Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Yes it’s true. It’s a hard thing to admit for a writer. When it comes to social engagement and marketing, visuals rule the social world.

At least that’s what research and the gurus say. But  I’m also pragmatic. My experience tells me that yes, visuals count.

Here’s the punchline. And, you’ll notice you need words to deliver the punchline.

Words are even more important in a visual world.

Use these 7 strategies to come up with a virtually endless supply of fresh ideas for content creation. Several of them involve simply tapping into the power of some websites you are probably already using...

Content marketing poses many different challenges to businesses of all sizes, one being producing enough content. In fact, according to a Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs study, 64 percent of small businesses and 53 percent of enterprise businesses note that producing enough content is a content marketing challenge they currently face. Often businesses aren’t able to produce “enough” content because they believe they simply do not have any new ideas for their content marketing projects.

Though content creation can seem daunting, there are many easy ways to make the content marketing process easier. Not only are a variety of tools available to help inspire fresh concepts, but there are also some hassle-free methods that businesses in any industry can take advantage of — simply by tapping into the power of some of the websites you are probably already using every day....

Last Saturday I had the honor of teaching at a public writing conference at The Washington Post. After I finished my part of the program, I spent the day listening carefully to four of the Post’s most accomplished writers and reporters: David Finkel, Bob Woodward, DeNeen L. Brown, and Ezra Klein.

I took copious notes, wrote down anything that struck me as wise or useful, and want to share with you what I learned from them. Please don’t take these as direct quotations, but as handwritten paraphrases containing the gist of their advice. Particularly notable were the shared values of craft and sense of mission and purpose in a gang of four that ranged from the 70-year-old Woodward, still cranking out books, to the young phenom Ezra Klein, who is trying to re-invent how to make policy stories interesting and relevant. I’ll take them in the order of their presentations...

Writing matters, and your blog is the best place to practice writing and develop your good ideas....

Next time you sit down to blog, take a minute to think about the whole. What are you really saying when you put it all together? What would the title of your book be if every blog post was a chapter? If you don’t like the book that results from this exercise, you may need to change your topic, or how you’re writing.There is an even more practical way to handle this.

Start today by writing a new book or ebook one chapter at time, one blog post at a time. In a few weeks, compile those posts together as a PDF and start giving it away. Let your blog be the rough draft.I believe that a blog is the most important marketing tool in today’s economy of ideas. It is your calling card, your idea journal, and your rough draft. Don’t let it go to waste.

It’s one of my favorite pieces of writing advice from Ray Bradbury, and it’s blindingly brilliant in its utter simplicity. If you want to identify the ideas you should write about, the themes you can write passionately and believably about, follow this advice: Make a list of ten things you love, ten things you hate, and ten things you fear. Write to celebrate the things you love, and write to destroy the things you hate and fear.

Bradbury put it this way in an interview with his biographer, Sam Weller: “You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things.

I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.”...