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| Issue No. 200409
| September 2004
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The PIOnet Newsletter is sponsored by Newswise and Dick Jones Communications
Feature Editor: Dick Jones Editor/Publisher: Roger Johnson
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PIOnet Newsletter is produced monthly to support media relations' vital role in integrated marketing for your institution. This role is not always adequately recognized, understood, or acknowledged. Our goal is to give you data, arguments, evidence, and ideas to enhance the understanding of and appreciation for media relations at your institution.
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How to Curb Foggy Writing
by Dick Jones
Dick Jones Communications
The news releases and pitch letters that you send should be written at a level that can be easily understood by high school seniors or juniors.
The audience for your writing, of course, is the editor, producer, or reporter who you hope will select your information for publication or broadcast. The harder you make this person work to comprehend your prose, the greater the chance that he or she will reach for the "delete" key. It will ever be thus until it is within your power to repeal the laws of human nature.
That's why it helps to run a fog index on your releases and pitches. For years, we have used a formula that approximates the grade level a person should have reached to be able to read and understand a document.
If a document has a readability level of 12, for example, a senior in high school should be able to grasp it. An index of 16 supposedly means one needs to have four years of college to understand it.
The important thing to remember is that even well-educated readers prefer stories with a low fog index. Writing something that is easy to read is not the same as "dumbing down" your prose. I've been told, for example, that J.D. Salinger's classic The Catcher in the Rye has a fog index of six.
Today there are several computer programs that monitor readability. Being a little old fashioned, I don't use them. Instead, I do the following:
- Use a sample of at least 250 words.
- Find the percentage of big words -- those with three syllables or more. (Don't count proper names, three-syllable verbs ending in ed or es, or words that have been formed from shorter words, such as rattlesnake). Record the percentage of big words as a whole number (21, not .21).
- Find the average sentence length in words by counting the number of words and dividing the total by the number of sentences.
- Add the numbers you found in steps two and three. Multiply the sum by 0.4. Drop everything after the decimal point, and you have the fog index.
I counted 413 words in this month's column. Eight percent of them are "big words." There are 27 sentences, making the average sentence length 15 words. Add eight and 15 to get 23. Multiply this by 0.4 and we arrive at a fog index of nine. That's within the acceptable range -- at least in my shop.
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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Communicating in a Visually Sophisticated World
by Zoltan Bedy, Ph.D
Oswego State University of New York
Usually, I write here about research that might be of interest and help to those of us who practice some form of public relations. But every once or twice in a while, I find an article not about research, that I feel may be worth some consideration. "George Lucas: Life on the Screen" by James Daly, in the premier issue (September/October 2004) of Edutopia is just such an article.
Lucas, best known for such popular films as American Graffiti, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Star Wars, is also chairman of the George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF), which publishes Edutopia bimonthly. The purpose of GLEF is to offer an exchange of ideas on new approaches to learning. The magazine subscription is free and is linked to an active website, where readers can get more information on each issue's stories via short documentary segments, interviews, and other sources.
This is not intended to be a plug for GLEF and/or Edutopia. It is, however, a plug for learning the rules and using the various forms of communication.
Daly, Edutopia's editor in chief, uses a Q&A format to talk with Lucas about the importance of bringing into the twenty-first century the way students are educated, and increasing the emphasis on learning a broader, more comprehensive form of communication. Although we work primarily with the written and spoken forms of communication, says Lucas, technological advances have made the world in which we live and work visually sophisticated. "[S]o we must be sophisticated in using all the forms of communication, not just the written word."
Verbal communication, whether in written or spoken form, has a grammar. So, too, do film/video, music, color, and graphics. Lucas talks about learning not only the grammar of these other forms of communication, but also the ways to express ideas through them. "When you are trying to write a paragraph and you want to get a point across," Lucas says, "how do you clearly make your point? What does your first sentence say? What does your last say?" It's that kind of thought and analysis, he says, that needs to go into thinking about the use of music, graphics, color, and moving or static images used in communication. "We must accept the fact that learning how to communicate with graphics, with music, with cinema, is just as important as communicating with words. Understanding these rules is as important as learning how to make a sentence work."
"What Lucas says is all well and fine," you may say. "But we are not educators."
That is true, to a point. Our job as public relations (PR) professionals is to manage relationships. But, in managing those relationships, we direct information to and from our organizations and their publics. The purpose of that information is to have organizations and publics learn about and from each other. And, in order to make that learning easier and more meaningful, and to make the communication as effective as possible, it is important for us to master the various grammars about which Lucas speaks.
I think it is safe to say that most public relations professionals got where they are today because of their knowledge of verbal language and their ability to effectively use it. I think it is also safe to say that some (perhaps many) PR professionals have been asked or required to venture into areas of non-verbal communication with which they are less familiar and less comfortable. Because the work of PR professionals is so widely disseminated, it is imperative that we learn and develop the visual sophistication about which Lucas speaks. Just as we serve as examples and teachers of proper grammar through our writing and speaking, so, too, must we employ the proper grammar when using music, graphics, colors, and video in the stories we tell about our organizations.
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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Book Review: The New PR Toolkit: Strategies for Successful Media Relations
by Sean Kearns
Humboldt State University
From a toolkit, you expect to grab something sharp, pointed, finely machined to fit the job, not a brochure promoting a particular saw.
Early on, that's how it feels rooting around in The New PR Toolkit. Don't expect detailed techniques or explicit operator instructions. This book, subtitled Strategies for Successful Media Relations, is more a catalog of what might be done in public relations (PR) rather than a precise guide for how to do it. And the title gives little clue that this book is all about Internet-based tools.
But keep digging. Deeper in The New PR Toolkit are solid design suggestions -- and cautions -- for a modern communications shop.
Published by Financial Times/Prentice Hall (2003), it is co-authored by Deirdre Breakenridge, an advertising and marketing executive, and Thomas DeLoughry, former editor of Internet World magazine and technology writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education. They deserve kudos for tackling in print the realm of PR in the online world, where many ephemeral wonders come and go.
In a well-organized, well-researched approach, they begin with a clear overview of online audiences (including journalists), their origins, activities, and compatriots -- and how you can pay attention to them without subverting their privacy.
The authors' audience comprises primarily corporate PR practitioners. Only three brief references to higher education surface: a one-page profile of Cornell's news service, a mention that some universities web cast a welcome from their presidents, and the tangential revelation that some firms offer "online covert operations" in which paid individuals hype products by "seeding" newsgroups with self-serving comments. "Frequently they will say they are college students who are working on a project, he (an advertising CEO) says, and their requests for information are generally well-received by other newsgroup participants."
As if out to save the fingers of an eager, neophyte carpenter, the authors waste no time in providing a safety tip: "As veteran users of the Internet, we should interject here that we see newsgroup seeding as a potentially troubling way to promote your client's interests. Newsgroups historically have been the region of the Internet with the strongest aversion to commercial messages, so there is great danger of exposing your client to a nasty backlash."
While the text is often redundant, with sidebar interviews repeating themes of a few pages earlier, take it like the hammering of a nail once more for good measure: with information this solidly put together, another whack at it won't hurt.
For example, in the section entitled "The Need for Continuous Research," a cited advisor wisely suggests reviewing your website's logs to uncover the entry points that lead visitors to your site. How many come from search-engine results? From your organization's front page? Or from Bad Bob's Blog of Bodacious Bodies of Water, Work, and Women? (Don't bother looking for it; you won't find it -- yet.)
From another practitioner, here's a tip: "You can incorporate a unique Uniform Resource Locator (URL) in the release or ad for a particular product and then use log software to determine how many people come through that door."
From the chapter "Building Your Online Newsroom" comes a five-pack of reasons journalists use online media sites (from a report by usability expert Jakob Nielsen): (1) To find PR contacts. (2) To check basic facts. (3) To discover an organization's "spin." (4) To check financial information. (5) To download illustrations.
From Bethlehem Steel's director of marketing comes an illustration of how to post illustrations: to increase your chances of protecting your institutional image and to keep track of who's interested in you, make only low-resolution images available online and require anyone seeking a high-resolution image to fill out an online form telling how they plan to use the image.
Chapters on newsletters, web casts, and crisis communications offer particular grist for the university PR mill.
- Give web casts another look, the authors urge. Much has been learned from past mistakes, bugs are fewer, bandwidth is booming, and, though still pricey, the cost has come down.
- Integrate your email newsletter into your website and, by all means, only distribute it to those who opt in.
- Learn from those who responded well to September 11, 2001. Be better prepared for any crisis you can imagine by developing "ghost templates" for your website, proactively establishing a strong relationship with your information technology team, and consider what information your constituents will really need in a distressing time.
While The New PR Toolkit is long on suggestions and short on schematics, it's handy on the shelf. Oddly, though, it omits one clear, emerging design instrument for building your institution's reputation for innovation: get one of your leaders interviewed for a book on new strategies.
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Publisher's book link:
http://www.phptr.com/title/0130090255
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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