“I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I did not have time to make it shorter.”

Whether this quote is more appropriately attributed to Mark Twain or Blaise Pascal is beside the point. What matters is that it aptly sums up the delightful, frustrating and fulfilling struggle that is the art of writing.

Whether you are an amateur writer of fiction intent on improving your craft, or a communications professional subject to the scrutiny and criticism of those who may fail to appreciate your clever turns of phrase, one observation of Twain’s still holds true: “A man cannot be comfortable with his own approval.”

As a communications professional accustomed to my approval of what I produce being secondary to that of the client, I often hear comments like, “This is what we want to say, but we’ll leave it to you to polish it up and make it sound good,” or, “I don’t know how we can get all that across in (blank) number of words.”

My job is to create an effective piece of writing intended to serve a specific purpose and achieve a desired result for people who lack the time, or the skill, to do it for themselves. They recognize the value I bring to the table, while at the same time, I appreciate that what I am doing has a direct impact on their image and brand. It is a collaborative effort that must balance creative freedom with the dollars-and-cents demands of lead generation and business development.

But at the heart of this process, regardless of how many other people are involved and providing their input, there remains the individual writer toiling in solitude to string words together in a manner that will engage the reader, convey critical information and spur them to action in as concise a manner as possible. Mastery of this skill requires a natural talent that must be honed through a process of lifelong learning, constant practice and a humble appreciation for the work of a good editor.

Being able to write effectively, on demand, to further someone else’s agenda, is a talent years in the making. It is a professional service that should be given its due and recognized for the value it provides. It should not be regarded as a commodified service. Writers are a dime a dozen, but great writers are in another class entirely. There is a profound difference between derivative cut-and-paste recycling of content and distilling a mass of information from numerous sources into a cohesive and concise form that furthers understanding.

So next time you find yourself in need of a good writer to support your marketing and public relations objectives, remember that you are looking for a partner who will bring unique strengths to the table and work with you to achieve a successful execution. And most importantly, great writers are worth the money, but not everyone who charges a premium rate is a great writer.

Technorati Tags: writing, communications, marketing, public relations, Mark Twain

It’s been a while since I have expounded on the subject of reference customers. (OK, it’s been a while since I’ve expounded on any subject on this blog, but here I am, back in form.)

In our work at inmedia, where we strive to engage with the editors of specific trade and industry titles to sell them on the merits of a client’s story, enthusiastic reference customers who can articulate the pain points that were addressed by our clients’ products will, more often than not, make the editor sit up and take notice.

Customers who have actually opened their wallets for a vendor’s product or service provide validation and demonstrate uptake in the market. They can speak in dollars-and-cents terms about why they adopted a particular product and the benefits and return on investment they have derived from it.

Please note the emphasis on that last part. A customer testimonial that is along the lines of “we thought this was a great product and we highly recommend it” is so utterly void of any statement of tangible value that is better to not have it at all.

When developing an in-depth article such as a white paper or case study with an agreeable reference customer who is actually in business to make money and who scrutinizes the worth of every expenditure, it is easy to delve deep and get beyond such a vapid endorsement.

In my freelance work, however, I have found myself working on a number of projects for clients who have taken the other approach to getting their name in a desired industry publication–they’ve paid their way by purchasing advertising space for a corporate profile. Which is all well and good, but to ensure those dollars have been well spent and the potential for lead generation is maximized, the copy must sing with the same unambiguous value statements expected of a case study that has passed muster with a competent editor dedicated to providing her or his readers with the information and opinion they need to run their businesses more effectively.

Too often, however, I see paid profiles, or advertorials, that come across as brochure-ware, produced either by writers who do not have the benefit of a journalism background, or worse, by a committee of the organization’s marketing staff and senior management.

It’s not that these profiles are poorly written (well, not always), or fail to convey core messaging, but they have often been developed with a lack of appreciation for three key points:

• This is an ad. That means the odds of actually engaging with a reader have just taken a nosedive, considering that the publication’s editorial content is also vying for their attention.
• We are all busy and pressed for time. We often don’t read, we skim. We take only a couple of seconds to decide if something is of value to us before flipping past it.
• People don’t want to read a bunch of quotes attributed to stakeholders in the organization. Flagrant self-promotion is a dish best served as an appetizer, not as a main course.

What does this mean?

• It means a 900-word profile that fills more than half of a full-page ad with grey text has little chance of being read.
• It means that there is no luxury of wowing readers with colourful prose that details the rich and successful history of the organization before getting down to the nitty gritty of why your products and services are relevant to them.
• It means that an unambiguous value statement from an enthusiastic customer eager to put their name beside what they have to say is not only essential, it should probably lead the piece.

And on that last point, don’t try to micro-manage the process and put the words you want to hear in the mouth of your reference customer for their rubber-stamped approval. Yes, some degree of polishing and massaging will no doubt be necessary, but let the customer express the value points that mattered most to them in their own words. They are, after all, representative of the people you are trying to reach. To have relevance and resonance, this value statement should come across as sincere and true. This is also worth keeping in mind when developing an effective news release.

Technorati Tags: Advertorial, marketing, promotion, public relations, references, value statement

Despite all the hype, hoopla and debate around social media as a marketing and public relations tool, there is one even more fundamental aspect of the Web that is far more pervasive: the search.

It seems weird to say “the search” without putting ”Google” in there, but there are other services available to dig up information, Wikipedia being the most obvious. It used to be that information was power, now it’s an avalanche that overwhelms us. Intelligence is what’s important: the ability to filter through the overload to determine what is useful and chart trends or patterns that have meaning and relevance.

When all that information is so readily available and convenient, it’s easy to take it at face value without looking deeper and doing some good old-fashioned digging to verify facts and the credibility of the source. For a journalist on deadline eager to wrap up a story, it can be a trap. Take the example cited by Drew Benvie at Drew B’s take on tech PR, in which a fictional athlete was presented in an article as an actual person, thanks to a bogus profile on Wikipedia.

That’s not to suggest that Wikipedia is not a valid research tool, but it is vulnerable to abuse and demonstrates the importance of verifying facts and cross-referencing any online source of information.

For organizations sensitive to how their brand or image is being presented to the world, it is definitely important to keep an eye on such online information portals to ensure the accuracy of whatever information is being presented about them.

And while there are valid questions about the veracity of online information, what about the value of obtaining media coverage online instead of in print?

As a newspaper editor with only so many inches of space in the print product but much more on the website, I would often hear the complaint that running a story only online was somehow inferior to running it in print.

Sure, there is tactile satisfaction to be had in handling ink-stained paper, but it should be amply evident by now that content online lives far longer and reaches a far larger audience than the processed corpses of trees. In the newspaper business, I would get feedback on stories from readers on other continents after the content appeared online. The print product, on the other hand, was distributed in only one city. You do the math.

Kevin Dugan at the Bad Pitch Blog shares my sentiment and offers a video clip to help make the point.

Technorati Tags: social media, Google, Wikipedia, media coverage, online media, print media

Over on the BBC web site, readers have submitted their personal choices for the most-hated cliches in current circulation. Reading through the article was a painful exercise, and I’m sure most of you will also recognize many of the expressions as appearing frequently in your own day-to-day vocabulary.

The technology sector is rife with such cliches, and I’ve summarized a few of these into a Top 10 list, some of which I must admit I still use “on an ongoing basis”, so to speak.

1: Going forward
2: Leading (as in “a leading provider of…”)
3: At the end of the day
4: Touch base
5: Mission-critical
6: Value-add
7: Downsizing
8: Out-of-the-box
9: Best practices
10: 110%

Got your own “favourites” or, better yet, can you truthfully say you’ve never used any of the above? Let me know.

Technorati Tags: writing tips, cliches, BBC

“I’ve just come to expect that my (public relations) agency can’t write,” was the astonishing admission I heard a few weeks back from a vice president at one of Ottawa’s larger technology companies who called us to see if we’d be interested in participating in an agency review process.

(I’ve promised not to name him (or her) for reasons that will be obvious as you read the rest of this post.)

I could hardly believe my ears. But yes, he said, it had long been his experience that the PR practitioners he had been dealing with from a range of different agencies and across a number of companies just weren’t very good writers, and so it fell to him to write most of the materials used in his campaigns. One of the key reasons he was approaching inmedia, he told me, was our very strong reputation in the marketplace as superb writers, a reputation he said was confirmed when he read our blog and web site.

I chalked this one up to what I assumed was just an unfortunate experience on the part of one technology marketing executive until I relayed the story to a colleague last week, a CEO at another technology company here in Ottawa and an insightful marketer in his own right. I was again utterly gobsmacked when he said he didn’t view writing as a core requirement in the PR function, that the ability to pitch the story was far more important.

“And what do you do,” I asked him, “When the pitch is initially well received and the next words out of the reporter or editor’s mouth are, ‘Sounds good, send me something about it.’?”

Here’s the thing. To work at inmedia and, I believe, to be an effective media relations practitioner anywhere, you must be able to write at an expert level and you must be able to effectively pitch what you’ve written. There is no hierarchy between these two fundamental skills. Lack one, and you’re out of the game.

And here’s why.

To believe, as these two otherwise successful technology marketers clearly do, that writing is either not terribly important or that your PR function, whether internal or an agency, can be permitted to be lousy writers, is to completely beggar the entire communications process.

In the first instance, despite all the wonderful new communications tools at our disposal, most journalists still want to see something in cold, hard black and white, even if it is delivered electronically. And even if they don’t ask for it, it’s just gotta be in your best interests to give them well-written material so they have the complete story, with all the relevant facts and accurate spellings of company, product and people’s names to which they can refer. This is just so basic I’m staggered it needs stating.

Second, how in the heck does a PR practitioner demonstrate her or his understanding of the story without writing about it? Yes, a properly written document proves the communicator can — gasp! — communicate. That is, the words run together in some sort of comprehensible order, everything is spelled correctly and the commas and periods are in the right places. But it still won’t be any good unless the person writing it actually has a thorough grasp of the subject matter.

Effective writing is not a case of cutting and pasting bits and pieces from other documents to make a different document and it needs to be more than a merely technically accurate use of words, grammar and punctuation. Effective writing is the process of distilling what has been learned — from other documents, certainly, but also, and critically, from interviews with a range of subject-matter experts — into a new piece of work. It not only communicates the story to all who read it, it also demonstrates understanding.

Bottom line: If your agency can’t write about it well, they almost certainly can’t pitch it well. And even worse, they probably don’t even understand it well.

So, did we get the business? Well, that’s another story that I cover here: The Ottawa inferiority complex theorem strikes again.

Technorati Tags: writing, pitching, media relations, business development

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

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