One of the challenges for many people tasked with the job of writing blogs and keeping content fresh on a web site can be making sure that they are covering topics that customers and prospective customers want to hear about.

if you think about the people inside your own organisation, the people with the most credibility in the eyes of your customers are your consultants – these are the people your customers turn to when they need to solve an issue so it stands to reason that they are a great source of content that will engage your audience, hows to’s, tips and tricks and best practices are very popular topics in the blogosphere and they lend themselves well to being multi-purposed.
What do I mean by that? A great tip or best practice can be leveraged in to a white paper, a blog, a YouTube video not to mention a great subject to use as a teaser sent our via Twitter.

Trouble is that getting your consultants to write blog content or white papers can be a challenge, after all, they spend most of their time on site working with customers – and of course thats where they should be.

So heres how I suggest you tackle that – every professional services firm I know of has regular team meetings, even when consultants can only dial in. So the secret to getting good content in a short space of time is a little bit like doing case studies. You can glean the key messages by asking a few simple questions.

What is a common challenge you have uncovered when working with your clients?
What do you do to solve it?
How does that benefit the customer in terms of their business process?
Can you put a dollar figure or percentage on the amount of time saved or benefit to the customer?

Of course, there are other things you can look at, such as industry specific issues, for example, you can ask, does this approach work with all customers in this industry and if not, why not.

In the space of a 5 to 10 minute mini interview, you can grab most of the core content you need to then wordsmith in to the full content which of course you can then ask the consultant to proof read prior to publication.
Add you own additional research on t he topic to gain additional material, if you want to and then away you go, you are ready to roll.

I have personally taken this approach in a number of on the spot interviews with consultants at SAP Business one partner organisations and in most situations, in the space of 10 to 15 minutes have ended up getting enough content for 3 or 4 separate posts.

So give it a shot and let me know what you find. Does it work for you, if not, why not? I would love to get your feedback and of course I am always willing to help you craft the content or even do your first few “interviews”.

PS- If you cant get your consultant face to face, why not use Skype to interview them and record the conversation, that way your note taking wont get in the way – there are a number of call recording add ons for Skype you can use – I use one on the Mac called CallRecorder for Skype from www.ecamm.com but there are others as well – including Windows solutions.

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