Category: branding

Friday Five: The 5 Ws (and one S) of good communication

If you’ve taken a high school journalism course, you’ve heard of the 5 Ws of journalism. The 5 Ws are the five questions a journalist must answer when writing a news account — especially when using the inverted pyramid approach to news reporting:

  1. Who?
  2. What?
  3. When?
  4. Where?
  5. Why?

But the 5 Ws matter to other communicators, too — not just journalists. It’s important for the marketer to be able to answer these 5Ws when preparing their materials. It’s also important to think about these 5 Ws (and 1 S, which I’ll get to in a minute) before you start working on any marketing project. These questions should be answered in strategy sessions — long before you sit down to write your copy, set up your video shoot or design your website.

Strong marketing copy should address the 5 Ws for the same reasons as a news story: To get to the point quickly and make it easy on your reader (customer). (This post provides more insight into why the 5 Ws are more important to business than to journalism.)

Answering these questions before you start writing your copy, creating your video or designing your marketing materials will save you a lot of time up front:

  1. Who is my customer? (In other words, who am I trying to reach with my message?) Also, Who am I to the customer? This can be an important distinction, and your relationship with the customer makes a difference in how you answer the other questions.
  2. What do I want the customer to do as a result of my communication?
  3. When do I want the action (the “what”) to take place? Enroll today!
  4. Where do I want it to occur? Apply online or Come visit our campus!
  5. Why should they take action?

But there’s a sixth question we need to ask before we start our production. And it’s more important than any of the 5 Ws. That question is:

So what? Who cares?

Who cares about your offering? Is your communication even worth sharing?

That’s the toughest question of all. Which is why it often goes unasked.

And that’s probably why we see so much “careless” marketing. And by “careless,” I mean marketing that makes the audience “care less” about what we have to offer.

Happy weekend.

(Image courtesy of Julian Gough.)

P.S. – Technically, that “one S” question is two questions. I include this caveat because I know some of you care about those details.

 

Friday Five: Money quote edition (#highered angst, #brand storytelling, the #debates and more)

Lots of good stuff to share this week. Here are five worthwhile posts and articles, each equipped with a money quote to whet your appetite for more. Enjoy these morsels.

1. Let’s calm down about higher education is a refreshing perspective from The Atlantic. It comes at just the right time, too, with all the hand-wringing about the state of affairs of higher ed these days. (I’m not immune to a bit of that hand-wringing, myself.)

The money quote:

The point here is not to deny the existence of problems in American higher education. That would be absurd. The point, rather, is to say that much of the writing about the current “crisis” in American higher education is meant to scare, not to inform; to back agendas, not to enlighten or improve. The worries that afflict us are as old as the Republic. American higher education is not going down the tubes.

2. 7 basic types of stories. Which one is your brand telling? A look at the archetypes of stories from a panel of branding and storytelling experts, put together by Ad Age. Quote de money:

“Brands are stories,” [Droga5 executive creative director Ted Royer] said. “They want to embody a story. When we start working with a client, we don’t want to take a brief. We don’t want to just say, ‘What’s your problem?’ We want to go right back to, ‘Why was your company started? What’s your mission?’ We talk about mission all the time, and it’s just another way of saying, ‘What kind of story are you on? What kind of story do you want to tell?’ … Part of our job as an agency is to reignite that and really figure out what that story is.”

3. 11 PR observations from the first presidential debate is PR Daily’s analysis of the way the two presidential candidates, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, came off from a public relations perspective. Sharp observations, all the way down to the way the candidates dressed (although the writer, Brad Phillips, failed to mention how huge and prominent Romney’s American flag lapel pin was compared to Obama’s). Worth the read if you’re interested in PR, branding and personal communication. Money quote:

It’s important to point out that as flat as President Obama was tonight, he didn’t have a particularly “bad” single moment; nor did Mitt Romney have a strong one-liner that will become a memorable debate moment. … Still, don’t mistake this analysis for a prediction of what’s going to happen in November. The two presidential candidates will debate two more times this month, and a strong showing by President Obama and/or a weak showing by Mitt Romney will inevitably change the media narrative yet again.

4. Universities are failing at teaching social media, from Fortune and CNNMoney, quoting William Ward (@DR4WARD on Twitter), of Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Quoth Ward:

Digital and social skills can be applied across majors and discipline, not just in a social media class. Faculty must change how they research, learn, communicate, and collaborate and model this behavior in all their classes and for their students.

5. Measuring the real value of a college degree, by Jeff Selingo of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Show us the money quote, Jeff:

[B]efore we buy a car, we can find various measures on everything from gas mileage to results of safety tests. We can turn to objective sources, like Consumer Reports, to check comparisons of similar vehicles and the Kelley Blue Book to see which cars hold their value over time. But when it comes to potentially one of the most expensive purchases in a lifetime, the attitude from colleges has always been that we should just trust them on the quality of their product.

Good weekend, all.