Category: communication

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.

 

Why it’s important to share your news via social media

More proof that social media is altering the way news is consumed and distributed: A recent study of news consumption trends from the Pew Internet and American Life Project points to the growing socialization of news content.

For people under 30, digital — and social — is the preferred method to share and get news content, according to the Pew study, which says that one-third of people under 30 get their news from social networks. A slightly higher percentage of that age group (34 percent) watched TV news, but only 13 percent read print or digital newspaper content.

Translate this to the higher education sphere. All colleges and universities are media organizations to some degree. Some institutions are more sophisticated than others, but we all generate tons of content, and we push it out through newsletters, alumni publications, our official websites and our social media platforms, to name a few. Since one-third of the under-30 demographic gets their news from social media, it stands to reason that at least that proportion of our under-30 stakeholders — young alumni, current and prospective students, younger faculty and staff — will follow suit. In fact, it’s a good bet that an even greater proportion of the under-30 people connected to higher ed institutions use social media to get their news.

How are we taking advantage of social media to share our news?

Are we leveraging our Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn sites to distribute news from our university?

News-sharing should be a key component of our digital content and connection strategy. Let’s not toss out the good ol’ alumni magazine yet, but let’s think about how alumni news could — and should — be shared via social media to meet the preferences of that under-30 group of alumni. Let’s think about how to reuse content from the employee e-newsletter to communicate with our younger faculty and staff. Let’s remind ourselves that students don’t check email as often as they check their social media accounts.

Let’s start thinking about social media as more than a marketing channel. Let’s look at it as a news distribution channel as well.