 Great photo by Grok. You may know—if you don’t, here it comes—that we’ve been writing these blogs, twice a month, for more than ten years, here at Copel Communications.
How do we always have something new to talk about? More important for you and your business: How can you always have something new to talk about? And when we say “talk about,” we’re, well, talking about things like blog entries. Videos. Social posts. Stuff that keeps you out there, in the eyes of your target audience, as a thought leader. Interesting note: This becomes all the more challenging in the age of generative AI. How can you possibly stand out amid the overwhelming tsunami of auto-generated material? Fast forward We recently gave a presentation on this exact topic. We won’t dive into the details here, but AI—tools like ChatGPT—are amazing at effectively ingesting and then memorizing (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?) the entire internet. Just as easily, they can spit out (first half of previous metaphor) content at will, using said input. But they have one massive limitation that you don’t. It’s why their “intelligence” is artificial, and yours is quite real. We’ll circle back to their weakness—and your strength—in just a second. But first, let’s just talk about the mundane challenge of populating your marketing editorial calendar. You do have a marketing editorial calendar, don’t you? Oh, don’t be embarrassed. Lots of companies lack them. But it’s never too late to start. Think of it this way: Why break into a flop sweat every time you need to push out new material on a pre-determined cadence? If that’s an hour of stress, say, twice a month, why not eliminate it? The solution is easy: Dedicate one big chunk of time, typically around year-end, to simply jot down a list of every month of the year, and then brainstorm the topic you’ll develop content for, for each month. It’s hard, but it’s a one-shot effort, and you’ll end up with a year’s worth of topics. Yes, it’s hard. But there’s a neat trick to it, as the headline of this article has not-so-subtly implied. Back to that ChatGPT weakness. Hindsight is overrated ChatGPT seems brilliant because it can memorize the entire internet. That’s some feat. But here’s a feat you accomplish every day, which it can’t do: You look forward. The internet is a repository of stuff from the past. If you can spot trends among your clients, guess what? You’re already smarter than ChatGPT. This dovetails with our populate-the-calendar challenge rather nicely. While you may be doing this at year-end (or right now, no one cares), you’ll be using information that ChatGPT has zero access to: Your thoughts, and your files. So here—finally!—is the trick we’d teased at the outset: Looking for topics for marketing material for your business? Look no further than your recent invoices. Yep. You read right. Your invoices are magic fodder for this assignment. Look at any given one. It shows how you earned your keep, and how you delivered unique value, for any given client. And therein lies a story. Think back on what you’d billed for. There was, invariably, a challenge to solve. And you solved it. (And your client was happy to pay you for that expertise.) That’s a story. It’s a cool story. It’s a story that showcases your uniqueness and thought leadership. It’s also a story that ChatGPT couldn’t write in a million years. Here at Copel Communications, we practice what we preach. We build our editorial blog-post calendar, and stick to it. And we routinely open up our own billing files for cool stories that we can anonymize and share with you for handy tips and lessons learned. Need help with that next marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!
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 Great photo by Matheus Bertelli. Special news! Sure, we’ve got a good blog article here, and we’ll get to it in just a second. But first, a little announcement, which segues to this article quite nicely:
We’re proud to announce that this article, these very words you are reading right now, are officially our tenth anniversary blog post. That’s right: We started publishing these in January 2015, and at that time, committed to publishing them twice a month. If you’re unaware—or simply curious—our cadence goes like this: At the top of the month, we publish articles focused primarily for our consulting/business-owner audience. At mid-month, we publish blogs focused a little more toward our “creative” audience, which includes ad agencies and other creative people we enjoy working with. Ten years! And we never missed a post. That’s 240 articles, if we’ve done our math right. And we’re not stopping now. Thanks so much for joining us for this great, long ride! Let’s dive into our latest topic. Why blogging shouldn’t be a New Year’s resolution If you watched any TV during New Year’s, you were surely inundated with ads for gym memberships. It’s as predictable as sunrise. Why? Because people invariably make a New Year’s resolution to “get in shape,” and those gyms are all too happy to cash in. Be honest. How many people have you known (you may be one of them) who made one of these resolutions, joined a gym, bragged to all their friends for the first month or two… and then kind of quietly quit thereafter? Getting in shape takes commitment. In that regard, it’s exactly like blogging. Or doing social posts. Pretty much anything that has to do with your marketing outreach. Not everyone is an Olympian or an NFL star. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t whip your marketing into shape. The good news: It’s much easier than doing squats or lifting weights. You might be surprised at the trick to all this. Ready? Aim low. What??? What???? You read right. This is counterintuitive advice if ever we’d dispensed any. Aim low. Allow us to explain. The attainable cadence The reason that so many people burn out on those January gym memberships is that they aim unrealistically high. So they over-do it. They can’t sustain that level of exertion. And so they just drop out. By aiming so high, they turn it into an all-or-nothing proposition. Which is exactly what you don’t want to do. So ask yourself this: How many blogs could I reasonably push out, every single month? Factor into your answer disruptions like client emergencies and vacation time. Now take your answer, and cut it in half. Really? Really. The resulting number should be laughably easy to attain. And that’s the number you want. For us, here at Copel Communications, we could probably turn these out every single week. But that’s pushing it. So we do it every two weeks, i.e., twice a month. And, as we’d noted above, we’ve never missed a beat. The calendar trick Surely, we’ve had our share of client emergencies, vacation time, and what-not. But the trick is to create what’s called an editorial blog post calendar in which you pre-select the topics you want to blog about. Once you have that in place (we do ours in the fourth quarter each year for the subsequent year), you can then use it to write your blogs in advance so that you always have a cushion for when those client emergencies and/or vacation dates arise. Think of it. You now have two cushions: 1) You cut your originally-intended cadence in half. 2) You have extra blogs, already written, in the pipeline, which you can publish with a single click. When you look at it—and do it—that way, there’s zero stress. And you hit the mark every time. Again, blogging is just one type of output. You can apply this exact same approach to all kinds of marketing and business-development outreach, including emails, webinars, videos, you name it. Who’da thought it would all start by aiming low? Need help with this or similar challenges? Contact us. We’d be delighted to pitch in.  Great photo by Alena Darmel. Here at Copel Communications, we get tasked with lots of different writing assignments. There are video scripts. Blogs. Case studies. Email campaigns. Sales decks. Landing pages. Social posts. You name it.
Thing is, a lot of these overlap. And therein lies an opportunity—for you—to approach your marketing outreach more effectively and cost-efficiently. Learn from our experience and evolved best practice. It’s actually pretty simple, but it requires both foresight and discipline. Signed, sealed deliverables Our clients will typically want to promote something (a product, a service, an announcement) to as many people/prospects as possible. Which requires leveraging various media, such as web pages, YouTube, email, and so on. And here’s where the “package” concept originated. We realized, early on, that all of these deliverables-centered-around-the-same-story were basically all parts of the same, bigger thing. Thus we coined the phrase “content package”; you might not see it described that way elsewhere. The idea of “packaging” these, however, is powerful. First of all, it’s hugely efficient. If you’re going to create one of these things, create all of them… at the same time. Note that we said “create.” Not, say, “post” or “publish.” That might be staggered, depending on your media plan. But you do want to create them all at once. It’s going to be easier and more efficient for your writing resource, since they’ll need to align their proverbial ducks just once. That will translate to more consistent content across the package’s discrete elements—and lower costs, too. Here’s another advantage of packaging these assignments together: It’s effectively a marketing checklist. By green-lighting a package, you eliminate the possibility of later discovering that you’d inadvertently left one element out. What’s the core asset? The components of any content package will be dissimilar, not in terms of facts or messaging, but rather in terms of sheer size. The package might include, say, an 800-word blog, along with a 280-character tweet (or X-chirp, or whatever it’s called nowadays). The point is, if you’re going to create all this stuff, know that it’s always easier to cut than to add. That matters, whether you’re creating the materials yourself or assigning them to someone else. In other words, you don’t start with the tweet. Identify the biggest, most detailed, and labor-intensive element in the package, and create that one first. Once it’s nicely honed, you can use it as a feeder for all of the others. It’s not quite as simple as doing a “Save as…” and then chopping down, because there are other constraints and style and audience factors to take into consideration. But still, all the heavy lifting should be done for the “core” asset. Example: We have a client who publishes case studies in a tightly-defined three-tab format (“Client,” “Team,” “Solution”). But they’ll also push out a more narrative-style blog about the same story—and the blog always has more detail, captioned illustrations, and little behind-the-scenes anecdotes baked into it. So we always do the blog first. Then the case study. Then the three-touch email campaign. Then the social teasers for the blog and the case study… you get the idea. Packaged goods As we’d mentioned earlier, creating content packages requires foresight and discipline. Foresight, in that you must often delay gratification, knowing that one element of the package may well roll out at some time in the future. And discipline, in that you must remember to employ the content-package approach, and stick to it. But, like any best practice, once you get used to doing this, you’ll find it becomes second nature… to the vast advantage of your marketing outreach, and your production budget. Need help “packaging” up any content, or creating the elements thereof? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio. It’s that time of year again: Time for the annual year-in-review of our top articles from Copel Communications. We do two of these each December: one for our “Creatives” audience, and another for our consultants audience.
This one is the former. (We’d published the other one recently.) Here are the top articles we’ve posted for creatives, chock full of tips and tricks that you can put to use ASAP. Enjoy!
That wraps up this year. And so… Happy New Year! Any topics you’d like to see us address in 2024? Contact us and let us know!  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio. Here we go again! Another year has zipped past… and presented us the opportunity to present you with a compendium of our top articles for consultants from this past year. If you missed any, here’s your chance to catch up. And if you have already seen, and liked, any of these, here’s your opportunity to revisit and brush up. Enjoy!
Have any topics you’d like to see us address next year? Contact us. We’d be delighted to hear from you!  Great photo by Pixabay. We have a client that does a lot of blogging—like a lot of our clients.
And, like a lot of our clients, they hire us to write—make that ghost-write—a lot of those blogs. Also, like a lot of our clients, they also use an SEO firm to create other, SEO-focused blogs for them. A two-pronged approach. So far, so good. But what are “production blogs”? And why does this client hate them so much? Production blogs vs. thought-leadership blogs First off, you can’t really Google “production blogs.” It’s a term we made up. Production blogs can be defined as blogs that are written for a business, using pre-existing web-based materials for their background research, and used primarily to drive up SEO (search-engine optimization) numbers, i.e., search results on Google. You, as a consumer, likely encounter these blogs all the time. That’s your clue that they work: You searched for some information on Google, and up popped one of these articles in the list of hits. Again, so far, so good. But then—and consider how common and familiar this is—once you click on the article, you’re quickly disappointed. It sure contains your exact question or query, probably about a dozen times, in different phrasing, but doesn’t give you much hard information that you’d craved. It feels very regurgitated. It reads like a mashup of other online articles, 1) carefully reworded to avoid copyright/plagiarism conflicts, and 2) like it was written by someone who’s, well, not the greatest writer. Trust your Spidey Sense on this one. You’re exactly right on all counts. Whatever site that blog resided on, just boosted its SEO numbers when you clicked to it. Did you feel satisfied? Did you get the info you needed? Naah. Not really. Importantly—sometimes hugely importantly—you didn’t get one whiff of a professional, well-informed opinion. Which segues, nicely, to the other kind of blogs: Thought-leadership blogs Just like “production blogs,” this is a term that we here at Copel Communications invented. But the name—“thought-leadership blogs”—gives away what they are. In stark contrast to production blogs, these are not written by scouring a lot of pre-existing material online. To the contrary, they’re written by interviewing a really well-informed SME or subject-matter expert. We enjoy writing these. We enjoy doing the interviews. In the best ones, our subjects get pretty adamant, even riled. That’s what we want. We want them to rely on their professional opinion, expertise, and years of experience to dismantle incorrect and ill-informed preconceived notions, and set the record straight. It's arguably an uphill battle: The search-structured web is effectively an echo chamber, where bad information gets reused and elevated to the status of “trusted source,” when it’s actually anything but. So our same SME client, who rages against the search machine, is justifiably mad at the production blogs they’re forced to proofread prior to publication. Why? Lots of reasons. For one, they’re rife with factual errors. While they assiduously don’t break any copyright laws, they do proliferate bad information that’s breeding online. This client of ours also operates in a highly-regulated industry, so the information found by the writer simply might not apply, because what’s legal and permissible in one U.S. state, isn’t in our client’s state. Also, production blogs are generally just hard to read. They have all the appeal of a Wikipedia entry. No hook, no drama, no story, no voice, no personality, no iconoclasm, no payoff. We know. We’re also tasked with proofing these things, and they take us forever. And we’re paid to read them! Two for one Knowing all this, why does our client still do both? For a very good reason. This is a basic tenet of marketing known as the media mix. You can’t achieve everything with either one of these blogs; using both is prudent and smart. The production blogs are better at finding people who are simply Googling at the top of the sales funnel. The thought-leadership blogs are better at converting visitors into believers—and thus prospects—deeper down in the funnel. It’s like mixing paid and earned media: a basic, smart mix. Our client recently asked us, somewhat rhetorically, “How come we can proofread your blogs in about two minutes, with almost no changes, while these other blogs take us hours and tons of aggravating work?” The answer is simple. As we’d noted above, we base our thought-leadership blogs off the SME interviews we conduct, where we take detailed, careful notes. So the SME’s knowledge is reflected in the final product. Credit where it’s due. If you need production blogs, there are plenty of good sources out there. If you need thought-leadership blogs, the field rapidly narrows. Contact us and let us help you advance your business’ mission—and passion—to the world.  Awesome photo by admiral-general-m-âââââ-godshepherdly. It happens every summer. Work slows down. People take vacations. If you’re still in a business-building mindset, it can be, well, a little maddening.
In this article, we’ll review some things you can do to be productive when others aren’t. To prep your business for the upcoming season of busy-ness. This article might not be for you. In that regard, it’s probably self-selecting: If you’re reading this, you’re still plugging at it. If you’re on vacation right now, this one will sail right past you. Mind you, we’re not judging here. You can fall into either camp; we don’t care. But between the summer preppers and the summer tanners, this article is aimed at the former. Down-time is your time Think back to the busiest part of this year so far. When you had so much work you’d wake up wondering how you’d get through that day. Now, on that day, think of all the things that you didn’t do. That you couldn’t do. Why not? You were too busy. Pretty simple. So now is the time to tackle all of those things you’d put off amid the rush of peak season. This is the time for all you cobblers out there to make your kids’ shoes. This is also a very good time to be selfish, in a biz-dev sort of way. Review what you’ve got, what you’re presenting to the world. Go through your website. Page by page. Remember all those little niggling details you’d intended to fix and/or update? Now’s the time. Ditto for your firm’s presentation deck(s). Weed out the outdated stuff. Make mentions of new, recent wins. For that matter, this is the best possible time to write new client success stories, a.k.a. case studies. (Need help with those? Contact us. We do tons of ‘em.) Pull together all the client-facing materials from those engagements. Use them to jog your memory. Steal from them, liberally, anonymizing as you go, to create all-new world-facing evergreen material. And what about your blogs? Are they looking sorely out of date on your site? Now’s the time to curl up with a nice cup of coffee or tea, and knock out a bunch of them so that you have a good backlog of evergreen material to push out on schedule. (Honestly: Do you think we wrote this July blog in July? Here at Copel Communications, we practice what we preach!) Speaking of blogs, you have a fully-populated editorial calendar for them, right? Well, if not, now’s the time to brainstorm your quarterly/monthly/weekly/whatever topics. (We have a good article to help you with that.) Get into production Blogs—which force people to (ugh) read—are just one way to push out your business. Some of the other ways are surprisingly interlinked:
And you can push them out just as diligently, using the exact same editorial calendar you’d created for the blogs. Of course, you can delegate as much of this responsibility and production as your comfort-zone dictates: The writing. The voiceover. The video production. The on-camera talent. And so on. There are other relatively self-indulgent things you can do during summer down-time, too. Take a good look at your office and your stuff. Is that desk chair begging for replacement? Could the walls use a new coat of paint? Good luck attempting any of those tasks during the busy season. If you can’t beat ‘em... And of course, there’s one other thing you can do during down-time: Relax. If you’ve accomplished even half of the things we’d listed above, you deserve a well-earned pat on the back and a nap. Heck, everyone else is taking time off. Things will get busy enough, soon enough. So enjoy the down-time. If you combine that with the productivity tips above, you’ll have the best of both worlds. And need help with any of those things? Contact us. We’d be happy to pitch in.  Okay. We’ll admit that the title of this blog—“ SME-based articles for non-SME audiences”—is a mouthful. But it’s also a good, important topic when it comes to business development for your consultancy or professional-services firm. And it speaks to assignments we work on a lot, to our clients’ benefit.
This story starts with a story. We were tasked with writing a highly technical blog article for a high-tech client. So far, so logical. But the intended audience was non-technical. Aha. Who’s pulling the purse-strings? Let’s keep one thing clear here: Our mission, at Copel Communications, is to help our clients make more money. Period. All of the deliverables we produce, whether they’re websites or video scripts or blog articles like the one we’re describing here, are designed to soften the beachhead of prospects, and ease them further down the funnel into buyers. Taking a customer-back approach to the challenge of this article, we asked our client: “Who is this aimed at?” More specifically, “Who would be buying what we’re selling?” This is where it gets interesting. Our client makes high-tech equipment for use in a variety of scientific applications. And there are lab technicians who use this equipment. For them, a highly technical article would be appropriate, with no need for dumbing down any of the nerdy details. But these lab technicians, although they are users of the equipment, are not the buyers of the equipment. Oooh. Let’s repeat that: These lab technicians, although they are users of the equipment, are not the buyers of the equipment. And this is where the lessons of this story apply to what is likely a ton of scenarios for your business. Two different audiences The lab technicians’ bosses certainly have technical know-how, given their career path up the corporate ladder. But they don’t need to read an article on the nuts-and-bolts of this technical equipment. They’d rather know the business case for buying one (which often involves replacing an aging or lesser version of the exact same thing). More importantly, a big, albeit secondary, chunk of the intended audience was relative newbies in the field: People just starting their careers who, despite their schooling, need to quickly get up to speed in the real world to get ahead. For those people, they’d be Googling topics of interest to learn more. And thus this article was seeded with the types of keywords they’d be searching on; think of it as a “101”-type intro article on the broad applications of this piece of equipment. Now, why would you want to educate this latter audience, if they’re not doing the purchasing? Let’s make this easier by re-phrasing the above question: Why would you want to educate this latter audience, if they’re not doing the purchasing today? Right. Given their ambition and hunger for information, they’ll likely be purchasers of this equipment tomorrow. Time moves fast in business. And they’ll be the ones who will thank this company (our client) for giving them the free knowledge they’d craved to get up to speed in their new careers. Not only that, but said company also proved to be a reliable source of expertise, which burnishes its brand and reputation. Why wouldn’t you go with that brand of equipment when the time comes? Un-SME-ing the SME So we knew all of what we described above, about the target-audience landscape, when it came time for us to interview the subject matter expert (SME) assigned to us for the article. Not only that, we explained this situation, upfront, to the SME. So she understood what our intention was, and what we needed to do. She was very generous with her expertise, but also helped us to explain the why’s and what-for’s of each nugget of information, so it would be more than just a litany of facts; it would be a basis for working knowledge in the lab. And thus the article. In fact, we did a couple of these; they’re peppered in among the company’s more-technical offerings, which is a smart approach unto itself: Never assume your target audience is homogenous, especially when it comes to their level of experience or expertise. So the next time you feel inclined to push out technical promotional material to the world, (re)consider your audience. You certainly don’t want to swamp or intimidate the very people who might make formidable future allies—or customers. Need assistance with this kind of complex communication challenge? Contact us. We help our clients with assignments like this all the time, and would be delighted to help you, too.  How to find and hire a ghost writer—or do it yourself
Halloween it still over a week away, but since it’s October, what better time to address the topic of ghost writing? People always seem to be impressed when we tell them that we do a lot of ghost writing. Maybe there’s some connotation to the term, implying that it’s being done for, say, a celebrity or politician. That’s not the case, in our case. Still, we do tons of ghost writing. You could almost argue that, aside from blog articles like this one, it’s all we do. Put it this way: Whenever you write something that’s ostensibly written by someone else, you’re “ghosting.” But does that mean you’re putting your words into someone else’s mouth? Dispelling the myths The answer to the above question is: “You’d better not be!” The whole idea of ghost writing is to help your “author” express their ideas, only better/faster/more efficiently than they could on their own. Every word should read as if it were written by them. This, incidentally, is why we tag ourselves as a “secret weapon” on our website. By reading this article, you know what we do. But most of the readers of the material we create don’t even know that we exist. And that’s the way it should be. Another myth about ghost writing is that it’s glamorous. We’ll admit that it’s fun, and intellectually stimulating, but “remaining anonymous in the shadows” isn’t exactly a red-carpet activity. It’s a job to be done. And done right, it’s all about helping your “author” to shine. In our case, “shine” means “drive in more business.” This isn’t some touchy-feely branding exercise. This is about helping time-constrained business leaders to get their thought-leading ideas, views, and sales pitches out to their intended audiences, for maximum impact and ROI. So, in case you hadn’t thought about it, our ghost writing encompasses virtually every kind of written communication medium. It could be a thought-leadership article. It could be a book. It could be a sales presentation or video script. It could be—and often is—an email, addressed to, perhaps a C-level prospect. Think about it: Do you honestly believe that our clients—these incredibly smart and busy people—want to spend the time organizing their arguments, let alone word-smithing the copy? They’ve got far bigger fish to fry. Hence the need for ghost writers. Finding the voice Here’s a neat story. We have a client—let’s call her Sue (not her real name)—who, like most of our clients, is downright brilliant. She’s also shy and soft-spoken. Yet we needed to create a piece for her, in her voice, that would sell. There was a mismatch of tone. But after speaking with her at length, and asking her about a certain topic she’s passionate about, that passion started to come through. Indeed, when we probed about specifics, she got even more heated and enthusiastic. And we realized: That’s the voice we need. It’s “Sue, Pissed Off.” So, interviewing her, we got all the facts we needed for this piece. And that’s a job unto itself. It’s important to respect her time and let her go down any rabbit-holes she likes, so long as they’re at least tangentially relevant, and take great notes. It’s not her job, incidentally, to organize these thoughts, or think about the end product’s structure. She just needs to “spout.” Our job—which isn’t easy—afterward is twofold: 1) We need to organize all of those random thoughts, and find the thread which aligns them into the most compelling possible argument. 2) We then need to make that argument in the “Sue, Pissed Off” voice. Is this “putting words into Sue’s mouth”? Hardly! Finding the fit Now let’s turn the tables. Let’s say you need to hire a ghost writer for, say, that upcoming marketing outreach piece that will have your byline at the top of it, or your signature at the bottom of it. What do you do? Well, you can find your list of candidates by whatever means you see fit, whether it’s a LinkedIn search, or through a site such as Upwork, or whatever. But this is not about just finding someone who can write well and will work within your budget. This is all about finding the proper fit. Can that person interview you well and tease out the information that’s needed for the piece and its tactical intent? Do you feel comfortable chatting—indeed, venting—to that person at length? And most importantly, can they empathize? Can they find, and “speak” in, the right voice that you want to project to the world, which will 1) best present your argument, while 2) ringing true as “you”? This is the crucial yet subtle compatibility factor that you really need to weigh, first and foremost, into your hiring decision. Staying on-message Unfortunately, after the interview is over, your work—as the putative “author”—isn’t done. You’ll need to review the draft your ghost writer submits, and check it not only for accuracy but for tone. Does it ring true? Does it “sound” like you wrote it? If you don’t feel comfortable, you’ll need to kick it back. Lest we remind you: Your name, not the ghost writer’s, will be on this thing. It’s personal. This is “you,” to the world. You shouldn’t feel uncomfortable about the product. To the contrary: You should be delighted. When you get a great ghost-written piece, you should be downright elated. We have clients who share our pieces with family and friends, they’re so excited by how they’ve come out. So that’s the bar you want to reach. Have a project you need ghost written? We can help with that. Simply contact us for a no-obligation consultation today.  Tips for this essential marketing and copywriting service
We’ve heard it pronounced “Smeee.” We’ve heard it pronounced “S-M-E.” Either way, it refers to “subject-matter expert” or SME. As experts, SMEs are often tapped for their wisdom. That’s what this article is all about. Why would you need to conduct a SME interview in the first place? It depends on the assignment. Here at Copel Communications, we’re often tapped to ghost-write thought-leading articles for business leaders. This is a classic case of “call in the SME.” Or you might be crafting a strategic situation analysis for your company or another company. You need to know the lay of the land. Consider using a SME when you need to get well-informed opinions about topics such as:
Note, importantly, that we said “opinions” above. This is huge. The whole idea of interviewing a SME is to get opinions, more than facts. Think about that. For “facts,” you could basically go on Wikipedia and seemingly get your questions answered. That’s not worth much, and it’s certainly not unique. The whole advantage of a SME is that this is someone who is toiling at the front lines, at the very bleeding edge of their area of expertise. So naturally they’ll have strong—and well-founded—opinions about all of the topics listed above. And that’s what you want to get from them. Every opinion they offer, of course, will be couched within the context of the facts that surround it. Such as “This new technology is the hot new darling of Wall Street, and the valuations of companies who manufacture it are going through the roof.” That’s the fact. Then comes the opinion: “But as far as I’m concerned, this is all smoke-and-mirrors; it’s another dot-com bust just waiting to happen.” If you’re not asking “Why?” right now, you need to hone your interviewing skills. Succeed in advance Clearly, the example above is made up. But it’s typical. We encounter these types of exchanges all the time. And they’re the best part of the interview. We’ll take ten minutes of opinion for every one minute of facts. Not only that, we love to probe in instances like this. Dig deep. Keep asking “Why?” Get your SME riled up, indignant, and on their high-horse. This stuff is solid gold. All of the above, of course, assumes that you’re already hip-deep in the interview. So let’s back up a little and help you set it up in the first place. Conducting a good SME interview is all about preparation. You want to be totally prepared. Some checklist items to consider:
The medium for the message Not long ago, we did all SME interviews by phone. Post-pandemic, that’s changed. There’s a lot more video going on. But that doesn’t mean that you need to use video. Let’s consider some of the advantages and disadvantages of each:
Key takeaways Depending on the assignment, you might nail the interview in one shot. Sometimes it will go so well, you’ll effectively get two interviews’ worth of information out of a single one. And sometimes the opposite is true: You’ll only get half of what you need. In that case, you’ll need to book a follow-up to complete the assignment. All of this, incidentally, is work. That’s in addition to having, and employing, “soft skills” such as putting the subject at ease, especially when they’re a highly technical person who might not be terribly social or outgoing. This is where we come in. We know how to do great SME interviews, because we do them all the time. We also craft the materials—everything from white papers to blog articles to case studies—that result from them, to our clients’ benefit. Need help with that next SME interview or the deliverable it will inform? Contact us today. We’d be delighted to discuss your needs. |