by Marcia Rhodes | Feb 1, 2023 | Blog
Many of our clients who accept an invitation to appear as a guest on a podcast are shocked when they learn that the interview included a video recording that was uploaded to YouTube. Keep in mind that even if the interview is in podcast form, you should always be ready for a possible video interview. No problem as you frequently use Zoom for calls. Right?
Zoom is undoubtedly the most user-friendly video platform in the world. It enables remote interviews without requiring a complex home studio setup. But there’s a catch: you’re now in charge of your own lighting, audio, and makeup.
Do not fret. There is no need to put in hours attempting to simulate an interview created by a professional company. Get the following fundamentals down, and you’ll exude assurance, polish and warmth.
#1: Learn about the “Touch up my appearance” tool in Zoom. Your video display receives an instant soft focus, giving it a more polished image.
#2: Steer clear of virtual backgrounds. They’re enjoyable with friends and coworkers, but not suitable for interviews with the press. The ideal setting is a neat home office. However, if you don’t have a specific working area, pay attention to your surroundings. A messy bed, an open bathroom door, or a background mirror might be embarrassing. Additionally, look for a location where you can keep out kids, other people, and your pets to prevent this scenario.
#3: Do not position yourself too near the camera. This gives the potential viewer the unsettling impression that a huge face is staring back at them through their computer screen. Put yourself in a position where your head, shoulders and chest are visible to the camera.
#4: Dress in professional business attire. On video, solid blue clothing projects well; however white could make you appear washed out. Avoid wearing jewelry with loud or dangling charms or busy patterns that will draw attention away from what you are trying to express.
#5: Powder your nose and forehead to “de-shine.” Any shine gets exaggerated on video and can be distracting. If you don’t happen to have a compact of powder on hand, crank up your AC ahead of the interview.
#6: Keep looking the audience in the eye. Direct your attention to the camera on the laptop or computer screen. To make sure that your eyes are pulled to the camera, experts advise adding an arrow.
#7: It’s a good idea to write down three important points that you want to remember and set them nearby, out of sight of the camera. It is preferable to glance down at notes rather than up at the ceiling when trying to remember anything. In fact, looking up during an interview makes candidates seem dishonest. To use as “cue cards,” you may also put up your talking points against the side of your camera.
#8: Instead of using your smartphone, use a laptop or desktop PC. Your interviewer will be able to capture you in landscape mode this way.
#9: Always rehearse with a coworker to ensure that all of the above have been taken into account. Your confidence and memory of the information you wish to convey will both be greatly improved by even one practice session.
If you would like coaching on what to say and how to say it during interviews, consider taking some “Media Training.” Everyone gains significantly from it, regardless of how frequently they have been the subject of media interviews. To learn more about our media training programs, contact Amendola at info@acmarketingpr.com.
Best of luck with your next video interview!
by Katlyn Nesvold | Jan 11, 2023 | Blog
Brand advocacy is not a new idea, but many brands are still lacking the momentum behind it. As we move into 2023, brand advocacy should be a vital part of your marketing strategy. In fact, according to Edelman Trust Barometer, employee advocacy-related leads converted seven times more often than other types of leads.
At Amendola, we recently had an employee contest to incentive staff to invite friends to “follow” our company page on LinkedIn. This simple, short, three-week campaign proved to be effective and resulted in a 33% increase to our LinkedIn engagements and a net follower growth of 850%. If this alone isn’t enough reason to jump on the employee advocacy band wagon, here are a few more stats that might convince you:
Many of us have heard the Richard Branson phrase, “Take care of your employees, they will take care of your clients.” When you have employees who are passionate about the company they work for, it’s obvious to outsiders, especially when the employees are active on social media. Organizations in that position have a large, targeted audience that could and should be leveraged.
Your social media and PR strategy should be intertwined, as should your approach to brand advocacy. As you are planning for 2023, find ways to leverage your employees’ networks as part of your marketing efforts. LinkedIn is uniquely positioned for B2B, has a large reach and is a great place to post and find thought leadership. Here are three easy steps to jump-start your efforts, get your employees set up and engaged (or re-engaged) on LinkedIn, and build or amplify your brand.
1: Encourage your employees do a LinkedIn makeover: Provide them with a correctly sized company branded cover photo that they can add to their profile (and make sure to provide updated images if you have a campaign you’re promoting.) Advise them to update their current job to reflect where they work, if they haven’t already. Suggest that they share details about what they do in their current position in the about section – or go one step further and provide them a few options for suggested copy to help get the creative juices flowing.
2: Kick off your advocacy campaign with a contest: Implementing a simple contest, such as sharing company posts, is more likely to get participation than a complicated multi-step process. As employees share posts with their own networks, the company’s posts will become visible in their newsfeeds and attract new views – and it’s likely than many of these new viewers are your target audience. To drive success, don’t forget to offer your employees a worthwhile prize!
3: Make it part of your marketing workflow: Share media hits, important news, and brand posts with staff with a simple link to the LinkedIn post. Alternatively, provide them with recommended copy they can post if they reshare a post. Take it one step further and ask them to “comment” on posts to move them up in the news feed. For any of your company thought leaders with larger, more targeted audiences, this should be a standard workflow any time you have a media hit or a post you’d like amplified.
Encouraging your thought leaders to be active on social can lead to an additional benefit: potential media interviews. Often reporters will search social media to identify thought leaders for interviews. Having an active and updated social media presence provides another layer of credibility for your thought leaders and brand.
The benefits of employee brand advocacy go far beyond boosting your marketing efforts. If you’ve tried to recruit in the last few years, you know just how valuable it is to retain talent. Having engaged employees is known to boost company culture, which leads to happier and more productive employees, and increased talent retention.
Have you started an employee brand advocacy program? If not, make it part of your 2023 plan and watch your social media channels grow.
by Grant Evans | Dec 22, 2022 | Blog
“The first draft is the best, and it’s all downhill from there.”
These snarky yet valid words came from a longtime friend, colleague, and mentor. They semi-jokingly referred to much of the writing we produced as the content marketing arm of a Fortune 500 healthcare IT provider. But it was most often muttered when talking about news releases.
Working in such a large, diverse organization, we never lacked fodder for any form of content, and news releases were among the most requested form of PR. As former trade journalists with decades of agency and in-house marketing experience, we’d both been the recipients and issuers of thousands of releases and had instincts––and opinions––about what made them good or bad.
Although we applied these principles with varying degrees of success, a few core tenets proved universal. So here are a few considerations.
Should This Be a Release?
Note that I say a news release, and not a press release. Whatever you are announcing should have news value, and its primary target should be the media––whether they report for trade, consumer, financial, or other outlets. But plenty of folks default to a news release when they should pursue other communications.
If the goal is lead generation, then a news release is not your best tool. If your target audience is prospects, customers, or potential partners, then communicate directly with them. Speak their language. Be persuasive. But don’t issue a news release. There are far better direct channels to use. Be creative and go direct.
Other times, a news release is a good choice, provides a solid proof point, but is not a news generator. Most partnership releases will not be covered, but you still need an asset to point to that documents the relationship, kind of like an old-school wedding announcement. Public companies have disclosure requirements and are obligated to issue such releases (among many others). Pending trade show participation or speaking engagements are other types that simply won’t get ink. But your partners, prospects, and customers may see them. Similarly, ‘point’ upgrades to existing solutions won’t garner reportage, but you’d be remiss in not announcing them.
Once you’ve settled on a news release as the vehicle, determine what level of distribution and muscle to put behind it. Should it be an asset posted to your website newsroom only? Issued on the wire? Issued on the wire with multimedia attachments and pitched directly to target media?
The Draft
When writing a release, avoid the formulaic approach employed by most companies. Leading with, “ACME Widgets, the acclaimed global leader in innovative platforms to end the scourge of hunger and promote world peace, today announced blah blah blah …” will immediately lose readers. Keep the company descriptor minimal and factual, because anyone who doesn’t know who you are can read the boilerplate at the end.
Avoid ‘inside baseball’ jargon. Succinctly describe what you are announcing, who it impacts, and what it means to them. No need to dumb it down to the point of ‘explaining it to your grandmother in Peoria.’ Just be mindful of the audience and their level of understanding. Provide context––frame up the problem that your solution addresses, and how you help solve it. Omit needless words.
Ask journalists about quotes in releases, and many will say they don’t read them because they’re typically superfluous, self-aggrandizing garbage. They needlessly inflate word counts and are rarely reprinted. But this doesn’t need to be the case. Ditch the back-slapping adjectives and “We’re proud/thrilled/honored to…” language and opt for editorial comments that add color and emphasize your value proposition. Statistics that underscore problem statements are gold. Be bold and declarative without bragging. And avoid multiple quotes when possible. Remember, you’re paying by the word.
Ride the Stallion, Not the Camel
It’s been said that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Well, release reviews are not only a source of delays that can torpedo the timeliness of your news, but can morph a fine Arabian stallion into a flea-infested camel. Establishing ‘need-to-see’ approval chains for each release helps, as does defining each reviewer’s role. For example, marketing reviews for adherence to corporate messaging, the product lead makes sure that features are correct, the legal reviewer checks compliance, and so on. If you have 15 individuals reviewing a single release, rethink your approach.
Implement a linear, serial review process––one reviewer at a time, with edits and comments returned to the document owner and resolved before moving to the next reviewer. Start with the most basic review, such as product, then on through the food chain and finish with legal. This way, you avoid “forked” reviews with conflicting edits that are difficult to resolve and only prolong the process.
Distribution: How Much is a Cab Ride?
When it comes to distribution, you get what you pay for, and the many ‘free’ services will get you about as far as a free cab ride. You’re nearly always better off with a trusted leader like PR Newswire (Cision), which provides tailored distribution to target audiences and a host of add-on features and feeds to refine and extend your reach. But that’s a topic that can devour another post.
One glaring distribution mistake that occurs far too often is when a company painstakingly crafts a release, then spends untold agency and in-house hours on reviews and revisions, only to squabble and balk at paying an extra $600 on features that will exponentially increase engagement.
One time-tested way to boost engagement is to bundle at least two pieces of related content with each release. These can be photos, data sheets, case studies, videos, archived webinars, podcasts––you name it. It costs a few more bucks but is very effective. Video has been proven time and again to turbo-charge engagement. The bottom line is to not rely solely on the release to tell your story. Link to related reports, eBooks, white papers … even cartoons.
And if you’re still reluctant to spend on bundled content, a link to a related content repository is another way to add more to the story without attaching individual items.
The justification, development, and distribution of news releases is a topic we could discuss for days. But keeping a few of these considerations in mind can help ensure that your next news release hits the mark rather than the proverbial circular bin.
by Jodi Amendola | Nov 30, 2022 | Blog
Blink and the media landscape changes: a magazine goes out of business, one company acquires another, a podcast launches.
Blink again and something else has changed.
In the nearly 20 years since I founded Amendola Communications, the media landscape for healthcare and healthcare technology has changed dramatically. Publications that I assumed would last forever are long gone while others have sprouted in their place. The dominant medium has shifted from print to digital and the lead time for news has shrunk from days and weeks to, well, almost nothing.
The number of journalists covering healthcare is also greatly reduced. The big publications once had mastheads with multiple editors and reporters; now, most have only a few and they’re juggling podcasting and social media duties along with reporting and writing.
I hate to see any media outlet vanish. That’s partly for selfish reasons; fewer outlets means fewer places we can pitch. But it’s also because I love journalism and I love helping clients get their news out.
But nostalgia is an indulgence, not a business model.
That’s why, amidst all the change, Amendola Communications remains focused on the constants: the need for companies to spread the word about their products and services and the interest in them among the industry. While there might be fewer media outlets now, there is more healthcare news and content than ever before and it’s just as important to get it seen.
So we’ve adapted our approach. Rather than primarily pitching media interviews, we now do a lot more content development where we conceive a story idea, pitch it to a media outlet, and then have one of our writers create a draft that is vendor-neutral and publishable.
Another example of adaptability is how we’ve had to change our approach to media interviews at key trade shows, such as HIMSS, HLTH and others. Instead of only relying on in-person interviews at the shows, we have been super-aggressive in securing more podcast and video interview opportunities for our clients as well as focusing on pre-and-post show news coverage.
We also now operate in a world where clients are less dependent on third-party outlets. Companies have acquired the ability to speak directly to customers through their own blogs, emails, websites, social media, webinars, podcasts and, in some cases, publications. Indeed, consumers now expect a more direct link with and greater insight into the companies they work with and those businesses can no longer depend on third-party media to provide that.
This good news is that this allows businesses to be more creative, comprehensive and in control of how their images are presented and how their stories are told. A big part of what we do now at Amendola is creating content for our customers and advising them on the best format for that information.
In an ever-changing environment, the greatest necessity for ourselves and our clients is adaptability in how we craft and deliver our messages.
by Philip Anast | Nov 9, 2022 | Blog
On the cusp of a new year, many of us start thinking about exercise regimens. But the founders of Politico and Axios recommend we put our “prose on a diet.” In their book, “Smart Brevity,” they spell out effective ways to communicate in a world of 24×7 news cycles and social media.
Theirs isn’t the first book to detail better ways to write. But they do build off the seminal “The Elements of Style” to account for our 21st century digital age.
Citing various research studies, they suggest that we’re “overindulging in words” and that we need to pay attention to how “people consume content,” and to “communicate to save people time.” The key is to get people focused “on what matters most.” That’s what they’ve done with their Axios newsletters, i.e., structured them in a way to inform, but also linking to the details if readers want to go deeper. Go “short, not shallow,” “with simplicity and brevity,” is their mantra.
In order to get people to understand what we’re saying, PR professionals also need to package content so it answers two questions:
- What’s new? (i.e., tell me something I don’t know.)
- Why does it matter?
It’s particularly important to be memorable in the subject line, be it in business communications or a story pitch to a reporter. The authors recommend no more than six words, grabbing the reader’s attention.
In the body of a communication, they also recommend bold-facing key points and using bullets to “impose rhythm.” The first sentence is important because it may be the only opportunity to “tell someone what they need to know.”
Here are other key takeaways, many already known, but still good reminders for anyone in the business of writing and communicating:
- Single out the person you want to reach
- Be simple and direct
- Use the right words
- As Mark Twain once said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
- Sharpen thoughts and ideas
- “Deliver depth, detail and nuance more quickly”
- Less is more
- Use active verbs always
- Write direct, declarative sentences
- Use one-syllable words in lieu of two- and three-syllable ones
- “Tell me a story; don’t tell me about a story”
One thing I found interesting was their recommendation to use emojis in e-mail subject lines, as a means to stand out.
The book also includes chapters with best practices for writing e-mails and presentations, running meetings, writing speeches, building visuals, doing social media, and running companies.
The ultimate goal is to “win the war for attention,” and this book provides a worthy playbook for doing so.
by Chris Nerney | Oct 19, 2022 | Blog
Anyone who has been in marketing eventually is advised to “write like an eighth grader.” People who offer this advice may cite legitimate literacy studies showing that the “average American” reads at the level of a seventh- or eighth-grader. If that is true (especially since more than 90% of adult Americans 25 years or older have graduated from high school), I’d like to have a word with our education system.
Maybe this is unfair, but when I hear people say, “write like an eighth-grader,” it sounds a lot to me like “dumb it down.” Yes, I fully agree that marketers should express themselves simply and directly. As a consumer or B2B buyer, I wouldn’t have it any other way! Who has time for a lot of smoke and mirrors or hyperbole? We’re all busy and just want to solve our problems or enable opportunities.
Technology can be very difficult to understand, let alone explain – healthcare technology even more so. And don’t get me started about life sciences and advanced medicine. But it’s our job to make sure we’re getting our clients’ messages across in a crowded, noisy market.
Take this blog post. I am not writing this at an eighth-grade level because my target audience is marketers and healthcare professionals, and I’m supremely confident that most of the people in those jobs can handle a flashy four-syllable word or two.
Going back further, I’ve been writing about enterprise technology and healthcare technology for many years. My primary target audience has been CXOs, the people who make buying decisions or can influence buying decisions. CXOs tends to be well-educated and articulate. If they were placed back in middle school today, I’m convinced most would get gold stars for their outstanding reading ability. I believe in you, CXOs!
So while “write like an eighth-grader” is a pithy and memorable phrase that will get you lots of likes and fond references to Strunk and White on LinkedIn, understanding your audience and writing to their level is much better advice. If you do this effectively, you can connect with existing and potential customers on a human level, show you understand their problems and needs, and persuade them that you have the right solution. And that’s how sales are made and brands are built.
Resist SEO tyranny
Speaking of connecting on a human level, digital marketers also are constantly told they must “write for SEO” (search engine optimization) – almost always, incidentally, by SEO experts. (Just sayin’! 🤣) This process may require clumsily shoehorning highly rated “keywords” into the first 100 words of your text, writing “compelling” meta descriptions, inserting links in the text (but not too many), and other best practices that can change depending on Google’s latest search engine tweaks.
When I was freelancer, I worked for a content company whose platform literally wouldn’t allow you to submit an article unless it met about a dozen SEO criteria. The pain and shame of mutilating my copy to meet the exacting standards of a string of code in C++ forever will haunt me.
I don’t know much about SEO, but I do know a lot of smart people believe in its ability to help improve Google search rankings and raise a company’s visibility. But I worry that an excessive emphasis on SEO eventually can be counterproductive because the writer ends up writing to an algorithm. Not only does that feel restrictive, but you run the risk of sounding like everyone else writing SEO-driven copy.
SEO is a tool. “Write like an eighth-grader” is a concept. Don’t let either get in the way of you communicating on a human level with your target audience. Yes, you should be concise and direct, but there’s nothing wrong with showing a little personality or using humor when appropriate. These techniques might not register with an algorithm, but they will help your company or client connect with plenty of people on a human level. And that’s worth a lot.
