Keeping people motivated when a company goes through a major business change is a challenge. There are many factors to juggle. Tinkering in one area may unbalance matters elsewhere. Workers worry about losing control during change.

And then there’s uncertainty.

Each person has what we could describe as an uncertainty threshold. Your threshold may be high; someone else may have a lower threshold. When extra uncertainty pushes people above their threshold, they feel uncomfortable.

People – particularly those in knowledge-based industries – often take everyday uncertainty in their stride. External events, like a terrorist attack or economic downturn lift background uncertainty levels and reduce people’s capacity to deal with workplace uncertainty. Yet most workers cope well during normal times. Read the rest of this entry »

From the Rut – a site well worth investigating.

This cartoon wrote a sweary word on your toilet wall. « the rut..

There is a huge demand for people who can combine technical expertise with professional communications or writing skills. Employers are looking for people to write company web sites and other online copy. The jobs break down into two distinct categories: working for companies that are primarily online information providers and working for the web operations of more traditional firms. Both sectors are equally hungry for fresh talent.

It’s not good enough just to know how to create good looking web pages, to get this work you’ll be expected to write the kind of compelling content that will keep customers coming back.

These jobs are not necessarily suitable for journalists and others moving over from old media. It requires a different mindset. Keeping copy flowing through a site and making sure all the clicks work is much more important than worry about whether a site is well-written or not. If you’re a hard-bitten newshound you might be expected to swallow your instinct for high levels of accuracy and checking.

And then there’s the tricky subject of search engine optimization—that is writing the kind of copy that ensures your company features at the top of Google searches from relevant keywords. As The New York Times points out this can mean waving goodbye to elegant, well-crafted prose and witty eye-catching headlines. These two aspects of online writing probably explain why grammar and readability standards are often so dismal on most web sites. Inside the online buisness it’s an open secret that ex-newspaper journalists are often particularly good at delivering readable material that scores well with search engines.

If you’re interested, you’ll find online communications jobs are advertised under I for Internet or M for marketing rather than J for journalism. It’s a great opportunity for out-of-work journalists—and there are a lot of them these days—as the supply of jobs is far greater than the supply of talent.

Many journalists think they can’t do this kind of work because online production tools are difficult to use and that it may involve scary things like databases and programming. In fact, most content production is not at the hard core code-cutting level. That’s usually all done by more geeky, backroom types. And today’s content management systems are no harder than editorial systems. In fact I’d argue they can be simpler.

Right now junior content producers and editors earn salaries in line with people of the same age working in other industries. In other words, you won’t get much of a pay rise if you sign up. However, while the raw salaries might not be all that exciting—the opportunities are fantastic. Some employers offer options, equity or profit share schemes—which puts an entirely different perspective on the offered salaries.

Many of the online editorial-oriented jobs on offer today are in companies which only have a few employees. They offer a chance to get in on the ground floor. There’s always a good chance that options will be worthless, equity minimal and any profit share doesn’t amount to much. In a small organization you’ll have plenty of scope to make sure there are profits.

Even if the promises of on-top-of-base-salary income never materialise, you’ll get to learn how a small company at the sharp end operates. And you’ll see the mistakes. You can take that experience to another start up or use it to form your own business.

Disclosure: I should come clean here and admit I do a lot of web writing and editing in my communications business. If you’re in business and looking for an experienced publishing professional to handle an online editorial project contact me through my web site.

Read: This Boring Headline Is Written for Google

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• Journalists Twittering – Great Resource! Use it for Good not Evil! (nettiehartsock.com)

Any fool can write a good press release that hits its target audience and creates an impact. Writing one that fails to make an impression requires more work. Fortunately there are people who have mastered the art. As an editor I’ve seen some great performance over the years and I’d like to share this expertise with you.

Here are my top ten tips for ensuring your press release gets minimum attention:

1. Cripple its chances of reaching editors and journalists

Everyone can read plain text messages contained in the body of an email. The message will almost certainly get through to any kind of desktop email clients, all flavours of web mail, as well as Blackberries, iPhones and Palm Pilots. To reach less than 100 percent of your potential audience, try putting some of the following clever barriers in the way.

Attachments are an effective way of cutting down the reach of your press release. People reading email on mobile devices often have trouble reading them. Spam filters can treat them with suspicion and if you’re lucky the recipient may use Lotus Notes as a client and have difficulty decoding the attachment.

Another advantage of attachments is that you can trim your audience further by using difficult-to-open file formats: such as the new .docx file format used by Word 2007 – many journalists will struggle to read them.

Attachments are great for bulking up the size of your release so it won’t squeeze through email gateways. If you’re  clever you can put high resolution logos in, say, your Word attachments.  These add  nothing to the press release but can swiftly push the file size over the email gateway threshold.

A further reason for a sending press release as an attachment is its invisibility to email search. So, when a journalist decides to look for your press release among the hundreds and thousands in their email in-box, it will be extremely difficult to find.

2. Minimize relevance

One of the best ways to make sure your press release fails is to make sure it has no relevance to any sane audience. For example, if you are a technology company and you buy a new fleet of cars you can squander your PR budget and make sure any future release goes directly to an editor’s recycle bin by sending the story to the technology press.

3. Send it out whenever

Timeliness is everything. So by sending out releases when you feel like it, you can boost your chances of failure. Better still, for print publications try waiting until five minutes after the final deadline. For online publications wait until the story has already broken elsewhere.

4. Organize schedules so contacts are unavailable for interview

Good journalists are such annoying creatures. Rather than simply printing your press release verbatim and passing the contact details over to their advertising departments, they may want to speak to the people mentioned in your releases. A tried and tested technique for avoiding these complications is to send the people overseas shortly after dispatching the release. International communications are good these days, so just packing them off to a partner conference in Atlanta isn’t good enough, you need to make sure they are on an 18 hour trans-pacific flight or, better still, holidaying on a remote island.

5. Use poor writing skills

Obvious when you think about it. If your writing is poor and confused so that editors and journalists can’t understand your message you’ll kill two birds with one stone.

First, you’ll make sure the first message gets spiked in the too hard basket.

But second, as a bonus, you can establish your reputation as an illiterate idiot that isn’t worth bothering with under any circumstances. That way, your future releases will go straight to the junk pile without even being read.

6. Try bullying

Sadly this powerful technique is often underused. By threatening to talk to a journalist’s editor, or an editor’s boss about their poor response to your press release you can permanently undermine your relationship with scores of people (remember journalists talk to each other so this is an efficient way of burning lots of bridges).

Another approach is to tell the journalist the company in question is advertising thus triggering their professional editorial independence.

7. Don’t bother with photographs

Journalists and editors like photographs. They love good photographs. By making sure they are no photographs of any description you’ll increase the chances that your press release is regarded as totally useless. If you think that’s taking things too far, try sending out crappy, unusable photos. Photos with dozens of un-named people work well in this respect. Getting people to hold champagne glasses, stand in front of company logos, gather around a totally unreadable normal-size bank cheque or impersonate public enemy number one mug shots are all effective techniques for creating instantly ignorable press release photographs.

8. Send it to everyone regardless

This is a great way to upset journalists and degrade both your personal and company reputation. At the same time if you work for a PR agency you can bill the client heaps for having a, er, comprehensive, mailing list and then bill them for time as you and your staff spend all day on the phone dealing with angry editors.

9. Keep things as dull as possible

Journalists prefer interesting stories. Public relations professionals recognise this and use clever tricks like passive sentences, boring ideas, irrelevant background facts, tired clichéd adjectives and implausible anodyne quotes to turn them off and help speed their press releases on their way to the great recycle bin in the sky.

In house and government public relations people are usually better at delivering boring releases than agency staff – if you’re worried your writing sparkles too much, they have much to teach you.

10. Make sure the subject line obscures the message

Even experienced public relations operatives can slip up by giving an email release an interesting subject line. The danger is that after putting in all the hard work required to guarantee nobody takes the slightest notice of their press release they use active language to put a relevant timely subject line message that tempts editors and journalists to open the document and read more.

The good news is there are fail-safe subject lines that are certain to turn off editors and journalists so they can just skip past your release. A classic subject line like press release will probably work, if that’s too simple try important press release or important press release from Company Name.

A neat by-product of badly written subject lines is they can often fool spam detection engines into rejecting a message altogether; phrases like important announcement from Company Name or message for Clark Kent can come in handy here.

My name is Bill Bennett and I live in New Zealand where I work part time as publisher of Reseller News at Fairfax Business Media.  The rest of my time is spent running a business-to-business communications consultancy. I have a web site and a blog, but pretty much zero visability because my name
is:

a) fairly commonplace and
b) shared with a number of people who are far more famous than me.

How bad is it? Last time I checked, I didn’t appear on the first ten pages of “Bill Bennett” on Google. Strangely I come in on page five with Yahoo! Perhaps the most annoying aspect is the other Bill Bennett’s even rate higher than me when I restrict my Google searches to New Zealand-only results.

The biggest problem is the American politician / radio host. I sometimes get his hate mail. There’s also an Australian film director, which was especially tricky when we both lived in Sydney, Australia. (Though I did get a couple of interesting nsfw emails from out-of-work actresses looking for a big break into movies). There’s also a country and western singer, a brace of Canadian politicians and an ancient British comedian.

Using William instead of Bill doesn’t help one bit, nor would changing everything to Billy. It doesn’t help me to brand myself as Bill Bennett the writer (that applies to at least two other Bill Bennetts on the famous list). I do some radio broadcasting, but that’s also useless.

Sadly, my new disambiguation page seems to get more traffic than my homepage.

I’d like to know from readers what I practical steps I can take to raise my online profile or at least rise a bit further up the list.