Any regular reader of this blog will know that inmedia is a shop that prides itself on its writing chops. Indeed, several of us willingly self-identify as grammar geeks.

When someone is looking to work here, I now ask three questions that immediately sort the writers from the rest. First, I ask candidates to rate their writing talent on a scale from one to 10. The real writers don’t hesitate to put themselves eight or higher. But posers will blow air into their answers to this one, so it’s not terribly definitive.

Next, I ask them what other people have said all their lives about their writing. This is the key question. Really good writers stand apart from the crowd and have been hearing ever since they were in school that they are exceptional. The question is not the least peculiar to them; they know exactly what I mean and they answer it right away and without so much as a blush of false humility. It is perfectly ordinary and everyday for their writing to be praised.

Finally, I ask them to name three writing or grammar reference books that they use consistently. I don’t really care what titles they give me so long as they offer them up with very little hesitation. While the posers will hum and haw, the real writers know that this craft is a complex one that regularly requires pulling down dictionaries, thesauruses and other reference guides as we strive for excellence. Besides the first two, I’m really looking for someone who cares enough about their craft that they own and can effortlessly recall at least a couple of standard writing, grammar and editing references such as the Chicago Manual of Style, about which I’ve written before, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, The Reader Over Your Shoulder by Graves and Hodge, or a little tome that actually became a best-seller a few years back, Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss.

If my candidate has ever taken a university-level writing course in any Canadian or American school, The Elements of Style, which two weeks ago marked the 50th anniversary of its original publication, is almost always cited. Although I own a copy from my own undergraduate days, it’s not a reference on which I have ever heavily relied. I have always been somewhat confused by what I have found to be its bewildering rules about passive versus active voice. I have always put my confusion down to the fact that I think I am better at writing well than I am about explaining writing well. In other words, I seem innately to know how to do it properly; I can’t always explain why or how I’m doing it properly.

Now, thanks to a linguistics professor at the University of Edinburgh, I perhaps have an explanation for my confused reaction to The Elements of Style. In a damning article in the April 17, 2009 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Geoffrey Pullham regrets the “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice” he says has been peddled to American students by William Strunk and E.B. (Charlotte’s Web) White. He takes particular umbrage at the guide’s admonition against employing the passive voice, writing that its authors didn’t know what they were talking about and usually identified as passive passages those that were, in fact, active. Much relief over here, I can tell you.

On another front, though, I have always credited Strunk and White when I dictate that adverbs should be avoided. At least, they should be avoided as cheap modifiers of adjectives. For example, it’s just lazy writing to stick a spare “very” in front of an adjective to convey a greater degree of whatever the adjective itself is describing; come up with a more potent adjective that can do the job without a modifier. Where the professor and I agree that Strunk and White were overly doctrinaire, however, is that adverbs are perfectly fine for the modifying of verbs and quite acceptable when conveying particular emphasis on adjectives. Note my use of the adverbs “perfectly” and “quite” doing yeoman duty modifying the adjectives “fine” and “acceptable” in that last sentence!

Happy 50th anniversary, Elements, but, like the professor, I probably won’t be throwing any parties. I’ll still accept you as an answer to my third question, though, so long as it comes without hesitation.

Technorati Tags: writing, grammar, inmedia, Elements of Style, The Reader Over Your Shoulder, Eats Shoots and Leaves, 50 years of Stupid Grammar Advice

I understand very well that setting up straw-man arguments just to knock them down can be a useful presentation tactic and a powerful rhetorical device but at some point, if that’s the only way you can prop up your case, you run the risk of sounding as vacuous and intellectually dishonest as the bleating sheep in George Orwell’s seminal “Animal Farm.”

I’m afraid that’s the chief reaction I was left with following this morning’s Social Media Breakfast Ottawa where presenter Chris Greenfield of Toronto’s Clever Communications had an argument that regrettably distilled into the single phrase, “Old way bad; new way (by which I mean my way) good.” He got a lot of chuckles from the crowd and several tweets hailing him as a fresh-thinking skeptic merely by highlighting the most egregious failings of traditional marketing and communications practitioners and then showing how the brave new world of social media is totally different from how those dinosaur hacks operate.

Here’s the thing, Chris: Many — dare I say, most — of us old-school marketing practitioners understand very well that the opportunity to communicate effectively lives at an intersection of interest between the participants in the communications process. We have been working our entire careers either to build those intersections or to meet our customers at the intersections where they already gather. By definition, this means we must engage – one of your most repeated terms but not an alien concept to the rest of us — in a bi-directional conversation characterised by honesty, openness and the fair exchange of value. For most of us marketers, a social-media strategy is a potent new tool we add to a complete and integrated campaign when they deliver the ability to bring us to the intersections where our customers gather.

For all his social media eagerness, Greenfield seemed to be peculiarly derisive about one tool, Twitter, with an argument that simply left me confused. On the one hand, he told us that social media tools were superb at distributing content through trusted channels to where customers can actually interact with that content. On the other hand, he was critical of Twitter because too many tweets simply parrot content available elsewhere. Huh?

Maybe I started with a chip on my shoulder because I walked in a little late but in time to hear him say that “ad agencies are just like print shops.” They have made themselves undifferentiated commodity propositions that “aren’t partners (with their clients) any more.” Only social media agencies can play that role, apparently. Tell that to the countless stand-out agencies — and yes, Chris, I think there are even some in Toronto! — whose people are creating brilliant, compelling and breakthrough campaigns, many of them effectively deploying social media elements, that are creating massive value for their clients’ brands as well as their own.

Finally, I have to comment on one piece that I think exposes Greenfield’s whole proposition that what he is doing is somehow new and different. “We use 30-second equivalents” to measure the effectiveness of social media engagement, he said, suggesting that perhaps 10 minutes spent on a web site is equal to a 30-second television ad. For as long as I have been a communications practitioner, I have railed against the common and popular but downright wrong and misleading practice of measuring media relations results by calculating ad-value equivalencies. Now Greenfield suggests we take one of the very worst and most discredited practices in measurement and apply it to social media, an approach that fails to recognise that the objectives of the social media component of a campaign are simply not the same as the objectives of the television advertising component of the campaign.

Sometimes, both four legs and two legs can be good. Even Orwell’s sheep eventually found that out.

Technorati Tags: social media, Social Media Breakfast Ottawa, Chris Greenfield, marketing, advertising, public relations, measurement

Two inmedia clients were among the finalists in their respective catagories in this year’s awards program by the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation and at last night’s awards dinner, both came away with top honours. So our heartiest congratulations go to PIKA Technologies Inc., whose WARP Appliance, an open-source platform for the development of voice applications, won product of the year, and to Vocantas, which was recognised in the Technology Partnership Commercialisation category for the patient-messaging system it developed for the Ottawa Hospital’s thrombosis clinic.

Technorati Tags: Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation, PIKA Technologies, Vocantas, awards, public relations

If last night’s standing-room-only three hours of drinking-from-a-firehose delivery of hard-core business education was anything to go on, Ottawa’s entrepreneurs are hungry to learn from experienced veterans just how to manage, finance and market their companies.

Entrepreneur’s Edge, or e2, is a professional-development program that the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation has offered for four years. In an inspired cross between effective promotion and community outreach, program manager Peter Fillmore decided to offer a stripped-down version of the five-day curriculum. That gave rise to last night’s staging at TheCodeFactory of e2-Lite, an intensely concentrated introduction to the joys and perils of founding and managing a technology startup.

More than 50 people took up every available seat in the room, and all but a very few stayed right through to the end of a trio of presentations by Jim Roche, Rick O’Connor and Rick Norland. While the condensed nature of the content meant that bits of it were somewhat fractured and the presentation slides were densely packed, the staying power of the audience was testament to both the quality of the material being delivered and the ready appetite for it.

Technorati Tags: Entrepreneurs Edge, e2 Lite, OCRI, TheCodeFactory, entrepreneurship, professional development

No matter how busy we become and how far flung we are from the people we need to communicate with to carry out our work, there is still no substitute for good old-fashioned face-to-face contact.

In recent weeks, I have been working on a series of business profiles that will run in an upcoming supplement in the Ottawa Business Journal. These are largely 350- to 500-word pieces for which I must interview the principal of each business and perhaps a couple of reference customers. (Nothing validates your business more than a good reference customer).

Considering the size of the articles I must produce, I could easily garner the information I need over the phone. It would be quicker and more efficient from a time-management perspective. But I’ve chosen to visit each of these businesses in person.  They are all local businesses, so why not take advantage of the opportunity to interview the principals in their natural environment?

So much of the work I do at inmedia is with clients outside Ottawa and with trade and industry media spread across the continent and beyond. It’s refreshing to actually put a face to a name and enjoy the interaction of meeting in the flesh. A face-to-face meeting is by its very nature much more intimate and dynamic than two bodiless voices communicating across wires and networks. There is definitely something lost when you can’t look into the eyes of the person who is speaking to you. Body language is a critical part of any human interaction.

Nonetheless, we frequently have little choice but to conference by phone, (as I am about to do with inmedia client Xsilva Systems of Montreal, thanks to a service called Calliflower). And while communicating in this manner may not be as ideal as in person, there are ways to make the most of it. Richard Laermer at the Bad Pitch Blog offers plenty of helpful advice on the subject, and it all begins with planning ahead and staying focused on the matters at hand during the call.

Technorati Tags: communications, conference calls, clients

I just got back from CNW’s excellent “Breakfast with the Media” featuring reformed journalist and now digital marketing and social media consultant Mark Evans along with the Ottawa Citizen’s own Vito Pilieci, who covers business and technology and so is on speed dial here at inmedia. Both had a lot of value to contribute, and you can see a full Twitter stream of their better pointers here.

The bone I want to pick is not with Evans and Pilieci who shared a lot of excellent counsel about, in Mark’s case, what the new social media tools are and how to make best use of them and, in Vito’s case, how best to engage with him as he toils in a more traditional newsroom. Hint: Don’t send him a fax to draw attention to the email you sent to remind him about the voicemail message you left alerting him to the news release you couriered over! It pains me grievously as a 30-year veteran of the journalism and PR game to think there’s anybody in our business still operating like that but apparently there is!

Equally painful, though, were some of the questions from self-professed communicators in the audience who utterly betrayed their abject grasp of the most fundamental principles of effective communications.

Here’s the crux of the issue.

Everybody seems to agree that you can’t engage bloggers and other social media channels in a spray-and-pray approach that spams your messaging out to hundreds or even thousands of targets. Everybody seems to agree that it’s essential you adopt a personalised approach based on a clear understanding of what your target is actually interested in and how that intersects with what you’re pitching. Evans put it well when he said you need to “understand the motivation” of your target blogger who “wants to feel some love.”

What has me utterly gobsmacked is the number of public relations professionals who believe this is a brave new way of doing things and who are having trouble adjusting!

Here’s your knock on the head, people: If you’re finding it a real wrench from how you used to do things to engage on a personalised basis in a two-way dialogue with your target audience, you’ve been doing it wrong all along. How dare you waste your employer’s or your client’s money by reaching out to even a single journalist without first establishing their clear interest in what you have to pitch.

One poor woman talked about her role monitoring media coverage of her organization and how that now needs to be expanded to include bloggers, of which there are many, many more. How, she asked plaintively, do you figure out which bloggers are worth the effort? Well, exactly the same way we always determined who the genuine influencers were in our marketplace, whether they were journalists, analysts or other stakeholders. It’s called “research,” people, and there are no shortcuts and — Knock on the head warning, again — there never have been.

It is not a brave new world out there. But not because there aren’t exciting new communications channels and tools that we all need to learn about and integrate as appropriate into our strategies. It’s not a brave new world because those communicators who have been doing it properly all along are having absolutely no difficulty extending their capabilities slightly to accommodate these exciting new tools.

One final note: Please don’t confuse adopting a personalised approach with a requirement that you have a personal relationship with the target journalist or blogger or whoever. I went up after the session to introduce myself to Vito, whom I’ve never met. In short, he couldn’t pick me out of a line-up. I have no personal relationship with him. But he knew exactly who I was and he knows every one of my consultants here at inmedia because of the personalised manner in which we pitch our clients’ stories to him. We know what he writes about. We know his information requirements. And when we think it’s in his and our client’s interests that he be pitched, we pitch him. It’s the only way we know how to do it, and we’ve been doing it since long before the first blogger ever put pixel to screen.

Update: There is one important way in which the new environment differs from the past. In the old days, if you were a spray-and-pray artist, the peeved journalists whose time you were wasting merely ignored you. Today, you’re going to be publicly outed as the spammer you are.

Technorati Tags: Media relations, public relations, communications, social media, CNW, Mark Evans, Vito Pilieci

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

Francis
March 3: Rick Mercer plays ringette
March 6: ‘Angry phone calls are your friend.’
March 10: Twitter: My first impressions

Leo
March 5: Be bold. Be nimble. Be heard.
March 12: Give’em what they want, not what they need
March 26: A tech company built to last in small town Ontario

Danny
March 19: The Pope and PR ethics

In the near-universal rush to write print journalism’s obituary, it was refreshing this week to hear the perspective of a guy who might otherwise be seen as an active undertaker in the whole thing. Mathew Ingram is an online journalist, editor and Twitterer with Canada’s national — and, I believe, best — newspaper, the Globe and Mail. He spoke to Ottawa’s Third Tuesday gathering, held on the fifth Monday(!) earlier this week, about his paper’s many experiments with various online channels.

As the guy often leading the digital charge at the Globe, Ingram could be fairly accused of seeking to hasten the demise of the paper’s print edition. Except he grasps one fundamental concept that seems to elude many of those who think newspapers are already extinct, and that online — and, probably, free — is the only way to go.

The problem is, this isn’t working for the vast majority of traditional media properties. Their online editions are generating little revenue while their print editions are on life support, having bled too many readers and advertisers.

The Globe, on the other hand, seems to be prospering online and holding steady, at least in its circulation numbers, with its dead-trees edition. Why is this?

Well, in a contention I raised at Ottawa’s Social Media Breakfast a couple of weeks back when presenter Brady Gilchrist likewise praised the Globe for its mastery of the online, I don’t believe the paper is a roaring digital success just because it thoroughly exploits every available online channel. Other Canadian media properties. notably CanWest, are similarly aggressive at adopting new media but with much less apparent success. The Globe generates enthusiasm online because it offers superb content.

(I am not a disciple of Marshall McLuhan. I have never believed the medium is the message. While messages may have to be shaped by and for, or may be better received via, one medium rather than another, I believe content is king, that excellent content will triumph no matter via which medium it is transmitted.)

Now here’s the rub. The Globe’s online content is available only because much of it was originally produced for the print edition. Expensively and originally produced by this country’s best team of journalists who not only cover the country more comprehensively than any other paper but staff the most overseas bureaus of any media outlet in Canada and more than most media outlets in the world.

How, I asked Gilchrist, is the Globe to continue generating such content when the very pillars of its economic model are being eroded? He had no answer but Ingram took a credible shot at this conundrum. The Globe’s writers and editors are passionate about creating outstanding journalism, he told me in a brief conversation before his session started. And their readers are passionate about reading it. And so long as passionate readers come together with passionate journalists, there will continue to be a market for excellence.

Damn I hope he’s right.

I did not Twitter the session

Unlike other events I have attended where I have put out a stream of live tweets reporting highlights from the presenter(s), I opted not to at this event. Why? Well, being a Third Tuesday event, which attracts digerati in the city, there was barely a pair of thumbs in the room that weren’t banging away at tiny keyboards and tweeting Ingram’s every word. I didn’t think I needed to add to that.

However, nor did I take any notes. A quick scan of the tweets as they went out told me I would be able to fully rely on them for any pithy quotes or other details I might need for this blog post. So I ain’t dissing those who tweeted.

Technorati Tags: Third Tuesday Ottawa, Mathew Ingram, Globe and Mail, journalism, Brady Gilchrist, Twitter