When you’re putting together a marketing or public relations campaign, don’t forget to invest in proper photography – of your people and your products. Human beings are visual creatures, and it has never been more important to present your brand well from a visual perspective. But please – and yes, I actually am begging here
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If a journalist is writing a news story about your company, don’t even bother to ask to see it. If they’re doing a feature, however – a profile on one of your people, for example – they might be kind enough to let you see it before it goes to production. Here’s how to behave.
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There’s a crucial mistake in many content strategies and I see it all the time. One topic seems to get the most engagement, so brands or individuals bang on about that endlessly, or constantly try to shoehorn unrelated topics into being relevant to that topic. It may get you a great deal of engagement –
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I am often involved in writing companies’ origin stories and narratives, but the most recent one came with an odd request – to obscure some names and details and couch them in more generic terms. I found this odd for two reasons. First, some of the details are readily available on the company’s website, and
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One of the most common things I do when I’m reviewing a piece of copy – whether it’s a proposal, report, media release or any other piece of content – is to cut out the first paragraph entirely. People are so focused on having a good introduction that they over-introduce, and the writing starts to
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Pee Arrs, gather round. You’re not going to like this, but it has to be said. Putting your client’s product and/or service in the introductory paragraph is what has that grumpy hack hitting “delete” faster than a politician authorising a tender for a family member. Products and services aren’t news. And if they are, they
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Most of what I do is invisible. You won’t find it if you google me; it doesn’t bear my name. And so most people don’t have a clue what I really do. I started my working life as a journalist, first on newspapers and then on magazines, and went freelance more than two decades ago.
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I review a great many speeches, reports, media releases and statements, and strategy documents straight from the C-suite at large companies, and the same problem keeps cropping up. Basically, people are too close to the subject at hand, and can’t always see the assumptions they’re making. A CEO’s speech I reviewed recently, for example, contained
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Do you want to write copy that isn’t long and circuitous? Copy that isn’t turgid? Copy that isn’t dull? Let’s try that again … Do you want to write copy that’s short and sharp? That’s energetic? That’s exciting? Do you see what just happened there? So often I see things expressed in terms of what
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If you’ve hired a PR consultant and you’re not getting the coverage you want, have you considered that you might be the problem? I write content for a variety of PR practitioners, and I see it over and over again – a really good release ruined by the client’s input. Because clients don’t understand the
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