Literary quotes for PR writing skills

Charlie Laidlaw is a director of David Gray PR and a partner in Laidlaw Westmacott.

It was Oscar Wilde who suggested that “there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

Being good at PR involves many skills, not least an ability to communicate a promotional direction that integrates corporate and marketing strategy.

Because the new PR is about business strategy; no longer on the periphery of the marketing mix but, in a new world order of social and digital channels, a central component in managing corporate reputation, driving engagement and winning customers.

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” – Rudyard Kipling

But there’s one timeless skill that anyone involved in PR needs above all others: an ability to write cogently, lucidly and persuasively – and that’s a skill not everybody has. 

Or as Frank Lloyd Wright put it: “I’m all in favour of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters."

Good writing starts long before putting pen to paper (or finger to keyboard).

 "If I was down to the last dollar of my marketing budget I'd spend it on PR!" – Bill Gates

The richest man in the world should know what he’s talking about.  However, before you write anything you have to understand what the story is.  Not the nuts and bolts of what the new product (or operating system) is: but the added value it offers customers.  In other words, don’t simply communicate the technology, get to grips with what it does and why people should buy it.

It’s as well to remember Mark Twain:  “The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.”  If they don’t understand the value of your new product, they won’t buy it.

“A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad.” – Sir Richard Branson

Again, Sir Richard should know, but it’s worth setting out some SMART objectives for your PR strategy, and the metrics you’ll use to measure success.  Interestingly, creativity is now being seen as a key element in how the value of PR is perceived, however you go about measuring its effectiveness.  If you haven’t read the latest Holmes Report, have a look at its main conclusions.

Good writing needn’t always be creative writing, but it often helps.

 “The formulation of a public relations strategy properly begins with listening, not talking." - Leonard Saffir

Wise words, because to write a perfect press release, blog or article needs a clear understanding not only of what it is you’re trying to sell – but what people are saying about it, or about competitor products.  For example, what’s out there on social media?  Or if your product solves a problem, first understand the problem.

Competitor analysis is also important, because you don’t want to copy the competition. You want to differentiate your product or service.

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein

Okay, few of us understand the theory of relativity, but we all know that part of Einstein’s genius was to simplify the hugely complex. 

The trouble is a lot of PR material is written people who don’t have a clear idea who they’re writing for.  Who is the audience you want to reach?  If necessary, visualize your audience as a person who you actually know.  Write your material for him or her personally.

Shakespeare is also worth quoting:  “An honest tale speeds best, being plainly told.” (Richard III)

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”- Mark Twain

Having sent out your material, keep a close eye on how it’s being received.  That’s not just important for ROI, but making sure that you’re not being misrepresented on social media.  Mark Twain was writing in a bygone age; but even then an untruth could very quickly gain currency.

A good tip is to make sure that nothing you write is capable of being misinterpreted.  Check and double-check.  Don’t exaggerate or make unfounded claims.

“If you don't tell your story, someone else will.” – Unknown

PR is no longer the optional bolt-on it once was.  In the digital age, everyone can say anything about you – good or bad, true or false.  It’s as well therefore to have a PR strategy to get your message across, before someone else does.

But how to learn how to write?  Perhaps the last word should lie with the late, great American journalist Charles Kuralt.  “I think good writing comes from good reading.”  Or maybe author Ray Bradbury.  “There are worse crimes than burning books.  One of them is not reading them.”

We are specialists in national and international PR strategy and delivery.  You can contact us at +44 (0) 1620 844736 or Charlie@davidgraypr.com or connect with us on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles

Audiences, Orwell and corporate messages

Charlie Laidlaw is a director of David Gray PR and a partner in Laidlaw Westmacott.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, PR was pretty simple: you wrote something that you thought potential customers might like to read and sent it out to as many media outlets as possible.

What has changed in the intervening years is our ability, driven by digital technologies, to better understand the audiences we are selling to and, using both traditional and social media, better interact with them.

Understanding target audiences has always been fundamental to building successful marketing campaigns but pre-internet, it involved making some fairly rudimentary and broad-brush assumptions.

 

Put simply, if you were selling cosmetics, you targeted women’s magazines.  If you were marketing a new razor, you targeted men’s magazines.

Audience segmentation was limited by the media you could reach and, given the hit-and-miss nature of PR, companies and public sector organisations relied more heavily on paid advertising.

All that has changed in a process of Orwellian evolution that now allows marketers to focus with greater precision on smaller and smaller target groups, with messages specific to our needs or aspirations. 

Sophisticated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and data mining capabilities now allow marketers to focus down onto comparatively small target groups.

In the new world order, where every click of every mouse can be recorded, it may not be long before audience segmentation becomes truly personal – a tailored message specifically for you or me, based on where we live, our gender, demographic profile and browsing habits.

It was, perhaps, big politics rather than big business that first pushed the boundaries of audience segmentation, both to reach and reassure core supporters and win over floating voters.

In the UK, back in the 1990s, that was typified by the invention of “Essex man” and “Mondeo man,” both less-than-mythical creatures who inhabited the undecided middle of British politics.  Essex man had done well out of Mrs Thatcher, and many had switched allegiance from the Labour Party.

Mondeo man was Labour’s demographic response at the 1997 election – an average person, driving a standard car, with a family to support – almost a mirror-image of Essex man, and someone to be wooed assiduously.

Interestingly, Ford have recently admitted that Mondeo man did them no favours – the suggestion that commonplace meant ordinary placed them at a commercial disadvantage against other car manufacturers such as VW.  (You can read more about Ford’s gripe here).

However, it was American big politics that took segmentation to a whole new level, in particular the social media strategy behind the election and re-election of President Obama in 2008 and 2012.  It used big data and digital channels to clearly focus messages – and, where possible, target individual voters.

Dr Pamela Rutledge of the Media Psychology Research Centre has a fascinating blog post that neatly encapsulates all that the Obama team achieved, and how they did it.

For most of us, without access to large research budgets, making good use of data must of necessity be on a smaller scale.  Like, for example, a retailer with a large stock of XXXXL clothing to shift.  Simple: contact everyone who has ordered that size in the past with an irresistible offer (unless they’ve been on a diet, in which case it won’t work!)

A thought-provoking case study is how Accenture, with tech partners, worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company to analyse data held by the theatre company, segment that data, and then craft messages pertinent to each sub-group.  The result, at a time of budget restraint, was a hugely significant uptake in ticket sales.

Segmentation models do of course vary, not least because of desired outcomes between the public and private sectors.  An interesting piece of research was by the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and which looks at segmentation methodologies for public engagement.

Lastly, it’s then down to the quality of the sales or corporate message; connecting your company and its products or services with its buying public.  In that sense, engagement is a two-step process; first, to understand and segment audiences and, second, to then influence their buying decisions or patterns of behaviour.  It’s a new fusion between marketing and PR.

What’s both frightening and exciting in equal measure is how evolving technologies will crunch big data into bite-sized chunks, and then chew them into smaller segments until our individual lives are laid bare for other people’s legitimate or illegitimate benefit.

A research report by McKinsey, published in 2011, sets out some of the opportunities and challenges ahead.  “The amount of data in our world has been exploding, and analyzing large data sets—so-called big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus…”

The report says that 15 out of 17 sectors in the US have more data stored per company than the US Library of Congress, and that the value of all that big data could translate into a $300 billion saving for US healthcare, a €250 billion value for Europe’s public sector – and a 60% increase in retailers’ operating margins.

Maybe we need another Orwell to make sense of those challenges and dangers, because (and with no disrespect) it’s going to be well nigh impossible for politicians to fully understand where the new technologies might lead – unless, of course, they make use of them to get elected.

We are specialists in national and international PR strategy and delivery.  You can contact us at +44 (0) 1620 844736 or Charlie@davidgraypr.com or connect with us on LinkedIn or Facebook.