at a time. Instead of hiding behind a corporate veil, put somebody – the CEO, the bizdev manager, the customer advocate, the receptionist – out in front of the castle gates by putting his/her name at the bottom of the About Us page.

To some degree, of course, your company should agree on the description of its soul embodied in your About Us page. The shorter it is, the less there will be to quibble about and disagree over in review loops. And you can always change it in two months; it’s only HTML. Have a look at what no less than The Blog Tyrant considers the 12 best About Us pages in the known galaxy.

I drafted another client’s About Us page touting four goals of most of the site’s likely visitors and describing (in you-oriented language) how the client’s software tools helped achieve those goals. I added a personalized signature block. It wasn’t bad, but it was a reach.

The feedback?

I really like what you’ve done here. While I think the personalized idea is a good one, I am just not sure how it will work in practicality since there are so many stakeholders to this site. There are quite a few groups that touch developers, and nothing internally holds these groups together. So I fear our internal dysfunction makes your good idea hard to implement.

So it goes. The result, after client edits, was about 65% of what I’d hoped to achieve, and the rest landed on the cutting room floor.

Marketing managers: Have you managed to nudge your company toward personalization? How is it going?

photo credit: Wootang01

No Blog, Wimpy About-Us Page – Are You Hiding Something?

“I Can’t See Myself in Your White Paper” – 2 Quick Fixes

John White — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:50:40 +0000

Your readers need to see themselves in the marketing content you publish. Otherwise, you’re a marketing manager just writing to hear yourself shout.

You know those year-end letters you receive around the holidays from your friends and family members? The ones filled with all the valuable content and important details that pop into your Uncle Willy’s head as he’s leafing through the calendar, looking for things to write about?

“…Felix fell off the stepladder while pruning the snail vines and twisted his ankle, so there went his bowling season…”

“…Kristin’s front tooth was loose for what seemed like ages until it finally fell out, and the Tooth Fairy brought her 5 dollars…”

“…and then Noodles, our Pekingese, got the mumps. I told the vet I’d never heard of a dog getting the mumps, and he said…”

“…our second trip to Branson with Alice and Bernie, but we never did find the other waffle…”

and on and on and on.

You know what? Like it or not, those year-end letters are content. Think about them the next time you publish a white paper, case study, newsletter, blog post or technical article.

“My white paper isn’t that dull.”

What makes you so sure of that?

Think about those year-end letters: what makes them so banal? Why do their recipients complain about them so consistently? Why would you rather drink battery acid than read Aunt Rose’s letter?

Because those people are writing right past you.

Your eyes glaze over as you move from one paragraph to the next. You’re hoping against hope that Cousin Bess will remember that live people of her own flesh and blood receive these things and actually form an audience. You want Grandma Perkins to wake up and realize that she has your attention for a few precious minutes and that she should take advantage of them to tell you something meaningful to you.

But alas, Maudie plods along from Florida vacation to lower back pain to school play, blissfully ignorant of the fact that readers are dying to see themselves in the letter.

Are you doing that to your readers in your marketing content? Are you writing right past them in your zeal to beat your messaging drum?

Put your readers into your white paper

Stop asking the question, “What do I want to write about?” It’s more important to ask, “What do my readers want to read about?”

When your readers can see themselves in your content, you score with them. They notice that you’re out to do more than just talk about yourself and they begin to trust you to give them valuable content.

James Chartrand posted on Copyblogger recently about “giving yourself a real person to write for.” The people who send you ghastly year-end letters are doing that, except that they themselves are that real person. Your marketing content needs to be for a real person in your audience.

Before you publish that white paper, case study, newsletter, blog post or technical article this week, run these two litmus tests on it:

Can your readers see themselves in the title? What did you call your paper: “An Exploration of Cloud-based Policy Management for the Public Sector” or “Five Things Government IT Managers Need to Know about Policies in the Cloud?” In which title are your target readers more likely to see themselves?
Can your readers immediately see whether the content is relevant to them? Are you going to make them read half the document before they can figure out what’s in it for them? Why don’t you summarize the main messages of the piece in a few bullets and put them in a box near the top? Help readers decide quickly whether it’s worth their time or not.

Even if you still need work on pulling your readers in, these quick fixes will give them a break.

And if you’re in doubt about your marketing content, just keep Cousin Ralph’s year-end letter near your keyboard. Every marketing manager needs an occasional reminder of what not to do.

photo credit: legends2k

B2B White Paper Interviews – 7 Questions (Part 2)

John White — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:30:37 +0000

Subject matter experts (SMEs) have the story in their heads. White papers help make that story readable, and these questions help build the paper.

Continuing from the previous post on interviews and how to write them up into a white paper, here are 4 more customer interview questions for generating the information readers want to see.

4. What are some current approaches to solving this business problem? Why are they inadequate?

Your readers are already making do, but they’re not very happy with what they have in place because:

it’s a chewing-gum-and-baling-wire hack
it’s too slow/expensive/low-performing
time is not on their side

That’s why they want to read your paper. This is also the opportunity to shake them out of their inertia by pointing out threats you’ve identified that haven’t yet occurred to them; e.g., “If another, less understood scenario of universal health care plays out, providers will also be on the hook for…”

5. Why/how can the approach you’ve chosen overcome these inadequacies?

This information forms the turning point for the paper, as discussion changes from listing problems to solving them. The SME’s time on this question is best spent relating how s/he has seen the approach work in the real world, in a variety of situations. Don’t soak up valuable interview time with a detailed discussion of the approach that already exists in other documentation, slide decks, technical content, etc.

Arm your readers with information and let them draw their own conclusions.

A true white paper will describe the approach rather than your product or service itself, then let readers figure things out on their own. If the paper needs to include a discussion of your product, label it a “technology overview,” “buyer’s guide” or similar. link to rant on mislabeling white papers>.

6. Which particular advantages do they get with your company’s implementation of the approach?

Again, in a true white paper, the goal is not to flog a product, but to build trust and educate. Describing a potential advantage to readers is more proof that you’re in their shoes, thinking of things that have not yet occurred to them.

For example, if the technology you’ve chosen for compressing digital movies also includes the advantage of encrypting them for protection against privacy, mention this in a clinical manner as a potential benefit, without naming it as a feature of your product.

7. Describe a few steps in adopting and integrating this approach in environments familiar to readers.

The white paper is not an implementation guide or a user manual, but this information anticipates the technology questions that will arise at the next level of scrutiny. The people responsible for installing, maintaining and living with the product or service have an itch that the white paper needs to at least begin to scratch, so don’t ignore that itch.

With the answer to this question, you can demonstrate your technical chops to all readers, even those with a business focus. Tell them about replacing the carburetor with fuel injection, but don’t go into which hoses to switch or bolts to loosen.

Once you see how to write customer interview questions that focus on real customer problems, you’ll begin to draw out the kind of information that builds trust with readers.

photo credit: DeepCwind

B2B White Paper Interviews – 7 Questions (Part 1)

John White — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:07:18 +0000

Subject matter experts (SMEs) have the story in their heads. White papers make that story readable, and customer interview questions help build the paper.

“We want you to interview our SME, then write up the result into a paper we can use in our content marketing effort,” you say to the marketing communications writer.

Sounds easy enough. But most SMEs don’t think like a writer. They think like a businessman or exec or technologist or financier. And if they simply improvise their way through the interview, the content will suffer for it.

Not all writers understand interviews or how to write them up into a white paper. And not all SMEs give good interview. Send your writer in with concrete customer interview questions designed to tease out the information you need.

7 interview questions

Here (and in the next post) are questions whose answers make a balanced white paper easier to write.

1. Who are your ideal readers for this paper?

The better you understand this, but more readily you can make the jillions of small decisions that will go into the paper: word choice, technical depth, amount of background information to include, hypothetical scenarios and examples to cite. It’s easy to answer this question incorrectly – or to think you know the answer, yet be wrong – and end up with a white paper that misses the mark.

2. What do you want them to do once they’ve read it?

The short answer is, “Move along in the sales funnel,” which can mean a lot of things:

click on a link
pick up the phone and call you for more information
think that you’re cool
pull out their credit card
discuss it with their boss
Tweet/Like/share it

Make your expectation clear in the opening summary; e.g., “This paper will equip readers with a business case for integrating baseball card database management in their own companies.”

3. What keeps these readers awake at night? What are some of the biggest problems they face (that your product/service can solve)?

Readers will devote about 2/73rds of their attention to your product and the other 71/73rds of it to their business problems. If they’re thinking about your product at all, they’re trying to figure out how it would fit in with whatever is causing those problems and envisioning life afterwards. Given that, shouldn’t you write from their perspective?

Information about customer problems is what you and your marketing communications writer need from the SME to demonstrate to readers that you understand their predicament and, in fact, have been dealing with it in lots of variations. When readers see that you you’re thinking more about their problems than you are about your own products, they begin to trust you.

In Part 2, we’ll see customer interview questions that touch on your products, but only obliquely. Remember, nobody really cares about your products. They care about their problems and whether they can trust you to help solve them.

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. Sign up for his Content Buffet Newsletter and get the free eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: eren

That Fatal First Sentence

John White — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 04:45:50 +0000

Good marketing communications writers nudge readers toward discomfort in the first sentence. It’s too important to waste on lousy copy.

If you want people to read your content, you have to first open the door and shake them out of their e-torpor. Your opening sentences need to nudge them away from their sleepy existence, toward the chasm of novelty.

Think discomfort.

Think “must make the reader itch a little bit.”

Think “mustn’t restate the obvious.”

Lousy first sentences

Over the last two decades, we have experienced an unprecedented technology boom.
Two main objectives exist for any Corporate Real Estate and Facilities (CRE) department. The first is to demonstrate proficiency in managing service delivery. The second is to demonstrate ability to implement corporate strategy by solving business issues.
An idiosyncrasy, if not a frustration of the technology evolution in health care regards the advances in diagnostic technologies exceeding the capabilities, if not the practical realities of existing, related therapies and corrections.
The increasing demands of machine automation pose a unique challenge to the engineers who are responsible for motion control.

Whoopee. These sentences either say restate the obvious, or they state something of potential interest in a way that’s too hard to read.

Allow me to add that any first sentence that includes “today” or “than ever” – as in “Today’s system administrators are stretched in more directions than ever” – is lousy. In fact, it’s worse than lousy: it’s an insult to your readers’ intelligence.

Decent first sentences

Literacy education in the poorest schools has often resembled a race between well-intended instruction and mandatory promotion to the next grade.
In an era of over-the-top energy costs and multi-billion-dollar state budget deficits, would you think that a federal education grant over four years would go very far?
The truly global company knows there is more to ‘going global’ than opening offices in multiple countries.
The contact center agent is your ambassador to the customer.
When you make sound equipment for 60 years, eventually you can design almost anything – even a heat-tolerant microphone that fits into electronic assembly flow like any other component.

These sentences draw the reader a little closer to the edge of discomfort and novelty. They are inching toward the goal of not restating the obvious.

Good first sentences

For your next translation project, how would you like to get a cost estimate simply by answering 13 quick questions? What could be easier?
“Better a rough answer to the right question than an exact answer to the wrong one.” -Anonymous (possibly Lord Kelvin)
Did you know that browsers are not one-size-fits-all? Did you know that it’s possible – in fact, encouraged – to modify them for better performance on specific chipsets?
If getting a software application to market is a foot race, then getting mobile applications to market is a foot race among jugglers.
‘How can I price my games to get more revenue?’ Every game developer, regardless of platform or application store, wants to know the answer to this question.
The mobile Web. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

These sentences are novel. They open white papers, case studies and technical articles in ways that try to catch readers off guard.

Readers assume you’re going to bore them. Please don’t.

And the writer is…

Me. (I had “help” on the lousy ones, though.)

Frankly, even the “good” opening sentences could be better. I’m not worried about criticizing them, because I wrote them as best I could for the clients, audiences and situations involved. Not everybody tolerates discomfort and novelty.

Do you have any memorable first sentences? Why are they memorable? Let me know in the comments.

photo credit: emdot

No related posts.

No Time to Create Great Content? Choose Good Content

John White — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:03:10 +0000

Marketing managers don’t always have the time, writing skills or resources for great content. Don’t wait for the ideal; get something decent out there.

“But I’m not much of a writer,” you moan. “How am I supposed to get a content marketing campaign going without spending a jillion dollars on great content?”

That’s true. Great content isn’t just great content; there’s usually an entire, time-consuming, arduous process wrapped around great content. There has to be, to yield something that you won’t look at in four months and think, “I’m so tired of that paper.” If you’re thinking that, your prospects probably are, too.

Can’t have great? Choose good.

All right, then, make good content the centerpiece of your marketing campaign to start with.

David Meerman Scott (whose work I often coattail) posted last week on how smart people who are poor writers create great content. He offers three ideas, the first two of which are potentially rather expensive, but the third of which almost any marketing manager can do:

Talk your ideas through and then transcribe the results.

It doesn’t take long to build a library of content from this approach. Sure, it’s humble, and it doesn’t tell the story as well as a professional marketing communications writer will, but it gets the ball rolling.

One of my clients in IT service management is building a huge library of case studies similarly. Its own customers are glad to describe in presentations, keynotes, interviews and testimonials their own IT problems and how the product has helped them, and my client records them. We transcribe and edit them, then produce them as case studies that go onto the Website for SEO.

The marketing managers look at each piece and think,

Well, it’s not exactly the messaging we’d use, but it is exactly the way at least some of our customers talk, so it’s good content. It’s a 15% solution.

They know that there’s no such thing as a 100% solution, and even a 30% solution would cost a lot more than twice as much.

Do you let great content become the enemy of good content? Let me know in the comments below.

photo credit: eddiedangerous

How to Give Feedback on Marketing Content

John White — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 12:28:51 +0000

Give your marketing communications writers feedback they can use. The more useful your input, the shorter the turnaround. And the smoother the dance.

Consider the dance of the review loop. Please.

For you, the marketing manager, the review loop is usually just a speed bump on the road to getting the piece published. You build it into your schedule, you circulate the drafts, you nag the reviewers, but most of the time you don’t stop to think about what’s really going on in a review loop:

You’re making sure that the marketing communications writer heard what you said and captured it correctly.

That’s important, and you’ve got a big stake in it.

Last week, Mark Nichol posted 10 tips for critiquing other people’s writing. I think his list applies more to friends reviewing one another’s work than to the client-vendor relationship, so I’ll supplement his 10 with four more.

Don’t be shy. If the writer missed the point, let him know that he missed it. Use a sentence like “You’ve missed the point,” or “This paragraph misses the point.” That’s what happened, so just say it. Then tell him what the point is.
Do it in writing, if you can; in a phone call, if you cannot. I vastly prefer written feedback to oral feedback. It means that the reviewer sees that something is wrong and wants to change it, and that she has made the mental effort to put it into words. Real-time, over-the-phone feedback sessions are a pain I endure when it looks like the only way to break a logjam in the schedule and get the project rolling again. They invariably go all over the map, so I record them and take copious notes.
Use the words you want to see in print. If a sentence is wrong, change it yourself to more accurate language. Don’t worry about grammar, flow and consistency; the writer will clean it up if need be. This is your chance to pluck out of the writer’s head the incorrect language and replace it with the language you want. It’s easier on the entire process if you use the words you want
Change actual text rather inserting comments. Assuming you’re using software like Microsoft Word with change tracking enabled, it’s easy to cross out actual text and write your own. In fact, it’s better than inserting comments, which are not always easy to see. Writers do better with “~~Gradual, incremental investment~~Dollar-cost averaging is more suited to the long-term investor than is market timing…” than with an inserted comment like “This isn’t right. Please fix.”

The review loop is a dance between the marketing manager and the marketing communications writer. The more clearly you express the next steps, the smoother the dance.

photo credit: Eric Ward

2 Ways that Writer’s Block Is Your Problem

John White — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:48:09 +0000

Marketing managers depend on copywriters. Writer’s block is the bane of copywriters. What if marketing managers have something to do with writer’s block?

I don’t like to make a lot of writer’s block, or whatever name you want to give to hitting a productivity wall.

It isn’t that I don’t believe in it. It’s more that it doesn’t really help me as a construct. Like the Garden of Eden or the Tooth Fairy, it’s a name for something that I honor in other people’s belief systems but don’t really accept in my own.

So here’s writer Melissa Karnaze posting on writer’s block as your secret weapon, with a six-step guide to unblocking yourself. Use it in good health.

As a marketing manager, do you think you have anything to do with writer’s block in the people who generate your content for you?

Maybe you do.

1. Writer’s block and the audience

While I don’t want to call it writer’s block, there are plenty of times when I’m staring at the blank page or the unfinished paragraph, then staring at the clock, then back at the page.

“Funny,” I think, “I don’t have this problem when I’m writing e-mail to my high school friends.”

“It’s the audience,” I reply. “You know what to write to your friends, and it’s interesting to you and you know that it’s interesting to them. That is not going on here, so you’re stuck.”

Dave Navarro posted a couple of years ago on ending writer’s block forever:

If you put your focus on what your audience wants to read (rather than what you want to write), the whole game changes — and the shift is in your favor.

Professional writers don’t usually call up their clients and moan, “I have writer’s block, and I can’t finish this piece for you.” However, you may get a call that goes, “You know, Claudine, I need to understand the audience for this article better. Can you connect me to somebody who knows the intended reader very well?”

Part of your job in assigning a piece to writers is to tell them what you want written. The other part is to tell them whatever you can about the ideal reader. The folks at Savvy B2B Marketing write extensively about the role of defining the buyer persona in creating content, and they’re right.

2. Writer’s block and the drone

I call it the drone because that’s what how it would sound if I didn’t bust my chops trying to fix it (and succeeding).

The drone arises when you tell the writer to give you six different pieces on the same topic, and about the only difference among them is the channel or medium.

“I need copy on childhood obesity in grades K-8,” you tell the writer. “The audience consists of social workers. I need a 4-page paper, a newsletter feature, a page for the Web site, a print article and a blog post. And I need to link them together so that they reinforce one another.”

You’re asking for writer’s block, because there are only so many ways to say the same thing and have it resonate with the same audience, no matter how much you spread it out. You’ll do better to work with the writer on different angles to the childhood obesity issue.

It’s easier for a good writer to search for and vet different angles on a topic than to try to say the same thing in different – but not too different – ways.

Help your writer avoid writer’s block

Are you surprised that there are things you can do to keep your writer’s pen moving smoothly? Has your writer ever mentioned writer’s block to you?

photo credit: Brian Tomlinson

3 Ways to Help Your Writer Over the Hump

Customer Interviewing – Some Basics

John White — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 12:46:15 +0000

Interviewing customers for case studies and success stories is the marketing writer’s stock in trade. Some ideas on getting the most out of it.

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.

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.
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.
Set up the conference bridge or online meeting and send the details to the interviewee.
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:

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.
Describe the audience and your goals for the piece. This gives the interviewee context and may determine the general direction of your conversation.
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.”
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?”
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.
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.

photo credit: St0rmz