Becoming a Better Writer

What makes a good writer? What is it about a blog post, story, letter or column that makes it engaging, that makes someone want to continue reading? How can I become a better writer?

If you’re in the public relations, marketing, investor relations and/or strategic communications world, perhaps you’ve already asked yourself these or similar questions. I know I have.

The snap answer, of course,  is to write. I’ve heard and read that answer more than 100 times — “If you want to be a better writer then you have to write.”

Okay, duh! But in my experience writing alone is not enough, especially if you’re not a particularly good writer to begin with.

I believe that the most important part of improving your skills as a writer, to becoming a better writer, is to have a good editor (or a good teacher, as the case may be).

In other words, I want someone who is better than me looking over my metaphorical shoulder prompting, prodding and pointing out specific examples of how and where I can improve my writing.

This point was brought back home to me this morning when a long-time friend asked me to review something he had written, and for the record, he told me I could “let him have it from every angle.” So here, in part, is what I wrote to my friend.

•  
  • new,
  • unexpected,
  • controversial,
  • insightful,
  • thought-provoking or
  • out-of-the-ordinary.

Are the items I mention above hard and fast rules? Of course not.

But I know they helped me to become a better writer - that and having a good editor.

Betty Benton Mann, the “Betty” Behind the Betty Factor, Died Friday Morning

Betty Mann (of "The Betty Factor" fame)

Betty Benton Mann, my 83-year-old mother-in-law and the inspiration behind The Betty Factor, died in her sleep early Friday morning, December 4, 2009 of health matters incident to old age and having her gall bladder removed earlier in the week.

Here is a copy of her obituary.

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After 83 wonderful years on earth, Betty Benton Mann returned home to her Father-in-Heaven, the Savior, Jesus Christ, many loving family members and friends, and her beloved husband, Ray, on December 4, 2009, nearly two years to the day after Ray’s passing.

Born July 3, 1926 in Boise, Idaho to Mamie Thompson and Otto G. Benton, Betty was the fifth of nine children. She was raised in Boise, Twin Falls, Idaho and Redondo Beach, California.

From the day she first walked herself to services as a young child, Betty was a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). As a teenager, she was president of her ward Golden Gleaner organization and helped plan and run the first ever LDS Youth Conference in southern California.

After graduating from Redondo Union High School, she moved to North Salt Lake to help her oldest sister, Wanda, care for her children, and it was there that she met her future husband, Ray Elwood Mann.

Betty and Ray were married in the Salt Lake Temple of the LDS church on May 4, 1948. They settled in Bountiful, Utah where they raised three daughters and two sons, while she also worked as a dental assistant for many years. Betty was active in the PTA in Bountiful where she ran the Halloween Carnival for three years and served as PTA president for two year.

After their youngest children graduated from high school in 1975, Betty and Ray spent an adventurous year in 1976 in West Germany for Ray’s employer, Chicago Bridge & Iron. The next year, Ray was transferred to world headquarters in Chicago where they lived until 1984. During their time in Naperville, Illinois, Betty filled an eight-year volunteer assignment with LDS Social Services working with out-of-wedlock mothers, including service as a counselor to birth mothers and transporting newborns to adoptive parents. She also served for a time as a member of the Relief Society presidency in the Glenbard Ward in Illinois.

Betty and Ray moved to Sandy, Utah in 1984 where they made their home for the rest of their lives. In Sandy, Betty served for 18 years in the LDS church’s Data Entry Program in the Canyon View Stake. She and Ray also served a one-year LDS Service Mission in 1994 near Bakersfield, California for the Home Management Department.

Betty was preceded in death by her parents, five siblings, her husband, and one son, Clyde. She is survived by four children, Linda, Pam (Harold) Egginton, Todd, and Allisha (David) Politis; 18 grandchildren (evenly divided between boys and girls); and 14 great-grandchildren.

A viewing will be held at Mountain View Mortuary at 3115 East 7800 South in Cottonwood Heights, Utah from 6 to 8 p.m. on Tues., Dec. 8, 2009. The funeral will be held at the same location at 11 a.m. on Wed., Dec. 9, preceded by an additional viewing from 9:45 a.m. to 10:45 a.m. Interment, on site, will follow immediately after the funeral.

The family extends its heartfelt thanks and admiration for all of the fantastic doctors and medical providers who worked with Betty in addressing her health concerns during the past few years. In addition, Betty (and Ray) loved living at South Towne Ranch in Sandy, Utah where they made many wonderful friends.

Betty had a sharp mind and wit her entire life, and she loved studying the gospel of Jesus Christ and learning about LDS church history. She was a devoted and loving wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and friend, and although she will be missed, we are happy she has “graduated” from this life to be reunited with her husband and best friend, Ray.

Goodbye for now, Betty.

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Although we had some initial son-in-law / mother-in-law challenges early in the 28 years of our relationship, we both grew to love and respect each other over time, and I’m grateful Allisha and I were able to have both Betty and Ray live so close by as we raised our five children.

She was a good person and taught me much, not the least of which was to always remember to work and work and work to make sure what I wrote could be easily understood by anyone, even my mother-in law.

To that end, I will always use the phrase “The Betty Factor” as a shorthand reminder of that lesson. I will also keep this blog alive in her honor and as a way of continuing to teach about the importance of keeping all marketing messages simple and on-point.

Thank you, Betty, and for now, goodbye. 

PR Hoax Hurts Integrity of National Press Club

Whether you work in the field of Public Relations or just happen to be a news junkie, chances are you already know about the PR hoax perpetrated this Monday to call into question the stance taken by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on climate change.

In fact, a quick search of Google news for the terms “chamber commerce climate change” (not inside quotation marks) finds several hundred news stories on the subject.

The event was staged at the National Press Club (in Washington, D.C.) by an activist organization that calls itself the “Yes Men,” and it’s a group that has punked the news media before. As reported in the New York Times, the fake press conference also featured fake journalists and fake press materials designed to look as if they were produced on Chamber of Commerce materials. And a number of major news outlets were fooled by the hoax, notably CNBC and Reuters (both of which later corrected and retracted their stories).

However, lost in all the hubub, hoopla and news coverage about the hoax is one critical point: I’m convinced that the Yes Men organization have also attacked and hurt the integrity of the National Press Club. Call it another example of the Rule of Unintended Consequences.

Certainly there are widespread examples of biased news organizations or media outlets that lean one political direction or the other. I get that, and I hope that most people are savvy enough to understand this fact too.

Regardless of one’s viewpoint on any subject (including climate change), the United States of America was founded on several key principles, one of which is freedom of the press.

The National Press Clubbills itself as “The World’s Leading Professional Organization for Journalists,” and none other than noted CBS commentator, Eric Sevareid called the NPC the “sanctum sanctorum of American journalists.”

By choosing to hold its fake news conference at the National Press Club, the Yes Men organization have besmirched the good name and integrity of the National Press Club.

Please note that I am NOT suggesting that the Yes Men were wrong to stage a fake press conference. I’m only suggesting it should not have been held at the National Press Club.

And for that, I bestow a Sad Betty Award on the Yes Men for choosing to stage their PR hoax at the National Press Club. 

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P.S.  To get a sense of what happened during the press conference when it was interrupted by a real representative of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, you might check out this YouTube video. It’s about six minutes long.

Want Better Results? Write Better Headlines!

Regardless of the specific industry you work in, everyone is always looking for ways to be more successful and generate better results. For those of us with marketing and/or communications responsibilities, that means getting more people to read, listen to and/or watch our stuff.

Why? Because the more people we can engage with our marketing/communications stuff the more successful we will be and that invariably means MONEY!

So if you really want better results, that means writing better headlines . . . at least that’s what MarketingSherpa says.

MarketingSherpa is one of the leading publishers of information and data on what really works in all areas of marketing and marketing communications. They have hundreds of thousands of subscribers to their free online newsletters, and do a substantial business in selling reports and studies and producing conferences around the U.S.

Last week, MarketingSherpa.com ran a great story in their online newsletter titled “4 Takeaways from MarketingSherpa’s Newsletter Subject-Line Analysis.” (Not necessarily the snappiest headline, but it does follow one of the four rules. See below.)

In summary, MarketingSherpa had their own people go back and analyze every headline for every article they had published in the last year to see if they could identify which articles were the most successful. Naturally, each article topic stands on its own and one topic may be inherently more interesting and/or relevant to more people than the rest.

But by the time they were all done - particularly analyzing click-to-opens (the number of people who clicked on a link to see an entire article) and reviewing clickthroughs (the number of times people clicked on a link within, or connected to, an article) - they came up with Four Takeaways, namely

1. The first two words in any headline are the most critical (such as How To, Top 12, Simple Email, and HTML vs, among others),
2. Use “trigger words” in your headlines (you’ll need to read this one because there isn’t a simple rule to follow, but they did suggest you “dedicate at least a few hours to the subject line“),
3. Avoid hard-sell headlines or headlines that ask for reader action (NOTE: The worst performing 10 headlines for MarketingSherpa last year ALL USED HARD-SELL LANGUAGE OR REQUESTED READER ACTION), and
4. Use “hot brands” in headlines wherever possible and practical (headlines that included company names like Facebook, Google and Wikipedia pulled the best for MarketingSherpa articles).

They also came up with a BONUS TAKEAWAY, which is

• Shorter headlines are ALMOST ALWAYS better (but there are exceptions, and MarketingSherpa provides a few examples).

This article has really inspired me to work smarter, harder and longer (when necessary) when it comes to writing any headline.

I believe that anyone who is focused on following the principles of The Betty Factor will do the same.

The Role of Social Media in Branding Efforts

My friend Jason Kintzler (@PitchEngine) - founder of Pitch Engine and overall social media junkie - started a personal blog the other day called New Media Cowboy and launched it with a post entitled “Social Media is Branding.”

Kintzler’s post reminded me that many internal branding efforts are misdirected at best because they’re caught up in the old world way of marketing-think: Specifically, “I (the big, important marketing executive) will tell you (the lucky consumer) what to think about and how to act toward my brand (be it product, service or organization).

This approach is so bass-ackwards it’s laughable, and yet it’s still the way many companies attempt to brand themselves, their products and/or services.

In reality, the definition of a brand has always been directed by those on the receiving ends of any and all communication and marketing efforts and NOT by those on the sending end.

It’s like my very first communications professor at BYU said: “You cannot not communicate.”

In other words, everything we do or say is a form of communication (or marketing, if you will). But since an effective form of mind control has not yet been invented (thank goodness), we cannot control how others will perceive such communication efforts.

Hence, communication has NEVER been a one-way street; rather (at a minimum) communication is a two-way thoroughfare (marketing too). And it is the perception of those receiving any marketing message that determines the brand of an organization, a product, a service or person and NOT the other way around.

“The perception of those receiving any marketing message determines (one’s) brand . . . NOT the other way around.”

That’s what intrigued me about Jason’s post.

He suggests that social media and the tools/services that make up social networking efforts are in fact branding efforts at their very core because they’re all about two-way communication and engaging individuals with one’s organization, product, service or person.

The reason why this observation is so critical is that the best customers are not just repeat customers - they’re evangelizers. They tell others about their great experiences with your brand and as a result they expand your sales, marketing and communications efforts many, many fold.

Why? Because they’re not on your payroll; they’re independent from your organization. As a result, what they write, say and/or do has a HUGE CREDIBILITY - often times generating more impact than virtually any other thing that you might attempt.

Kintzler’s right - social media is ALL ABOUT BRANDING. 

This is a very important concept to grasp and it should flavor any social networking effort undertaken by every marketing, PR, new media and/or communications pro from this point forward.

Do Your Online Press Releases Make a Good First Impression?

Thousands of press releases make the rounds on computer screens every day - milling around in editorial systems, emails, RSS feeds, and online news portals like a literary Times Square.  Whether you post releases to your website or utilize a wire service, the challenge is this:  How can you make your content stand out from the crowd?

In my opinion, the headline is the most important aspect of a press release and falls under the “you never get a second chance to make first impression” category. After all, if you can’t persuade someone to open your release they can’t really read it, can they?

A headline should be compelling, it should succinctly state the theme of your release, and it should make someone want to know more. That’s it. The sub headline and body of text should have the honor of going into detail.

So what can you keep in mind when crafting your releases for a company newsroom or for online distribution?

Write a headline that is keyword rich. You know your audience. What terms or phrases will catch their attention and make them want more info? Think “hot buttons.” It is your release vs. everyone else’s.

For online releases, the headline becomes the page title. The headline becomes the press release’s page title in the HTML source code. This is one of the pieces of content that search engines use to index your press release. According to SEOmoz’s most recent Search Engine Ranking Factors, keyword usage in the page title is the #1 positive factor in search engine rankings.

Google only displays the first 63 characters of a headline. I use Google as an example, as they own a majority of search market share. I’m not saying that you should make all headlines 63 characters - just try to front-load your headline with the most valuable part of your headline so the important stuff is visible in search engine results pages (SERPs). Yahoo! shows 120-characters, in case you’re curious.

Headline creation should take you a long time. Between picking key terms that will attract your audience, coming up with a succinct way to describe what your readers can expect from your release, and considering what your readers will see should they stumble across your release in SERPs, you have a project on your hands. In the end, it will be worth it.

Your headline is the first thing people will see, and it is the key to having a release that’s read vs. one that isn’t. It also is someone’s first impression of your release.

Make it a good one.

Media Relations Rules #2 and #3

This really seems to be a busy day for PR/media relations goof ups. Rule and tips number two and three come courtesy of the Utah Democratic Party.

Rule #2

Always double check your facts, in fact, for something that could go national, triple check your facts. The Utah Democratic Party thought it would be a good idea to attack Gov. Palin for her affiliation with a supposed anti-Mormon religion. The rub here: the religion is not, in fact, anti-Mormon, and she hasn’t gone to the church in about five years. Come on! We’ve got to do better than this, these are amateur, semi-pro mistakes!

[Link to KSL story and link to official news release from the Utah Democratic Party]

This gaffe leads me to media relations rule #3.

Rule #3

Always have the person you are quoting in a release or statement or media brief, whatever, review his or her quotes. This seems like a hassle sometimes, but trust me, it will pay off in the end in a variety of ways.

The Chairman of the Utah Democratic Party told the Salt Lake Tribune that he hadn’t seen the news release that was sent out by the Party. Really?! Maybe the Utah Dems need to go find a new director of communications.

I really hope this isn’t the future of the PR industry, if it is, we’re all in trouble!

LDS Church Fights Misperceptions with Web 2.0 Campaign

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints launched a Web 2.0 / PR 2.0 campaign last week to combat misunderstandings that still exist in the United States and among certain media outlets that erroneously tie the LDS faith to individuals and organizations practicing polygamy today. Chief among these is the so-called FLDS Church.

Members of the FLDS Church practice polygamy; members of the LDS Church do not. In fact, although polygamy was practiced among select groups of the LDS faith prior to 1890, members of the LDS (or Mormon) Church who choose to practice polygamy today will lose their church membership.

Hence, with the recent media and legal brouhaha surrounding the fact that Child Protective Services in Texas seized and eventually returned more than 400 children from an FLDS ranch in El Dorado, Texas, it’s almost expected that certain journalists and media outlets will “get it wrong” and report that those affected in El Dorado are members of the LDS Church — WHICH IS INCORRECT.

So last week, the LDS Church went on the offensive to correct such misperceptions and lazy reporting.

Central to this effort was the launch of seven Internet videos featuring seven “average” Latter-day Saints out of the more then 260,000 Mormons who live in Texas. (A separate post from earlier today on UtahTechWatch.com delves into more detail on this subject. Additionally, here’s the original news release from the LDS Church announcing its campaign.)

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Want Better Media Coverage? Consider Using “A,” “B” and “C” News Releases

I just came across a blog post from Janet Meiners (NewspaperGirl.com) where she writes that PRWeb told her that “you’ll start to see diminishing returns if you publish press releases too often.” Interesting.

I suspect that if an individual / company is using press releases as a way to boost one’s search engine rankings, then yeah, that’s probably correct.

Janet goes on to correctly state that “The releases go to Google News and Yahoo News first and stay there for 28 days. You’re basically spamming those news sites if you distribute a release too much more often than that.”

However, there is another side to this issue.

Readers should understand that NewspaperGirl works for OrangeSoda, a company that specializes in helping companies promote-market themselves online to reach customers in their hometowns and areas.

As such, OrangeSoda primarily focuses (today) on helping small businesses get online (if they’re not online already) and then helps drive greater sales in their local markets by boosting their visibility on the Internet through a mixture of PPC (pay per click) and search engine optimization / search engine marketing (SEC & SEM) campaigns.

I am confident in describing OrangeSoda in this manner because I spent more than two months working closely with two of OrangeSoda’s execs – COO (Derek Miner) and CFO (Sam Clarke) — to help them prepare for an investor presentation at the Investors Choice venture capital conference this past February. On top of that, Politis Communications is in the process of signing up to become a reseller/master reseller of OrangeSoda’s products and services.

So to be clear about this, I am a true believer in OrangeSoda. You could even go so far to say that “I’m drinking the soda” (as opposed to drinking the kool-aid).
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Got Great Headlines?

We’ve all seen the headline in the paper or online that immediately grabs you by the lapels and draws you into a story. Nevermind the quality of the story, writing great headlines is a skill good writers practice and hone. With so many articles vying for attention, we’ve got to find a way to draw in the audiences.

Here are a couple tips on writing headlines that will draw in readers:

1. Create controversy. Getting readers riled up isn’t all that bad, some issues will create mixed feelings and will serve as a lightning rod for companies or issues. The key to putting out this kind of message is that you need to be ready for the backlash and be able to manage the story as much as possible. In this case the proof is in the pudding, 113 comments in the first 5 hours the story has been online.



2. Write something shocking. The next example says it all.



3. Just be creative. Whether it’s using a tongue twister, funny or a variation on a cliche, whatever, the bottom line is to grab the reader’s attention.

I think you get the point. Good headlines get readers, the fact is, more people will read your headline and lead paragraph than the article. Writing catchy, eye-grabbing headlines increases the chances readers will pick your article over another.

Seen any good headlines lately? Post the URL or headline in the comments.