Kirsten Mortensen's blog

As promised, here’s another installment in my fantabulous extradeliscionary mini course: Top Notch Customer Case Studies.

I introduced the series here if you want to read that. Short version: I’ve been doing this for a long time, I know what I’m doing, and I’m ready to perform the ultimate brain dump ;-)

If you’re looking for the basics, however, this isn’t the place for it.  I’m assuming that you are already a decent writer. The closest you’ll get to the basics is in the first installment, here.

So let’s get started.

Today’s lesson is

Make value your story’s lodestar.

Definition of a lodestar, from Princeton’s Wordnet:

guiding star; a star that is used as a reference point in navigation or astronomy.

Your story’s lodestar is the reference point for every element of the story — every thread you develop, every subtopic you introduce.

So how do you make value a story’s lodestar?

Let’s get to that answer by first considering what customer case studies are: stories with a purpose — tools intended to move prospective buyers along a sales process.

And why do people buy a product or service?

Because they get some kind of value for their money — something that, to a customer’s mind, is worth more (hopefully much more) than what they had to spend.

That said, customer case studies can’t be too obvious as marketing pieces. I’ll cover that in more depth in a future installation of this course. For now suffice to say: you’re ghosting a third party endorsement, not writing a marketing brochure.

Big difference. With straight marketing pieces, value — the product or service’s benefits — is always front & center. A marketing piece is a kind of argument for value; it intends to be overtly persuasive.

Case studies are narratives. You’re juggling more elements. You’re using inputs from customers — people whose experience of a product or service might not gibe exactly with the company’s messaging. The structure of the piece is driven by the story itself, not by somebody’s marketing plan.

That’s why case study writers have to be more deliberate about keeping an eye on the lodestar. Make sure you know up front what the messaging is supposed to be. What is the company’s idea of the product’s value? How can the customer’s story be synched up with the “official” value proposition? Can  the customer’s story include any fresh insights into that value?

When your approach is guided by these kinds of questions, the story will naturally display internal cohesiveness as a marketing piece.

And it will serve its overarching marketing objective: to influence decision-makers who are considering those same products or services.

Okay, this lesson will probably end up being the shortest, because it’s the one that interests me least ;-)

But I have to include it I suppose, even though most of what I’ll post here should go without saying.

1. Know your audience — and write to it. If you’re targeting executives, for instance, make sure the content is written to a suitably high level. What does your audience care about? How will the story benefit them? Mess this up, and the piece is a waste of your time — and everyone else’s.

2. Lucid organization. This ought to be a no-brainer, but I’ve seen case studies that fail miserably on this count, so I’m including it. The content has to follow some kind of logical structure. Don’t expect a reader to follow points that jump back and forth in time, for instance, unless you explicitly explain that you’ll be jumping back and forth in time (and why). Speaking of which, a timeline is probably your best structural fallback. Case studies are stories — they’re narratives. Pick a point at which the story began, tell that first, then tell what happened next, etc. (I nearly always conduct my interviews using that framework as well, incidentally — it helps with content organization as well as content communciation.)

3. Style guidelines. Most larger corporations will have selected a particular style guide (AP most likely) and will expect you to adhere to it. If not, suggest that they do. Then follow it.

Okay. That’s enough for now. Notice that I didn’t mention grammar, because I’m going to tackle that in a dedicated post. Ditto for sentence structure.

I think Lesson 2, however, will discus “the case study lodestar.”

Can you guess what that lodestar is?

Update: Click here for installment #2.

We learn by doing, and something I’ve been doing for over 15 years now is writing customer case studies.

Clients I’ve worked for know that I’m good.

They can tell by the quality of the finished product.

But what makes a particular case study “good”?

I’m willing to bet not many people can answer that question. Not beyond the obvious. “Grammatically correct.” Stuff like that. Ho hummity dum.

But I can.

In fact, when I started jotting down some ideas on this topic, I was surprised at how much I do know — and by how much I’m able to articulate.

How could this surprise me, you ask?

Well, I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but for me the act of writing takes place on the thin film that separates awareness from . . . whatever it is that’s down there below awareness. It isn’t an act of intellect; it isn’t something I control.

Sometimes I can feel ideas as they begin to organize themselves “down there.” More often, that thin film is essentially opaque — whatever is going on below is hidden.

As ideas begin to break up through into my awareness, I sometimes catch glimpses of them. Sometimes the impression is visual–not pictures, but abstract shapes. More often the sensation is kinesthetic. I’ll get excited about something or pulled toward a particular idea and suddenly it shapes itself into words.

And I start typing really really fast :-)

I write in bursts for this reason: when things are ready to come out, they come out in near-finished form. (If I try to write before they’re ready, the writing itself is more cumbersome; the process is forced; the draft will need more rewriting. Sometimes even to the level of re-organization, which is particularly tedious, bleck.) (Which isn’t to say that I sit around waiting for “inspiration” or some such My Little Pony nonsense. Just that there is a gestation period, no doubt about it.)

Anyway. My goal here is not to write a long post about me or my Creative Process ;-P

My point is, this all happens really really quickly. I make “decisions” about what I’m going to write and how I’m going to write it, but the decisions themselves don’t have time to become verbalized.

Yet they are “decisions.”

Some are specific to the particular piece I’m writing. I might choose a particular word because the customer I’ve interviewed uses it; by overlapping the story’s vocabulary with the customer’s, I’m making it more his/hers — I’m also adding a note of authenticity to counterbalance the marketing messaging that is also part of the recipe.

In other cases, the decisions I make are more general — they relate more to the craft of writing customer case studies than to the specific piece.

Generally, I don’t need to document those decisions as I make them.

Ergo, I don’t pay much attention to them.

But if I slow down and think about it, I can verbalize them.

I can also turn them into tips :-)

So that’s what I’m doing. And I’ve got ten of them. (Miraculous how tips tend to show up in groups of ten, isn’t it. Nothing to do with how many fingers I have, I swear.)

I’ll post them here over the next few days as I find time to write them out.

Back soon!

Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

– Robert A. Heinlein

Via a comment on Ann Althouse’s blog, I skipped over today to this review in the London Times of an essay titled Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus (“How to discuss books that one hasn’t read”), which was written by one Pierre Bayard, who is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII. And also (writes the reviewer, Adrian Tahourdin) a “practising psychoanalyst.” How beautifully French.

Bayard’s droll conceit includes a description of the four categories into which he places books:

“LI” indicates “livres inconnus” (books he is unfamiliar with); “LP” “livres parcourus” (books glanced at); “LE” “livres dont j’ai entendu parler” (books he has heard discussed) and “LO” “les livres que j’ai oubliés” (books he has read but forgotten).

Tahourdin next recounts that Joyce’s Ulysses falls into the category LE.

[Bayard] claims not to have read the novel, but he can place it within its literary context, knows that it is in a sense a reprise of the Odyssey, that it follows the ebb and flow of consciousness, and that it takes place in Dublin over the course of a single day. When teaching he makes frequent and unflinching references to Joyce.

I suppose we should delight in his honesty.

I also wonder . . . hmmmm . . . what do his students think?

I’m afraid I can’t relate. Having attended a modest state college, I’m reasonable certain that my lit professors had actually taken the trouble to read the books to which they had the habit of making “frequent and unflinching references.” An alarming lack of pretension, I agree. But I forgive them.

Another thought also occurs to me. What does it say about a literary novel when People Who Read Serious Books can sum it up in a single sentence — sum it up as an idea — without even having to read it — and then discuss it, as that idea, amongst themselves?

Where are its roots?

Michael Blowhard wrote this, a couple of days ago, in a post about mystery writer Elizabeth George:

When you pull an artform out of the earth it grows from, even if you do so with the best or the loftiest of intentions, it’s likely to whither and then die.

I’m not sure we can accuse Joyce of yanking literature out of the earth — I think he was just marchin’ to the beat of his own drunken Irish drummer — but in the end he didn’t need to even if he’d wanted — he has the Bayards of the world to do it for him . . .

Technorati Tags: James Joyce, writing, books, literature

That’s been my motto lately. Because I’ve felt like I’ve been pretty boring. At least on the outside, lol

It’s not that I haven’t been busy. I’ve been reading a ton of books — all kinds of interesting books — like I just finished-but-one-story “The New York Stories of Henry James” — which I picked up while in NYC of course. Only I haven’t felt inspired to blog about it — more fun to immerse myself and not assume the arm’s-length relationship that writing about it would require.

I’ve been working on revising my last-novel-but-one, which like my most recent novel got some passing interest from agents but wasn’t good enough to get anything more.

It’s been a painful process, the revision, because I’ve been confronting my own . . . naivete, if I want to be nice about it — incompetence, I think to myself in my less rosy moods. How could I have written so stupidly and not realized it? Sigh. Writing novels is without question the most difficult thing I’ve done, ever. Having to do major surgery well after I’d hoped The Thing Was Done only brings that point home all the harder.

I’ve been golfing a bit more lately, which has been nice. Will blog about that some more in the next few days.

And I’ve been writing for another site I’ve launched, WomenGolfApparel.com. I undertook this venture as an experiment: can I monetize my writing by creating a content-rich site and then run Adsense ads? I’m happy to say results so far are promising, although it has nowhere near the traffic I’d need to, you know, buy that nouveau-Italian palazzo-style McMansion with the the spinning hot tub in the back yard that I’ve had my eye on. ha ha ha

But it’s been fun, and IMO satisfies a real need, also. Especially if you don’t live in a major market, finding fun, stylish golf apparel — if you’re a woman — can be a pain. Many pro shops don’t carry much women’s clothing (due in part to their general focus on male golfers, but also because women’s shopping habits are different, according to an acquaintance who ran a pro shop with her husband for awhile. Men do things like notice it’s raining and buy a raincoat on their way out to the first tee. Women want to shop shop — and don’t combine that with their trips to the course to play.)

Even general sporting goods stores like Dick’s shortchange the women in their golf apparel sections — at least that’s been my experience. You might find one or two racks of women’s golf clothing. And it gets picked over fast, so you finding your style can be a problem.

Another major hole: it’s really really hard to find out what, exactly, the LPGA pros are wearing. I’ve been trying to hunt that info down, and it’s not easy. In some cases, it’s probably because they aren’t wearing endorsement-deal stuff. But as I wrote here, I think it’s also because the media is hesitant about covering what pros are wearing. We don’t interview Tiger about how cute his shorts look — wouldn’t it be insulting to focus on a woman pro’s clothes instead of her game?

But the fact is, when women see a golfer on t.v. and like what she’s wearing, they want to know how to buy that piece for themselves. At least according to the anecdotal evidence I’ve encountered.

So the site will, I hope, help women in a couple of ways — it will help them find opportunities to buy golf apparel online (I try to find news about deals!) and it will help them track down what the pros are wearing.

I’m putting the finishing touches on a women golf apparel newsletter now as well, which features an interview with Geoff Tait, one of the founders of Quagmire Golf. The interview discusses how golf styles are changing, partly because LPGA pros are breaking old style conventions. I plan to send the newsletter out within a few days — if you want to be on that mailing list, drop me a note or sign up here. If you’d rather just read the interview online, it’ll be published on the main site sometime later in August.

So yeah, I’ve been busy. Just not blogging. But that’s one of the nice things about having a blog, if I don’t post, what does it matter! I have only myself to please ;-)

Technorati Tags: women golf apparel, writing, blogging

Via Instapundit, Wired has a piece about a programmer who supposedly outsourced his own job to India:

Did you hear the one about the programmer who outsourced his own job? I read about it on Slashdot.org, the “news for nerds” Web site. A pseudonymous poster wrote, “About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 to do the job I get paid $67,000 for. He’s happy to have the work. I’m happy that I only have to work 90 minutes a day, talking code. My employer thinks I’m telecommuting. Now I’m considering getting a second job and doing the same thing.”

Wired says the story is probably apocrophal, but even so, mightn’t it be an early clue to the new direction?

The only trouble is, offshore outsourcing is awfully hard to do when you’re a writer.

OTOH, considering how cheaply many freelancers give away their time, perhaps it’s possible to find a subcontractor here in the U.S.

Hmmm . . .

Technorati Tags: outsourcing

From John Leo, writing in City Journal. A take-down of bad writing. Lots of examples, in case you want more for your scrap book (e.g. from a hospital bill, “disposable mucus recovery unit” instead of “box of Kleenex.”)

On a lighter note, a bit about his own decisions as a writer. When he began his U.S. News & World Report column 18 years ago, for instance, he copied the style of . . . John Madden. And then this:

After a month or so, I realized that readers of columns don’t just follow the words. They listen to the background music too. Readers want to know who you are. Is the writer consistent and fair? Does his take on the world relate to me? Is he humorless or playful? Do I want to spend time with him? Is he in the pocket of some cause or political party?

Good questions for any writer to ask.

Lots more to enjoy in the piece, and look, only a click away ;-)

Technorati Tags: writing

If you’re looking for a Serious Article about Serious Writing, here’s a dish served up by the Guardian from U.K. writer Zadie Smith.

Smith starts by asking why it’s so difficult to write a perfect novel. She doesn’t try to define “a perfect novel” however, and right off the bat dismisses critics, falling back instead on an assertion that writers aren’t ever satisfied with their own books, ergo, their books can’t be considered “perfect.” This dissatisfaction, she says, can be traced back to dissatisfaction with one’s ability to fully and truthfully capture “the truth of experience”:

There is a dream that haunts writers: the dream of the perfect novel. It is a dream that causes only chaos and misery. The dream of this perfect novel is really the dream of a perfect revelation of the self. In America, where the self is so neatly wedded to the social, their dream of the perfect novel is called “The Great American Novel” and requires the revelation of the soul of a nation, not just of a man … Still I think the principle is the same: on both sides of the Atlantic we dream of a novel that tells the truth of experience perfectly. Such a revelation is impossible – it will always be a partial vision, and even a partial vision is incredibly hard to achieve-

Hmmmmm.

Obviously this refers to literary novels, since a novel’s entertainment value plays no part in the equation. There’s no room here for the perfect “page turner” ha ha ha, nor for the sort of innocent reading my daughter enjoys, where she loves books for the pure pleasure of being lost in their pages.

Literary novels, on the contrary, are Serious; writing them is no less than a moral act, as per part 2 of the piece:

The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy, the tissue of self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what there is outside one … This is not easy, and requires, in art or morals, a discipline. One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals.

A case of morals. Yeah. “I’m a writer, and I’ve come down with a baaad case of morals.”

Interestingly enough, there’s nothing really about craft in either of these lengthy piece’s two lengthy parts.

Maybe craft is assumed . . .

Technorati Tags: writing

LOL

Technorati Tags: stewie