If you got your news from an email newsletter called theSkimm, the story was introduced more obliquely—even though it linked to the same USA Today piece:
WHAT TO SAY TO YOUR FRIEND WHO WANTS TO GO SKYDIVING FOR HER BIRTHDAY…
Be careful. That's what President Obama is telling President-elect Donald Trump when it comes to dealing with Russia. Obama's been on his final world tour...
TheSkimm’s off-beat, wry approach is winning fans among communicators, both internal and external. After hearing from several of them, I rounded up a few lessons from theSkimm.
Here’s what its communicator fans told me:
1. Simplify complexity.
Kaitlin Bitting, a longtime subscriber to TheSkimm, says she is impressed by the authors' ability to make complex subjects more relatable, particularly through the section headers.
“It's a great reminder that casual language can be even more effective than super-formal writing, even in business communications,” says Bitting, who is vice president of public relations at Allen & Gerritsen.
2. Find your unique voice.
Carrie Zukoski, owner of Open Road Communications, admires the way theSkimm has established its voice, taking difficult news and putting a short, informative and witty spin on it.
“Not every business or organization can get away with the quick wit that theSkimm does,” she says. “That's how it positioned itself from the get-go ... [But] if your business/organization doesn't have a voice—find it and stick to it.”
[FREE DOWNLOAD: Seven ways to personalize content for employees]
3. Cultivate ambassadors.
TheSkimm has grown rapidly because of a ”Skimm’bassadors” program that allows its fans to get credit for recruiting new readers. TheSkimm even mentions their birthdays at the bottom of its email, allowing the editorial team to “connect directly with their audience,” says Krysten Copeland, founder of KC & Co Communications.
Adds Zukoski, “Ask them to share. Can you offer something in return? If so, all the better, but it’s not necessary.”
4. Inject humor and personality.
TheSkimm teases stories with headlines such as “What to say to your friend who thinks butter is a carb,” notes Lisette Paras of Gravitate PR. Follow the link, and you’ll find a story about Oxford Dictionaries naming “post-truth” as the word of the year.
Under the headline, “What to say when you find a hair in your soup,” theSkimm adds, “That’s nothing. Really,” and links to a story about a woman who says she found a rat sewn into her Zara dress. (It’s happened to the best of us.)
Humor surprises and grabs readers’ attention, Paras says. “Letting your personality shine through can make an impact on the person reading your email,” she says.
5. Adopt an informal tone.
“Everything we create should be crafted in a tone that is appropriate for and appreciated by our audiences,” says Heather Cosson, inbound marketing specialist for Communications@Syracuse. “The Skimm takes complex news stories and provides a brief synopsis in the same way that I might share the story with a friend over coffee.”
6. Respect your audience’s time and intelligence.
Good writing is relatable, says Kelly Gentile, social media and PR strategist with Brokaw, and theSkimm respects the time, attention, and intelligence of their audience. There is a middle ground between talking down to people and just quickly mentioning something and assuming people understand it, Gentile says. TheSkimm has mastered that balance.
7. Shorten your pitches.
The top lesson theSkimm offers communications professionals is to keep it short and sweet when pitching media, says Amanda Moss, associate vice president of Finn Partners.
“It's reinforced the idea that busy professionals need digestible information they can read on the fly, and that certainly applies to busy reporters as well,” she says.
8. Break up heavy blocks of text.
The Skimm leads with a major news story or two and breaks it into short paragraphs about what's happening, why, and what’s next, with a conclusion, Paras says. This bite-sized format helps readers digest complex stories easily, allowing them to click on the links if they want more information.
9. Timing matters.
TheSkimm arrives in inboxes around 6:45 a.m. Eastern, just as most readers start their day, says Lindsay Karn, senior account executive with Version 2.0 Communications. Many (including Karn) read it even before getting out of bed.
It hits when audiences want to know what's happening in the world; a half hour later, and it would already be irrelevant to many, Karn says.
“This applies most to PR and content pros thinking about trendjacking campaigns,” she says. If you want to get client commentary into stories in a breaking news cycle, the ability to act quickly is of the utmost importance.
10. Don't just create, curate.
TheSkimm incorporates links to existing, more detailed news stories, Karn notes, offering a curated look at the most important and interesting headlines of the day, adding pithy analysis to make them more digestible. Panjiva, a company that provides global trade intelligence, has mastered this model with its daily newsletter, she says.
11. Distribute across channels.
In addition to its newsletter, theSkimm boasts 167,000 followers on Twitter. It posts each morning missive on Facebook for the 600,000 people who prefer to read it there. This models what Karn calls “the COPE strategy”: Create Once, Publish Everywhere.
“TheSkimm is best known as an email newsletter, but that just scratches the surface of how they get their content to the masses,” Karn says.
@byworking(Image via)
from PR Daily News Feed http://ift.tt/2gTG95O
No comments:
Post a Comment