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!