Who is your audience?

Do you know the names of the reporters who cover your industry? If you are a flack you do; but if you are a business owner you might not. You might know who your favorite reporters are, but not everyone who covers your industry. You should know them (or hire someone who does know them). If those reporters are on Twitter, you need to follow them.

You should follow your customers, your competitors, your employees (not to check up on them, but to learn from them, have some faith in your hiring process), industry analysts, and anyone prominent in your industry. 

Social media is your virtual store front window. It gives prospects and reporters a chance to view your business in a very low pressure manner. It gives them a preview of what to expect.

Social media is the online version of the social hour before a business meeting. It is an occasion to exchange gossip and get to know people personally. In other words, social media is a chance to strengthen existing relationships and build new ones. That is why too much attention to SEO and search engines is so destructive. It diverts your attention from where it needs to be, on your human audience.

We provide solutions for our customers' culinary needs

So what is the business? Is it a pizza delivery service? A Chinese restaurant? Or is it a grocery store? It could be any of the above.

No Pizza place, Chinese restaurant, nor grocery store would describe itself in such a manner; but this is common in technology. Every other industry describes itself in clear terms with an eye to catching the eye of its prospective customers.

I don't know why technology marketers embrace such vague copy. I thought that SEO would change this. After all, if you are a Cloud Computing company, it is in your SEO interest to say so on your homepage. Your company has a better chance of floating to the top of search results if you describe your services in the clearest possible terms. But for whatever reason, technology continues to embrace the sales killing rhetoric of IT market speak.

We offer solutions to help customers achieve business objectives

It is sad how many IT companies, especially government contractors employ such language to describe their business. Look at the website of almost any IT company and you will be hard pressed to work out what they actually do. I cannot work out why marketers are so obtuse about this.

Are you a cloud computing provider? System integrator? Web services consultant? Software tools developer? Web designer and content management company? Just say so.

Do you develop software for the financial services sector? Data visualization to the military? Records management for the legal market? Just say so. 

I have never understood IT's aversion to direct communication.

What a great name for a Communications blog!

Say no to mean, I Say What I Mean, but I Don't Say it Meanly The thoughts and words of Diana M. Rodriguez

 She has some excellent tips for email, my personal favorite:

Don’t #2 Texting acronyms: Many college students will be in for a rude awakening if they believe that acronyms that are used in text messages are acceptable when writing business emails. For example, using the acronym “GTG” for “good to go” will not be accepted or understood. In an office environment is best to stick with clear, concise wording and limit the use of abbreviated acronyms that the receiver may or may not understand.

Readers of this blog know that I try to stay away from acronyms of any kind. Between federal acronyms, military acronyms, and technology acronyms, room for confusion is too great. We should try to set a good example for our clients.

A professional looking press release is not the same as an effective press release

If you want to write a press release that actually gets placed with a news organization, don't model your news release on other news releases, model it on the style of the news organizaton you want ot place it with. If you want to place your story in the Washington Post, write like the stories you see in the Washington Post.

If you go to a trade show you will see hundreds of press releases, and they all read the same. It is truly a pity, because most of them have interesting stories to tell.

Too many press releases are written to be professional looking rather than newsworthy. If you put the phrase "leading provider of" in the first paragraph, you need to rewrite your release. Describe your company in the simplest way possible, say you are a content management company, or financial software company, or SaaS provider, or something the reader can easily understand.

Put your news in the headline or at least the first paragraph. It is astonishing how often this obvious technique is overlooked.

Here is an easy test to find out whether your news release is effective, give to a friend or family member and ask if they understand it. If they don't, it needs to be rewritten. Even the most technical stories can be communicated to a lay audience.

No one will struggle to understand what your product or service does. No one will struggle to understand why it is newsworthy.

Begging the question

Beg the Question

"Begging the question" is a form of logical fallacy in which a statement or claim is assumed to be true without evidence other than the statement or claim itself. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place.

I always get this wrong.

Assessing credibility

I must dissent from Jim Horton on this one. Mere anonymity, or the more common pseudonymity, does not necessarily detract from an author's credibility.

As a reader I ask myself does the writer offer a basis for their consclusions? Are their sources on the record? Do they refer to documents that are publicly available? These are the kinds of things that weigh with me.

In defense of boring corporate blogs

I am coming across more and more boring corporate blogs. The blog posts consist of new hire and promotion announcements, new products and product upgrades, contract awards and similar fare. The prose is written in the style of classic impersonal corporate press release.

These blogs would be interesting to prospective customers checking up on the company, reporters who were looking for background and similar readers.

In other words, these blogs provide useful information to individuals trying to find out more about the company.

These blogs also help with search engine visibility by continuously providing fresh content.

There is a great deal to be said for "good enough" business writing.

To have a truly excellent blog, the kind that drives traffic to your web site and establishes thought leadership, you really need to work at it or hire an expert. But to simply communicate your news and enhance search engine visibility, good enough is good enough.

Why I founded Presto Vivace PR

I started Presto Vivace PR for editors like Dan Beyers:

Someday someone will explain why so many businesses in the area want to make it so hard for regular folk like -- say, me -- to figure out what they do.

I've also sat through endless briefings about enterprise solutions and information assurance support environments, server virtualizations and system integrators and ... well, you name it.

And that's the problem, we need to rename it.

Clients so often see tech speak in industry publications and their competitors' press releases that they just assume that all those buzzwords serve a purpose. You have to work very hard to get clients to understand that jargon filled press releases, even if you can kid an editor into printing them, will never attract readers because no one can understand what you are talking about.

I think industry analysts are partly to blame. Coining terms and buzzwords that only they understand is a way for them to look like experts. It is also a status thing, understanding buzzwords is an indication that you are a member of the tech priesthood. Except it just gets in the way of customers understanding how your software could help them.

I use a copy editor who does not have a tech background. If my copy editor cannot understand what I am talking about, I start again from scratch. Even the most technical of concepts can be written in plain English.

Huh?

From J. Timothy Sprehe's opinion piece in Federal Computer Week:

So what does the agency do to achieve integrated information management? It conceptualizes the solution as one of standardizing on a single ECM system toolset.

I have been working in content management since 1994 and I have only a vague idea as to what he means by that. If I don't understand it, there is a good chance other readers don't understand it. The struggle against IT speak is a constant one and sooner or later we all succumb; but if you want to make your point to the general public, or at least policy makers, you have to make your prose more accessible.

New to me local writer's blog

Thinking Like A Designer, A site for authors who want advice on preparing to work with designers, and for designers who work directly with authors.

New to me local writers blogs

Editorial Inspirations; A place to explore grammar quirks as well as discuss the world of publishing.


Narrative Nonfiction; Telling Stories That Are True

GreenListDC Blog, Information and commentary about green living, green events and green issues in the Washington, DC area.


Debbi Mack: My Life on the Mid-List, a few reflections on the writing life

Let's not listen

Jeff Porro: Tough Talk in Hard Times

Word Kitchen, where copy cooks

Rebellion, at the intersection of design and activism

Kinetics, From lab to park bench

One Tomato at a Time

The fine art of writing email

John Monroe alerts us to this piece by David Silverman.

I would offer two modest dissents. Not every email needs a call to action, some email may be For Your Information, on those occasions when no specific action is required, but he recipient has an interest in being informed. Like CC, this sort of email should be used sparingly, only when the sender has good reason to believe the recipient actually wants to be kept current. There are also many times when, for reasons of office politics, you might want to forward something with the non-committal what are your thoughts.

Prosumers?

In an article about social media's impact on conferences, and the blurring line between the speakers and the audience Wired uses the word "prosumers," presumably a combination of producer and consumers.

I just want to say to editors that if you don't want flacks to use cute, gimmicky, jargon, don't you be using it.

New to me local writing blog

The Editorial Advantage

What is this product?

Identity Engines Releases Authenticated Network Architecture

SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwire - July 14, 2008) - Identity Engines, a leading provider of role-based access control solutions for heterogeneous networks, today announced the Authenticated Network Architecture (ANA): the industry's first vendor-neutral best practices framework outlining how organizations can migrate from the static, IP-address based architectures of the past, to the newer identity-based controls enabled by recent standards including IEEE 802.1X.

Regulatory compliance mandates such as HIPAA, SOX, PCI, GLBA, NERC/FERC, FERPA, HSPD-12 across multiple industries have driven IT organizations to search for secure, efficient, cost-effective methods of controlling access to their network infrastructure. The ANA framework fulfills that need by leveraging latent enforcement capabilities present in most enterprise network equipment, enabling transparent role-based access across all existing infrastructure (wired, wireless, remote access).

I read the whole release three times, and I only have a vague notion of the product. First of all, what is an authenticated network? If I don't know there is a good chance that even a trade audience won't know. What is a role based access control as oppposed to other forms of access control, and does that belong in the first paragraph?

I don't want to be too censorious here, I used to send out press release like this. Nowadays I use a copy editor, and I keep rewriting the release until she understands what I am talking about. It is a good idea to have a second pair of eyes.

The problem with terminology

Web Service

A Web Service is a software component that is described via WSDL and is capable of being accessed via standard network protocols such as but not limited to SOAP over HTTP.

A web service is a software component that does one very specific thing, such as retrieve a customers account number, and is used in combination with other web services to perform certain functions. Web services can be reused, thus are very handy.

Clearly Steve Rubel is talking about something entirely different:

The leading players on the web all see the train coming. They are wisely creating APIs and turning themselves into plug-and-play services, not just big destinations. YouTube is just the latest to do so today. Amazon has S3. Google has OpenSocial and an extensive library of APIs. As does Microsoft. Facebook is allowing its applications to live outside the site. Twitter is an API first and (eventually) a business model second. Finally, the booming widget economy shows the promise of small content that can go anywhere.

These are the leaders. But everyone - including marketers - will need to think of their online brands not as sites but as portable services that can go anywhere and everywhere the consumer wants. Without such appendages, no brand will ever be able to break through the online clutter such unlimited choice offers.

In this context the term web services is clear enough. We just need to be careful when we do presentations of what is meant by a term. The context is not always as clear as we assume.

He left out leverage

Words that Need to Die in 2008

Department of what are you talking about?

Public Knowledge has a post about a proposed law that will increase penalties for copyright violations ('cause suing their customers is working so well for industry). What is the name of the law? Which committee is considering the law? What is the current status? The post does not say, nor does it provide links.

It is called the "Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (“PRO IP”) Act of 2007", and Slashdot has a vigorous discussion about the act.

When you are an expert and talk about an issue all the time it is easy to forget that most people do not have the basic information. One of the strengths of blogging as a medium is that you can write for your fellow expert and provide links for those who need additional information.

Great headline writing

Tudor First Hedge Fund To PAC A Punch