By Leo Valiquette
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.”
By Francis Moran
Although no inmedianauts were stranded yesterday when Ottawa-based Zoom Airlines suspended operations as it sought bankruptcy protection in the face of actions by several of its leaseholders and creditors, we very easily could have been. Ever since our Danny Sullivan repatriated himself to his native Scotland and set up office for us in Glasgow a few years back, we have been enthusiastic and regular passengers on this quirky little airline that offered good prices, excellent service and a peculiar schedule that gave us direct, non-stop flights for most of the year between Ottawa and Glasgow. It’s as though Zoom was made for us.
Our best experience happened when we flew Danny on Zoom to Ottawa on fairly short notice when a long-time client hired a new marketing vice president and wanted to talk about an aggressive new program. The veep, who had flown in from San Jose, did not believe that Danny had come to town just for that meeting. Turned out, however, that it cost less and took less time for Danny to get there than it did for the veep!
Zoom was a favoured carrier for my family, too. In the winter, Zoom used to offer non-stop weekend service between Ottawa and St. Maarten that could see a winter-weary citizen of this frozen northern capital get on a plane at about 6:30 a.m. and be frolicking in the warm Caribbean by noon. And three summers ago, we flew Zoom to Scotland for a family vacation in England, Scotland and Ireland.
From a PR and crisis communications perspective, though, Zoom does not seem to be managing this potentially fatal setback nearly as well as it managed its early growth and success. News stories have focused on the suddeness of the shut down, the lack of communication to stranded passengers and the apparent abandoning of their posts by Zoom personnel at airports. This does not create the kind of forgiveness and understanding a company needs to successfully emerge from such a crisis. And that would be too bad for Zoom and those of us who enjoyed flying with them.
By Francis Moran
I was hoping to find the time today to blog about how Canadian packaged goods company Maple Leaf Foods Inc. has been responding to the outbreak of listeriosis linked to one of its meat-processing plants. In general, I have been impressed by the company’s upfront and forthright approach.
However, I really can’t improve on what Dave Fleet has written so I’m happy to provide this link to his post.
By Leo Valiquette
“Do what you’re supposed to do to the best of your ability and be content with the results.”
Okay, that isn’t a catchy quote from some luminary of historical note. I just made it up. But it is along the same lines of the general theme that Francis espoused the other day with that comment from Canada’s oldest Olympian, 61-year-old Ian Millar, “If you persevere long enough, if you do the right things long enough, good things will happen to you.”
These are words to take to heart for any pursuit in order to reach a state of acceptance and satisfaction, as opposed to a stressed-out state of frustrated discontent. Do the best that your skills, experience and resources allow and find satisfaction in the fact that you’ve done all you can do, rather than feel miserable that the outcome of your effort was less than desired. It’s the best way to evaluate objectively how the results could be improved and muster the courage to try again.
I raise the point because John Greer at Catching Flack blogged today about Five Ways to Make Pitching More Productive and Less Painful. He talks about how many PR people dread pitching the media due to fear of rejection and the expectation of a churlish response.
Well, as any of us in this business know, churlish rejection is a fact of life. There’s no way around it. However, as John points out, if you’ve done the necessary homework to understand the story you’re pitching, to provide relevant and factual information, and know why the journalist should be interested, there’s no reason for fear and stress. You’ve done your job to the best of your ability. If this fish won’t bite, reel in the hook and cast in another direction.
Like they say in sales, every “no” is a step closer to a “yes.”
By Francis Moran
I originally wrote this post for DangleTech, Canada’s largest community-sponsored website dedicated to the issues surrounding Canada’s technology sector, where I contribute a weekly blog called “In the media: It’s where you need to be.” But my editor here at inmedialog, who’s been itching all week to see a post on this subject, decided we should also post it here.
One of the most frequent and, to tell the truth, most boring and least helpful, themes in the blogosphere is the all-too-common declaration by one blogger or another that PR is dead. With all the authority of his well-read blog, Robert Scoble started the ball rolling again this week with a post Monday that celebrated the fact that he actually heard about a new company – more of a raw beta concept, really – from some source other than a PR or corporate flack.
Leaving aside for the moment the question why this should be so noteworthy – Hey, Robert: It’s a rare day I don’t learn something new or hear about a new company, product or service with no involvement whatsoever from a PR or corporate flack. I call it waking up, opening my eyes and walking down the street! – he went on to extrapolate from this that PR is dead.
I’m not going to weigh in with comments on all the arguments raised both pro and con the silly idea. If you really have nothing better to do, if Canada’s not doing well enough at the Olympics to draw you in to all the TV coverage and you have time to kill, then you can see a good round-up here.
Notwithstanding the tediousness of this apparent fixation on the part of a lot of the blogosphere to bury PR and speak its eulogy, two useful points emerge.
The first is that when it comes to understanding public relations, the full scope of activities that fall under its rubric and the even fuller scope of marketing activities of which PR is merely a subset, Robert Scoble is strictly a blind man touching an elephant. Like many of his blog brethren, all Scoble ever sees (touches) is the story pitch. And since they are on the receiving end of a staggering number of poorly written and badly targeted pitches, it’s no wonder these guys see no value in what most PR people are doing with them.
In fact, the pitch is the very end of a lengthy and intensive process that, if done properly, creates tremendous value, both for the idea being pitched and for the person to whom it is being pitched. It’s merely one arrow in a PR quiver that, in turn, is merely one weapon in a marketing armoury.
The second useful point is that in many ways, Scoble and his colleagues are right. PR is dead. At least, PR – as it has been practiced by too many for far too long – is dead. That old way saw (mal)practitioners source huge lists of so-called contacts from commercial media directories, mail-merge them with their news release or story pitch, and then blast it out to hundreds, if not thousands. It didn’t work in the old days any better than it does now. All that has changed is that the targets of those useless pitches are naming and shaming those who do it. (I did weigh in on the death of the media directory.)
Far from the blogosphere sounding the death knell for PR, it has focused attention on the most egregious practices of the industry. While I still find most of the arguments tendentious and silly, at least they’re serving this one useful public service.
