Insights for Leaders Navigating
Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
Crafting the direction and order of ideas mid-writing can be confusing and lead to missing information, random interjections, and illogical presentation. A thoughtful outline will help ensure your writing is organized, thorough, and achieves its purpose. An outline is a plan for your writing, typically consisting of the work’s intended goal and audience, an ordered list of relevant topics, and points to support these topics. Outlines define the structure of your article, essay, or other modes of communication and can remind you of the essential elements of that writing style.
Outlines can reduce revisions and make your writing process more efficient. By providing a clear path, outlines allow you to start writing any section instead of beginning with the introduction. Furthermore, outlining your topic and key points should provide accurate keywords and alt-text for SEO purposes. Outlines can also illuminate elements of your argument that need more research or tangents that don’t belong in the writing. In addition to organizing your thoughts, outlines allow you to collaborate, share plans, and gain consensus on your ideas with coworkers, clients, or supervisors before spending time crafting sentences.
Here are some best practices for developing an outline:
- Determine your writing format. Before starting your outline, make sure you’ve established the final form your writing will take. The choice of topics and order of ideas differ based on the format. A news article begins with the critical information and then fills in details, a persuasive essay adds new arguments throughout the paper, and a case study may prioritize chronological storytelling.
- Determine your topic and express it in a single sentence. Clearly define your topic before you start outlining, addressing the who/what/where/when/why/how of your article. For example, my sentence for this blog post was, “Explain what an outline is, why it’s important, and how to best outline an article to help improve your writing.” If you don’t have enough information about your subject to summarize it, do more research before you start outlining.
- Develop a list of relevant ideas. Based on this summary, start brainstorming ideas related to your sentence that directly address the goals of your work. For instance, some topics for this blog included “explanation of an outline,” “benefits of an outline,” “best practices for outlining,” and “using an outline.” You may not use all topics you identify at this stage, so think broadly.
- Narrow and group your ideas. Once you have a variety of themes that explore and support your topic, organize those ideas and eliminate tangents. Ideas could be arranged chronologically, logically, in order of or reverse order of importance, or randomly. Now is the time to determine the overall shape of ideas.
- Add supporting information and research. With a general order of concepts, add information that proves and reinforces your themes. This information can include logical statements, quotes, cited facts, and linked materials. Consider also adding transitions and other connections between topics to make drafting easier.
- Review and adjust your outline. If you notice that important themes don’t have at least two supporting points or reveal other logical gaps, do additional research, or re-arrange your outline.
Once you’ve developed your outline, you can use multiple strategies to transform it into finished written work. Drafting the body of the article first before the introduction and conclusion can lead to a more cohesive piece. You can also write your topic, themes, and supporting information in complete sentences, then simply remove bullets and other formatting for a bare-bones draft.
Most importantly, use your writing expertise to develop a piece of work that addresses your goals. If your outline doesn’t match your final product, that’s not necessarily a problem. However, the differences between your outline and finished work should be mindful choices made in the writing process, not accidents. To revise your draft, consider reverse outlining, a technique where you construct an outline based on the main topic of each paragraph. Seeing an outline of your drafted work can help you view the structure of your work and confirm that your writing meets your goals.
Outlines are a vital step in the writing process. They can improve your writing efficiency and your ability to communicate logically. Your outline’s format barely matters; it’s most important to outline in the way that helps you write. As long as you thoughtfully state your intended topic, intentionally structure the order of ideas, and include supporting information, your outline can improve your writing.
No organization ever expects to find itself amid a public relations crisis. However, the unfortunate reality is that unforeseen crises do happen, even to the best of us. And these crises can be most crippling when there’s no management plan in place.
Even worse than combatting a crisis is doing so while caught flat-footed on your response, which can result in hasty or poor decision-making and further damage to your company’s reputation. While no one wants to envision their company in crisis, the best way to deal with them is with effective planning and preparation on how to respond. Planning for the worst, while it may sound pessimistic, can help with mitigating unwanted surprises that arise.
Below are five essential components that every crisis management plan should have.
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The Core Crisis Management Team
As you develop your crisis management plan, establish who will make up your company’s core crisis management team and outline their roles and responsibilities. Your team will likely comprise a mix of executive leadership, department heads, HR managers, PR representatives and a legal or financial adviser. Establish the sources available for legal counsel and expertise.
- Your Crisis Team’s Org Chart
Your crisis management team must be familiar with your ideal response strategy. It may be helpful to develop an organization chart for your crisis management team that delineates chain of command, who owns which tasks and who reports to whom. This can enable your team to coordinate effectively and ensure your crisis management plan is executed as efficiently as possible. In assigning roles, determine who will serve as spokesperson for media and external messaging, and who will communicate with clients and customers. If government officials or other regulatory agencies must also be contacted, determine who will own this correspondence.
- Internal Comms Strategies
Keeping employees apprised is key. With your internal communications strategy, outline the methods and processes in which your crisis management team will distribute critical information to employees across the company following a crisis. Plan how to communicate sensitive news to employees and determine the appropriate cadence for providing companywide updates. To help convey your desired messaging, develop a key messaging framework that specifies the critical details your company wishes to communicate as well as an FAQ for common questions you expect to field about the crisis.
- External Comms Strategies
In the event of a crisis, a sound external communications strategy can go a long way toward ensuring damage control. Develop a plan for engaging with the public, external stakeholders and media. Draft a statement to share with media and keep it available for all company spokespeople. If all relevant information isn’t immediately available, plan to add these details once they are. In your external comms strategy, provide detailed instructions for which media outlets your company plans to notify. Finally, establish your broader communication objectives and ensure your external communication strategies align with your desired outcomes.
- Your Response Action Plan
Create a detailed plan for how your organization will respond in the event of a crisis or various crisis situations. In some instances, this may require working backward from the aftereffects of the crisis and the impacts to your business. Identify the potential risks that your company faces and determine the necessary actions your company must take to remediate these threats. Determine contingencies that can help your organization respond to the crisis effectively. Remember to continually review, test and update your response plan to keep it relevant as your company evolves. This plan shouldn’t be crafted with a single crisis mind. Instead, it should use an “all-hazard approach” and serve as a template for any and all potential crises that may arise.
Remember: In times of trouble, don’t panic. Having a solid crisis management plan will help you stay the course, maintain poise and navigate any rough patches that life throws your way. You’ll have a step-by-step guide outlining what actions you’ll need to take to keep any crisis from spiraling out of control and leading to subsequent problems. Even in the event of unforeseen circumstances, you’ll remain in control.
For more on this topic, check out our past CPR blog posts on crisis management.
A little over a year ago, we published a post sharing four tips to optimize blogging for SEO. With 2022 well underway, we want to revisit those tips and determine if and how SEO content development strategies have evolved in just one year.
As a quick refresher, blogging is an important tactic to improve SEO because it can help increase the visibility of a company in organic searches, establish credibility and boost website authority. According to Semrush, “Blog SEO is the process of using technical and on-page SEO techniques to increase your blog’s visibility in organic search.”
Semrush explains two primary goals when developing blog content for SEO: 1) “Make sure search engines can find and understand your blog posts so that they can deliver them to relevant searchers,” and 2) “Make sure you’re writing relevant blog content that aligns with your audience’s needs and interests.” These two goals can help companies ensure that the blog content will attract readers and improve SEO efforts.
In our blog post we shared last year, we highlighted four tips:
- Set editorial guidelines.
- Don’t forget the keywords and phrases.
- Include links to external and internal pages.
- Review traffic and engagement with blog posts.
While aspects of these tips have evolved over the past year, these four best practices will still result in blog content that achieves the two goals noted above. For example, identifying the right keywords and phrases, and using those key phrases throughout a blog post, will help search engines and searchers find your content. When selecting keywords, it is critical to use words and phrases that are relevant and specific to the topic at hand.
Additionally, reviewing traffic and engagement with blog posts will help you create blogs that meet the audience’s needs. If traffic consistently starts to dip, it may be a sign that content is no longer relevant or serving your readers.
So, how have the four tips evolved in the past year? At a macro level, not a ton, as those tips are more guiding factors and general umbrella tips that encompass multiple and more specific SEO blogging tactics such as knowing your audience, having a consistent tone, leveraging topic clusters when researching keywords, etc. Therefore, it is important to revisit those supporting blog tactics to make sure they continue to map back to the two overarching blog SEO goals noted above. You might find that it’s time to change your blog post length or update headers to make sure they are still catchy to your existing or intended audiences.
Another helpful approach to ensure SEO strategies are up to date is to look at reports and data from SEO leaders, especially because SEO as a whole continues to evolve.
Across Communiqué PR, we use different tools to support strategies and track results. We’ve linked them a few times in this post, but we’ve had the opportunity to leverage Semrush to brainstorm and define keywords. Semrush is a great tool and published a report that shares the latest data on content marketing trends from 1,500 marketers and other digital sources. Below are a few key findings and tips from The State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report that can help inform blog SEO strategies.
- Use a consistent tone of voice. Some 78% of high-scoring texts have a consistent tone of voice. Having a unique persona and capturing it in writing will help your readers feel connected.
- “How To” and “Guides” articles are still popular. Nearly three times more traffic comes from “Guide” articles.
- Write clearly and concisely. This could include short authoritative sentences that help your audiences read through the content with ease.
- Remove excessive references to COVID. Of course, there might be some instances where addressing the pandemic is necessary, but readers have pandemic fatigue, and content that continues to address COVID might turn readers away.
- Evolve your visuals. Short-form videos are popular and engaging. If relevant, consider embedding gifs and other company videos in related blog posts.
These are just a few takeaways from the 115-page report. It is a comprehensive guide that shares overarching SEO trends and then specific and actionable best practices to help improve efforts.
At Communiqué PR, we’ve had the opportunity to work closely with our clients to support SEO content development blogging. Check out more SEO-related blog posts from our blog here.
Communication is critical in times of uncertainty. The current geopolitical conflict in Ukraine and the economic climate are increasing uncertainty for employees, customers and partners. CEOs and business leaders need to communicate responsively and thoughtfully.
The CEO of Forrester recently advised CEOs to ask their direct reports three key questions specific to the Ukraine war:
- “Are we ready for the inevitable cyberattacks, and have we patched all vulnerabilities?”
- “How are our supply chains threatened, and what are you doing about it?”
- “Is our advertising supporting Russian disinformation, and should we announce to the world that we stand with Ukraine?”
All three questions should also include a communication component and, as such, should involve the company’s PR team. Do we have a current cyber crisis communication plan? Do we have a plan in place to articulate to customers, partners and employees what we are doing to mitigate any supply chain impacts? And, what is the plan to communicate our stance to employees, partners and customers?
As the Conference Board detailed in an article on the importance of communicating with employees during times of crisis, “World events, pandemics, national politics, natural disasters and social change movements thrust companies and their leaders into the spotlight with employees, stakeholders and the public clamoring for a corporate statement if not also action. The corporate stance, once articulated, can shape consumer sentiment and move markets; it can also reinforce or shatter espoused corporate values.”
Crisis planning and preparedness enable company leaders to respond promptly. Part of an effective plan is integrating key stakeholders internally – including the PR team. For specific guidance on crisis planning, consider the following articles:
- Components of a Successful Crisis Plan
- Tips to Consider When Developing a Cyber Crisis Communications Plan
- Lessons From the Royal Family: The Importance of Informed PR Counsel in Times of Crisis
Do you have a crisis plan and response team in place?
Good self-confidence is something that no one is naturally born with and is something most of us are consistently working to build. Many people, especially those who identify as women, struggle with confidence early in their careers. This often results in a lack of women who self-promote, especially compared to men.
Our sense of self-confidence begins forming before we’re even aware of it and is taught and learned over time, the same as anything else. From an incredibly young age, we begin to formulate the ideas we have about our capabilities, knowledge, self-worth, and even looks, through the actions of those around us and the society in which we live.
A lack of self-confidence can be the result of several factors, such as the messages received during early childhood about one’s worth, a lack of representation in the media or at your company, previous life experiences or other causes.
However, it is absolutely never too late to begin building up some genuine self-confidence. If you or someone you know is dealing with self-doubt in the workplace, below are eight tips to practice and build your confidence at work.
1. Understand Yourself
Understanding and connecting with yourself is the first step to building confidence both inside and outside of the workplace. Understanding your strengths, expertise, passions, and talents is essential to forming a foundation of self-confidence. Think about your family dynamics, where/how you grew up, your ethnicity, education, relationships, work experience, hobbies, personality, wins, losses, etc., to understand how each of these factors have taught and shaped you into the person you are today. You can rest assured knowing that you are an expert in your life and have unique lived experiences of depth, to which only you can speak. Knowing this can help you understand and trust yourself more deeply when expressing your opinion or ideas.
2. Shift Your Mindset and Behaviors
Now that we’re older, we can better understand where our feelings are coming from, how they got there, and what we can do to change them. As conscious beings, we have the capability to stop negative thoughts and behaviors in their tracks and redirect them to more positive thoughts and actions. A doubtful mindset can often present itself at work when you want to express your opinion, but begin with a qualifier statement such as, “I’m not sure but…” or “This may not make sense but… .” These kinds of statements show a lack of trust in your own expertise, so how can you expect your coworkers to consider your statement if you don’t seem to like it yourself? To allow yourself space for acceptance rather than writing yourself off, try beginning your statement with, “Perhaps an option might be…” or “I’d like to add to that thought… .” Remember, confidence begins internally.
3. Get Outside Your Comfort Zone
The best way to meet a challenge is to face it head on. In many situations, it is a refusal to leave the comfort of one’s space that prevents them from growing as an individual. Think of someone who is used to sitting alone in the corner, quiet and uninvolved. That space may be comfortable for the individual but doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity to build relationships, involve oneself in business decisions, insert one’s opinions and more. Leaving the quiet cozy corner and entering the heart of your organization can be daunting and uncomfortable at first but is bound to help you feel seen and heard if that is what you truly desire.
4. Focus on Your Strengths
Everyone has strengths, and everyone has weaknesses. None are greater than the other, and each of our talents and downfalls helps balance the world and the workforce. Sometimes, comparing ourselves to others has an impact on our self-confidence. When we see other people who are great at what they do, it often makes us wish we were more like them, but it is important to remember that we cannot all be great at everything, and that is perfectly fine. What is important is to know and remember where our individual strengths do lie. Once we pinpoint those factors, we can then nurture and feed those strengths rather than wishing we had someone else’s.
5. Learn from Your Mistakes
Everyone makes mistakes. Mistakes are not failures, and it is important to understand this first and foremost. It is easy to get frustrated with ourselves when we slipup and to even call ourselves disparaging or critical names. And it is difficult, yet essential, to catch ourselves in those moments, rethink what we’ve said, and decide then and there whether we will berate ourselves or cut ourselves some slack and remember we’re only human. One wall that often keeps individuals from developing true self-confidence is a harshness on oneself that does not allow grace for mistakes or other mishaps. Mistakes are a learning opportunity, and while making them can often leave us with a less than desirable feeling, it is important for them to occur. We often cannot learn otherwise. Don’t be hard on yourself for making mistakes and be glad that an issue presented itself that you’ve now had the opportunity to learn from so you can better handle the situation next time.
6. Develop or Learn New Skills
If you’re feeling insecure about your capabilities, there is always the option to learn more. Keep yourself sharp and on your toes by continuing to develop your skills and learning new ones. No human will ever know all there is to know, which means we have infinite room to grow, and that’s a great thing! If you’re not feeling fully confident with where your skills are now, or you’d like to strengthen the confidence you already do have, challenging yourself to learn more about your expertise or develop a new skill is a great idea. These days, there is knowledge all around us – it just takes time and effort to collect and put that knowledge to use.
7. Practice Makes Progress
Don’t be afraid to meet yourself where you are. It is perfectly alright to start small by practicing confident behaviors such as eye contact and body language in the mirror or with a friend. This method can also be helpful when practicing confident language skills, such as speaking loudly, clearly and captively. Additionally, don’t be afraid to “fake it ‘til you make it” during your process of self-confidence work. Wearing a positive mindset and acting confidently can actually work wonders. Not only will your teammates feel confident about you when you seem confident about yourself and your capabilities, but you’ll soon realize that you genuinely are a capable person with many skills to offer. After all, you are what you think.
8. Have Patience
Changes like these do not happen overnight. It takes time and consistent effort to shift one’s behaviors and mindset from a place that may have been subconscious for years, or even decades, beforehand, specifically if these were years filled with negative reinforcement. Building confident behaviors takes practice and determination. You must also remember that there are various ways to go about the confidence journey, so some trial and error may be needed when you’re getting started. Over time, with patience and consistent effort, these confident behaviors will become second nature. Be patient and kind with yourself, understanding that self-betterment is something that will take time and relearning.
Building your confidence will take time and constant action toward the place you’d truly like to be as an individual. It is vital to have confidence at work, whether you’re speaking your opinion, asking a question or pitching an idea. Remember to have patience with and to affirm yourself! You and your mindset are the only things standing in your way on your journey to greatness. Your confidence starts with you.
Sources
Writing is a central component of a PR professional’s role and day-to-day tasks. We’re masters of communicating effectively through writing. We can adjust our tone and voice for specific authors and audiences and lead the reader to a desired conclusion or call to action. Strong writing skills provide a foundation for all aspects of public relations.
If you want to sharpen your writing skills, you’ll see improvement, in part, by reading more. Outlined below are four ways reading makes PR pros better writers.
No. 1: Reading exposes you to different writing styles. Reading various things such as investigative news articles, essays, novels, short stories, autobiographies and more allows you to focus on the mechanics, structure and stylistic choices that make various pieces work. Approaching varied works with an eye on the authors’ stylistic tendencies will help you find your own style. It will also help you elevate your writing style, drawing from other authors’ styles.
No. 2: Reading improves comprehension of a subject. One PR job requirement is to learn to speak many “languages.” We learn the our client’s terminology whether its about business management software, construction or voice-enabling technology. We immerse ourselves in the jargon and become fluent in common industry acronyms. The same is valid for working with media. PR pros who speak the language of a reporter, understand the deadline process, and know how to craft a compelling pitch are equipped to connect with media for meaningful results.
Reading can play an essential role in establishing and maintaining our industry language speaking skills. Reading industry trade publications or other materials goes a long way in improving our understanding of newer and more complex subjects. Over time, this ability sharpens so much that it is possible to read a variety of topics and comprehend the basic essences of the topics even quicker each time. At the same time, we hone our ability to write in these “languages.”
No. 3: Reading allows you to study grammar in context. Reading allows us to research grammar without having to thumb through a textbook. The best books and articles clearly communicate their messages, and to clearly communicate, you must have a working knowledge of grammar. Take note of how authors tackle grammar questions you are unsure about in your work. Study how they use punctuation and grammar conventions and inject these lessons into your own writing.
No. 4: Reading helps you expand your vocabulary. If your writing suffers from repetition or if you want to describe your thoughts more precisely but don’t know how the chances are that your vocabulary needs some improvement. A great solution is to read materials related to your subject and write down words that look interesting to you. If you want to understand the meaning of some new words better, look them up and write down their definition. Highlight or write down various turns of phrases that you find especially masterful and assimilate them into your own writing.
If you read often, you pick up skills you might not even notice. For example, you’re learning characterization, point of view, dialogue, sentence structure, grammar, idea organization, humor techniques and spelling. All these principles can improve PR writing.
So, what will you read next?