The process of creativity isn’t glamorous. It’s simply about hard work, the management of emotions, and delayed showmanship. And it’s necessarily lonely. To want to be creative—truly creative—is to want to entertain, which is often depressingly opposite of being entertained.
– Eddie Smith, Practically Efficient.
There is no trick to creativity, no secret initiation or gnostic teaching to be revealed by invitation only. Continue reading
There are many articles out there on how PR professionals should seek, contact and engage with bloggers. We are focused on building a relationship with bloggers and converting them into brand ambassadors for our client. We hope that they will write amazing posts about our clients and it will spread through the blogger world like wildfire.
But as PR pros have we stopped to think about what the bloggers want from us?
I am a mom blogger, crawfishtales.com, and I have had the opportunity to be on both sides of the pitch. This has given me insight that I have used to mold the way that I, as a PR pro, engage bloggers. I constantly remind myself that bloggers are receiving multiple pitches just like a reporter and that I need to make my pitch stand out from the others. The best pitches are the ones that are thorough and have thought through the pitch from the bloggers prospective. Continue reading
Many people have aspired to become a writer at some point or another. After all, there is something magical about creating places, stories and characters using only the power of the words. It should come as no surprise then that so many people look for jobs in the journalism domain. Even though writing facts might not be as interesting as writing fiction, it’s impossible not to get excited about having a job that requires something different from you every day. The articles you write are never the same, the subjects are always different and the fieldwork involved might be engaging. Continue reading
PR: The land of content and the home of the brevity.
I thought that perhaps it might be a good time to visit the subject of brevity in PR. We live in a world with increasingly strict space limitations and tightened engagement protocols to grab attention. From writing content to posting tweets to email media pitches to blog posts to writing news releases, the maturation and digitization of the Information Age has spawned an enormous number of people vying for attention and doing everything they can to be noticed. Continue reading
Public relations, like many things in life, is 90 percent perspiration and 10 percent inspiration. Many people have a misconception of what we do (even our family). Writing is something that is a part of a PR pro’s daily hourly duty. PR isn’t about rubbing elbows with celebrities and throwing extravagant parties for clients. But, I’m speaking to the choir on this.
Any PR pro knows the importance of honing their writing skills. It’s a must. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be anywhere in the PR world. Not only do we have to craft the perfect pitch for media, we have to write compelling press releases and blog posts people find interesting. Continue reading
Did I lure you in with my snazzy headline? Yes? Okay great. Now I’m going to spend the first few sentences using buzz words so that you will keep reading my social media post. Then after you’ve gotten through the first couple of paragraphs, I’m going to provide you with these awesome bullet points packed with information that you already knew. Lastly, I will summarize the topic which pretty much has nothing to do with my headline that I created for SEO purposes.
Does this situation sound familiar? Every day my inbox and RSS feeds pile up with articles about social media. The articles seem to always be about the same topic but recycled, rehashed, rewritten – they are offering me nothing of value. If you are like me, you’ve probably about had it. Continue reading
This blog post begins on a personal note. I am legally obligated to tell you that in case you are a very important person who can’t be bothered with personal notes. You have been warned!
I’m currently dating quite the sweetie and life is pretty good, I guess! We have fun times, and we’re both wordy people. Ahhhhh, the joy of conversing with someone who knows what adverbs are! It’s quite nice.
But a spanner was thrown in the works, guys. We had our first fight. And it was about punctuation. Continue reading
Alright All right folks – let’s try this again. As a very late followup to part won of this post, presented below are some of you’re own pet peeves when it comes to proper word youse. And if you haven’t noticed it yet – every underlined word so far is improperly yoused or completely nonexistent. As a reminder, I’ll repeat the notes presented in the first post – Continue reading
Purple is the color of a cloak which your words should never wear, treading on a barren stair in the dark to meet a woman whom they know is from a city they’ve never been and should not dare make haste toward.
Or, in other words, quit the #@$%ing purple prose already.
Purple prose means writing that is way too flowery, effusive, extravagant, or showy. It’s a phrase used to describe works or passages that are out of place or just plain stupid. The poet Horace coined the phrase (sort of) and the lesson is don’t ever, ever go overboard.
“Elaborate poetry?” you may ask. “Florid diatribes? Surely these never appear in my businesslike writing of business!”
Are you sure? Continue reading
Last week, we here at the PRBC HQ received one of Cog‘s many passive-aggressive e-mails about meeting our deadlines. We don’t really mind those e-mails; we usually ignore them while our deadlines go whooshing by. But this one was more ingeniously manipulative than most. “For those of you without posts in the queue,” it said, “(and you two know who you are) this is a reminder to get your posts in on Sunday as early as you can.”
Obviously our internal e-mail thread devolved into lots of people apologizing for being one of those two. Which was weird, because at least 10 people came forward to claim their place of shame in those two slots. Waitacottonpickin’ minute, I said, clearly we are all slackers, not just two of us! You really made us scared, Cog, that we were only one of two deadbeats in the group. Cog tried to defend himself by saying that “you two” referred to the two goody-two-shoes that DID finish their posts under the deadline. Continue reading