The panel will explore how dramatically newsrooms are changing and how PR practitioners must adapt their strategies to better meet the needs of journalists. Scott will talk about the importance of creating publication-ready content for use by media organizations, in the form of byline articles, infographics,  and more.  He will also discuss how a company can use a single content idea across both its inbound marketing and media relations programs.

Appearing with Scott on the Tackling Media Relations panel will be:

• Alexis Patterson Hanes, associate director of Public Information for the Austin Community College District
• Lauren Butler, vice president/group manager at Ketchum
• Casey Norton, vice president of Media Relations at Weber Shandwick.
• Sarah Marshall, senior vice president of Phillips & Company, who will moderate.

The conference is sponsored by the Austin chapter of the Public Relations Society of America and takes place June 5-7 at the Omni Austin Hotel Downtown. The three-day event offers PR professionals everything from sessions on managing a crisis and making an impact to free yoga on the hotel’s roof.

ServiceVirtualization.com was launched in April 2012 by the Application Delivery business at CA Technologies. The site focuses on a field of emerging software solutions that enable faster, better and less-expensive application development. Idea Grove was called upon to develop and oversee content on the site’s blog, which Mike began editing in October 2012. He quickly grasped both the complex technology and the community of people with an interest in it.

The site now ranks second in native search for “service virtualization” behind the Wikipedia definition. Along with the improvement in online search visibility, the ServiceVirtualization.com community has grown to thousands of members, and Twitter feeds that support the blog have nearly 1,200 followers (@svcvirt and @virtualization6).

“These kinds of tangible results are essential for Internet marketing firms; and they are clearly helping fuel the incredible business growth our agency has experienced over the past year,” said Idea Grove President Scott Baradell. “Since we are so focused on getting result for clients, it seemed only fitting to celebrate the most noteworthy ones with a quarterly employee award. Mike’s stellar work on ServiceVirtualization.com is exactly the kind of effort we want to be about as a company, and it was most worthy of this recognition – and a $250 prize.”

Mike joined Idea Grove in 2012 as vice president of content after more than two decades writing and editing for The Dallas Morning News and The Associated Press. At Idea Grove he specializes in content development and curation, focusing on our technology public relations clients.

Hey, Mike, way to Grove!

Exploring an unfamiliar website is like driving in a new city. Drivers need directions and so do website visitors.Make sure to give your visitors a visual cue or message to take an action or they may get lost in an array of images and content. Never assume that a visitor will know exactly what to do when they land on a page.  Direct them to a contact form or a subscription button. Promote engagement with social buttons and comment forms. Direction ensures your visitor can efficiently move from one section to the next.

If your website doesn’t have the best directional cues, check to see if there are distracting elements that lure your users away from the goal. Is music causing a high bounce rate? Are load times affecting page speed and causing frustration? Is there a distracting image on the homepage that doesn’t fit with the company’s brand guidelines? All of these things can cause headaches for your visitors and should be tested thoroughly to make sure your website is optimized for engagement.

Believe the numbers, make sharing easy

Don’t leave analytics to the inbound marketing agencies. Using analytics and tracking codes can tell you what pages of your website are getting the most hits.  Users are most likely finding what they need on these pages, and through tracking you can use the information to improve other pages. You might find that pages with more imagery are getting more traffic than content-heavy pages. If this is the case, try breaking up your content with images or videos.

We live in a sharing world. It can be very frustrating when you find an interesting article on a website but there is no easy way to share it. You want visitors to share your content, so make sure you integrate social sharing buttons with your images and articles.

Keep it simple

Sometimes a minimalist approach can be the most effective. Think about Google and Craigslist. These are two very different websites but they continue to use a very simple formula for their user experiences.  Google’s homepage remains a single search field with two buttons, and Craigslist is essentially an interactive classifieds list.

Ensuring that your visitor has a positive experience is a key component to maintaining a website that drives awareness, engagement and ultimately conversions. With some targeted direction and simple design, you’ll start seeing more engagement — and sooner than you might think.

“We the human capital of the United States, in order to facilitate a cutting-edge, best-of-breed convergence of revenue-generating entities, actualize Justice, insure scalable domestic Tranquility, provide for the interdependent interfacing of defensive capabilities, promote mutually beneficial functionality in the North American market space, and secure the Blessings of harmonized, re-engineered culture to ourselves and our Posterity, do conceptualize and cultivate this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Let us bow our heads and give thanks that Gouverneur Morris, the Founding Father credited with writing the preamble to the United States Constitution, was a far better writer than many of today’s marketers. Otherwise, millions upon millions of children would never have been able to memorize the preamble in grade school – much less understand it – and the Union might never had held together.

A Confession and a Theory

I have a confession: Vague language drives me bonkers. And ever since I made the jump to Internet marketing firms after a long career in newspapers, I have puzzled on this question: Why is so much business writing mind-numbingly obtuse? I developed an armchair theory. Vague language is high art in business because a negotiation is a courtship of adversaries, and ambiguity is necessary to avoid driving off the other party before you have time to draw him in. We marketers have simply gotten lazy and adopted it.

It turns out my pop psychology on business speak was hardly groundbreaking. Actual academic researchers were way ahead of me. Their studies have found ambiguity used for all kinds of valid reasons: as a means of self-protection, to minimize risks, to avoid offending the other party, to extend negotiations, and sometimes to gain advantage by withholding critical information. As philosophy student Xiaohua Zhao wrote in his 2010 doctoral thesis on Chinese business negotiations, vague language “can function as a weapon, a lubricant and a disguise.” It can be used “to describe, to suggest, to complain, to praise, to refuse, to cover, to concede, to inquire,” all with minimal risk of offending.

Ambiguity Undercuts Our Success

So I admit it. Vague language has a necessary place in business. But here’s the thing: Not only is it unnecessary in marketing, it undercuts our success. We in technology public relations have suffered for our proximity to endless gobbledygook. We spend so much time listening to business speak that we start to incorporate it in our own work, like chameleons just trying to fit in.

The thing to remember is that our goals differ from the folks negotiating deals. We seek to resonate and engage, for people to read what we write and pass it along to friends on Facebook. Our goal is clarity over obfuscation. We are translators of the difficult and complicated. We write to communicate specific messages to real human beings. Do real human beings talk like this?

“Doctors believe that the pharmaceutical industry could play an important role in helping value-based healthcare providers such as accountable care organizations (ACOs) to deliver better care at lower cost. But pharma companies currently do a poor job of delivering the kind of data needed to accomplish that goal. The insight comes from a new survey of physicians in value-based delivery models …” blah, blah, blah. [Excerpted from an actual press release I just plucked off Business Wire.]

Of course they don’t. And I’ll tell you something else: Real human beings don’t read it, either. Neither will the reporters you so desperately want to notice your story. My experience also tells me modern readers have become far too savvy to be drawn in by empty jargon about market space, deliverables, value-added, business spend, best practices or any of the endless -izations. They don’t buy it for a moment. They simply move on.

A Call to Action: Resist!

So let this be the day you ditch vague language in your work, even if you still must use it in the boardroom. Choose active over passive voice. Write short sentences. Employ vivid imagery. Ditch the acronyms. Avoid the gerunds. Steer clear of long, boring quotes. Pity the poor reader. When you’re writing, try to imagine his eyes breezing through your work like a hot knife through butter.

You can do it. Resist the contagion of vague language!

Idea Grove won in the Public Relations category for our work for ShopSavvy, the leading mobile shopping application. The team included Idea Grove President Scott Baradell, Senior Account Executive Stephanie Fedler and Chief Content Officer Clay Zeigler.

Scott put together a public relations program leveraging news releases, media pitches and video. Stephanie worked to implement the program, focusing especially on media relations. It all culminated during retailing’s most-visible period: the kickoff of the holiday shopping season well known to consumers as Black Friday.

The program had a content marketing element as well, as Scott created an online forum to systemically win allies for ShopSavvy, its value propositions, and its leadership. That vehicle, The Future of Retail Alliance, launched in the summer and edited by Clay, grew as a platform throughout the fall, adding an average of three articles a week on mobile retail.

Response Included 200,000 Downloads

ShopSavvy was featured during November and December in dozens of reports on television and radio and by online outlets as diverse as Shopper Marketing, Good Housekeeping, Mashable and VentureBeat. Television coverage was extensive. One television report was picked up on more than 25 other TV stations.  Consumers responded, in November and December they downloaded the application some 200,000 times. The company set records for numbers of product scans, gaining a peek at the national Christmas gift list.

Marketer of the Year Awards in 12 categories were announced along with the Collegiate Marketer of the Year and the CMO of the Year. Kent Huffman of BearCom Wireless, an Idea Grove client, was one of two Chief Marketing Officer finalists.

The Idea Grove award is the first industry recognition for Stephanie. Clay has contributed to numerous projects that won journalism awards from the National Newspaper Association, the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, the Texas Press Association and the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.

Last fall, Scott was a finalist for the PR Professional of the Year award given as part of the PR News PR People Awards. His writing has earned him awards from the International Association of Business Communicators, Texas Public Relations Association, and Associated Press Managing Editors of Texas.