When NOT to Write a Case Study What are most common blocks to partnering with a customer for a case study?

1.Your customer is really unhappy. They'd do a case study all right, but you wouldn't want them to. If you're hapless individual setting up initial interview, be sure that customer really is happy and is open to talking to you. Otherwise they'll just give you an earful. Fix: promise customer that you'll pass on all of his comments to technical support team, or whoever you think will best handle it. Then do it, and forget about it. 2.Customers who fear their market will punish them. Prime example: legal firms with security issues. Sure you helped them through a security project and now they're Fort Knox, but they don't want their clients to dream that a problem ever existed in first place. Fix: Forget it. They'll never give you permission to produce study. Besides, they're probably right. 3.Your customer is an exacting IT type who is suspicious of success story format. This customer considers project a success too, but they dislike purely positive spins - and no project is perfect. Fix: If they are happy for most part, get a buy-in that project really was successful. Don't put him off about negatives, capture those comments too and promise to pass them on. (Then do it.) This is usually enough to secure interview. 4.Your customer is scared to be interviewed. This is usually IT guy who did all footwork, and prefers to stay behind scenes. He (or she) will either be too nervous to talk, or will despise you because he doesn't think you've got technical chops. Usually both. Fix: Understand technology you're interviewing about. You don't have to be an engineer, but you should understand IT pressures and issues. Ask leading questions, but if they clam up and won't talk, thank them and hang up. Tell your customer contact that you're so happy you got to talk to technician, and now could you talk to a project manager too? Christine Taylor is an expert copywriter for technology industry. Call her today for help with your white paper, trade journal article, case study, positioning document, or any other B2B marketing piece. Call 760-249-6071 or e-mail her at chris@keywordcopy.com, and start that white paper selling!

1. Provocative Operation, coined by Edward de Bono - This involves disrupting your thought patterns. It works with premise that more you are used to something, less stimulating it is for your thinking.

Application: Insert "interruptions" into your day. This can be writing in a different room or area, reading magazines you wouldn't normally read, tuning in to a different radio or television station, cooking and eating something different.

2. Forced Analogy - This method forces you to compare a concept, idea or problem with something else that it has little or nothing in common with. The results are new insights.

Application: Compare an emotion (e.g., elation, excitement, anxiety) with a tangible object (e.g., pen, chair, door). How is anxiety like a door?

When you need to tap creative inside you, use these 2 techniques. Tap into your imagination and you enable yourself to create new things, come up with ideas you have never thought of before. Tap into your imagination and you awaken your creativity.

Copyright (c) 2003-2004 Shery Ma Belle Arrieta-Russ