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Feb 09 2016

To Fix the Copy Fix Your Thinking

Lauren EdwardsLauren Edwards is founder of WriteCulture, a company that coaches PR teams on writing, pitching and interactions with clients. Lauren has trained over 1,000 PR pros, from entry-level staff to SVPs.

I sat down with Lauren to get her perspective on current PR challenges.

Why is poorly written content so prevalent these days?

The bar is lower because there are more publishing platforms run by untrained writers and editors. There’s also the advent of automated writing and outsourced writing. New software lets non-humans assemble and package nuggets of information into simple formats like online slideshows and “Top 10” lists. And ESL speakers are writing first drafts later edited by native speakers.

Some of the new “citizen journalists” have realized that writing is harder and more time-consuming than they expected and are looking for help. We’re at a juncture where more people would like to communicate effectively but don’t have access to the right kind of education.

What advice do you have for PR professionals who want to write better copy?

Take time to think from the audience’s POV, and write about people not products. When you write about people, you put human beings at the start of your sentences and use active verbs. Also, give away the punchline at the beginning to get to the point faster.

Always keep your clients’ long-term business goals in mind. For example, a famous company I worked with had 80% commercial customers, but their long-term goal was to have 80% residential customers. If you were pitching for them, you’d be smart to emphasize a residential angle to further their business goals. If you don’t know their goals, your choices might actually work against them.

Why is there so much jargon in tech industry PR copy?

Unseasoned PR writers may not know their client’s technology or industry, so they use material already crafted by marketing. They move the words around without trying to reach out to an audience. Curiosity and experience eventually make it possible to write in a meaningful way, but some people retain bad habits.

Another reason is that some people come to work wearing a “professional” veneer. When that veneer is on, they don’t write like people; they write like a “company,” in a stiff style.

What can PR agency supervisors do to improve their teams’ writing?

Stop treating the symptom; treat the disease. The problem isn’t grammar and syntax; it’s the thinking behind the writing. People often focus on details like new product features, but there’s a larger story to tell that will improve business outcomes. The writer should look ahead to goals and coming initiatives, and back at important milestones. This puts “news” into context and accomplishes more valuable goals.

Writers need to think critically during the pre-writing phase, and learn who they’re writing for and why. I always say, “Writing is thinking made manifest.” If you can fix the thinking, the writing often fixes itself.

Written by Shelly · Categorized: Journalism, Pitching Stories, PR Writing, Public Relations, Reporters, Uncategorized · Tagged: article, articles, content, journalist, journalists, media, pitch, pitching, PR, press release, Public Relations, writing

Jan 26 2016

30 x 30 x 3 – the Perfect Pitch Package

 

pitch telephone callIn a previous blog post I talked about the email/voicemail duo pitch — how emailing a cold pitch with a voicemail follow-up can trigger a response from a reporter, often within minutes, even if you haven’t schmoozed him first at CES or SxSW.

Since reporters answer their phones less than .0000000001% of the time these days, sending a short, compelling email followed by a crisp, call-to-action voicemail in 30 seconds or less has proven to deliver results.

But what if the reporter answers his phone? Gasp! After the initial shock of hearing a live human, you have 30 seconds to tell him what you said in your voice message, plus three reasons why he should interview the most interesting person at your company.

The conversation might go like this:

Reporter: “Fred Pickleweed” (reporters rarely say, “Hello, this is So and So”) – .5 seconds

You: “This is Paula McHappy with [company X]” – 1 second

Reporter: “What’s up?” – .5 seconds

Now you have 28 seconds to tell Fred why he should care. First, you’ve done your research and you know that Fred covers the clean tech industry and loves batteries.

The problem: Tesla’s new battery for the home is supposed to extend solar power, but it maxes out after microwaving a potato.

1. What’s missing is high-density energy storage.

2. XX company makes a high-density, high-power energy storage device using a simple capacitor – no more toxic lithium batteries. The device can store energy from solar and keep the lights on for just 3 cents per kilowatt-hour – the lowest in the industry.

3. We have a great source for the story (company executive, customer, unbiased expert).

4. Either Fred is underwhelmed or you’ve piqued his interest and he wants to know more. This is where the rule of three comes in. Give Fred three delicious facts about company X’s technology in plain English, give him a metaphor and paint a picture.

If you’ve sold him on the idea, it doesn’t mean you’ve landed an interview for your company yet. Fred might say:

  • “Sounds interesting, but I’m working on several stories right now, so I won’t get to this for a while. Call me in three weeks.”

Or…

  • “Send me the email again and I’ll take a look.”

Here’s how you might respond:

“The inventor had an article published in Battery Magazine recently. I’ll send you the link to give you some more background. And I’ll check back with you in February. Thanks for your time.”

Or if you’ve hit the bulls eye with Fred, he might say:

– “Let me talk to the guy who invented this energy storage system.”

Remember the 30 x 30 x 3 rule for the voice-mail follow-up:

  1. “30” – Think hard to find 30 words that enticingly but plainly sum up the problem ( not easy!).
  2. “30” – Practice introducing yourself and saying you sent an email regarding your 30-word rendition of the problem in 30 seconds or less.
  3. “3” – Have three juicy nuggets on paper in front of you to anchor you if the reporter picks up (or to use later if the reporter calls back).

 

 

Written by Shelly · Categorized: Journalism, Pitching Stories, Public Relations, Reporters, Uncategorized · Tagged: battery, energy, media, media outlets, news, pitching, PR, press, Public Relations

Jan 20 2016

The Phone is Dead. Oh Wait… I Feel a Pulse!

image for voicemail pitchThe common refrain from PR professionals when pitching stories is that reporters just don’t answer their phones anymore. If only I could talk to them… I bet I could sell my story idea.

But their phone message always says the same thing… The best way to reach me is through email. So then we spend hours honing our pitches and crafting irresistible subject lines that make the grade. But for the most part nothing happens. In fact, we’re so used to being ignored even a little crumb from the reporter like a “not interested” is cause for celebration.

Emails vaporize, we’re left out of the media echo chamber. So we try a virtual handshake greeting on Twitter, hoping they reply or RT our tweet.

But there’s a 1-2 punch that could bring surprising results if done with efficiency, honesty and humility.

Say hello to the voicemail-email duo. Next time you email your pitch to a reporter, try placing a call immediately afterwards and let that person know you sent it. State the idea for the story you’re proposing, the time stamp, the subject line and your phone number. Oh, and boil your voicemail down to 30 seconds. You may even want to write a script so you don’t fumble in the rush to meet the 30-second time frame.

You’d be surprised at how often your email gets read and a response shows up in your inbox, oftentimes within minutes of leaving your message.

There are no guarantees you’ll get a message back every time but it’s worth the experiment.

And stand behind your story proposal; that you’re not doing it for the boss or a client. You authentically believe your story carries an important message for readers. You stand behind your conviction that your story idea has teeth.

At WriteCulture I teach PR agency account teams to pitch stories to the media which covers the 1-2 punch.

Next up: what if the reporter answers your call? What should you do?

Written by Shelly · Categorized: Journalism, Pitching Stories, Public Relations, Reporters, Uncategorized · Tagged: journalists, pitching, PR, Public Relations, reporter

Jul 21 2014

Leveraging Community for Successful Aging in Place: Q&A with Martin Entwistle, Part 2

I recently introduced you to Martin Entwistle, Executive Director of the David Druker Center for Health Systems Innovation at Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF). The Innovation Center team is working “to create disruptive solutions that tackle the pressing health challenges of our time,” Entwistle explains. “We think through real problems, build prototypes to address them, and develop solutions at the enterprise level for wider deployment.”

One such pressing issue is the impact of aging on seniors, their families and the wider community. Here, Entwistle offers a closer look at linkAges and its potential for activating communities to better care for and support aging individuals. He also shares insights into PAMF’s process for discovering and refining innovative solutions to our most pressing healthcare problems.

What does the PAMF innovation process look like?

We innovate by human-centered design which means peeling back the onion of the problem. For example, in evaluating the issues faced by seniors, we may identify access to transportation as the problem, but this is a solution to one part of a bigger problem. The real underlying issue is isolation and loneliness, which is multi-dimensional and requires solutions that provide a more systemic approach than just providing transport.

Our approach is heavily informed by ethnographic studies of the people who are the subject of our solutions. We use this approach to provide an in-depth understanding of the issues people face in their day-to-day lives, in this case seniors and their caregivers. This process helped us understand the importance of community and community-level support to address the issues of successful aging, and to begin to develop solutions that would directly tackle the identified underlying problems.

Further careful planning and execution is required. Solutions need to be designed and tested, typically through a process of prototyping, and sometimes these prototypes don’t get the expected results. In innovation you try something and you might have to throw it away, but even when you do create a successful prototype you have to think about how to deploy it, build it out and scale it, all the while making sure that the various components fit together and work as a seamless system. Going from prototype to actual deployment is one of the hardest steps in the process.

How is the Innovation Center approaching health care for a growing aging population?

As described above, our analysis of the barriers to successful aging identified the need to create a community of support for the aging process, and to enable people to grow old and remain valuable in society. How do you get the support of the community when there is a lack of neighbors helping neighbors and your family is scattered across the country? The experience was succinctly described by one of the participants in the ethnographic studies who reported “in older people their world dies before they do.” They’d like it to be bigger and more expansive–have more people and hobbies in their lives, or simply be able to go to the store. We realized the solution needed to be community focused and address social context and behavioral issues, including access and the ability to interact with others. It’s all about life continuing to be meaningful as people age.

It appears that many of the issues older people experience are driven by loneliness or isolation. The focus of our linkAges program is to address these challenges and help people age in place successfully.

In what ways is linkAges innovating to change the current healthcare model?

Healthcare providers have extensive and in-depth information about the medical issues faced by patients, but frequently more detailed and current social information is lacking. There are significant direct and indirect opportunities for use of such social information; identification of people who have difficulty getting to appointments or to the store for food, alerting an individual’s physician that her patient is largely unsupported in their day-to-day life.

In linkAges we want to identify the people in need of interaction and activate community in a way that enables them to get support from other people.

One barrier for aging seniors could be their inability to pay for things. How do you access services if you don’t have money? Our solution to this problem is time banking. Time banking creates an interconnected community of people who support each other with offers and requests for services where time, not dollars, is the currency. Could someone come and cook a meal or mow the senior’s lawn, while the senior may offer to give knitting lessons or teach younger people skills like wood-working? A key idea is to actively links across all ages in the community, not just seniors.

Another innovation component of linkAges is to try to identify people who are declining and provide support, before an adverse event happens. Can we build a detection system that tells the caregiver if a senior’s pattern of living is different? We put out a developer challenge: how do you identify patterns and get alerts that something is not quite right with the senior? We’re working with a company called Vevity. They had the idea to use utility smart meters which can tell you about energy usage within a household. We could use that information to determine if the stove or lights are going on and off and use these patterns of activity to tell caregivers when the normal pattern of daily living habits has changed.

Finally, seniors have difficulty activating resources. Google and Yelp are typically well tailored to the specific needs of seniors. For example, a senior may want to know if a restaurant is wheelchair accessible, or which pharmacy will spend time to help them find just the right cane to help their mobility. If they can’t find that out they won’t go. If we start a database for this kind of information how do we maintain it? Can we get the community to support this? We’re using our own internal team to do the analysis and find out if this is another part of the system we should tackle.

Conclusion

There’s a fundamental thirst for some kind of new community engagement for the aging population. Society has an appetite to address this challenge but it hard for organic solutions since communities are more and more fragmented. Even in younger people there’s a great desire to interact with older people. They want to be part of giving; there’s a level of altruism. It isn’t all about profiteering. There’s a great interest in linkAges and it is very exciting to be creating a community model that could scale to significant size and have a major impact on successful aging, one of the most pressing issue of our time.

Photo: PAMF

Written by Shelly · Categorized: Healthcare PR, Other, Public Relations, Uncategorized · Tagged: aging in place, community, healthcare, innovation, medical, seniors

Feb 19 2014

Unshakable Marketing Principles for the Digital Age: Q&A With Marketing Consultant Kathryn Gorges

Kathryn Gorges (pronounced gorgeous!) knows how to spell out the core principles of marketing for companies overwhelmed by the present demands of content strategy: “The most important thing is who you’re targeting and how you’re solving the customer’s problem. You can’t create content for the masses; you need to speak directly to your target segments.”

Gorges is a marketing consultant and Social Marketing Diva with over 17 years experience. She works with brands to increase visibility and nurture customer relationships through web content, social media, email, and event marketing.

I spoke with Gorges to glean insights into how marketers and PR professionals can generate quality customer conversations and relationships in the digital age.

In the midst of constant changes in digital marketing, what are the core, unshakable marketing principles?

KG:  We’re still in the middle of a transition where we have these bright shiny objects and we’re not sure how to use them. People are throwing thousands of dollars away on marketing automation and blogging and images, and not knowing what they’re doing.

The truth is, at the heart of everything is still the story. People doing marketing strategy the right way are the ones that lead with the story of how the product or service is really making a difference for people. Out of that, all content is created. The story is the core, the touchstone.

Companies need to figure out, what is the central narrative? People are developing all kinds of content and wasting money because the content doesn’t match up to that central story.  It’s the story and behind that is the customer.

There’s a problem of focus these days. The focus is on lead generation and brand awareness and putting all that into these tools. But where you make money is with repeat business. Otherwise it’s a transaction. If you don’t have real customers and repeat customers then you’re not building relationships with those customers.

It’s not about one-way messaging. What is the reality like when someone calls your company for service?  If you know your job is to give them an excellent experience but the customer gets put on hold for 20 minutes then it doesn’t matter what your message is. Companies can’t rely on the artifice of messaging and phone scripts.”

What value does social media provide in all this?  Lead gen? something else?

KG: Customers talk to other customers. They can do a search and find out what others are saying about you. It’s all out there. Millennials have come through the recession and are really skeptical about vendors’ promises and one-way marketing. They want real relationships. They are going to build that relationship on top of the trust that gets passed on by knowing how other customers feel about your product or service, especially from people they know. That’s first, then the relationship with the company follows.

That means the real experience people are having is more important than the messaging. Customers won’t form a relationship with a brand because of the brand’s messaging. They want to know, ‘does this make a difference for me?’

Today there are so many places to find out about a product or service before customers even talk to a company. They want other people’s experiences first. Once they’ve seen that then they are ready to see what the company says about itself.”

Why does content strategy matter?

A content strategist figures out how to create a bigger view (and greater visibility) on the web.  This person develops a cohesive strategy that in every way carries forward the narrative, with different pieces of content for different platforms.  Companies need a content strategy where derivatives of the content are published on the companies’ social platforms as well as 3rd party media platforms.

Derivative content includes: press releases, infographics, blog entries, bylined articles/op eds, social channel entries, etc.  You can get your content in front of people directly but it delivers real value when you have a direct relationship with the customer.  Now you have this whole other mechanism of getting content out there.

Knowing how to develop and produce the most compelling content; knowing what resonates is now vital to marketing success.  Marketing people haven’t had to produce this content before.  There wasn’t this big content machine.

So there is an ever demanding content generation machine and your potential customers are consuming that content.  But there’s also Google – companies need to get decent search results to have social authority.  There’s this crushing need for generating content and putting it out on company websites.  But the company needs to be a subject matter expert, not a media company.

Don’t lose sight of the 2-way relationship with the customer.  That isn’t going away any time soon.

Images:

Kathryn Gorges: Kathryn Gorges

 

 

Written by Laura R. · Categorized: Marketing, Other, Public Relations, Social Media, Uncategorized · Tagged: content, content strategy, customer, customers, marketing, PR, Public Relations, social marketing, social media

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