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Moving communication campaigns into action |
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Writing news stories Here is a back issue of Marketing Booster, the email newsletter that Richard Groom writes and sends free every fortnight to subscribers. You can subscribe here or read over 60 back issues using the back issues index page. This week I had the opportunity to coach a client on how to write news stories for his company's customer magazine. We looked at a few of the draft articles he had written and talked about what was needed to finish them. Here are the conclusions we drew: 1. Get the basics right. The starting point for any article is to get the basic facts right. Usually that means reverting to the Kipling's famous phrase: "I keep six honest serving men. (They taught me all I knew.) Their names are What and Why and When. And How and Where and Who." It's easy to forget to mention where an event happened for example, so keeping these six little words in mind will help you remember to include the essential facts. 2. Readers are stupid. Or at least, they probably won't know things that you take for granted. You might know that TLF stands for Tandy Leather Factory, but do your readers? And it also stands for Fédération des entreprises de Transport et Logistique de France and dozens of other things. So always explain abbreviations and anything else that readers might not understand. 3. Keep the internal stuff out. You can get really bogged down in explaining people's job titles, department names and so on. Even worse, you can go off into tangents about internal information that readers just don't need to know. A customer magazine isn't the same as the staff newsletter: you don't have to cover all the internal stuff. 4. Check the names of things. It's amazing how often we know something by a certain name, and yet we are wrong. The classic one is Tiffany's. Most people think that's the name of the famous jewellery store. But actually it's called Tiffany & Co. So it's always advisable to go to the source for clarification, which in most cases is the website of the organisation, event, or whatever else it is that you are mentioning, 5. Have a beginning, middle and ending. There's no set formula for this, but somehow articles that flow from a good beginning to a clear ending work well. One idea is to start with a short paragraph that sums up the whole story, then add some details, then close with what happens next (eg "the product will be launched in December"). This has been a very quick run through five of the things that if done well will improve articles for customer magazines - and they could just as easily apply to press releases and other similar items. I'd be happy to take a look at the next article you write and give you some feedback. Just drop me an email if you'd like that. But remember, I won't be around to reply for a couple of weeks. |