Infographic: How to choose between text, photos or video for your content

In the days before social media and the smartphone rewrote the rules, the dominant life forms in mass media were writers, photographers and videographers.  They were specialists serving an editor who would mix and match the media as needed to best serve the story.

But in the online world … all media merge. 

Content journalists can’t afford to specialize in just text, photos or video. We must have a working knowledge of all three media

So the question becomes: What to use and when to use it?

Text – Words remain the fundamental building blocks of the online world. Search engines look for them. People use them to fuel Twitter, Facebook and any number of blogging platforms. “Text” is now a verb.  Words remain the fastest and cheapest forms of communication to produce.  Sentences can do two things. They can describe things. They can describe actions.  When you need to persuade, to explain in detail, or to tell a story, text remains your best option. 

Photo – Sometimes words are insufficient. You need to illustrate your message. You need to show instead of tell. Photos work well when you need a quick way to communicate things like shape, texture, color or environment. Good news: Becoming a competent photographer is easier, faster and cheaper than ever. If you own a smartphone, you have a professional camera. Download something like the KitCam app, and start shooting. If you get serious about photos, go to the Digital Photography School and learn more.

Video – Sometimes you need motion. You want to demonstrate a series of steps. You want to put a product into action. Video can do both. It also gives you the option of adding audio, either as a narration to provide extra personality to your content, or as ambient sound to enhance the sense of “being there.” Good news: It is also faster, easier and cheaper than ever to become a competent videographer. To learn more, check out the New York Video School's online lessons. (Amazingly cheap!)

To sum things up:

• When you want to explain, use text.
• When you want to illustrate, use photos.
• When you want to demonstrate, use video.

How to write for readers

Anyone who can converse in English can learn to write clearly.  I’m convinced of it. Not everyone can write like Hemingway. But just about anyone can learn to write to the level of an above average newspaper reporter.

It’s a matter of discipline. If you follow a handful of principles, many of them set down by the readability expert Robert Gunning, you can master the craft of writing clearly:

1. Write to express, not to impress. If you follow this principle, the others fall into line. Get past the idea that there is an “educated” style of writing.  Communicate ideas as quickly and easily as possible.
2. Keep your sentences short. This is a general rule. On average, you should compose sentences that can be read aloud in a single breath. But it's also a good practice to vary the length of your sentences to improve their flow and to avoid choppiness.
3. Choose the simple; avoid the complex.  If you expect readers to wade through a tangle of needless adjectives, adverbs and clauses to discover your point, then prepare for disappointment.  Keep your sentences lean.
4. Stick with familiar words. There are only a few thousand words we use in everyday conversation. Work with them.  Words with more than two syllables slow down the reader. Grease the wheels. Stay with one or two syllables whenever you can. Use polysyllable words as your change of pace.
5. Use precise nouns. If you find the need to use an adjective, think again. There’s probably a noun that will allow you to avoid the modifier.
6. Use active verbs. Any sentence can perform two tasks. It can describe a thing or it can describe an action. The best sentences do both. Do your best to work around sentences that use verbs like “is,” “are,” and other variations of “to be.” Such sentences lack verve.
7. Use the active voice. All sentences that are written in the passive voice should be recast.  The active voice brings power to a sentence. The passive voice drains a sentence of its momentum.
8. Prefer the concrete to the abstract.  If you wouldn’t use a word or a phrase in everyday conversation, then find another one.  Scientists, engineers and economics speak in abstractions. We’re not writing for them. Everyday people talk in concrete terms. You will get further writing for them.
9. Understand your readers. Study their wants and needs. Learn to speak their language. Relate your ideas to their experiences.
10. Write with a human voice. Avoid the legalese. Distain the corporate drone. Craft sentences that sound as if they come from a friend.

3 reasons for every brand journalist to love the inverted pyramid

For generations, newspaper reporters have depended on the inverted pyramid when they need to crank out a story on deadline.

The form has taken a beating in recent decades. The critics say it’s outdated.  They are wrong.

Think about it. Today's news cycle is both 24/7 and instantaneous, even for brand journalists.  Plus, more and more readers are choosing the smartphone as their main news medium.

We often have to write fast. We have to fit our stories onto smaller screens. Thus, the virtues of the inverted pyramid are clear. It is:

Easy to write

Unlike the story or the essay, the inverted pyramid is not designed to flow logically from premise to conclusion.

Instead, the inverted pyramid starts with a lead that answers the 5Ws and the H: who, what, when, where, why and how. After you’ve nailed the lead, you simply arrange the remaining paragraphs in the order of their importance.

This is child’s play with Microsoft Word. Just write the paragraphs in any order than occurs to you,  and then rearrange them into order by cutting and pasting.

There is a reason this is the first form a rookie newspaper reporter learns to execute.

Easy to edit 

The inverted pyramid is as easy to edit as it is to write. The editor really has only a few decisions to make. First, does the lead work? Second are the paragraphs in the right order?

Any rewriting takes very little time, even if you kick it back to the writer.

Easy to read

Readers are trained to read the inverted pyramid. They understand the rules and aren’t expecting a brilliant essay or a riveting story.  They just want the facts.

The inverted pyramid is designed to deliver information quickly and cleanly.  The reader can quit the story at any time and still get the gist.

Best time to use 

• When you need to write fast, particularly on deadline.
• When you are reporting hard news.
• When you are starting out as a content journalist.
• Anytime you are in doubt about which format to use.
• If you have a small staff with a large workload.

Keep a simple idea simple; avoid needless complexity

Here’s a news release that allows the news to get lost in the weeds of legal and technical yip-yap.

Supertel Hospitality, Inc. (NASDAQ: SPPR), a real estate investment trust (REIT), today announced that it sold the 114-room GuestHouse Inn in Jackson, Tennessee for $1.1 million. Supertel purchased the property in July 1998 and it was no longer classified as a core holding. The company will use the proceeds from the sale for general corporate purposes.  

Year-to-date Supertel has sold 11 non-core hotels generating gross proceeds of approximately $19.3 million. Four hotels are currently under contract and expected to close by year-end, pending financing and other customary closing conditions. The sale of the hotel demonstrates the company's continued commitment to the business plan which calls for continued balance sheet improvement by shedding underperforming assets.

What went wrong

• The original text is written for the high school graduate, scoring a 12.7 on the Gunning Fog Index. We prefer to produce text that scores between 6 and 7.

• The text contains only 114 words, but 26 have three or more syllables. That’s about 23 percent. We want to cut that by at least half.

• The original takes a simple business deal and makes it hard to grasp. It forces the reader to wade through a lot of wasted words to find the main point. The real story here isn’t that the company sold a hotel.  The story is that the company is following through with its plan to sell off its worst hotels. The underlying message is: “We’re getting better, so you should buy our stock.” But that gets lost in all the wasted words and clumsy punctuation.

• The text is written for the eye, not the ear. Try reading it aloud. Notice how awkward it feels on the tongue. This is a sure sign of writing that lacks clarity. If you can’t say it easily, you can’t read it easily. It is just that simple.

• The lead paragraph uses two sets of parentheses in the first 11 words. Parentheses are stoppers. They disrupt the flow of a sentence and make it harder to read. It makes far more sense to work parenthetical information into the body of the text.

• Lawyers love to add words that add nothing.  In the pursuit of absolute precision, they sacrifice clarity. For example: “Four hotels are currently under contract and expected to close by year-end, pending financing and other customary closing conditions.” Needless words put the burden on the reader. When faced with hard-to-read text, readers seldom work harder; they are more likely to quit.

The rewrite

Supertel Hospitality has sold the GuestHouse Inn in Jackson, Tenn., for $1.1 million, the company said today. The GuestHouse is one of 11 hotels Supertel sold this year for a total of $19.3 million.

The company has sold 11 hotels this year for a total of $19.3 million.  

Supertel viewed the hotels as poorly performing assets and sold them to improve its balance sheet. Contracts to sell four other hotels should close by Dec. 31.  

Supertel Hospitality is a real estate investment trust that trades on Nasdaq as SPRR.  

The company bought the 114-room GuestHouse Inn in 1998.  Money from the sale will go into the general fund.

Why the rewrite is easier to read

• The rewrite scores a 6.8 on the Gunning Fog Index., making this text measurably easier to read than the original. Of its 94 words, 11 have three or more syllables.

• The rewrite puts the actual news front and center. We no longer have to search for the connection between the news hook with the big picture. The hook is the sale of the hotel; the big picture describes how the sale fits into the company’s strategy.

• We’ve cut the multi-syllable words to 12 percent, making the text much easier to comprehend on the first reading. We could make the rewrite easier to read if we could cut the multi-syllable words like “hospitality” and “investment.”

• We have also changed the voice of the text from passive to active.  For example, “Contracts to sell four other hotels should close by Dec. 31.”

• We've taken out those nasty parentheses that mucked up the lead paragraph, and moved that information to graf 4. The lawyers may not like it, but the readers will.

2 apps that can turn your smartphone into a broadcast studio

Karl Hodge at the Content Strategist reports:

Tools like Vyclone, a social video editing and publishing platform for crowdsourced video. Up to four streams can be used as the raw material for automatically assembled coverage of a chosen event. The applications for journalism are clear — enabling a small team armed with iPhones to capture multiple angles of a story as it unfolds. 

Then there’s Bambuser, available for iOS, Android and Windows phones. It’s an app that enables you to stream video live, direct from your mobile device. Outside broadcasting has never been easier.

Why the writer is the star of content marketing

Bryan Clark at Copyblogger says the future of content marketing belongs to the writer:

Google made talented writers more important with the Panda and Penguin updates. Instead of weak content and “unnatural” link building, now sites need strong content that attracts links organically. 

But it hasn’t stopped there. Now who creates the content, and who does the linking out matters – which is why Google wants to know who you are via your Google+ authorship profile. What’s been dubbed Author Rank has the potential to be the biggest algorithmic signal for SEO since the hyperlink itself. 

The days of lame anonymous content are over. Even better, rock star writers with demonstrated success and strong social followings will command the highest compensation and equity positions. 

Think about that.

First rule of content: Be the show

James O'Brien at Mashable writes about the Red Bull content strategy:

The idea central to content marketing is that a brand must give something valuable to get something valuable in return. Instead of the commercial, be the show. Instead of the banner ad, be the feature story. The value returned is often that people associate good things with — and return to engage with — the brand.

4 ways you can succeed with a mobile landing page

Greg Hickman at Copyblogger says:

Landing pages are critical in your marketing funnel. That means they need to work well in a mobile environment. 

If your customers can get to your landing page from an email, your mobile responsive website, or an SMS (as mentioned earlier), you’ll want to take a few steps to make your mobile landing pages a success.

• Create a clear call to action. You thought a clear call to action was critical on a normal landing page? It’s a must on a mobile device. Screen real estate is limited, and people navigate with one eye and one thumb. Make it clear and un-missable.

• Be thumb-friendly. For most devices, the ideal clickable area is 44×44 pixels. You’ll want to add padding to your links, and make sure you have some negative space between those links to avoid mis-clicks. (All the more reason to follow the best practice of having no irrelevant links on landing pages.)

• Use simple forms. Keep your forms to as few fields as possible. Simple is sexy. Long forms equal lower conversion, and that’s even more true on mobile devices.

• Test, test, test. What works on desktop won’t always work on mobile, so be sure to test your landing pages with your end goal always in mind.

The MoPR Manifesto

Let's start with a basic truth: Most journalists have total contempt for publicists, and publicists are sick of pitching stories.

Here's the good news: There's an unprecedented opportunity to make both sides happy.

Publicists no longer need journalists to tell their clients' stories to the public. We can bypass them entirely and talk directly to the stakeholders who matter most to our clients.

Behind this opportunity are three significant developments.

One is the emergence of social media. Another is the near ubiquity of smartphones and tablets. The final is the development of personal communication technology that allow just about anyone to write a story, snap a photo, shoot and edit a video, or make an audio recording -- on the fly and with very little training.

All of this is readily available to any publicist. But access is just the first step.

To exploit this opportunity, we must master a wide range of media. We must write well. We must learn to take great photos. We must shoot great video and edit it in compelling ways.

Above all, we must master the art of storytelling. We must combine text, audio and images into stories that our clients' audiences will embrace and share.

The press release is dead. Long live the mobile publicist.

12 virtues that can make your content more shareable

Monica Romeri at Social Media Today identifies 12 characteristics of content that folks are likely to share:

1.  It covers real-time, relevant issues or news. 

2.  It includes captivating images. 

3.  Highly shared titles are actionable, concise, clear, descriptive, authoritative and intriguing. 

4.  It includes compelling and illustrative infographics. 

5.  Highly shared content has breadth and depth.  

6.  It shares fresh, original thinking. 

7.  It covers topics blowing up in the news a la newsjacking. 

8.  Highly shared content is not solely focused on pushing products or services. 

9.  It is free of spelling errors, typos and grammatical and editing flaws. 

10.  It is visually interesting and presented in an organized fashion. 

11.  It showcases industry-relevant thought leadership. 

12.  Highly shared content may come from a trusted and credible source.

Simple tip to improve your writing: Use more periods.

Writers love commas.

They allow us to start in one place, meander freely through a series of connected concepts, wrap our prose around a metaphor or two, and arrive safely at a conclusion.

Unfortunately, they also allow us to abuse our readers, stumbling from one unrelated idea to another, ignoring the need for transitions, droning on and on, and utterly losing and confusing our audiences.

There is a simple solution to improve your writing. Use more periods.

Embrace the concise. Next time you are thinking about one more comma, go with a period.

4 ways to create URLs that attract Google to your online content

If you want Google to find your content, it helps to create a URL that is easy for the search engine to recognize and catalogue.

That means you should:

1. Use words in the URL that tell the search engine about the content.
2. Keep your URLs brief and to the point; trim any extraneous information.
3. Avoid including generic information like page numbers or session IDs.
4. Avoid using too much keyword information in the URL; one keyword or phrase is probably enough.

Think of it this way: If you can recite the URL from memory a day after you created it, then it's a cinch for Google to find it. If you can't, then you are making it too hard for Google to find your content.

Is brand journalism 'real' journalism?

When properly executed, you bet your ass. And I say that with 20 years in the "real" news biz.

There are a lot of doubters. Most of them are hard-core journalists who are still slaving in a dying industry. (OK, it's not really dying, per se. But it's definitely changing from a corporate model to an entrepreneurial model, and few journalists are making the transition comfortably.)

I've got news for the news snobs: For the last 70 years or so, you've been doing exactly what brand journalists are doing. That is, making a living generating timely, useful, interesting stories in the service of a corporate client.

Newspapers, radio stations and TV stations are owned by corporations, not collectives. It's time to stop pretending you are on higher ground.

To be successful, brand journalists must tell stories that engage, entertain and inform their audiences. How is covering the news generated by a brand any different than covering any other beat?

"But brand journalists must submit their stories for corporate approval," the doubters say. 

OK, so how many reporters don't have to submit their stories for editing from a higher-up who works (gasp) for a corporation?

Stories are stories. Journalism is journalism. Get over it.

KitCam: It's a lot of camera for just $1.99

Here's a new camera app I'm playing with. It's called KitCam, and it offers some interesting advantages over Hipstamatic, Instragram, Magic Hour and other such apps. The app comes with a wide range of lens and film choices. It handles video and time-lapse and tilt shift and even multi-exposure. It connects you to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Dropbox, Instagram and more. And almost all of it comes with the basic $1.99 package.

Here's a video introduction:



Give it a try and let me know what you think.

5 ways to use Pinterest to make your content better

Mallory Jean Tenore at Poynter says reporters and editors are using Pinterest to:

1. Highlight feature content by connecting it to topical Pinterest boards.
2. Resurface old but quality content to give it a new life.
3. Respond to news events by posting in-house and crowd-sourced content.
4. Showcase images from local attractions and events.
5. Reach new audiences by creating a visual index of their content.

For detailed examples, read her post.

3 ways to pique interest with a great title

Roger C. Parker at the Content Marketing Institute says:

• Metaphors make titles easier to understand and remember by giving readers a mental picture or point of comparison for the subject you’re talking about. Jay Conrad Levinson’s “Guerrilla Marketing” communicates its promise of describing unconventional ways to achieve success, by likening the marketing tactics to tactics used in guerrilla warfare. Another metaphor-based series is the “Chicken Soup for the…” series, which communicates a warm, nurturing feeling by referencing the meal that mothers and grandmothers have traditionally served to their family members who need some TLC when they’re under the weather.
• Alliteration, or rhymed consonants, also makes titles easier to remember. Examples include Cliff Atkinson’s “Beyond Bullet Points,” Dr. Frank Luntz’s “Words that Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear,” and Lynne Felder’s “Writing for the Web: Creating Compelling Web Content Using Words, Pictures, and Sound.”
• Curiosity can be aroused by unexpected words or contradictory terms, which can help set your content apart from “duller” treatments of the same topic. An example is David Chilton’s “The Wealthy Barber.” The contradiction between “wealth” and “barber” compels readers to find out “how” and “why” barbers can become wealthy.

Visit CMI to download Parker's 10-point checklist for creating titles that will sell your content to your audiences.

5 ways to use social media to improve your content journalism

From Alice Brennan at Forbes:

1. Develop a voice. You don’t mess around with your logo, so be focused in creating a pitch-perfect social media presence.
2. Embrace the nuances. Consumers are smart, so branded content should be subtle.
3. Be seen at all the right parties. Where your content is published matters. Be sure to research the sites and outlets your customers frequent and respect.
4. Get it out there. This is where social media is your best friend. Get a real distribution plan for your branded content and execute it well— in some cases, you may even want to consider using a content distribution platform.
5. Tailor content to the social media platform. For example, post photos on Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram; promote text on Facebook and news on Twitter.

How to tell a story with one photo and 60 seconds of audio

Jeff Domansky at ThePRCoach.com says Fotobabble may be the Twitter of storytelling:

Fotobabble is a storytelling tool that lets you do just that using your computer or iPhone. It’s got great potential from quick and easy storytelling to curation and content marketing. I can see all kinds of creative possibilities. 

It’s easy to use. Upload a photo and add your story by recording a simple audio track on Fotobabble’s website. It’s free and with a studio quality microphone, the only limit is your imagination.

There is more than one way to be a journalist these days

That's a central theme in this brief video from PBS Off Book:

4 things that decide if your Facebook post shows up in a news feed

Josh Constine at TechCrunch says Facebook now looks at four factors to determine if any given post will show up in any given news feed:

1. If you interacted with an author’s posts before: If you Like every post by a Page that Facebook shows you, it will show you more from that Page.
2. Other people’s reactions to a specific post: If everyone else on Facebook shown a post ignores it or complains, it’s less likely to show you that post.
3. Your interaction with posts of the same type in the past: If you always Like photos, there’s a better chance you’ll see a photo posted by a Page.
4. If that specific post has received complaints by other users who have seen it, or the Page who posted it has received lots complaints in the past, you’ll be less likely to see that post. This factor became a lot more prevalent starting in September 2012,