Riffs, Tiffs and What Ifs

We've moved to a new site - WritingRiffs.com Appreciate you checking this article out at WritingRiffs.com . We'll be deleting all the content on this site over the next few weeks. Thanks! Steve From personal experience and conversations with many experts in the business -to-business field, there is reasonable agreement that most corporate sales, marketing and PR lingo suffers from ... "The Four Too’s." Too wordy Too complex Too confusing Too valueless Agree or Disagree? Why is that? Essentially it boils down to: Trying to be all things to all people at all times Not knowing you can’t be all things to all people at all times Trying to sound really sophisticated, cool, intelligent, intricate and inclusive And finally, the biggie, not understanding your customer/buyer. They only want one thing. Understand this. You exist to solve a problem for them. In a recent technology ana...

I'm a PR GITM now That's right. Do I look like one? Impressive? What's GITM mean? Well, it's a highly valued, intensely competitive, world-class business designation that only " special" people get. People like me. And, intellectually, you have to be heads above a Rhodes Scholar - a deep thinker, like me - to get the professional designation. At the end of this highly informative, spectacularly written, best practices case study (eat your hearts out New Yorker and Wall Street Journal ), I'll tell you what GITM stands for. I took a little time off the "Shoot the Donkey " columns to work on a freelance brand-building campaign. Well actually, that's not true. It's really a brand-building campaign using advertising instead of PR. But there really isn't too much of a difference between the two. I prefer advertising, however, just because it's more creative (like me), but strate...

Why Can’t New Marketing and PR People Write? T his article was in response ( or supplement ) to "When It Comes to PR Writing, Only One Thing Beats Talent... and there ain't much talent around," written by Don Bates, director of the Master's Degree in Strategic Public Relations program at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management . It was originally posted on the Media Bullseye site . I’ve had Marketing and PR employees work for me right out of college, and found most were woefully unprepared for the real-world new PR environment. Not because of any inherent deficiency in the school they came from, but more from the frenetic pace of change in the PR industry. Blogs, Vlogs, Podcasts, Social Media, SEO, SEO PR, Tags, and on and on and on. The technology changes alone can be daunting or intimidating. But the writing … the writing, that’s now part skill, part science and part art. It is the absolute foundation o...