In the course of staying on top of what’s the meme of the day in the PR blogosphere, I wade through reams of commentary on social media and how it can be turned to serve a corporate communications and marketing strategy. In fact, one would think it’s no longer possible to run a marketing or public relations campaign with any effectiveness at all unless it relies heavily on channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube.

This perception has been fueled by passionate early adopters eager to explore the features and functionality of The Next Big Thing, whatever that may be. In fact, last week came word of one fellow launching a new PR outfit called 3W PR “designed to help organizations, brands and individuals navigate through the World Wide Web.”

Web 2.0 has certainly provided a dazzling array of shiny new tools for the marketing and PR toolbox. The trick is getting past the giddy rush of excitement that comes of having a new toy to play with and understanding how to use them effectively in a practical sense.

George Livingston over at the Buzz Bin reinforced that point today by extolling the virtues of having a sound grounding in traditional PR and marketing strategy to understand a particular business, its market and its value proposition, in order to develop an effective communications program.

Bottom line: Web 2.0 isn’t a standalone game complete in its shrink wrap for marketing and PR practitioners. It’s an expansion pack.

The subject warrants another look at a piece of Shel Holtz’s from a month back about where social media responsibility should reside in the enterprise and the importance of ensuring it is used with surgical precision to further the organization’s goals.

Technorati Tags: public relations, social media, communications strategy

Those of you among our clients who had Linda Forrest working on your account have been missing her outstanding services these past several weeks because she booked off on maternity leave at the end of July. We’re delighted to announce that her latest project, a joint venture with husband Jack Forrest, has now been successfully launched. Little Parker Simon Edward Forrest came tumbling into the world, healthy if a touch late, on Wednesday of last week.

Linda, who is well used to clients who set, and then never meet, deadlines, managed little Parker’s protracted arrival with the self-same aplomb and reports that he is “a very agreeable baby.”

Like many agencies, inmedia has been staffed mainly by young women over the past 10 years and yet, this is the very first birth to a full-time inmedianaut. So forgive us if we treat it as a very special occasion.

Congratulations, Linda and Jack. Now get that little guy in here so we can properly look him over!

Technorati Tags: Parker Forrest

This weekend, everyone’s favourite search engine turns 10. And what a decade it has been for Google - a rise to end all rises, “meteoric” doesn’t even do it justice.

One of the things that strikes me about Google is that its success is one of those increasingly rare occasions where the technology itself was the key. Those of us in technology marketing circles are only too aware that having the best technology by no means guarantees pride of place at today’s marketshare table.

I recall when Google first started to appear in the workplace - a colleague recommended I “give it a shot”, and from that day forward I never looked back. Up till then I had been a user of the “others” (Lycos, Alta Vista etc.) and, as I recall, there was nothing much to choose between them. But on that day, I was immediately staggered by the relevance of Google’s results and the speed with which they were delivered.

This was not part of some slick marketing campaign, designed to seduce me into believing that Google was the best new thing around. No, it simply blew everything else out of the water. Of course, Google has gone on to capitalize on its initial success, and marketing has been a huge part of its continued rise, but without that initial triumph at the technology level, none of this would have happened.

But those companies looking to emulate Google’s route to success should beware. Tech startup founders will often rail against marketing and PR - “We know our market, our technology is the best and will sell itself” they cry. Invariably, this is not the case, so unless you are supremely confident that your product has Google-like appeal, don’t forget to market the hell out of it.

Technorati Tags: Google, search engines, marketing, technology

The Chicago Manual of Style, that is. And, believe it or not, it’s often quite the humorous journey.

Those of you who are regular readers of this blog will know that we take considerable pride in being word nerds, and that strong, effective and precise writing is the hallmark of our work here at inmedia. But even the best and most practised of us needs to refer to an unimpeachable expert every now and then. We make heavy use of dictionairies — my Pocket Oxford Dictionary has been my desk-side companion through four decades, and its missing spine and dog-eared appearance is testimony to my continued reliance on it — as well as style guides such as CP Style Book, and all the online tools we can get our cursors to.

The best of these is the Chicago Manual of Style, or simply Chicago, as its devotees call it. We regularly go to Chicago, if you will, to check the finer points of grammar and punctuation and settle the very occasional difference of opinion that might crop up here between writer and editor.

As subscribers to the online edition of this style guide, we get monthly emails listing questions that have been put to its editors by readers. They reply with a certainty and conviction that is reassuring, while maintaining a cheeky sense of humour; many of their answers are good for a chuckle.

Take this recent exchange, for example:

Q. The assistant editor of my local newspaper wrote the following sentence in a column: “My parents had my little brother and I later in life.” I said I believe it should be “my brother and me.” She remains adamant that she is correct and referred me to your book. How is this possible?

A. It’s not possible; she’s flat-out wrong. (And we rarely say that anything is flat-out wrong.) Ask her if she would write “My parents had I.”

Or these two that had the word nerd in me chuckling:

Q. I’m going to have signs made for the tennis courts at my rather academic club. I want one of them to say something like this:

Tennis Players:

1. Please sign in at front desk.

2. Groom your court after play.

Thank you.

I have lots of questions! Is it fine in an application like this to omit articles to save space? How should I capitalize and punctuate? Is it awkward to have a list like that? I wanted to make it absolutely clear to the reader that he has TWO duties (that is, I don’t want him to stop reading one long sentence and not register his second duty).

A. It’s easy to answer when the writer already has everything down just fine. It’s all fine—really! Sticklers might think that having “your” would mean you have to have “the” to be parallel, but I would argue that “your” isn’t optional and that adding “the” on a sign like this isn’t necessary or even conventional. Maybe you could have another sign pointing that out, just in case.

And:

Q. In a technical proposal, would you say “400-ton-per-day scrubber” or “400-tons-per-day scrubber”? Thanks a bunch!

A. The first construction is the more usual one. (Btw, what is a 400-ton-per-day scrubber, exactly? And where can I get one?)

Who says grammar can’t be fun?

Technorati Tags: Writing, grammar, style guides, Chicago Manual of Style

In case you missed them, here’s a roundup of our blog posts from August:

Francis:

Aug. 8: Something very strange came in the mail …
Aug. 11: Ottawa has the best coffee (machine) in the world
Aug. 15: Robert Scoble touches the elephant
Aug. 18: Test your vocabulary, feed the world
Aug. 20: “If you persevere long enough…”
Aug. 25: Bloggers: To pitch or not to pitch…
Aug. 26: Great post on Maple Leaf’s crisis communications
Aug. 29: Zoom was the unofficial airline of inmedia PR

Danny:

Aug. 11: Are you ready to execute a PR program?
Aug. 25: Getting a return on analyst briefings

Leo:

Aug. 5: Laying claim to social media
Aug. 7: Where are all those eyes coming from?
Aug. 13: Even dead horses can learn new tricks
Aug. 14: The social graces of social media
Aug. 19: You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry
Aug. 21: Don’t worry, be happy
Aug. 28: Finding time to blow off some steam

There’s been no shortage of commentary here and elsewhere about the value of brevity when it comes to engaging with the media. As PR practitioners, we’re often making cold contact with harried folks overwhelmed by numerous pitches that all claim to be inherently more worthy than whatever else is clogging up the inbox.

By the same token, readers must be equally busy, with equally short attention spans, so it only makes sense that written material intended for their consumption must also be short, sweet and to the point, right?

Well, not necessarily.

There is a clear difference between copy that is reader friendly and copy that isn’t. And mere length is a poor means of distinguishing one from the other. On the fiction front, I’ve torn through tomes 400 and 500 pages long in an afternoon, and struggled for days through artful prose only half that length. The style in which something is written is as important, if not more so, than length, when it comes to engaging the reader.

So what defines reader-friendly copy from that which isn’t? It’s an important question for us, as we produce for clients news releases, backgrounders, case studies and other materials that must be both informative and engaging for the media and the media’s audience.

Daily Writing Tips offers up some good pointers and refers to a fellow who has had significant influence on the business of writing, Rudolph Flesch, the man who developed the Flesch–Kincaid Readability Tests for assigning appropriate grade levels to reading material.

From our perspective, spinning a good yarn is what’s important to engaging the reader and how long that yarn will be is determined wholly by the quality of the material. The key thing is to ensure the piece has a tight focus with an obvious beginning, middle and end, written in a clear active voice. Long-winded sentences and complex vocabulary should be kept to a minimum. Lots of periods and white space are good things.

One of my profs from J-school summed it up best. When asked how long a story assignment should be, she would always answer, “Give it what it’s worth.”

Technorati Tags: writing, readability, Rudolph Flesch, Flesch-Kincaid, Daily Writing Tips