How to write media friendly press releases
Be aware of your audience Jargon that rolls off the tongues of experts at specialist magazines will be as clear as hieroglyphics to other journalists. Industry speak will get you noticed by trade publications but will be lost on mainstream media, so alter your release to suit the target publication. Make it relevant and newsworthy...
10 tips for writing web copy
The first rule of writing web copy is: your customers don’t read web copy. Okay so I am splitting hairs. It would be more accurate to say that your customers don’t read web pages word-for-word. They are far more likely to scan the page, focusing in on words or sentences that are relevant. The second...
Nice pear! Top 5 commonly confused words
During a recent trip to Vietnam, my partner and I went off-piste and booked into a low-budget hostel for the night. The experience wasn’t as bad as we’d feared. OK, so there was no window. But we had clean sheets, free wi-fi and even some complementary fruit. Now, I’ve stayed in a few places that...
Is it curtains for the Golden Goose?
I’m going back in time today. Among the many reasons why Rome fell, did its empire just get too big? Too far-reaching to control? The answer is yes of course. Fast-forward to social networking. Several of our clients have had issues lately with major social networking sites. False profiles are being created – often purporting...
The Apprentice: learning from their mistakes
It seems like only yesterday that Stuart Baggs “The Brand” had us throwing rotten fruit at our TV screens. And yet The Apprentice is back, with an equally deplorable bunch of deluded self-promoters as before. But as you delight in the candidates’ business blunders, it’s worth picking up a few pointers in “what not to...
Thunder from The Cloud
It’s time to respect to some aged disciplines this week. Today it’s the old adage that mistakes are often the price on the road to progress. This thought struck me when reading about the failures in Amazon’s Cloud services last week. And then again when Sony’s Playstation network was hacked. The outcome will almost certainly...
Failure: the key to successful copy
The Economist (16-22 April) is running a fascinating article about the role of failure in business success. The tenet of the piece is that those who “do not at first succeed but try and try again” often ‘make it’ – big style. Famous failures include Edison (the light bulb took 9,000 attempts) and Henry Ford...
Stop press…Microsoft innovates. No, really.
“I can do way more with much less.” “I have changed the way everyone works without changing the way they work.” Sound familiar? These are just some of the smashing straplines for Microsoft’s new Cloud campaign. The ads are running in the quality press and tube stations across London. The copy for the campaign catches...
Social media: asking the right questions
It’s the million-dollar question on every PR’s lips: is social media worth my time? At first glance, a survey of 1,000 business journalists by communications firm Brunswick shows the answer to be a resounding “yes”. According to the respondents, the influence of social media is growing more than any other source of information on stories. Nine...
Helping Virgin Media to predict entertainment trends
Look out this month for Virgin Media’s first Entertainment Index (EI), written and produced by yours truly. Released quarterly, the EI will give insight into trends in the entertainment industry, share performance data relating to Virgin Media’s services and predict the shape of things to come in the ever-changing media landscape. The DEI is essential reading...
Practicing, not preaching
So here we go – our first blog entry. We’re strangely nervous about this, given that we write blogs for clients and also provide advice to them on how to pen them! Abiding by our own rules, we make three pledges. Our blogs entries will be: • Useful: readers will be able to apply our advice...
