We regularly capture content for clients that is fashioned into a press release or case study but one of the things I see clients struggling with is capturing really good testimonials.
All too often clients will want to post testimonials on their website or in their newsletter from favored and happy clients. The problem is that most of these unsolicited testimonies are pretty weak and usually pay compliment to an individual on your staff and not to your organization as a whole. “Suzy is great to work with,” is valuable customer feedback when it comes time to writing Suzy’s review but doesn’t belong in any of your other customer or prospect communications. For testimonials to be valuable, they need to be specific to your organization, product or service offering and ideally include a metric like ROI or time to delivery.
In a post on GadPedal.com today on this same subject he goes so far as to put a limit on the word count of your testimonials as just SIX. I think six will be a struggle for some but it definitely looks good on the web, in the margin of printed material or pushed out as a Tweet. The challenge to you will of course be to provide quality in those six words.