I love the title of this post: “clear is the new clever.” There — I said it again.

I’m not a particularly “clever” PR person. I don’t come up with lame excuses, I don’t misdirect people to divert their attention. I like to help clients sort out their story, position themselves strongly, and then tell the world about it.

So I loved picking up this line from journalist/author Sarah Lacy on a recent Bulldog audio conference. Like me, she prefers that people just give it to her straight and clear, rather than trying to grab her attention with something they think is “clever.”

Love it.

The term “press release” is a whopper of a misnomer. The public communication we call a “press release” hasn’t simply been a message to the media for a long time.

Now, though, the web makes the term virtually meaningless. So many different people and audiences other than the media can access our press releases in real time that calling it a press release is almost a blunder. [If someone's got a better phrase, let me know]

So if reaching many different audiences is now both a given and an objective of our releases, what do we need to know to make the most of the opportunity?

This, in a nutshell, is what we will be talking about on Wednesday at 1 PM ET on the PR University audio conference, “New Ways PR Can Use SEO and Smarter Writing Techniques to Reach Wider Audiences.”

I’ll be moderating and will be joined on the call by:

• Paul Furiga, ABC, President, WordWrite Communications
• Laura Sturaitis, Senior Vice President, Media Services & Product Strategy, Business Wire
• Paul Dyer, eMedia Director, WeissComm Partners, Invigorate Communications
• Greg Jarboe, President & Co-Founder, SEO-PR

We’ll be covering these and other topics:

• SEO Fundamentals: How to conduct preliminary keyword research—plus online tools and new techniques for finding your company or brand’s keyword sweet spot
• Word counts, hyperlinks, headline writing rules and other SEO guidelines for optimizing press release copy without alienating readers
• Using video, audio, photos and multimedia to boost your online footprint
• SMR Update: What a social media news release (SMR) is and how it differs from a traditional press release
• Overcoming the challenges of creating and distributing effective social media news releases
• Online Distribution: How to seed your releases, announcements and ideas in blogs, forums and even Facebook, LinkedIn and beyond
• Measuring your success: new tools for measuring the effectiveness of your press releases

Hope you can join us!

Anyone making a living in PR ought to know this, but it always bears repeating: a good story is the best way to convey information. Dry facts = boring. Good story = interesting. And interested people are much more valuable than bored ones.

But if you’re the type who needs academic facts to back up your business theories, then here’s an article from Harvard Business Review: “To Boost Knowledge Transfer, Tell Me a Story.”

Here’s the summary of the article:

We studied a particularly successful program of the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation called SmartLessons. Started in 2005 in response to a push from managers in the field, the voluntary program teaches employees how to deliver information through human stories that people can connect with. It offers a simple guide for writing narratives to post online, as well as the services of an editor, who ensures that the articles and multimedia presentations posted on the SmartLessons site really are in story form. We found that storytelling dramatically increased IFC employees’ ability to absorb information.

Doing PR can be a pretty frustrating job, with endless client/boss demands, temperamental reporters and editors (and bloggers), pitching difficulties and the like. It’s a wonder any of us enjoy making a living at this at all!

Over the years, I’ve found that working in teams, brainstorming with colleagues and having the occasional bitch session with my peers makes this challenging profession a little more bearable.

Unfortunately for many of us, we don’t work in large enough teams to make such collaborative moments possible. PR is often one of the smaller functions in a business. It’s not uncommon for PR to be handled internally at a company by one or two people, and even in agencies, most client teams have only a handful of people.

As a result, our thinking can get stale, leading to more frustration and potentially less PR success. That’s why I’m very happy to let you know that I’m launching a new webinar series, PR Power Boost. The first one will take place Monday, June 22 at 1pm ET/10am PT.

PR Power Boost is a 60-minute webinar to recharge your batteries and send you off with a raft of new ideas to accomplish your PR goals.

Here’s how it will work:

• A small group will meet on a conference call to get the latest PR tips and share ideas. To make it as high-value as possible, there will be no more than 20 participants per call.
• Everyone’s line will be live, so you can ask questions, get answers and offer ideas all throughout the call.
• I’ll facilitate and make sure everyone gets the answers they need.

I’m really excited to offer this new service to the PR community and I think it’s going to be a great success. I’m pricing it at a very reasonable $75 per session, and offering at introductory price for this first webinar of $60 (use the discount code BOOST).

I hope you will join us, and feel free to pass this post and the discount code around to your colleagues!

In the PR game, words really matter. The well chosen or well-coined word can really change the discussion, raise awareness and influence decision-making.

Too often, we in PR fall back on old words, and as a result, we send the signal that we only have old things to say. Not good.

So go ahead and coin that new word, or try that new phrase. It just might be the key factor in the success of your campaign.

This post was prompted by a terrific William Safire column in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. The first part was about the rampant use of abbreviations, or as they are now being called, “abbreves.”  A sample from the column:

Today, the fave (for “favorite”) abbreves are obvi (a shortening of “Thank you, Captain Obvious”) and belig (a clipping of “belligerent,” retaining the soft g). Nobody in the young-barflies crowd orders “the usual”; it’s the yoozh. My grandnephew Jesse concludes sentences with whatev, which is probs (for “probably”) “whatever.” In this cacophony of abbreves, word endings are scattered all over the floor. Go fig.

His second section was on the coinage of new words using “templates” of old words. (BTW, as he points out, a newly created word or phrase is called a “neologism” (knee-OL-o-ism)). Examples per Safire:

• Phrasal templates, e.g., “the mother of all [fill in the blank]“
• Single word templates, e.g., “[blank] chic”, “[blank] point” (talking point, tipping point, etc.)
• Prefix and suffix templates, e.g., neo-, -oholic, -sphere

What these templates do for us is allow us to influence the discussion by talking about what we want to talk about in terms people already understand. So, for example, a  “TV-oholic”might be someone obsessed with TV, while “Obama-gate” is sure to be coined for the first scandal of the Obama Administration

If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about PR, it would be this: to make all press releases and PR pronouncements about the interests of readers, users and editors, not about the organization issuing the press release.

Think about it: aside from pronouncements from the White House, how often are news stories just verbatim press releases from an organization? Virtually never, right? Instead, all news stories are broad stories about a particular situation, with many elements, possibly including you, your boss or your organization.

Yet to this day, the vast majority of press releases are written in that stilted, third-person style (“So-and-so announced today”) as if we were contributing an article to an imaginary media outlet.

Why, just today, I surfed over to PitchEngine.com to check it out — this is a site that intends to help PR people shift from issuing stilted old media-style press releases to new style press releases that are supposedly more user-friendly for the social media environment. But they don’t apparently have editors stopping users from taking their old third-person perspective and jamming it into the SMR format.

A couple of today’s PitchEngine headlines, plucked fresh from the site:

• THE WILMA THEATER Announces Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo as the final selection for its 2009-2010 Season
• Paws Unlimited Foundation Holds their Open House to Raise Awareness and Funding for their No-Kill, Ten-Acre Animal Shelter in the Greater New York Region

Do you care? Why should you?

But, there was a ray of light in this headline:

• Revenue Sharing Cuts from Governor, Legislature to Trigger More Crime, Layoffs Statewide

It’s about Michigan (should have been in the headline) and was posted by the Michigan Municipal League. But at least it’s about other people and not about them!

Tweets. Text messages. Emails. Emoticons. LOL.

You name it, and we can shorten it into a tidbit of information. That’s an “infosnack.”

No longer do people want to “digest” a full newspaper article or curl up with a good book. Give me the story in 140 characters (twitter) or even less (TXTing) and let’s get it over with.

So — to get to the point — what sorts of “infosnacks” are you providing to your key audiences? Are they the usual corporate inedible mush, or is it something tasty and brief?

This is one of the main challenges in PR today — in some ways bigger than the Internet revolution itself. People don’t have time, or don’t want to take the time, to understand what you are trying to say. They want it now, fast.

That means:

• Short email subject lines
• Tweets
• Social media style press releases
• 60 second videos
• TXT messages

Give it to them the way they want it, or find yourself asking why you’re being ignored.

As this blog has noted many times, PR writing needs a major, major upgrade. On second thought, cancel that — as long as PR writing sucks, I’ll probably still be able to make a living, because I know how to string two words together.

But seriously — I would like to see the profession’s writing skills improve dramatically. I hope it happens in my lifetime, but as a sportswriter I love (Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle) would say, that’s not the way to bet.

I’ve written and spoken a lot about improving PR writing, and I’ll be giving it another stab next Thursday, April 23, when I moderate a Bulldog Reporter PR University audio conference on the subject. I just did the speaker briefing call and I can assure you that this audio conference will be full of actionable information about improving your writing skills.

Probably the main thing you need, however, is willpower. You are not going to improve your skills without a) wanting to and b) having the fortitude to take the criticism you need to take to get better. This is the perfect time to commit to improving your writing, because good writing is always a marketable skill.

I took the headline for this post from one of the panelists on next week’s call, Paul Furiga, and it’s his way of saying that good writing works in any medium, from Twitter to books (or e-books). It’s about the writing, not the platform you use to distribute your writing.

The Obama Administration is thankfully retiring the term “Global War on Terror” to describe the U.S.’s, uh, what was it used to describe again?

This was always the first problem with this misbegotten phrase — that it sounded all puffy and strong but it was about as strong as a souffle — that is, easily popped. Because “terror” is a common noun, like “poverty” or “unhappiness.” It’s simply way too vague, which of course has been the problem since the U.S. began using its military to fight this “war.” What does it mean to “win” this war? What forces are needed? Who do you fight when you fight “terror?”

The answers to these questions are still important and largely unanswered, but at least we aren’t tied down by the phrase and its unfortunate acronym, GWOT. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said yesterday that the administration was no longer using the phrase.

Aside from my personal and political distaste for the term, I bring it up here in a PR blog because of the importance of  word choice and names. Labels are how we categorize things in our world, to fit them into a simple construct so that we can effectively communicate with each other. They are by nature both limiting and defining.

We as communicators have a powerful opportunity to set agendas and influence decisions when we choose words and name things. Don’t take this power for granted. And when you need to change the subject or give people something new to think about, consider a name or wording change.

Yesterday, I laid out the three skills every PR person should have if they want to succeed:

• Developing strategy
• Writing
• Pitching

In yesterday’s post, I talked about being a strategist. Today, let’s talk about writing. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about pitching.

As I’ve said repeatedly on this blog, the paucity of good PR writers is baffling. It may be the single biggest reason we are a fringe profession (Yes, we are. We are about 1% of the size of the advertising industry, for comparison, and we have fewer discernible industry standards than licensed plumbers).

It would be impossible to lay out a quick plan for becoming a better writer. But here are my essential tips:

• Get a good editor. Everyone, including the best writers on the planet, run their work past editors. Good editors help you shape your work and your writing style, forcing you to dig deeper and provide your readers with more and better information.
• Develop your ears and your eye. Your ears hear words and ideas you can incorporate into your writing. Your eyes draw you to good writers you can learn from. Pay attention to these senses and work to develop them.
• Simplify. Use the fewest, shortest words possible. Believe me, no one is impressed with multi-syllabic words for their own sake. One of my favorite current writers is the Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon. He uses lots of complicated words, and so I started to read his books with a dictionary by my side. Damned if each of those words wasn’t the exact right word at the right time to express the nuance and depth of his thought! That’s when you use big long words — when you have no other choice.
• Rewrite if you need to. Unless you are sure that your draft is the best you can do, give yourself permission to rewrite. All the best writers do it. It’s magic, really — rewriting helps you clarify your thoughts and exposes whatever weaknesses were hidden in your first draft.

Good writing is hard, and good writers, generally, aren’t born that way. They develop over time, with the help of good editors and by their own perseverance. If you want to be a better writer, and you should, commit yourself to it over the balance of your career.