Day: September 3, 2003

Given writing is a key component of most PR practitioners’ daily lives, writing for the web is an obvious extension.  However, how many of us change our writing style for an online audience?

There are some basic rules.  For example typically people don’t read online, they scan. As a result your word count should be one third of the equivalent printed text.

If you’re writing a long and detailed piece, provide an abstract and let the reader download a PDF or at least provide a printable HTML page.

Ryan May over at the excellent Minnesota PR blog points to a short MarketingProfs article by Gerry McGovern (of Nua fame) on the Seven Deadly Sins of Web Writing.

The great thing about new areas of technology like RSS, is the amazing innovation that takes place in the early stages.

RSS Readers is no exception.  I had been using FeedReader as my RSS application of choice (and it’s the product I use in the RSS tutorial) but in the past week I stumbled across FeedDemon and it’s fantastic.

The product is still in beta, so all the usual warnings apply, but I strongly urge any Windows users out there to download and try it today.

Also PC World have a nice introduction to RSS here.

I know I revisit topics here, but what can I say.  These topics are very popular at the moment.

The latest is the debate between RSS and E-mail. And in particular, that because e-mail is struggling under the strain of viruses and spam, RSS is the obvious alternative for publishing newsletters.

(We’ve an introduction to RSS here)

RSS obviously won’t replace e-mail for everyday communications, because in its current format RSS is a publishing medium, it doesn’t allow interaction as such.

However, RSS does provide a useful means of communicating with your audience.  The downside is the chicken and egg situation with RSS.  Although it’s an ideal way to communicate news, the number of RSS users is still relatively small.

My advice is that you should be offering your audience a choice of RSS and e-mail.

Given that you are probably already using e-mail, that means you need to look into how you can publish your press releases, newsletters etc as RSS and then how you will promote those feeds to your audiences.

We might cover that in the near future if I get around to it!

Just remember that there’s rarely one solution to a problem and if something sounds to good to be true…. it usually is.  If you remember that when researching new technology you won’t go far wrong!