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. 

Getting Back to Writing

This weekend, I took my wife, Allisha, to go see the new movie, Julie & Julia.

This fun, funny, heart-warming and life-reaffirming film covers the yearlong journey of discovery young wife Julie Powell takes as she sets out to produce in 365 days the 536 recipes found in Julia Child’s cooking tome: Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

For the record, it was a completely delightful movie (yeah, not necessarily a very manly adjective to use to describe a film, but apropos nonetheless), and I highly recommend this movie to everyone.

What I especially liked about Julie & Julia was that I walked out of the theatre feeling energized and hopeful about life and convinced more than ever that I made a wonderful decision nearly 28 years ago in choosing to marry the young lady who has since become my best friend.

Julie & Julia also reminded me once again of the importance of the career-choosing message I learned from Mormon educator and philosopher, Truman Madsen, when he delivered a brown bag luncheon presentation in the Wilkinson Center at Brigham Young University many, many years ago:

1. Choose something you’re good at.
2. Choose something you enjoy.
3. Choose a career you can support your family with while making a difference in the world.

Turns out my best grades as a directionless sophomore/junior were in Mass Communications, which also happened to be the classes I enjoyed the most. And now, close to 30 years later, I am deep into a career that spans more than 25 years and regularly finds me helping clients of all types successfully

• deploy public relations campaigns,
• unleash social media programs,
• support stock valuations, and
• sell more goods and services.

As it turns out, I ab-so-lute-ly love what I do! And I am blessed beyond measure by the good Lord above with several gifts that make me quite good at this career.

Which brings me to the point of today’s blog post.

It’s hard to imagine, but it’s now been more than four months (April 11, 2009) since I’ve written anything new on The Betty Factor. Four months! UGH!

Naturally, April 11 is just about the same time that Politis Communications lost two clients and saw a third client cut its PR budget by two-thirds. Yes, it was awful. Although we had been holding on through the toughest economic downturn that this country has seen since the Great Depression, it’s been a hard couple of months, culminating with the tough decision to let three employees at the end of June (2 full-time and 1 part-time).

As a result, I’ve focused almost all of my professional efforts of late on pursuing prospective new clients. And I’m grateful to say that we’ve been fortunate to land a couple of new projects recently and appear to be on the verge of landing several contracts as well, which is great!

Nevertheless, to circle back to Julie & Julia for a moment, watching that movie also reminded me how much I love writing. It’s been in my blood ever since I was in the 3rd Grade and wrote a take-off on Creature from the Black Lagoon, that campy 1954 SciFi/Horror flick I first watched in the early 60s.

I’ve also been reminded recently how much I enjoy getting down in the trenches to work with clients, craft strategic plans, roll out campaigns, pitch story ideas to journalists, and see concepts become reality.

That said, I feel re-energized and I am recommitting to write regularly here within the four digital walls of TheBettyFactor.com.

I don’t plan to write every day, and I suspect I will mostly be writing after hours or on the weekends, but I am going to write. And I’m going to do so about my professional passions, especially as it relates to the premise of The Betty Factor — identifying and writing about the best and worst examples I can find from all areas of marketing and marketing communications.

That’s it. Thanks for reading.

And if you haven’t seen it yet, I do recommend Julie & Julia.

David

P.S.  Anyone out there looking for great PR, IR and/or marketing communications consulting and/or services, feel free to contact me at dpolitis@politis.com, 801-523-3730 xt. 11, or 801-556-8184(cell). I’d love to visit. 

Do You Speak Engineer? We Can Help!

I was recently introduced to one of those silly flash sites where i chose a two-digit number, subtracted the first, then second digit from my number, and with the result my virtual magician showed me a page of gift ideas, and then she would magically guess my gift.

I’ll be honest I was amazed, and a little weirded out at first as it seemed every time I guessed a number, went through the formula, she guessed it right — and mind you it changed every time! Now, a little disclaimer here, I am a PR guy. I always tell my friends that my degree is a BA, not a science degree, so math is in no way my forte — much less when it involves more than just basic addition, subtraction, division and multiplication.

So I shared my new found online magic trick with my friends through Facebook and mentioned I didn’t know how it worked, sure enough, my friend, an engineering student and possibly one of the most brilliant people I know, answered with the exact formula.

Here’s what he sent me:

A two digit number could be considered a sum of two integers, x and y. We’ll let x represent the tens digit and y be the ones digit. Thus, x can only have values 1 through 9, since if x is zero, it would be a one digit number. On the other hand, y can be any digit 0 through 9.

Thus, a two digit number can be written algebraically as 10x + y

For example, on the website, she uses the example of 25. So x is 2 and y is 5.

Now subtract the digits.

10x + y - x - y.

Do a little clean up here.

(10x - x) + (y - y) = 9x + 0

Thus the y’s go away and your left with 9x.

Thus it ends up as any multiple of nine.

Now, like I said, math isn’t my thing, when it starts moving away from numbers and including letters it’s Greek to me!

But it provided me a valuable lesson. In the ongoing debate of “what does PR really offer?” herein lies one of the answers (and, I might add, one of our strengths at Politis Communications): while we understand engineering speak and technology, we can translate it into non-geek speak.

To illustrate, here’s my version of how the little math trick works:

Take any two-digit number, let’s use 31. Now, subtract the two digits in that number, so 31-3=28 then 28-1=27, or a multiple of nine. The secret to this trick is that every time you follow this formula you will end up with a multiple of 9.

Make sense? It’s always easy to make it more complicated, but when it comes to communicating, especially in technology and the sciences, we have to remember that not everyone will have a degree in quantum physics. If you need help communicating your highly complex concept, give us a call or shoot us an email.

Don’t give up, there IS help available ;o)

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.

12 Great Tips on How to Pitch a Reporter

I know I just posted something earlier this morning, but sometimes I find something so valuable I have to write about it right away.

That’s the case with a blog post I just came across titled “How to get a publication to write about your business” that was written recently by Jennifer Schiff.

Schiff is a 20-plus year veteran journalist, freelance writer, marketer and PR gal who really knows her stuff. If you don’t believe me, check this out: you’ll find she’s got more than 300 35 bylined articles for Jupitermedia’s Ecommerce-Guide.com alone. See http://tinyurl.com/59tq86. (NOTE: Jennifer corrected me; it’s 37 actual articles and more than 300 “links” to those articles.)

Anyway . . . back to Jennifer’s pitching tips. She’s outlined 12 in all, ranging from

• Target the right publication(s) to
• Respond quickly to editors if or when they contact you.

She also includes a sample pitch letter and a follow-up letter, both of which a very well written and use just the right tone for the subject matter.

I urge readers to check out Jennifer’s post, what I see as being a great foundational outline of 12 Great Tips on How to Pitch a Reporter.

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.

Are you a flack or a flak?

I’ve often wondered the origin of this nickname for PR pros, well look no further, you can read the answer here.

So are you a ‘flack’ or a ‘flak’? (post your answers in the comments section)

[Photo courtesy: Journal of Combat Missions]

McClellan, the Disenfranchised Flack

With the McClellan issue still in the press, I couldn’t resist when Bacon sent me this cartoon.

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.