ABCs of best practices online

‘A’ is for:

• Aggregation

Subscribe to and combine feeds from multiple web sources and receive them on your desktop or your inbox. RSS – really simple syndication – makes it possible to monitor media: blog entries, articles or entire publications as frequently as you wish. The CBC and BBC offer the best news feeds online under vast arrays of subject matter. This is a way to have a daily digest, made up of as many subjects and from as many sources as you can stand, custom delivered. A great way to filter and organize information.

• Audio

For decades, I have wondered why even the best and most expensive consumer video cameras have lousy in-board sound/microphones. I pestered Sony on this matter for an entire year. Still no answer.

When vlogging, interviewing or podcasting, consider using a unidirectional mic. For very little money ($25) you can vastly improve the quality of your recording and, hence, the playback. This way, you can also avoid irritating background noise (cats yowling, toilets flushing etc.) while making your voice as clear as possible.

To improve your speaking ability on- or off-camera, try exercising your mouth muscles, tongue and palate with the same vocal warm-ups that actors and singers use.

This one is easy to remember. Sing through the vowels in alphabetical order, first slowly and one at a time: A-E-I-O-U. Make sure to stretch your mouth around each vowel. Repeat twelve times. Then break up the vowels into staccato sounds and speed up, pushing each breath out from your chest: aaaaaaaaaaaa-eeeeeeeeeeee-iiiiiiiiiiii-oooooooooooo-uuuuuuuuuuuu. This will sound like panting or throat singing. Repeat twelve times and don’t forget to breathe in at regular intervals.

• Attribution

Always provide citations for quotes, images and information borrowed from other writers. Not to do so constitutes plagiarism.

• Awareness

Always read the terms of service, usually in squinty-print. Know what you are giving up, in privacy and content, before you sign up.

‘B’ is for:

• Blogs and blogging

Originally known as the web log, the blog has become the online self-publishing tool of choice. A website of one’s own or a shared repository for people with common interests, the blog can accommodate text, comments, widgets, audio and visual files.

A blog like this one, from WordPress or Google Blogger, offers open source code, so you can make frequent changes to the content and design. Proprietary blogs, such as Typepad are corporately owned. They are more flexible and generally look better, but they come at a price.

• Bookmarking

Social bookmarking, that is. It goes hand in hand with blogging and allows readers to find your posts, and you theirs. It is a record of websites that you can share according to mutual interests. These are identified in the tags you create and associate with each URL you bookmark.It is easy to create a del.icio.us account and begin identifying and posting your bookmarks.

‘C’ is for:

• Content

It’s chaos out there: spiralling galaxies of thought and deed in an expanding universe of words and images. The signal-to-noise ratio of content online is enormous. Don’t add to the noise.

Like all good writing, good writing for social media adheres to some basic rules and tenets, with a few twists. Melanie McBride’s 5 tips for (better) social media writing is an excellent, concise place for the Canadian communicator to begin. For more indepth advice, complete with interesting background information and references, check into Jakob Nielson’s notes on web writing.

Regardless of the medium, take care to guard the quality of the content you post. Edit, edit and edit again, for spelling, grammar, style and tone. If you have nothing to say, don’t post.

• Camera-readiness

There are lots of make-up tricks you can use to make yourself look your best on-camera. With just a few bits and pieces, you can slim down your nose, highlight your cheekbones, widen your eyes and keep your entire face matte and cool looking. Ladies Who Launch Magazine has a few.

Pose yourself in a not-too-cluttered background in adequate, even light and position the camera so that it tilts (slightly) up to your face. This is a flattering angle. You want a head and shoulders shot, a medium close-up: not so close that your features are distorted, nor so far away that they don’t read. Rehearse!

From Fiction to Fact: Borrowing from the Arts for Business Writing

Researching an article, a speech, a script or any piece of business writing is a lot like researching a character in a play or a novel. You start with a few basic questions: where or with whom does the piece originate and why does it need to be written or spoken? Then, you take a good look at your audience and determine how best to craft messages that will speak to them.

My writing career began in theatre, where I collaborated on original productions and studied the masterworks of Shakespeare, Chekov and Williams. When I began to write fiction, I found myself using acting techniques to get inside my characters’ heads and hearts. I call this “method writing”, after the Stanislavski System or Method, adopted and made famous by Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler at the Actor’s Studio in New York. This is very useful for writing natural-sounding dialogue, but it works equally well for writing speeches, or coming up with convincing quotes for media releases.

Fiction, drama and screenwriters build stories around a basic dramatic structure, the dramatic arc. Sometimes, to add tension or expose details, a “false climax” is introduced between the intro and the climax. You can recognize this highly effective method of storytelling in the tragedies of Aeschylus, the comedies of Neil Simon and the novels of Ian McEwan. Try applying this structure to, for example, a short donation letter and see if it works for you.

Effective business writing contains other elements found in fiction, drama and poetry. Establish a consistent theme, and don’t be afraid to use metaphors, irony and humour to enliven the driest subject.

Finally, a marketing presentation or voice-over script must be “performed”. After you have drafted a speech, test it for impact and adherence to the dramatic arc. Choose three colours of highlight markers, representing three emotional states: blue for “cool”; yellow for “warm”; and pink for “hot”. Go through your script and mark up key sentences or phrases according to the corresponding colours they evoke. When you lay the pages out horizontally, you should see a progression from “cool”, to “warm”, to “hot” and back to “cool” near the end. Especially in a long piece, it’s a good idea to “spike” the dramatic arc with “hot” phrases that help to hold your audience and presenter’s interest.

Share the above technique with your clients. If they are delivering your material, the highlights can help them vary the pace of the presentation, emphasize the right points and bring your writing to life.