PATRON SAINT PRODUCTIONS, INC. ~ CHAT TRANSCRIPT ~ Patron Saint Productions, Inc. Online Publicity Chat Series Topic: Session #6: Online Newsletters Guest: Steve O'Keefe, author of "Complete Guide to Internet Publicity" Date: February 19, 2004 Hi, Valda, binford. We'll be starting in just a moment. Hi, Steve, Tatyana. Hello, all. You have joined the Internet PR chats with Steve O'Keefe. Today's topic is Online Newsletters. Happy Mardi Gras, everyone! Are there any questions from last week? Welcome, Michael. Hello. Okay, hearing no questions, and wanting to get to the parade grounds, let me start. Today's topic is Online Newsletters. Let me start by asking if anyone here is currently producing an online newsletter? (Also called e-zines.) I produce a monthly newsletter for the International Association of Online Communicators (IAOC). But, interestingly enough, I have no online newsletter for my own web site. Why? After our session today, you should be able to answer that question. Wow, quiet crowd today. Okay, let's talk about the main advantages of an online newsletter: * It gives you the ability to maintain a connection with people away from your web site. * It alerts them to new content available on the site. * It gives them a reason to return to the site. * It reminds them that, yes, you HAVE NOT GONE OUT OF BUSINESS YET. * It keeps your name in front of the target audience. Welcome, Leah. Greetings. Many people will come to a site once, and forget to come back. The newsletter gives you a chance to remind them to visit you again. There are many other advantages to using online newsletters. Let me list some, in no particular order... Ok, I'll jump in -- fbinford here -- the biggest challenge I have is to keep a balance between giving my customers information and promoting my products. Any advice? Okay, fbinford. Thanks for breaking the ice. I would say you need to err on the side of giving information, and keep a low-profile on product promotion. For example, you'll seldom see me mention that I have a book published in these chats. People are not coming here to hear promos for the book. If I deliver quality information, I trust those impressed enough will be able to easily find information about the book. Same with your newsletter. When you give informational content, people respect that. When it comes time to buy the product or service you're selling, they'll think of you first. You gain respect and trust. Thanks -- that makes sense. A good example of a way to achieve this in a newsletter is to use case histories of people who have used your products or services. Case histories are very attractive newsletter content, and it's not YOU hyping your services, but a client explaining how you've helped them solve a problem. Good content and good PR. Thanks, Steve -- appreciate the advice. Okay, some other advantages of using online newsletters: * No printing or postage costs. * They flush out anonymous site users (that is, you get e- mail addresses). * They are nearly instantaneous -- for breaking news. * They balance a passive web site with active outreach. * It is easier and faster to respond to an e-zine than a printed publication. * You can include instant purchase links for impulse buying. Those are a lot of compelling reasons to publish an online newsletter. Let's look at the other side of the coin, though: What are the disadvantages? * Inability to get paid subscribers. * Almost no one will pay for an e-zine. * They can be enormously time consuming. * They always come with technical headaches -- software problems. * The technology is, like, generation 2.0 -- still very buggy. * You get a lot of complaints. * You can't communicate at length in an online newsletter the way you can in print. * They are much less effective, overall, than printed newsletters. * Readership deteriorates quickly. * It's often difficult to tell how active the readership is. Okay, let's take some questions, and I'll start with one of my own: How many online newsletters do you subscribe to? I subscribe to about 10. About five or so at any given time. Certainly, some of the rest of you subscribe to an e-zine or two? Yes? Now, how many do you read? I find myself mostly unsubscribing to those where I've bought products and no longer desire to hear from them. I read NONE. Probably about six to seven -- I at least skim all of them. Yes -- some for "news," some for "networking," or syndication possibilities, etc. I read two of them completely. Here are some e-zines I like: PublishersMarketplace, Holt Uncensored, WriteMarkets. These are trade publications for the book publishing industry. They are among the best of the lot. But I seem to just archive them instead of reading them, then once a month I dump my archives. Unread. Why don't you read them???? No time. Had to read on computer screens. Am reluctant to print them out for some reason. I know I should follow them, but I don't. Part of the reason, I think, is that e-mail is typically processed when it's opened. Is it a problem with their length? You either read it or delete it. If you set it aside, that becomes a habit, and eventually you are staring at 50 unread e-mails, and you delete. Or archive it, to throw out later. Exactly, Michael. What about writing them -- and ALSO keeping them archived and available on your site? I'm not going to make the mistake of interpolating my behavior to the general online user. However, I know e-zines with hundreds of thousands of SUBSCRIBERS and very few READERS. One reason I produce a printed newsletter is because I want it to be read, not just subscribed to. Plus, I know many e-newsletter editors who spend upwards of four hours a day putting out their free e-zines. It can suck up your time, big time. Okay, so those are some of the drawbacks. Good advantages. Substantial disadvantages. Thanks for joining us today. This week's topic is Online Newsletters. I'll take questions before moving onto newsletter content, style, and formatting. Let's start with the writing style. The standard format for online newsletters has evolved into paragraph-length news items, coupled with a link to more detailed information. It works well for screen-reading. And there is a depth of information for those who wish to follow. It's actually very important to have a strong personal voice in an e-zine. Most journalism schools will teach you to be objective. But in e-zines, objective equals boring, and boring equals no readers. Folks like it if you have a strong slant. Very true. They can get objective (or what passes for it) from the major news media. Readers go to e-zines for an alternative or marginal point of view. They like gossip, people being pilloried, humor, sarcasm. As long as it doesn't violate good ethics, speak your peace. Also, user comments really liven up an e- zine. I wouldn't print lengthy letters to the editor, but short bits of edited dialogue make e-zines more compelling and friendly. Let me give you an example. I subscribed to PublishersMarketplace, but didn't read it very often. It comes out daily, with good-format, paragraph-length articles and links to longer pieces. It's publishing industry gossip, and the editor, Michael Cader, makes no bones about where he stands. He told me people mostly read the publication to see who was going to get skewered next. Anyway, I opened it up once after about a month's hiatus, and there was a new feature: Letters to the Editor (or "Feedback"), and the people writing in were the kind of senior publishing executives that are my target audience. So I thought, "Jeez, I better pay attention to this rag -- my target audience is." Letters help build community, bridge gaps between people, and make an impersonal electronic publication more personal. Any questions about newsletter style? Hi, Maureen. Hi, OnWrite. Happy Mardi Gras. While I'm waiting for questions, let me talk about content elements that work well in online newsletters. SHOW US YOUR TIPS! * News briefs (obviously). * Feature story. (I like to start with a feature story, and stretch out for -- gosh -- a whole THREE paragraphs -- before getting back to one-paragraph news briefs.) * An events calendar. * Chat transcript teasers or interview tidbits. * Letters to the Editor. * Polls and poll results. * Factoids and filler. You can use the filler for little product plugs. These are all snappy little bits of text that, hopefully, inspire the reader to take some action: maybe vote in a poll, write a letter, finger a link for a longer article. Any content questions? Hi, Jim. Sorry I'm late .. Welcome, Jim, you've joined the Internet PR chat with Steve O'Keefe about online newsletters. Before I forget, please allow me to introduce our lovely new chat moderator: Tatyana. Tatyana has an unspellable last name -- maybe she can do it, I can't in a chat. She's my new office manager, so if you want transcripts, e-mail her, not me. On content: Does it make sense to include information somewhat afield? Political opinions? Or would that alienate too many? How much time is spent gathering content info?? Leah, here's a great tip for gathering info for an online newsletter: One day a month, interview everyone in the office for 15 minutes: What's the coolest new thing you've learned this month? What really upsets you about this business? If you ask people to write-up something for you, they never will. But if you grill them, they'll spill the beans. Mixing cliches there -- sorry. Great idea, thanks. If it's just you in the office, it's a little different. Maybe you could look at all the web pages you bookmarked in the last week and write-up something about one or two of them. What's the most interesting thing you got in the mail? In other words, the content is lying all around, waiting for someone with a sharp eye and a sharp pencil to pick it up. But, honestly, publication of an e- zine can be incredibly time-consuming, mostly due to tech difficulties, formatting, maintaining the mailing list, etc. Content's the easy part. Okay, let's move this party along and talk about formatting. I like plain ASCII text -- no rich formatting, no html. E-zine readers are almost unanimous in the desire for plain text. And they certainly won't open an e-zine that comes as a file attachment. If you make up a page formatted in HTML, will it display correctly in most mail programs? Plain text is boring, thus increasing reading fatigue and reducing readership. Thus the "chunky" paragraph-style news briefs + URL format. You have to be visually creative with plain text: * Double space instead of paragraph indents. * Asterisks instead of bullets. * ALL CAPS instead of bold for headlines. * Tildas instead of italics. Once the newsletter is copy-proofed, save it AS TEXT WITH LINE ENDINGS. That is, force the line length to wrap at roughly 55 characters per line (think of the speed limit). That produces a line length that won't cause eye strain. Are you in Word? Yes, I now work in Word, but these rules apply in all word processors. All of them offer some kind of "Save as Text With Line Breaks" option. Ok, I wanted to be sure it wasn't some new software. To get a 55 character line, you can make a template using a font such as Courier that is monospaced. Set the margin at 55 characters. 55 characters /line also means nearly everyone "sees it as you wrote it." Leah, all versions of Word are different on exactly how to do this -- but they can all do it. Bill Gates keeps trying to make it harder and harder to find a way out of saving files as Word docs. That's going to be one ugly newsletter. No wonder it's hard to get people to read it. Michael, ugly, yes, but accessible. Anyone can read text, and files don't automatically get deleted. Too much flash and dazzle would make it look like an ad. It's one reason you shouldn't try to push an e-zine to do something it's not supposed to do. Ever open up one of those 20 page zines and then roll your eyes and think, "They must be kidding"? Who cares this much about what anyone does? But in print, people will read anything. Thus, the romance novel was born. Oops, I'm supposed to be "objective," aren't I? Okay, fire away any questions. In the background, I'm going to speed things up cause I got a parade to catch. What about such $25/month options such as Topica to help get out the newsletter? Keep track of subscribers -- and dropouts? Is it worth it? Better solution? There are resources for locating good newsletter management software in the Resources/Links section of this site. Topica is fabulous, Jim. A top choice. YahooGroups will give you a free newsletter, but it will have Yahoo-generated ads. I used to have a Yahoo Group, but the ads got too raunchy for my taste. I didn't care to share them with my clients. Some offer the option of plain text or html (would be a pain to do, I expect). Valda, absolutely, offering options of formats is the way to go: Would you like that in plain text, HTML, Word, or PDF? That lets everyone have the zine they want... And you only have to put in four more hours of formatting a week... Do you think the print vs. screen reading habits will change? Leah, no, I think no matter how good screens get, they'll never replace print. Sad for the trees. Trees are renewable. Brains are not. What about frequency? When you make an e-zine, e-mail it to yourself using multiple accounts, if you can. Look at it on AOL, CompuServe, in a plain text e-mail reader, in a web e- mail reader. You'll catch lots of formatting errors if you do this. Fix your templates once a year, and forget about them. Every year, do another multiple-format test -- with friends, family, co-workers if necessary -- fix any problems in your templates and forget them for another year. Finally, here are some alternatives to producing your own e-zine. Find the best e-zine in your area out there, and support them. Advertise with them. Write articles for them. Send them news leads. It's often wiser to partner with a publication that is already reaching your target audience than to start one of your own. Lord knows, they could use all the help and support they can get. Thank you for joining us today, everyone. Next week Steve will discuss spam laws, blacklisting and handling complaints. Thanks, Tatyana. I mentioned a few alternatives. Well, there's just that one. And, of course, my alternative: print. I do a quarterly print publication. If you'd like a sample copy, send Tatyana your snail mail address. I just have a jones about the printed word, you know. I'm a paper freak. Former typesetter and layout artist turned geek. Have mercy. I like reading on screen ... being a Star Trek geek. And I do have a book out -- somewhere. I ordered it. Okay everyone, see you next week, same time, same place. Have Fun! Happy Mardi Gras! __________________________________________________ ABOUT THE GUEST STEVE O'KEEFE is the author of the outdated classic, "Publicity on the Internet" (Wiley, 1997), and the updated new book, "Complete Guide to Internet Publicity" (Wiley, 2002) -- based on over 1,000 online campaigns. Steve pioneered many online marketing techniques which are now considered standard practice. Steve's writing has appeared in over 100 publications including The Wall Street Journal, Harper's, Internet World, PR News, Outside, Small Press, Salon, Curio, NetWorth, and HotWired. Steve is a member of the adjunct faculty at Tulane University where he teaches online public relations. He is Executive Director of Patron Saint Productions, Inc., a publishing consultancy specializing in online marketing strategy, campaigns, and training. __________________________________________________ ABOUT THE BOOK Complete Guide to Internet Publicity: Creating and Launching Successful Online Campaigns by Steve O'Keefe Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2002, ISBN 0-471-10580-5, 436 pages, softcover, $34.95) Available in most bookstores online and off. "Nobody knows more about making a splash on the Internet than Steve O'Keefe. And no book reveals better how to do it than this one." -- Fraser P. Seitel, Author of "The Principles of Public Relations" "Steve O'Keefe's book is, by far, the most comprehensive Internet publicity book available. It's a tool that any business owner or publicist needs to read to conduct an effective online PR campaign." -- Lorilyn Bailey, CEO, NewsBuzz.com "Complete Guide to Internet Publicity" is the bedrock reference book for designing and implementing online publicity campaigns. The book takes a "how-to" approach, with detailed instructions for planning the campaigns, creating the materials needed, launching the campaigns, dealing with any problems, and measuring the results. The instructions are highlighted with anecdotes culled from hundreds of campaigns conducted by the author and other Internet publicity professionals. Chapters include: 1. The Power of Internet Publicity 2. E-Mail News Releases 3. Online News Rooms 4. Discussion Group Postings 5. Newsletters and Direct Marketing 6. Chat Tours 7. Online Seminars and Workshops 8. Web Site Registration and Linkage 9. Contests and Other Fancy Promotions 10. Syndicating Your Promotions 11. Building an Online Publicity Operation "Complete Guide to Internet Publicity" is a goldmine for those people responsible for online publicity operations, whether as managers, professionals, instructors or students, including such professions as marketing, advertising, web site design & construction, e-commerce, direct marketing, and customer service. The book and companion web site both include templates for all the campaign materials described, and time-saving resources to help locate target audiences online. This book is essential to anyone charged with promoting a product, service, company, person, or web site. Order your copy today. __________________________________________________ Copyright ©2004 by Patron Saint Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Please request permission before duplicating or distributing this document. For reprint permission, send mailto:permissions@patronsaintpr.com. Thank you.