From PR to storyteller in 10 easy steps
Social media may have democratised journalism, but that hasn’t made it easy for brands to get in on the act. Customers are often suspicious of corporate storytelling, and many organisations find it hard to break bad old PR habits to communicate in new, exciting ways.
This is probably because most comms professionals are not necessarily writers and publishers – they have chosen to be publicists. Yet, in this new age of digital communications, a brand’s story is likely to remain anonymous to the world unless content is curated, crafted and optimised to be seen and shared on the web.
So does that mean PRs need to be writers and journalists too? Not quite, but what they do need is a regular brush-up on their content marketing skills to help them understand how they can design their content so as to highlight the peg and think like a journalist, a scrapbook collector and a search engine to maximise the output of their communication.
Our latest tipsheet that is free to download, gives you straightforward advice that will help you transform dry old business communications into the type of stories your customers and would-be customers will want to tell each other and make you a brilliant storyteller.
Download the tipsheet to immediately improve your comms, and the results you’re delivering to your business.
Photo Courtesy of digitalrob70 on Flickr
Please provide the link to your PR to storyteller in 10 easy steps
http://go.pardot.com/e/35802/ds-story-Cision-Whitepaper-pdf/wqg39/111387962
I agree with this blog’s sentiments but PRs cannot and should not pretend to be journalists – they must remain PR professionals. That is, experts in the art of communication and not ones that hide behind an Inbox, or have their telephones directed permanently to answer-phone.
In my experience, some of the worst ‘professional PRs’ are ex-hacks (often failed ones), with zero PR training.
A further issue is that PR-penned copy, by its very nature, cannot be independent, even if many members of the hobbyist ‘citizen journalist’ blogger fraternity are prone to cut-and-paste the content lazily, as if it were their own, when it certainly is not. Let us not forget that the original writer is paid directly by the company concerned and that the aforementioned corporation will, therefore, own the article.
Also, is biased copy, or ‘advertorial’, which poses as independently written ‘journalese’, both moral and legitimate? Does it, therefore, corrupt the basic journalistic values of informing, educating and cajoling the reader?
Indeed, journalists (and journalistic techniques) can assist PR and marketing departments positively but the definite lines that separate the independent writer, thinker, critic and creator from PRs must not be blurred and confused, for the sake of both our professions.
Rob Marshall.