These days, news releases can do more than just get your story reported in news outlets. Online releases can get posted on news portals and other Web sites; be seen directly by customers, clients and other stakeholders; and even boost your search engine rankings.

In fact, the number of times the release gets published on portals and other Web sites is the No. 1 measure of success for today’s communicators, according to “ROI of Online Press Releases” (PDF), a study of professional communicators who use press releases by the Society for New Communications Research.

1. Place anchor text next to important URLs. Anchor text (it looks like this: one-on-one writing coaching) is important because it tells Google and other search engines what your link is about. That increases your inbound link “credit” for search engine optimization (SEO).However, according to HubSpot, the inbound marketing experts, many portals don’t publish anchor text. So add a URL next to your anchor text, like this: one-on-one writing coaching (http://www.wyliecomm.com/consulting/coaching.shtml).Even if the portal doesn’t publish live URLs, the portal’s readers will see your link: “one-on-one writing coaching (www.wyliecomm.com/consulting/coaching.shtml).”
   

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Spike Jones and I have had a running joke about circles after I posted the cycle of the fan diagram. This became a company-wide joke when I tried unsuccessfully to turn a financial graph into a circle on a recent project. Several good things came out of my sharing of a cycle of how a brand can interact with and move people along the steps of fandom. I have to admit I had many reservations about putting a visual thought process out in the blogosphere. But as David Armano told me, “Geno, posting your thoughts to the world in the form of a visual is daunting, but feedback you get in return that helps shape thinking is worth it all.”

So I’ve decided to open the kimono and post about sustainability and the cycle model we use for our not-for-profit client Rage Against The Haze (South Carolina’s teen-led anti-tobacco use movement). When BOF was awarded the contract for RAGE five years ago we made a decision to build a sustainable movement, not another anti-tobacco industry campaign. I don’t know if this was a case of brilliant thinking more than the fact that funding was limited and also limited in terms of commitment of funding. Believe it or not, our mantra for RAGE was “if BOF got hit by a bus tomorrow, RAGE will need to continue to live. ”

As we traveled around the state talking to adults and teens, one thing became obvious — the teenagers needed to lead the movement. What I mean by lead is with their words and actions, so they have true ownership. The major problem we faced with RAGE is similar to a college or high school coach. You only have your current players for a limited amount of time; they grow older, and leave high school for college or the next step in their lives. The RAGE demo is 13–18; this rather wide demo was really a blessing. It forced us to think in terms of a continuous evolution.

Continue reading " Sustainability Cycles Create Sustainable Word-of-Mouth Movements "

Anecdotes make your messages easier to believe, understand and remember.

“Stories are the most powerful form of human communication.”

— Peg C. Neuhauser
Author, Corporate Legends and Lore

If you want to win the hearts and minds of your audience members, you must be a master storyteller. Stories can help you:

• Get and keep reader attention. It’s no secret that our audiences suffer from information overload. Each day, Americans face an average of 5,000 attempts to spark their interest — that’s nearly 2 million messages a year. In this environment, communicators must cut through the clutter to grab our audience’s attention. The best way to do that is through storytelling.
• Bring your mission, vision and values to life. These are arguably some of an organization’s most important messages. Yet in most companies, they’re relegated to laminated cards in employees’ wallets or to the back of the annual report — in six-point type. But storytelling can bring these defining statements to life. In fact, there is no other way to adequately communicate these big-picture elements.
• Enhance credibility. People who are cynical about statistics — and who isn’t these days? — find stories credible. It’s the Peer Principle of Persuasion: Our audience members believe that if it worked for someone else, it will work for them.
  

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Amid the hype about social media, there’s one thing social media has changed, and that’s the tone and temperature of the entire process of building and maintaining community relationships. For many business, commercial, or other interests working to influence community attitudes and decision making, robust engagement by individuals from inside and outside communities should be forcing the rethinking of many old-fashioned techniques so many have taken for granted for so many years.

Where political connections were thought to matter significantly in the past, now they are only valuable to the politician if you can prove you can control the temperature of the opposition and the bullying, bloviating and bellyaching of an ever-growing number of virtual participants through social media.

Another artifact of the old days is having frequent private contacts with political and elected officials, and other decision makers, on pending and current matters with significant public impact. Increasingly, all encounters are watched, counted and reported by someone, forcing an ever more intense transparency; in fact, the transparency has all but stopped these meetings.

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Make Sure Your Web Visitors Get Your Main Ideas — Without Reading the Text

Online, readers don’t read; they scan.

In fact, in one study, usability guru Jakob Nielsen found that the scannable version of a Web page was 47 percent more usable than an unscannable version.

That’s a pretty huge ROI for some bullets and subheads.

The key to scannability is to make sure your Web visitors can understand the gist of the page by reading nothing but the microcontent.

Microcontent is all those short bits of text that guide the user and provide an at-a-glance overview of what the page is about. Microcontent includes:

• Headlines
• Decks
• Subheads
• Links
• Lists
• Bold-faced lead-ins
• Highlighted keys wor

To make sure your page is scannable, run the skim test on your copy. That is, make sure your Web visitors can get the gist of your page — without reading the paragraphs.
 

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