Steven Johnson: Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
Malcolm Gladwell: Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Thomas L. Friedman: The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
Michael Ray: The Highest Goal: the Secret that Sustains You in Every Moment
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This is worth reading and not just because it echoes my thoughts every time I read someone's blog writing that's too wishy-washy: 5 Words You Can Cut Out, from the Daily Writing Tip:
- just
- really
- quite
- perhaps
- that
I have to add two:
- maybe
- very
Every time you re-read your writing, be on the look-out for these wishy-washy offenders and make your writing stronger, better.
How do you get free publicity for your business? How can you create a well thought-out media plan to catch the attention of frazzled news directors, busy reporters and grumpy editors?
If you don't have a penny to spend on advertising and you want the world to know about your product, service, or cause, then you need to know how to get the attention of the media, according to Joan Stewart, aka The Publicity Hound.
Because of the importance of media publicity for a growing business, The Blog Squad is interviewing Joan Stewart Wednesday January 16, 2008 at 5 p.m. ET, for their monthly mentor program teleseminar series, Blogging and Beyond.
Attendance is free, but you must be a member of the Blogging and Beyond Mentor Program. You can join the program at www.theblogsquad.net/mentor. A 30 day trial membership is only $9.95.
The seminar will be delivered simultaneously via telephone and live webcast where participants can submit their questions directly to The Blog Squad and The Publicity Hound.
David Meerman Scott updated his Goobledygook Manifesto this week. He proves his point: news releases from company and pr writers use the same old worn-out empty phrases ... worse than a teenager's annoying talk, like totally inane.
I'm reprinting David's graph here just so you can see the catch phrases to avoid in your next piece of writing for the web.
The words mentioned most often were similar to last year’s analysis. In North America – next generation (10,427 mentions), robust (8868 mentions), flexible (8515 mentions), and world class (7887 mentions) were the leaders.
Others are easy to use, scalable, cutting edge, well positioned, market leading, mission critical, turnkey, groundbreaking, industry standard, user friendly, enterprise class, best of breed, enterprise wide, interoperable, extensible, and breakthrough.
They say the more you do something, the bigger your muscles get and the easier it is. Writing news releases has always been heavy lifting for me.
Somehow, using the mental imagery technique I described in the post "Writing: How the first sentence is like the serve in tennis," I cranked out 3 press releases yesterday without much struggle.
Maybe this stuff really works: deep breathing and telling myself I'm really good at this. Or, just maybe, all of the online studying on how to write a press release has kicked in.
Like most things in life, success is usually preceded by doing something poorly and practicing the hell out of it. It helps to have good teachers and coaches along the way.
My press release writing teacher is Joan Stewart, aka The Publicity Hound. Joan actually gives away her knowledge about writing good news releases in an email tutorial, "89 Ways to Write Powerful Press Releases." You can learn from her too if you sign up, it's free.
Here's a nugget gleaned from 37 Signals' Signal vs Noise blog about writing advice given by master story teller Stephen King in his book On Writing:
"Formula for success: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%..."
I'm one of those picky writers who trained as an editor in an earlier life, so I even reread my emails before sending. I hate typos and errors and excess words. And I commit these faults frequently.
That is why I recommend rereading everything before sending or publishing. If you're a writer of anything on the Web, you owe it to yourself to become nit-picky. Or get a professional editor or even a friend to review before you publish.
True, much of what is written in blogs is rife with errors, and some younger writers seem to not care so much about form as content. But the rules of grammar and spelling weren't invented by anal-retentive professors bent on slapping knuckles. They are there for good reason: to avoid ambiguousness and confusion.
And there is an additional reason this is important when you are writing for the web:
Continue reading "On Writing: Stephen King's Advice Extended for the Web" »
Press releases are getting major overhauls these days, turning the traditional PR format into more user-friendly versions that facilitate journalists' jobs of finding information faster.
Julie Crabill from SHIFT Communications participated on a panel at BlogHer called "The Press Release Must Die," along with Bambi Francisco of MarketWatch, moderated by Erin Kotecki Vest of the Huffington Post.
The whole idea is to create press releases that are more useful and convenient for journalists, giving them deeper information and better information through links to blogs, audio and video files, as well as RSS feeds and tags.
I posted about this new social media press release previously and make this new template available to you here through SHIFT Communications:
Blogging and Beyond: Episode 9
New Rules for Press Releases
with guest expert Joan Stewart, the Publicity Hound
How to Write an Internet Press Release to Attract Media, Customers, and Google Juice
©2007 Patsi Krakoff, Psy. D. & Denise Wakeman, The Blog Squad
To leverage the Internet effectively for your business, you must learn to write press releases. Submitting frequent press releases to the online distribution services will get you exposure to media, customers, and improve your search engine rankings.
Press releases are relatively simple, but not easy to write. They take some time to craft because you must tell your story in a compelling way, and deliver the facts in the fewest words possible. In addition, like a news story, they should follow basic journalism standards. Oh, and did I mention, they need a clever hook to really work? All that in only 350-500 words.
The following is what I do when I write a press release for The Blog Squad. I trained as a journalist years ago. However, standards for writing press releases are evolving for the Internet.
Continue reading "Marketing with Press Releases: 10 Steps to Writing an Internet Press Release" »
I just finished posting about Joan Stewart's "New Rules" for press releases when my feed reader let me know that Lee Odden also posted similar news about the way press releases play into your marketing mix.
His great post goes into more details and gives 10 tips on how to write a release for search optimization, so you won't want to miss it.
Joan Stewart is affectionately known around the Internet as The Publicity Hound. And there's a reason...Joan has a nose for news and she sniffs out trends for evolving Internet marketing strategies.
You won't want to miss our interview with her Thursday March 8 at 11 a.m. EST on Blogging and Beyond, our Internet radio show. She'll reveal the new rules for writing press releases for posting on the Web.
Here are a few tips she'll explain:
• Press releases no longer have to announce legitimate news
• They no longer have to be only one page
• We can distribute them online as often as we want.
• They can include links so that consumers can click through to a landing page or a sales page.
• We no longer have to use the "who, what, when, where and why" formula high in the press release.
• No longer do we have to consider a press release a failure if it gets no media attention. If it brings people into our sales funnel, we can proclaim the release a success.
• Under the new rules, we don't measure the success of our releases by the number of clippings it has generated but by whether the press release has been able to change people's behavior
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