Cari Shane

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What’s your point?

By carishane

When you write, no matter what you write, make a point.

For “essential writing lessons,” it’s hard to top an on-point piece in CommPro.com, written by New York University’s Don Bates. In it he tells two anecdotes, one by the great essayist, humorist and filmmaker Nora Ephron; the other by a professor who helps academics write so the general public can understand.

First, the Ephron story pulled from her book, I Feel Bad About My Neck:

“The best teacher I ever had was named Charles Simms, and he taught journalism at Beverly Hills High School in 1956 and 1957. The first day of journalism class, Mr. Simms did what just about every journalism teacher does in the beginning—he began to teach us how to write a lead. The way this is normally done is that the teacher dictates a set of facts and the class attempts to write the first paragraph of a news story about them. Who, what, where, when, how and why. So, he read us a set of facts. It went something like this:

‘Kenneth L. Peters, principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the faculty of the high school will travel to Sacramento on Thursday for a colloquium on new teaching methods. Speaking there will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, educator Robert Maynard Hutchins, and several others.’

“We all began typing, and after a few minutes we turned in our leads. All of them said approximately what Mr. Simms had dictated, but in the opposite order (“Margaret Mead and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the faculty,” etc.). Mr. Simms rifled through what we had turned in, smiled, looked up and said: ‘The lead to the story is, ‘There will be no school Thursday’.”

“It was an electrifying moment. So that’s it, I realized. It’s about the point. The classic newspaper lead of who-what-where-when-how-and-why is utterly meaningless if you haven’t figured out the significance of the facts. What is the point? What does it mean? He planted those questions in my head.”

A second anecdote presented by Bates in his CommPro.com piece is a great lesson for the writer who needs to take what may be considered dry, academic material and make it sexy for the masses. The lesson here is one that I explain to my clients all the time. When trying to attract the attention of the media (which is, in turn, trying to attract the attention of its audience), follow these rules of engagement.

  • Wow the reader. Write something that makes him/her say, “wow.”
  • Make is sexy. Sex sells.
  • Make it about money – making money, losing money, saving money.
  • Make their stomachs churn. “If it bleeds, it leads” remains a newsroom mantra.
  • Make it emotional – emotion sells.

Professor David Poulson, who according to Bates, “helps academics write smarter for the public,” recounts Poulson’s own lesson about a scientific paper and asks his audience, which article would you read?

Original title: “Grasshopper and Locust Farming as a Sustainable Source of Protein for Non-Ruminant Livestock and Humans in Kenya.”

Poulson’s title: “Eating Bugs.”

When you write, do the following…

  • Write a headline (if the project warrants it) or intro that is short and clever and grabs the reader immediately.
  • Make your point immediately and, whenever possible, succinctly.
  • Make your subject matter relevant to your audience.

As Robert Wynne suggested in his Forbes piece, How To Write A Press Release, “think of Dale Carnegie and his book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. ‘First, arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.’ The process is simple. Not easy, but simple.”

So back to the point: What is your point? Keep that question in mind when you write for your reader.

Filed Under: Blogs - Inside Social Journalism, Writing for Business - Press Releases Tagged With: Business, Business writing, corporate blogging, journalism, marketing strategies, public relations, writing

What’s social look like in 2016?

By carishane

While the 20th Century brought us the phrase, “location, location, location” — that is, having the corner lot for double the visibility to the passersby — in the 21st Century (as we slide toward 2020 — hindsight as we know it!), the corner lot is social space. Almost nine out of 10 US companies are active on social networks, with 90% reporting that social media has been good for business, i.e. increased sales, because of the increased exposure.

Newsflash — it’s only going to get better.

A superpower change in workplace communication: Email — which new research shows is adding to our already high stress levels (research by London-based Future Work Centre) — will lose its communication superpower status. With studies showing that using social media at work increases productivity and engagement, it’s only a matter of time before more businesses get on the bandwagon. Intranets within the workplace, though around for decades, will become mobile friendly. For example, Slack, with its million daily active users (growing in just two years), is emerging as the next great superpower in business communication. With an “intuitive interface, built around themed chat rooms and searchable archives,” it’s become popular as an office/business system in both large and small companies. Facebook, too, is offering “Facebook at Work” currently in test mode. “We’ve had company intranets for almost 20 years, but it’s the mobile friendly nature of many messaging apps that is shaking up this space,” wrote Catherine Lawson in a BCC business article from November 2016.

Employees will become businesses’ best advocates: I’ve been telling this to my clients for years. Start with what you have. Use your own team to create a social media buzz. While stats show that 80% of businesses have social media teams, many are still struggling to reach an audience. With a growth of 191% since 2013, businesses will continue to encourage their employees to share updates about the business on their own social media accounts with two-fold results: “companies not only expand their social media reach they also get measurably better results,” according to one recent measure, eight-times more engagement. In fact, Hootsuite is among those to have created a new generation of employee-friendly sharing tools that will help enable this concept to make great strides.

Social messaging will see the light: Known as “dark social,” companies are aware that messaging, though a content mystery, needs to be part of the conversation, from a marketing stand point, that is. A key piece of the one-on-one social customer service puzzle, Twitter in 2015 lifted its character limits and follow requirements on direct messages and FB has been piloting customer service features of its own.

Social media advertisers will really get to know you: With an increased ability to target their customers, age and gender, interests, location, company affiliation, etc., social ads spending will increase even more than the 33.5% it increased in 2015.

Social video will win the popularity contest: The numbers tell the story. First, adult users consume a total of 66 minutes of online video, every day with an expectation that those numbers will continue to grow in 2016. Second, 70% of companies surveyed in 2015 say video is their most effective marketing tool, “not just because [videos are] popular, but because they’re highly effective,” says 2015 State of Digital Marketing, a report featuring insights from more than 600 marketers. According to the report, “74% of B2Cs and 76% of B2Bs create videos for their target audiences making video the most popular content marketing format for 2015, ahead of case studies and blogs.” 66% of businesses surveyed expect video to “dominate their strategy going forward.”

Some video stats from 2015:

• Facebook more than doubled its daily video views to 8 billion, reportedly overtaking YouTube.

• Twitter launched native video

• Snapchat reported 6 billion daily video views.

The trend predictor for 2016 from the world’s great marketing pundits: social media is now considered “business as usual for companies,” with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn (and other networks), “fundamentally changing how companies reach and interact with customers, offer products and services, communicate with employees and do business.”

Filed Under: Blogs - Inside Social Journalism Tagged With: marketing strategies, social journalism, social media

Corporate Social Media Strategy & Blogging

By carishane

SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY (SMS) must be adopted as a long-term business plan with crowd sourcing as an important growth motivator. 

SM provides free on-line real estate that organically boosts SEO (search engine optimization) and is the tool on which to engage with the marketplace on venues on which they are already “hanging out”:

Boomers: Facebook, Google+

Millennials: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat

Professionals: Linked In.

SM should be viewed as “extreme short-form journalism” and approached as a journalistic opportunity wrapped up in self-PR (promotion), not as “something we just need to do.”

Posts should be headline-driven with added-value verbal commentary that is newsworthy, i.e., important to a business’ platform, industry and companies with which the business works or wants to work while providing interesting information to the reader. There should be a strategic angle to the “stories” that are written and commentaries should work within the company/industry’s business cycle, seasonal cycles (back-to-school, first day of winter, etc.) as well as the “Hallmark” calendar of events (everything from major holidays — i.e., holidays upon which the news media will focus, such as Valentine’s Day — to minor holidays that could trend, such as #AuthorDay).

If tackled strategically, social media can be a biz’s headline news operation and therefore a key PR venue.

Sample of a customized, researched, developed and written SMS

BLOGGING is an effective SEO tool. In fact, I wrote all about it in my own blog on the subject, “Why you need to blog.”

For SMBs already strapped with too much to do, writing a blog becomes a low priority especially because, as most of my clients tell me, they have no idea what to write about!

First of all, write about what you do.

Second, strategize your blog titles/themes when you are strategizing your monthly social media calendar. Your social media, PR and blog themes should coincide so they can work in tandem to present your platform and messaging to the public.

What do I mean?

By way of example, I recently edited a “Camera Day” blog for my client, Maryland Brain Spine & Pain, a neurology practice in Annapolis. While it’s not a banner holiday, such as Thanksgiving, “Camera Day” provided the neurologist who penned the piece a theme about which to write. The blog is about how the camera has changed the course of brain surgery.

A second example is the blog I wrote for a Bethesda based dental practice, Prestipino Dental Group. “Tabacco use and periodontal disease: Understand the dangers,” published to coincide with “The Great American Smoke Out,” details the smoking/periodontal disease connection.

 

Segment of the “Blog Request Form” provided.

When writing a blog for my clients, I provide a “Blog Request Form” so I can understand the thesis and tone of the blog./or

 

 

 

 

 

Shoot me an email at Cari@CariShane.com to ask me about creating Social Media Strategy and/or to ask me about how my writing, including blog writing, can help your company.

See, Creating a strong 21st century footprint for more information about all capabilities.

Read my full bio.

Filed Under: Writing for Business - Press Releases, Writing for Businesses Tagged With: Blogging, blogs, Business, corporate blogging, marketing strategies, public relations, social media

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What’s your point?

When you write, no matter what you write, make a point. For “essential writing lessons,” it’s hard to top an on-point piece in CommPro.com, written by New York University’s Don Bates. In it he tells two anecdotes, one by the great essayist, humorist and filmmaker Nora Ephron; the other by a professor who helps academics write so the general public can […]

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