Posts

Unleashing the Power of the Epistle

Image
  Read for Dec. 2, 2024: In “Band of Brothers,” an excellent HBO series about a real Army company and their true experiences in World War II, made about 25 years ago, Lt. Nixon is depressed when he gets a letter from his wife. Serving in the U.S. Army during WWII, you might think Nixon would crave a letter from home, but this is a “Dear John” letter—slang for what today would be a dump text. Mrs. Nixon was writing to say she had met someone else and was filing divorce papers. In an era of instant communication, your ability to craft a compelling letter or email is still a key PR tool. Your text is mostly about “direct mail,” a kind of advertising that centers on a letter. The text is pretty complete in its description, and it is a good chapter rich in quiz question terms, so make sure you read Chapter 5. That kind of letter and direct mail package is still used a lot, particularly in the nonprofit world where fund raising is a key. However, I think one of the key letters a PR
Post a Comment
Read more

Web Writers Won’t Tell You These Three Weird Tricks

Image
Screen shot of a Disney.com page--clicking on "news" leads you to this, a web page full of PR content. Read for Nov. 18, 2024: This blog post has a click-bait heading, one you should probably avoid because that structure is trite and cliché, although being able to do it as a joke may mean that you do understand the web a bit. When I am writing about “web writing” and “new media,” the concept bears some explanation. After all, almost any media today is disseminated via the web, whether it’s by posing a version of it on your organization’s web site, or sending a file via email. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Englishman who wrote the original HTML and decided to make it available as free shareware, thus changing the world. Create a whole new information infrastructure that rewires the world (and be British) and King Charles might knight you (although he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II), too. Berners-Lee created HTML about 1994 or so, is shown here in 2014 in Wikimedia Commons image by
Post a Comment
Read more

Speeches: Ancient Rhetoric & Ghosts in the Modern World

Image
 Diana Nyad speaks of swimming from Cuba to Florida--famous swimmer does the "impossible." Read for Nov. 11, 2024: Arguably, formal public communication as we know it, in our culture, dates back to the time of the ancient Greeks. (There are older traditions than that, especially oral storytelling, but I’m writing specifically about formal rhetorical traditions that are relevant to Public Relations and to this week’s writing). The Greeks, in Athens in particular, began to use proto-democratic forms of government, and that made public discourse, the oral exchange of ideas, important to them. And today, in a sometimes post-literate world, the ability of a person to speak on behalf of an organization is still a key to getting important messages to key publics. Dr. Todd Olson, president of Mount Mercy University, speaks Aug. 15, 2023 at an all-employee start-of-year training day. And social media, where video can spread both poignant and unfortunate remarks globally in the blink o
Post a Comment
Read more

Free Beer! Now That I Have Your Attention …

Image
Source: Adsoftheworld.com Read for Nov. 4, 2024. The text chapter this week is on Public Service Advertising and Announcements, but to me, what we’re into this week is writing advertising copy . Ads: They are all around. We see them all the time, and tend to think, as individuals, we are somehow immune to them. We’re not. Corporations would not pour billions of dollars for more than 150 years into an enterprise if ads hadn’t proven effective over time. Many iconic movements and products owe their success, at least partly, to successful advertising. Consider, for example, the Volkswagen Beetle. It was a product of Nazi Germany—literally encouraged by Adolph Hitler who wanted a German company to design a “people’s car.” Following the war, as the western world recovered and grew prosperous, the VW Beetle slowly became a global sensation. Including in the second-most important country (the first was the USSR, the third was the UK) in defeating Nazi Germany. How did a German company sellin
Post a Comment
Read more

Writing for the Ear and Eye: Audio and Video

Image
Annie Grayer of CNN shown in a CNN photo gallery of reporters covering the 2020 election campaign.  Read for Oct. 28, 2024:  Your two chapters this week describe two kind of audio and video script writing: an audio news release (ANR) and a video news release (VNR). That’s OK, as far as it goes, but the world of PR scripting for audio and video is broader than those two artifacts. Next week, we’ll cover advertising, and a script for a “public service announcement,” (PSA) a kind of ad open only to nonprofits or government agencies, will bring this genre of writing back. And the week after that, we cover speech writing, which is another format in which, like VNR and ANR and other video and audio scripts, you’re writing for the ear. In other words, your audience won't see or read your words, they will hear them. Think of the many ways audio and video are used in communication: Radio and TV. While the media world has diversified, these can still be key ways to reach key publics. Online
Post a Comment
Read more

Planning Media Kits, Writing Reports

Image
Cover of 2017 Rockwell-Collins Annual Report (one of the last ones, since this is now Collins Aerospace and part of a larger company). Annual reports cover the previous year, so this would have been published in 2018. Read for October 21, 2024 : Public Relations writing involves several levels of corporate writing, and reports are an important part of corporate writing. The annual report, for a publicly traded corporation or a nonprofit, is not only a legally required statement of financial data, but often a key PR and marketing tool, too. I’ll write about that in the second half of this post. I am not assigning a lab assignment based on chapter 1 of your style guide--we won't try to write a report--instead, the writing this week be be based on chapter 6 in your text on Media Kits. That's what I'll write about first here (but although I don't assign chapter 1 for lab writing, note that this blog post does cover reports and there will be some quiz questions about them).
Post a Comment
Read more

Brochures—Controlled Media on Services, Events

Image
Sample of tri-fold brochure. Outside panels arranged as 3 layout units. Read for Sept. 9, 2024 :   There is a difference between controlled and uncontrolled PR media. News releases, although they are usually posted on an organization’s web site, are considered “uncontrolled” because their main purpose is to generate coverage via news media. You send a news release to "The Des Moines Register" in the hopes that the Register then published favorable information about you. But the Register controls if and how and in what form its audience sees your information—the format and context of the story is not something you control. A brochure is controlled media, and generally a concise publication that describes something that’s important for your organization to promote. For example, Mount Mercy University has what its admissions department calls “one sheets,” which are one-page printed descriptions of each academic program. These are a form of brochure. A brochure thus: Is a des
Post a Comment
Read more