THE COMPLICATED ETHICS OF REVIEWS & RATINGS

Businesses are being blackmailed ... Is there a solution?

The single social necessity we all have as humans is not to have power, but to not be left powerless. This fundamental principle led pilgrims to new lands, colonists to organize governments and oppressed of all walks of life to rally against those holding the notion of powerlessness over them.

And so it comes to bear on the Internet. Protecting your reputation is an activity all people and organizations should participate in. Companies are especially keen to this practice because the liberation of publishing has led to the simple fact that anyone can post anything about anything online, regardless of motive or motivation, with little recourse in the offing. Sure, libel and slander online are still libel and slander, but there’s a whole lot of reputation-sensitive content that won’t fall under the guise of legal precedent.

Anyone can jump online and say, “You suck, company!” That’s not libel. That’s opinion.

Unfortunately, many sites, especially those in the business of aggregating ratings and reviews, take a company or an individual’s power to protect their reputation away from them. Allegations abound from Yelp to ResellerRatings.com and more. Heck, even RipOffReport.com — the site you’re supposed to be able to go to and report ripoffs, has been alleged to trade payment for positive reviews or removal of bad ones.

If these sites are allowing anyone to post reviews of businesses and individuals, there’s no issue. However, many of the sites have been caught or alleged to have filtered out positive reviews only to tell the businesses in question they’ll post the positive ones, or perhaps have a writer from the website produce a positive story about the business, in exchange for money. No pay, no positive reviews. That’s not only not fair, it leaves the businesses powerless.

Yelp even has gone so far as to discourage businesses from encouraging their customers to post reviews on the site. As we’ve discussed before, while their terms of service don’t explicitly state so, an answer on their FAQs in as much says Yelp doesn’t think businesses will solicit reviews in and of themselves, but will only solicit positive ones, thus biasing the content. They assume businesses will exchange discounts for reviews as well, not considering that a business owner may just say to their customers, “Good or bad, review us on Yelp. It will help us get better and/or look better.”

From the review site’s perspective, I can see second-guessing the transparency of the random business owner. I stopped counting the number of clients who have asked me to take down negative reviews or delete negative posts on their Facebook page without even addressing the situation first. So there may be a need for a policy against pushing positive reviews.

But from the business’s perspective, if the only way to combat negative reviews is to pay the site to allow them to solicit or produce positive ones, you’re biasing the information just as badly.

We’d like to assume that every business would solicit reviews — good and bad — and respond to each accordingly. But the honest truth is that most business owners would only solicit positive ones and would just as soon sweep the negative ones under the rug. Still, holding positive reviews hostage and forcing the business to pay is simply put: blackmail.

Is There A Solution?

While a perfect resolution for the great ratings and reviews quandary probably isn’t in the offing, if I were made King of Ratings and Review sites tomorrow and could write policies for them all, I would construct something like this:

It is our intent to offer our site visitors organically posted reviews of every business listed, both positive and negative, that are not solicited from any interested party. However, we understand that businesses may want to use our platform to host customer reviews and ratings for all to see. As such, here are some basic guidelines for businesses on doing so:

If you ask your customers to post ratings or reviews to this site, please only ask them to do so honestly and refrain from asking only for positive reviews

Do not offer customers a discount or incentive for posting ratings or reviews to this site

Should we discover evidence that any business has or is soliciting only positive reviews, or is incenting people to post reviews, we will remove any reviews (positive or negative) we determine to be produced during the timeframe of such encouragement or solicitation and temporarily suspend the businesses ability to mange its page and content on the site

Repeat violators of our policies will permanently lose the ability to manage their brand page, access brand page analytics or receive any benefits of premium or advertising partner relationships with our company

Actively respond and participate in discussions about your ratings and reviews on the site, but do so in a fair and professional manner with the spirit of serving your customers — good, bad or indifferent — with excellence in mind

Upon request, we will supply your business with point-of-sale and on-premise signage to encourage customers to use the site. For those wishing to, we also offer both advertising and premium business subscriptions which provide more exposure and brand page management benefits. We reserve the right to suspend any of those paid or premium activities for businesses violating the terms above.

Call me romantic if you like, but I can’t see much wrong with that kind of approach. It’s fair to the business that doesn’t want to fork over money to the site, to the business that does and to the financial prospects of the site itself. It’s also infinitely more useful to the site visitor, whom one would assume is the top priority for all parties in question.

So, Yelp, ResellerRatings.com, RipOffReport.com or any of the others that might fall into the pay-to-play review sites, you’re welcome to the above. We’d be tickled if you used that approach. We don’t even need credit for it. All the payback we need is the knowledge there’s a better way to do business here and someone is following it.

Did I miss anything? What would you add? Are you being held hostage by one of these sites? Share your story in the comments. (But please remember to report your situation as honestly and fairly as possible. Libel and slander online are still libel and slander.)

The Main Types of Blog Advertising Opportunities:

Online advertising offers three primary types of ads bloggers can use to make money from their blogs.

Pay-per-click: The advertiser pays the blogger each time someone clicks on the advertiser's ad.

Pay-per-impression: The advertiser pays the blogger each time the ad appears on the blog's page.

Pay-per-action: The advertiser pays the blogger each time someone clicks on the ad and performs an action such as making a purchase.

Contextual Ads:

Contextual ads are typically pay-per-click ads. The ads are delivered based on the content of the page on the blog where the ads will be displayed. In theory, the ads shown on the page should be relevant to the content of the page thereby increasing the chance that someone will click on them. Google AdSense is an example of a contextual advertising program.Google AdSense and Kontera are examples of contextual advertising oppportunities.

Text Link Ads:

Ads that are not served based on the content of a blog's page but rather are placed based on specific text in the posts of a blog are called text link ads. Text Link Brokers and Text-Link-Ads are examples of text link advertising opportunities.

Impression-Based Ads:

Ads that pay bloggers based on the number of times the ad appears on the blog are called impression-based ads. FastClick and Tribal Fusion are examples of impression-based advertising opportunities.

Affiliate Ads:

Affiliate ads give bloggers a choice of programs to provide links to products. Bloggers are paid when someone purchases the advertised product. Amazon Associates and eBay Affiliates are examples of affiliate advertising programs.

Direct Ads:

Many bloggers offer an option for visitors to purchase advertising space on their blogs. Direct ads are typically shown in the form of banner ads or similar display ads provided directly to the blogger by the advertiser to be uploaded to the blog. Pricing and payment methods vary from blogger to blogger (often dependent on the amount of traffic the blog receives). Direct advertisers on blogs are sometimes called sponsors of that blog.

Reviews:

Reviews (often called sponsored reviews) are an indirect form of advertising on blogs. A company might contact a blogger directly asking them to write a review for a product, business, website, etc. If the blogger is paid to write the review, then it is a form of advertising revenue. Some companies offer forms of review advertising such as PayPerPost.

Why television will thrive and print media will struggle in 2013

“You know things are not okay if, on a New Year’s Day, The Economic Times  frontpage has negative news. This pink worthy runs on the belief system that optimism is good for the economy and the markets (and thus its own advertisers). It goes out of its way to tell people the good news, and buries the bad on the inside pages. But today was different. “New Year starts with a number of reasons to worry”, said the lead story in Mumbai,” writes Firstpost’s editor-in-chief R Jagannathan this morning.

Jagannathan’s prognosis is not good news for the media industry. A slowing economy (real growth at 5.4 percent) almost always sees corporates slashing their advertising and marketing budgets. With no silver lining in sight, the media business in India is set for a difficult year ahead.

In short, there will be less advertising budgets chasing the same advertising inventory, implying, immediately, pressure on margins. TV, though, is different – we might actually see inventory shrink, thanks to TRAI’s proposal to put a cap on commercial time.

Let’s take a look at how the year ahead will pan out for different media. To begin with, let’s take a look at the macro picture as measured by IRS (Q2 2012). Press has shown a CAGR (percent) of just 0.9 percent from Q4 2011 to Q2 2012 – the worst performing of all media. TV has grown by 5 percent, C&S by 11.7 percent, Radio by 1.9 percent, Cinema by 9.4 percent. And digital, the darling of consumers, continues the high-speed growth – showing CAGR of 34.8 percent for the period under consideration. Today, we discuss TV and newspapers.

Let’s begin with TV, the largest contributor to advertising expenditure.

TV

It’s going to be an interesting year for TV – and TV will have it much easier than print thanks to two developments. The first is the cap on commercial time, a policy decision which will see a shrinkage in available inventory. For genre leaders, this is a boon, as advertisers want to play ‘safe’ and park their money on channels and programs with a proven ability to deliver viewers. So, for example, in the Hindi general entertainment channel genre,  for Colors, STAR Plus and Sony, each of whom guarantees at least 200 GRPs per week, it could result in advertisers queuing up to buy time, which should result in higher yields on premium, big ticket programming. The flipside, though, is that stragglers in each genre might see their already low yields going down. The muscle that the leaders have will get multiplied by a successful roll-out of digitization, which could dramatically increase revenue from subscribers and automatically easing pressure on the need for advertising revenue. So 2013 will be a good year for the leaders in TV – and a tough one for the rest.

Pay channels, again, will be gainers. Digitisation will allow channels to charge significant premia on exclusive, premium content, as is being experimented by Kamalhasan with the pre-theatre release of his new film on DTH platforms at a premium price of Rs. 1,200. We will see such premium pricing for movie premieres, for big-ticket sports programming and for exclusive events. A significant increase in subscription revenue will allow TV airtime salespersons to play hardball with media buyers for the first time in over a decade. I’m going to watch this battle from the front row.

The biggest gain, interestingly, will accrue to high-quality special interest and niche channels. Thanks to the low number of people meters, channels with niche viewership end up being significantly under-measured – and digitization will change the picture significantly. First, it will allow all households subscribing to be reflected and measured and, second, as a consequence, to demand higher prices for their advertising time.

Print: Newspapers

This is a mixed bag. With the total print readership flat and the ad revenue shrinking, this was never going to be an easy year. Whatever readership growth is visible for the category as a whole comes from new markets, with the mature markets flat or negative. As a result, I see the industry operating different strategies for new and mature markets.

In the mature markets, pressure on both margins and volumes will force the newspapers, finally, into looking at cover price revenues to generate income. English, especially pink, newspaper cover prices in the metros will go up. Simultaneously, I see pagination in the main papers coming down, as it is in this section that the advertiser demand is most vulnerable. Supplements will increase across the country, as the low ad rates (justified by low print runs) will continue to attract smaller advertisers targeting niche geographies or readers. Leaders in mature market, thanks to their domination in respective markets, will be able to keep ad rates steady, but it is difficult to see any increase in 2013.

In the new markets, cover prices will stay low, as will the advertising rates, thanks to the competitive environment. This will continue to be a loss making segment of the trade. Examples will include Times of India’s new editions in Kerala and Vizag, and the new Bengali newspapers launched by ABP and BCCL. It’s win-win for reader and advertiser in these situations, and bleeding for the publisher.

We will also see the shrinking of the editorial teams in all small towns, with the bulk of the content coming from a central office, and only city pages being made in the city of publication. Technology allows smooth and low-cost transfer of data, making many in small towns working on ‘national’ pages, business pages, sports pages and entertainment stories redundant. This will also change the mathematics in the business, as people cost in these editions will come down. The papers will bleed, but not bleed badly.

What merits close watching is what the larger newspapers do on the digital front. All large newspapers have a mature digital presence, and consumption of content on the web is increasing exponentially. The problem is the monetization of this readership, which few in the world have managed to find a solution to. In 2013, I see at least BCCL making a big play in this area, perhaps creating a digital only, semi-paid offering. In the English market, as readers embrace (especially the new, young readers) consumption on digital devices, the paper, in a physical form, is under threat. The flat readership, as measured by IRS, is perhaps a proof of the migration to digital.

The explosion of tablets is a factor that will weigh on the minds of think-tanks at all media houses, but particularly in the print media houses.

“A recent study undertaken by Manufacturers Association of Information Technology (MAIT) said tablet sales in India were expected to cross 1.6 million units this year, a growth of 40 percent over last year, and way above the 16 percent growth registered by PCs and 26 percent by notebooks. Desktop sales grew by only 11 percent. MAIT estimated tablet market would grow to 7.3 million units by 2015 to 2016,” said ZDnet.

Each tablet owner is a likely migrant from newspaper in the printed form to newspaper in the digital format. If the reader migrates, publishers of current print products need to have an ecosystem which can deliver on the reader’s needs – and monetize him or her. Much has been achieved in successfully moving the loyal reader from paper to digital – but it is in the area of monetization that we will see some experimentation.

Active Listening

Hear What People are Really Saying

Listening is one of the most important skills you can have. How well you listen has a major impact on your job effectiveness, and on the quality of your relationships with others.

We listen to obtain information.

We listen to understand.

We listen for enjoyment.

We listen to learn.

Given all this listening we do, you would think we'd be good at it!

In fact most of us are not, and research suggests that we remember between 25 percent and 50 percent of what we hear. That means that when you talk to your boss, colleagues, customers or spouse for 10 minutes, they pay attention to less than half of the conversation. This is dismal!

Turn it around and it reveals that when you are receiving directions or being presented with information, you aren't hearing the whole message either. You hope the important parts are captured in your 25-50 percent, but what if they're not?

Clearly, listening is a skill that we can all benefit from improving. By becoming a better listener, you will improve your productivity, as well as your ability to influence, persuade and negotiate. What's more, you'll avoid conflict and misunderstandings. All of these are necessary for workplace success!

Tip:

Good communication skills require a high level of self-awareness. By understanding your personal style of communicating, you will go a long way towards creating good and lasting impressions with others.

About Active Listening

The way to become a better listener is to practice "active listening." This is where you make a conscious effort to hear not only the words that another person is saying but, more importantly, try to understand the complete message being sent.

In order to do this you must pay attention to the other person very carefully.

You cannot allow yourself to become distracted by whatever else may be going on around you, or by forming counter arguments that you'll make when the other person stops speaking. Nor can you allow yourself to get bored, and lose focus on what the other person is saying. All of these contribute to a lack of listening and understanding.

Tip:

If you're finding it particularly difficult to concentrate on what someone is saying, try repeating their words mentally as they say them – this will reinforce their message and help you stay focused.

To enhance your listening skills, you need to let the other person know that you are listening to what he or she is saying. To understand the importance of this, ask yourself if you've ever been engaged in a conversation when you wondered if the other person was listening to what you were saying. You wonder if your message is getting across, or if it's even worthwhile continuing to speak. It feels like talking to a brick wall and it's something you want to avoid.

Acknowledgement can be something as simple as a nod of the head or a simple "uh huh." You aren't necessarily agreeing with the person, you are simply indicating that you are listening. Using body language and other signs to acknowledge you are listening also reminds you to pay attention and not let your mind wander.

You should also try to respond to the speaker in a way that will both encourage him or her to continue speaking, so that you can get the information if you need. While nodding and "uh hushing" says you're interested, an occasional question or comment to recap what has been said communicates that you understand the message as well.

Becoming an Active Listener

There are five key elements of active listening. They all help you ensure that you hear the other person, and that the other person knows you are hearing what they say.

1. Pay Attention

Give the speaker your undivided attention, and acknowledge the message. Recognize that non-verbal communication also "speaks" loudly.

Look at the speaker directly.

Put aside distracting thoughts.

Don't mentally prepare a rebuttal!

Avoid being distracted by environmental factors. For example, side conversations.

"Listen" to the speaker's body language.

2. Show That You're Listening

Use your own body language and gestures to convey your attention.

Nod occasionally.

Smile and use other facial expressions.

Note your posture and make sure it is open and inviting.

Encourage the speaker to continue with small verbal comments like yes, and uh huh.

3. Provide Feedback

Our personal filters, assumptions, judgments, and beliefs can distort what we hear. As a listener, your role is to understand what is being said. This may require you to reflect what is being said and ask questions.

Reflect what has been said by paraphrasing. "What I'm hearing is," and "Sounds like you are saying," are great ways to reflect back.

Ask questions to clarify certain points. "What do you mean when you say?" "Is this what you mean?"

Summarize the speaker's comments periodically.

Tip:

If you find yourself responding emotionally to what someone said, say so, and ask for more information: "I may not understand you correctly, and I find myself taking what you said personally. What I thought you just said is XXX; is that what you meant?"

4. Defer Judgment

Interrupting is a waste of time. It frustrates the speaker and limits full understanding of the message.

Allow the speaker to finish each point before asking questions.

Don't interrupt with counter arguments.

5. Respond Appropriately

Active listening is a model for respect and understanding. You are gaining information and perspective. You add nothing by attacking the speaker or otherwise putting him or her down.

Be candid, open, and honest in your response.

Assert your opinions respectfully.

Treat the other person in a way that you think he or she would want to be treated.

Key Points

It takes a lot of concentration and determination to be an active listener. Old habits are hard to break, and if your listening habits are as bad as many people's are, then there's a lot of habit-breaking to do!

Be deliberate with your listening and remind yourself frequently that your goal is to truly hear what the other person is saying. Set aside all other thoughts and behaviors and concentrate on the message. Ask questions, reflect, and paraphrase to ensure you understand the message. If you don't, then you'll find that what someone says to you and what you hear can be amazingly different!

Start using active listening today to become a better communicator, improve your workplace productivity, and develop better relationships.

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Treat the other person in a way that you think he or she would want to be treated.

Key Points

It takes a lot of concentration and determination to be an active listener. Old habits are hard to break, and if your listening habits are as bad as many people's are, then there's a lot of habit-breaking to do!

Be deliberate with your listening and remind yourself frequently that your goal is to truly hear what the other person is saying. Set aside all other thoughts and behaviors and concentrate on the message. Ask questions, reflect, and paraphrase to ensure you understand the message. If you don't, then you'll find that what someone says to you and what you hear can be amazingly different!

Start using active listening today to become a better communicator, improve your workplace productivity, and develop better relationships.

The 7 Cs of building a social media strategy

After using social media for a while, a lot of people and companies decide that they need a strategy. Of course, that approach is like putting the cart before the horse.

To ensure success, think about your social media strategy in the context of the seven Cs.

1. Community

Like all good communication, it is best to start by determining your target audience. Where do they spend time online? What social media channels do they use? Before your social media efforts can take shape, you should listen and learn about your community.

For example, one of their top social media communities for a business-to-consumer brand such as Oreo is Facebook. Its recent salute to the Mars landing was a huge hit with their 27 million Facebook fans. Meanwhile, a job seeker will most likely find a community on LinkedIn. According to a recent survey, 93 percent of job recruiters use LinkedIn to find qualified candidates.

Finding out where your community interacts on social media is the first step of a successful social media strategy. It’s important to determine what type of conversations are taking place about your brand and in your industry before engaging in a community or building a community from scratch.

2. Content

After you figure out how your community engages with social media, you should determine what content you’re going to share with your followers.

For example, if you want to grow your personal brand, what articles are you going to share to highlight your expertise about your job or personal interests? If you are a company, how can you show your clients and prospects that you are a thought leader or that you are trying to make their lives easier?

To learn more about the importance of content, you may want to read the Content Marketing Institute blog.

3. Curation

You can’t think about content without mentioning curation. Curation is a way of sharing other people’s content. According to Beth Kanter in her post Content Curation Primer, content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the Web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way.

In his post "Manifesto for the Content Curator," Rohit Bhargava defines a content curator as someone who continually finds, groups, organizes, and shares the best and most relevant content a specific issue. Content curation is one of the easiest ways to share content because you don’t have to create anything. This leads well into the next “C”: creation

4. Creation

Creation is the act of producing content online, whether it’s in the form of text, images, or video. If you have published a blog post, uploaded a video to YouTube, or taken a picture and posted it to Instagram, you are in the creation business.

One of the ways to help you create content is to start an editorial calendar. It may be helpful to use this editorial calendar template. If you don’t like spreadsheets, you may want to consider using an application like Divvy. For the more advanced content creators, using a content marketing software platform such as Kapost should be something you consider.

5. Connection

After you have either curated and/or created content, the next C is the physical act of sharing content. This C is about connecting with your community and gaining a deep understanding of what your target audience likes about your social media activities and strategy.

By looking at measurements and data, determine the kind of content your communities are attracted to and willing to share with their friends and colleagues.

Many brands have created buyer personas so they can better understand and connect with their target audience. In other words, personas are fictional representations of your ideal clients, based on real data about demographics and online behavior, along with educated assumptions about their history, motivations, and concerns.

On the personal branding side, use these five tools to manage your relationships online.

6. Conversation

This C is all about having a conversation with your community. This C is similar to the community, but the difference is the actual engagement part of communicating with your communities. To help you with this concept, learn the 3 key social media conversation starters.

7. Conversion

The seventh C is conversion. You can’t talk about social media without having a return on investment (ROI) conversation. Remember, your social media strategy should be tied to your business strategy. To help you get started, you may want to look at these 14 social media ROI metrics.

When thinking about this from the company perspective, it is important to remember to look at it two ways: the external view by your clients and prospects and the internal view by your employees. To develop a successful social media strategy, it is important to communicate, convince, and most importantly, convert social media into action, both externally and internally. Your social media metrics should boil down to three main categories: awareness, sales, and loyalty.

On the personal branding side, social media is a way to help you advance your career—whether it be climbing the corporate ladder or launching a successful business. You can judge the success of your personal social media strategy by whether you’re top of mind with your network and whether it helps you get that interview or land that perfect job.

For ways to maximize conversion with your social media strategy, you may want to learn about the social media maturity model. According to Forrester, there are five main stages of social media maturity and adoption.

Truly influence people by making an emotional connection.

People are wired to connect.  Neuroscientists have discovered that there is a part of our brains in the prefrontal cortex that helps us tune into other people, making the connections that are necessary to create relationships that help us survive.

How does this little bit of neuroscience have anything to do with blogging?  Because the most successful blog posts are those where the writer has tuned into something that the reader is experiencing.  This affects that part of the brain, generating an emotional connection with the reader.

For those who understand how people really make decisions, that’s the key. You may imagine that we weigh all the rational choices and do some mental calculation in our heads that helps us make a choice but in reality, all the possible considerations would literally stop us in our tracks if we didn’t have the shorthand of emotions to guide us.

Typical objectives for a corporate blog don’t take this into consideration.  They focus on goals like providing thought leadership, generating traffic, or to improving SEO–all reasonable goals for a blog but they tell only part of the story.  If you want to truly influence people, the most effective way to do that is to connect with them on a deeper, emotional level.

And as a marketer, influencing people is your job.

This means that when people read your post, they  must feel something.  When a reader connects with you emotionally, you are able to establish trust and as we all know, trust is what makes people want to do business with us. The secret sauce is how you accomplish that.

At Lion Brand, we have several talented writers who are passionate about our product.  Our objectives are to inspire and educate people.  But the real home runs are when we are able to touch peoples’ emotions.  A recent post by a guest blogger is a perfect example of creating that emotional connection.

Franklin Habit, wrote a post called Me, Me, Me, about how he feels guilty about knitting sweaters for himself.  He talked about how he gives away most of what he knits and it is sometimes unappreciated. He goes on to say that if he knit more for himself, he would know that he could make something that fit perfectly and it would give him great pleasure.  Franklin was able to tune into a universal truth about knitters and about people in general that speaks to the guilt of taking care of yourself.  He did it with openness, vulnerability and humor. (I invite you to read the post and consider how you relate to it, whether you knit or not.)

The numbers back up the power of connection.  That post, written within the last couple of weeks has been viewed over 11,000 times, shared on social media a couple of hundred times and has received many comments that talk about how he captured their feelings exactly.  Clearly engagement is closely related to connection.

There is truly nothing like the feeling that someone “gets” you.  People who read that post knew they had been “felt.”  This mirroring of peoples’ emotions is one of the most important ways to connect with others.  When reading his piece they said to themselves,  “Yeh, that’s how I feel too sometimes too.”

I know myself that my most successful posts were written when I was emotional about something and felt I needed to right a wrong.  When I wrote this post about how businesses need to change to be able to participate in social media I was feeling angry about an interchange with someone who didn’t understand this. I believe that the sharing of this post was based on others who felt the same frustration that I did.

It’s not realistic to think that you can create a moving piece of writing every day.  In the same way that relationships are built on a range of communication from small talk to deep, relationship-building conversations, a blog will consist of a mix of different types of writing.

There are probably thousands of blog posts about (pick your number) of ways to get more traffic or to write a successful post.  And all of those tips and tricks can lead to the “small talk” part of the relationship.

But the real secret sauce of a great blog post is the ability to connect with another human being and to make that person feel that you know her.  That’s how we create relationships that last.

10 Differences between Advertising and Public Relations

If you're searching for a career or trying to promote your company, you may have questions about advertising vs. public relations. These two industries are very different even though they're commonly confused as being one and the same. The following ten properties just scratch the surface of the many differences between advertising and public relations.

1. Paid Space or Free Coverage

Advertising:

The company pays for ad space. You know exactly when that ad will air or be published.

Public Relations:

Your job is to get free publicity for the company. From news conferences to press releases, you're focused on getting free media exposure for the company and its products/services.

2. Creative Control Vs. No Control

Advertising:

Since you're paying for the space, you have creative control on what goes into that ad.

Public Relations:

You have no control over how the media presents your information, if they decide to use your info at all. They're not obligated to cover your event or publish your press release just because you sent something to them.

3. Shelf Life

Advertising:

Since you pay for the space, you can run your ads over and over for as long as your budget allows. An ad generally has a longer shelf life than one press release.

Public Relations:

You only submit a press release about a new product once. You only submit a press release about a news conference once. The PR exposure you receive is only circulated once. An editor won't publish your same press release three or four times in their magazine.

4. Wise Consumers

Advertising:

Consumers know when they're reading an advertisement they're trying to be sold a product or service.

"The consumer understands that we have paid to present our selling message to him or her, and unfortunately, the consumer often views our selling message very guardedly," Paul Flowers, president of Dallas-based Flowers & Partners, Inc., said. "After all, they know we are trying to sell them."

Public Relations:

When someone reads a third-party article written about your product or views coverage of your event on TV, they're seeing something you didn't pay for with ad dollars and view it differently than they do paid advertising.

"Where we can generate some sort of third-party 'endorsement' by independent media sources, we can create great credibility for our clients' products or services," Flowers said.

5. Creativity or a Nose for News

Advertising:

In advertising, you get to exercise your creativity in creating new ad campaigns and materials.

Public Relations:

In public relations, you have to have a nose for news and be able to generate buzz through that news. You exercise your creativity, to an extent, in the way you search for new news to release to the media.

6. In-House or Out on the Town

Advertising:

If you're working at an ad agency, your main contacts are your co-workers and the agency's clients. If you buy and plan ad space on behalf of the client like Media Director Barry Lowenthal does, then you'll also interact with media sales people.

Public Relations:

You interact with the media and develop a relationship with them. Your contact is not limited to in-house communications. You're in constant touch with your contacts at the print publications and broadcast media.

7. Target Audience or Hooked Editor

Advertising:

You're looking for your target audience and advertising accordingly. You wouldn't advertise a women's TV network in a male-oriented sports magazine.

Public Relations:

You must have an angle and hook editors to get them to use info for an article, to run a press release or to cover your event.

8. Limited or Unlimited Contact

Advertising:

Some industry pros such as Account Executive Trey Sullivan have contact with the clients. Others like copywriters or graphic designers in the agency may not meet with the client at all.

Public Relations:

In public relations, you are very visible to the media. PR pros aren't always called on for the good news.

If there was an accident at your company, you may have to give a statement or on-camera interview to journalists. You may represent your company as a spokesperson at an event. Or you may work within community relations to show your company is actively involved in good work and is committed to the city and its citizens.

9. Special Events

Advertising:

If your company sponsors an event, you wouldn't want to take out an ad giving yourself a pat on the back for being such a great company. This is where your PR department steps in.

Public Relations:

If you're sponsoring an event, you can send out a press release and the media might pick it up. They may publish the information or cover the event.

10. Writing Style

Advertising:

Buy this product! Act now! Call today! These are all things you can say in an advertisement. You want to use those buzz words to motivate people to buy your product.

Public Relations:

You're strictly writing in a no-nonsense news format. Any blatant commercial messages in your communications are disregarded by the media.

How to write a book

Buy a notebook. Or several. While you may wish to type your novel directly into a computer, it's not always possible to be near one when inspiration strikes. Thus, it's best to have good old-fashioned pencil and paper no matter where you are. Moreover, many writers swear by the connection from mind to hand to pen on paper, so at least give it a go before dismissing this as an option to aid your writing experience.

A leather-bound or heavy card notebook is the sturdiest and can take lots of abuse in a backpack or briefcase, whereas a spiral-bound notebook, while not as robust, is easy to keep open. Better still, should you decide the page you just wrote is utter garbage—it's easy to rip out!

Spiral or bound, consider using graph paper versus standard lined paper. You may end up creating drawings and sketches as you go, and it's useful for indenting paragraphs, or outlining.

Put your thinking cap on. Now that you have your notebook, it's time to squash the traditional bugaboo of all writers: that empty first page. Use those first pages to create the overview of your story including an outline, notes about characters (possible names, descriptions, "back stories", etc.), places, era—all the little things that go into a larger story. There are several advantages to this overview approach, including:

It will give you new ideas for your story as you describe different parts of it (write those down!)

Nothing goes to waste. You may describe a character, for instance, who never appears in the story directly but who influences another character.

You always have something to refer to when you run out of immediate ideas.

Create your outline. An outline will help you define the arc of your narrative—the beginning, development of plot and characters, the setting up of all the events leading to the big conflict or climax, and then the resolution and ending.

The beginning of the story is often the hardest part—if you want it to be. The best thing to do is start as broadly as possible. Say, for example, you want to write a mystery novel, and you're a fan of World War II. Write that down: Mystery, WWII. The beauty of this is that both categories are very broad, but simply by putting them together, you instantly narrow the field of possibilities. You now have, at the very least, a time period, and a focus. Something mysterious happened during WWII. Try to focus it a little more.

Is it personal, or is it sweeping? WWII was certainly both. For the sake of example, say its personal, one soldier's story.

When does it take place? WWII is obvious if it's about a WWII soldier's story—or is it? This is one of those decision points you will come to right away. Say it actually takes place now, which leads to the next question, "How now?” To move right along, lay out the beginning scenario: Your main character finds a journal—his grandfather's journal from WWII. This is a revelation, because Grandpa never made it home from the war, but nobody knows what happened. Perhaps, in this journal, your hero will uncover the answer.

You now have several key questions answered, right out of the gate: who: your hero; when: then and now; what: a journal, and the mystery of a missing person. You don't know "why," yet. That is one of the things you must discover. How? Again, this must be uncovered through asking yourself questions.

Develop your characters. Start with the obvious. In this case, you have already created two characters—a young man and his grandfather. You can determine characteristics of both simply by the setting, and expand your characters in the process. Grandfather would likely have been married, so there would be a grandmother in the picture. There's a generation between grandpa and the young man, so there would be one of his parents who is also Grandpa's son or daughter. See how easy that is?

Continue along in this fashion, extending from one character to all the others that they may interact with. Before long, it's possible that you'll have too many characters and interactions. This is good, especially in a mystery. You may have need of "red shirts," like the hapless, disposable ensigns from the original Star Trek!

In the process of developing your characters, you will likely ask yourself the same question your readers will soon be asking: what happens next? Use these questions to develop the story. You know, for your story that the young man wants to find out what happened to Grandpa. Since all he has is the journal to go on, he reads it, and discovers Grandpa's story that lead him from his small town in Kentucky and his pregnant wife (grandma!), to the beaches of Normandy, to finding himself wounded behind enemy lines—all of which he wrote of in his journal. He never makes it home. Knowing these things, you see questions and a pattern emerge:

Events take place in "today" time, and also during WWII: As the journal is read, the date is 1944. As the grandson explores, it's today.

To add some action to the mystery, the young man must do something. Since Grandpa isn't coming home, send the young man to Germany to find him—dead or alive.

Where was Grandma in all this?

Continue along this process of creating the arc, but at this point you could even hazard a tentative ending: the young man discovers why Grandpa never made it home, and how his journal did. Then all you need to do is write down everything in the middle!

"Timeline" your outline. Now that you've created the basic story (minus all the words), sketch your outline as a timeline, with each character's milestone events laid out on their own line. There will be times when two or more characters intersect, and where some disappear altogether. Just draw a line where those events happen. This too will give you something to kick start your muse when she falters.

Edit mercilessly. If you find your plot goes nowhere, and nothing you can do will help it—back up to where it last made sense, and try something else. Your story is not required to do anything you tell it to do in the outline. Sometimes, the story has other ideas where it wants to go. Wherever you are in the process, the muse may beckon you elsewhere. Follow her—this is part of the joy of writing.

Write your novel. With your story and characters prepared, you know what happens next: tell the reader how the hero got from page one to page 500!

Writing Your First Screenplay

Over the past 10 years, I've worked with approximately 25,000 screenwriters and filmmakers in various capacities. Professionally, I've written screenplays, television shows, many commercials for TV and radio, and countless scripts for a variety of purposes. Still, I don't pretend to have the perfect answer how to start writing a screenplay. I'm not sure such an answer exists. You have to find the path that works for you. I do have some suggestions that should make writing your first screenplay a little easier.

-- Joe Mefford

1. Love your story. You are going to be thinking, breathing, and living with your characters for a long time. When you are writing your script, nobody else but you will know these characters and their story. If you are writing a love story, you'd better cry when they break up. You'd better laugh out loud at your comedy and leave on the lights if you are writing a horror film.

2. Watch Movies. Watch a lot of movies. Approximately 100,000 screenplays are written a year. Hollywood produces roughly 500 feature films a year. So even the worst film of the year beat impressive odds to make it to the big screen. You can learn something from almost every movie out there.

3. Read Screenplays. Before you start writing your screenplay, read several screenplays. Read at least 5 or 6; it would be better to read even more. You can download screenplays off the internet from sites like www.iscriptdb.com, you can buy them from www.simplyscripts.com, or you can find them at a library. It doesn't matter how you read them, just be sure to read them.

4. Learn the form. After you've read 5 or 6 screenplays, you've figured out that screenplays follow a particular format. This format must be followed. You can learn the format from a book like The Screenwriter's Bible. We have a free article called How to Format a Screenplay. And Final Draft will even format your script for you while you write.

5. Read the trades. There are magazines, blogs, websites, and plenty of books on screenwriting. Not only are these important for you to learn the craft but you'll also gain

6. Read a screenplay while you watch the movie. With one eye on the script, watch a movie with the other eye. Notice how a well-written screenplay follows the adage, "Show, Don't Tell." Even though you're reading words on paper, a well-written script shows you the movie in your mind.

7. Try to write the screenplay for a favorite movie. Before you read the screenplay for a favorite movie, watch a few scenes. Then try to write that screenplay. Obviously you'll just copy the dialogue verbatim. But try to write the Scene Headings and Action Lines for that movie. Then compare your efforts to the actual screenplay.

8. Learn screenplay structure. There are countless books, seminars, and articles on screenplay structure. My definition of screenplay structure is that "your screenplay must make sense." My favorite beginning book on screenplay structure is Writing Screenplays that Sell by Michael Hauge. We also produce a great 5-hour DVD on story structure called The Hero's 2 Journeys.

9. Limit your learning. I know writers who own every book, subscribe to every magazine, and use every possible software program. They go to every conference and attend every seminar. They do everything related to screenwriting but write a screenplay. Of course, you can never learn too much. But spend as much time actually writing as you do learning about writing. Trust me; you'll become a better writer by first writing poorly.

10. Share your work. Don't be afraid to join a writing group where you share your work with others. Some of the best screenplays have come out of writers' groups. If you're serious, then join a serious writing group where members push each other to turn out their best work. If you can't join one in your community, you can sometimes find writers' groups online.

11. Learn the business. This is an aspect of screenwriting that too many writers overlook. The irony is that the solitary nature of screenwriting is counterbalanced by the fact that your script is going to be the blueprint for a film that may hire hundreds of people. You had better understand how you fit in the whole filmmaking process. The best scripts don't always get made. 

12. Have fun. If you type an average of 45 words-per-minute, you can type an entire script in just 5 or 6 hours. Thinking about your characters, developing your plot and coming up with ideas for scenes obviously takes a lot more time. Have fun with it.

13. Don't limit yourself to just feature films. Writing a good script is a skill valued by a lot of people and companies. You can take these skills to advertising agencies, production companies, and even video game manufacturers.

How to Write a Movie Review

Writing a movie review is a great way of expressing your opinion of a movie.  The purpose of most movie reviews is to help the reader in determining whether they want to watch, rent or buy the movie.  The review should give enough details about the movie that the reader can make an informed decision, without giving anyway any essentials such as the plot or any surprises.  Below are our guidelines and tips for writing a good movie review.

1. Watch the movie

The first step in writing the review is to watch the movie.  Watch the movie in a relaxed environment you are familiar with.  You do not want to be distracted by an unfamiliar room.  Watching the movie a second time will help you to absorb a lot more detail about the movie.  Most movie reviewers take notes as they watch the movie.

2. Give your opinion

Most movie reviewers will give their opinion of the movie.  This is important as the reviewer can express the elements of the movie they enjoyed or disliked.  However, as in all good journalism, the reviewer should also give impartial details, and allow the reader to make their own mind over an issue the reader liked or disliked.  Opinions should be explained to allow the reader to determine whether they would agree with your opinion.

Many regular movie reviewers will develop a following.  If one can find a reviewer who shares a similar taste in films, one can confidently follow the reviewer’s recommendations.

3. Who is your audience?

You need to consider who your likely readers are.  Writing a movie review for children requires a different approach than if writing for a movie club.  Ensure you report on the factors that matter to your likely audience.

4. Give an outline

Give the outline of the movie, but don't give away essential details such as the end or any surprises.  If there is a big surprise you want to entice readers by telling them something special happens, just don't say what.

5. Actors

If the movie contains actors, as most do, detail who is starring in the movie and how well you think they acted.

6. Structure

Did the movie follow a regular predictable story line, or did it get you thinking like a Quentin Tarantino movie?

7. Cinematography and lighting

Give details about how well the movie was shot and directed.  Was the lighting good in the moody scenes?

8. Music

Did the movie have its own score like Koyaanisqatsi or ET, or did it feature songs from popular artists?

9. Read, read and read

Read and check your review thoroughly.  It can be embarrassing to find errors in your work after it has been published.  This is especially important for reviews that will be published on the Internet, as search engines are always looking for the correct spellings of keywords.

How to Write a Book Review in 10 Easy Steps

Okay, so you have to write a book review. What do you need to do and in what order? Here's a 10-step process you can use to review any book.

1) Don't read the book. At least, not yet. Instead, start by looking at it. Look for clues to the nature of the book you'll be reading. Is it a richly manufactured item aimed at collectors? What does the cover illustration indicate the book will be about? What sort of blurbs is included? How is it categorized by the publisher? All of these will tell you the book's target audience.

2) Don't read the book. At least, not quite yet. Instead, open the book and flip through it. Look at how the words are arranged on the pages. Start with the largest distinctions—the number of pages, the number of chapters, and so on. Then move to the size of paragraphs, how much of the book is dialogue, etc. This will tell you about the book's readability and how the author structured the book.

3) Build a framework for taking notes. You always focus better if you have something specific to look for and markers to pay attention to along the way. Start with the simplest things—the number of chapters, for example—and then move on to more complex tasks, such as questions you'll want to answer: "What makes this book a classic?" or "What made this book 'speak for a generation' like the introduction said it did?"

4) Read the book. And as you do so...

5) Pay attention. That isn't a disciplinary command like, "Don't let your mind wander!" Instead, pay attention to your reading experience. This is the first real challenge for most people. What caught your attention, and when were you bored? When was the book suspenseful? Which characters did you like, and why?

6) Review the book and take notes that let you explain its effects. This is the second tough step for most people. Remember that note-taking framework you built earlier? Now's the time to fill it in. Flip back through the book and write brief, purposeful notes. What happens in the first chapter—and what was its effect on you as a reader? When you passed from one part of the book to the next—chapter, section, or setting—what kept your attention? This is the part most people neglect, but it lays the foundation for the rest of the book review, so keep at it until you can do the following:

Explain how the book as a whole affected you.

Explain how the author achieved the effects he or she did.

Explain the relationship between form and content.

If it is fiction, explain the function of each character in the novel

Explain the characters' relationships to one another.

7) Sum up the book. This is the easy part, and half of what most people think a book review is. Put the book in a nutshell. Keep summarizing it until you've got everything covered clearly. Use that to start your review.

8) Pass judgment. This is the other half of a book review for most people. Is this book good or bad? This is the time for you to say so. Put that second in your review—but use your notes from earlier to explain why and to make your judgment persuasive. Give specific examples, and move from passing judgment to explaining the book. That comes third.

9) Put the book in context. You might have been able to get this information from looking at the book's cover and introduction, or you might need to do a little research. What categories does this book fall into? Is it science fiction or fantasy? Is it the first of its kind or an imitation? The author's first book or fifteenth? Spend some time relating this book to others in its category to further explain the book and your judgment of it.

10) Check your aim. You've written your review. Now's the time to step back and apply this sort of reasoning to your own review. Did you explain every major aspect of the book? What was your target audience? Did you write this for a class with specific criteria—or for a fan magazine whose audience already knows this type of book well? If so, you might have to edit your review to add or remove details. If you don't...you're done!

Improve Your Writing with these Editing Tips

Teachers, business people, and just about everyone else it seems complain often and loudly that people today (usually “kids today”) don’t know how to write. I’m convinced, though, that a big part of the problem (perhaps the biggest part of the problem) is that people don’t know how to edit. We labor under the notion that good writing flows easily from the pen or typing fingers, and that editing too much will “kill” our work.

The best writers know differently, of course — their memoirs and biographies and writing manuals are filled with stories of books that needed to be cut in half to be readable, sentences that took weeks or months to get just right, and lifetimes spent tinkering with a single work that never strikes them as “just right”. To paraphrase a common saying among writers, there is no good writing, only good re-writing.

But if writing isn’t taught well enough or often enough these days, editing is hardly taught at all. This is too bad, since editing is where the real work of writing is at. More than just proofreading, good editing improves the clarity and forcefulness of a piece. Here are some tips and tricks to help you make you’re writing more effective:

Read out loud: Reading a piece out loud helps you to identify clunky, awkward passages that seem to make sense to the eye, especially to the author’s eye.

Read in reverse: You may have heard about reading backwards, word by word, to help proofread. This works because you bypass your brain’s tendency to fill in what it expects to see, allowing you to catch spelling errors you might otherwise gloss over. This is useless, though, when it comes to content, where meaning comes from phrases and word order. Instead, read from back to front, sentence by sentence (or maybe paragraph by paragraph, or both) to make sure that each sentence and each paragraph is internally coherent — that it makes sense on its own.

Sleep on it: Wait at least a night, and preferably longer, before starting you’re editing. Ideally, you want to forget what you wrote, so that — again — your brain doesn’t see what it expects to see but only sees what’s really there. A lot of times we make logical errors that make sense at the time, because our minds are filled with ideas, examples, and arguments related to our topic; when we approach our writing with a clear mind, though, those mental connections are gone, and only what we’ve actually written counts.

Cut, don’t add: We are almost always too wordy. While you may need to add a word or two while editing, for the most part you should be removing words. Concise writing is more powerful and easier to read than lengthy prose.

Justify yourself: Every point, statement, question, joke, even every word should have a reason to be in your piece; if it doesn’t, strike it. Be harsh — if a word or phrase does not add value to your writing, get rid of it.

Establish cognizance of pretentious language usages and eliminate such material: That is, watch for fancy words and cut them. Inexperienced writers often ape the language of academia, or rather the language they imagine academia uses. Even if you’re in academia, don’t use academic writing as a model. While there is a time and place for jargon, for the most part jargon exists to exclude readers, not include them. For most readers, the language of journalists is a much more appropriate model — and that means aiming for at best a smart eighth-grader’s reading level.

Throw out and get rid of unnecessary redundancies you don’t need: This applies in both sentences and the work as a whole. In high school, you might have learned to “say it, say it again, and then say what you said”; for most readers, this is a waste of their time and an insult to their intelligence; in the end, they’ll just tune you out. Say it clearly the first time, and then move on.

Kill unsightly adverbs: Some adverbs are fine, but usually they serve only to pad out a statement that doesn’t need padding. For example: “He ran quickly”. It is in the nature of running to be quick. If there’s something unusual about his running (perhaps he ran slowly), then mention it; if not, just say “he ran” and trust your readers to know what running means.

Passive sentences are to be avoided: Beware of the use of “to be” and its conjugations (is, was, were, are, am). These often indicate a passive sentence, where the subject is acted upon instead of acting. Passivity makes for weak, unconvincing writing. Passivity is often the hallmark of someone trying to weasel out of something: “Mistakes were made” assigns no blame, while “I made a mistake” tells the world you’re taking responsibility. It does not convey the action, it only suggests the effect. So avoid passive sentences.

Good editing, like good writing (or, better, as part of good writing), is an art. It takes time and practice to develop a real talent for editing, but the end result is worth it — your writing will be more alive, more effective, and ultimately more likely to be read. And that is, after all, what’s important: that your audience reads and, just as crucially, understands your work.

Add ONS FOR A GOOD PRESENTATION !

Have you ever had the intention of creating a boring presentation? One that’s not memorable or leaves no lasting impression? Probably not. Nobody has the ‘intention’ of doing that. So, why are so many presentations boring and forgettable? Great question!

I remember the summer just before I entered first grade. My parents built a new house just across town. It was exciting — I can still see the trucks and cement mixers, and smell the soft clay they were digging up. After they poured the foundation and built the framework, I finally got to help! They put the plywood down for the floor in my room and gave me a little hammer and some nails and let me go to town. To this day, if you were to pull up the rug in that bedroom, you’d see scores of nails that were hammered half way in, bent and then hammered flat.

What does this have to do with your presentation? Think about it. Once the structure was in place, little Darren couldn’t really affect the building of the house. Small issues won’t cause any damage when the structure has been built correctly. There are three components to a good presentation: structure, content and delivery.

Structure: the framework on which you build your speech (the ‘skeleton’)

Content: the stories, examples and metaphors (the ‘meat’ of the presentation)

Delivery: the manner in which you present (the ‘life energy’)

Often, we can find great content and work passionately on our delivery, but without good structure, it all falls apart. Many presenters don’t see the value or take the time to create good structure. For example, last year I was giving a keynote speech at a company in Florida. As usual, I arrived early to hear the other presenters. I listened to one passionate presenter who’d been on Oprah and was doing great work with kids. His stories were very good, his delivery was passionate and compelling. I’m sure many audience members left thinking he was great, simply because they laughed and liked him.

I don’t believe, however, that audience members walked away with a memorable message. He lacked good structure. I don’t fault him — if you don’t know, you don’t know. Many passionate presenters can ride a long way on great delivery. The challenge is that they don’t see how good they could be by building a simple structure.

For many years, I struggled and created my keynote speeches by trial and error. I had a three-point structure: an opening, a body, and a conclusion. Having an opening and closing is better than not having one, but the body of my speech was just a bunch of funny stories strung together. There was no real purpose to it. That might be okay for a seven-minute speech or an amateur one-hour presentation, but surely not for a professional!

In the corporate world, the presenters I coach deliver presentations with slides to help make their point. I always show them the power of creating a good structure before they put together their slide show. They see how 10 minutes of planning can save time and bring much clarity to the listener.

Many people (including me, in my early days of keynoting) don’t like structure. They feel it ‘confines’ them and limits their ability to be in the moment. I’ve learned that just the opposite is actually true.

Lou Heckler, CSP, CPAE and speaking coach says it brilliantly…

“Structure — it doesn’t ‘freeze’ you, it ‘frees’ you.”

.

That’s deep and powerful, isn’t it?

Like me, you may have to read it several times before you fully grasp what he’s saying. Good structure allows you to be in the moment and even go off on tangents, yet still have the ability to get back on track — and the audience will be able to follow right along with you. Structure is the opposite of memorizing. Early in my comedy career, I memorized my routine word-for-word. I was so nervous that if anyone heckled or said anything to me, I’d lose my place! In my mind, I had to go back to the beginning of my routine and start over to find my place. It gets even worse — when I would re-write a routine I’d have to un-learn the old one first!

Even great comedians, before a show, write out their ‘set list’ — a list of ‘bits’ in a specific order. There’s a reason for their order, though. They know which ‘bits’ transition best into other jokes. For presenters, it requires more of a structure than a set list to leave a lasting message. In my quest to help presenters connect with their audiences, I came to realize that the one piece I was not teaching was “structure.” That’s why I developed the Create Your Keynote by Next Week program.

If you ever visit my parent’s house, don’t carry a metal detector into my childhood room. It would light up like a Christmas tree, but you wouldn’t find anything but half-bent nails. There’s a logical reason why my Dad didn’t allow me to help while they were ‘framing’ our house… the structure was just too important.

Without good structure your speech could fall apart… it could blow up… lose the audience… go off on a tangent and never return. It could just bore your audience to tears.

Content and delivery are equally important. A great speech begins with structure. Great structure gives you confidence, a solid plan, and a stronger ability to be ‘present’ with your audience, make mistakes and still have a clear and memorable message. It’s quite simply the first requirement for creating a memorable speech. Got structure?