Pr Writing Quotes

Networking isn't how many people you know, it's how many people know you.

Do you know what the difference is between PR and advertising? Advertising is when you say how great you are. PR is when other people say how great you are. PR is better.

Advertising, Marketing, PR can get more people to buy your book. Only great writing can get more people to love it.

An entrepreneur with strong network makes money even when he is asleep.

Truth-telling is difficult because the varieties of untruth are so many and so well disguised. Lies are hard to identify when they come in the form of apparently innocuous imprecision, socially acceptable slippage, hyperbole masquerading as enthusiasm, or well-placed propaganda. These forms of falsehood are so common, and even so normal, in media-saturated, corporately controlled culture that truth often looks pale, understated, alarmist, rude, or indecisive by comparison. Flannery O’Connor’s much-quoted line ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd’ has a certain prophetic force in the face of more and more commonly accepted facsimiles of truth - from PR to advertising claims to propaganda masquerading as news.

Jonah Berger, a social scientist well-known for his studies of virality, explains that publicness is one of the most crucial factors in driving something’s spread. As he writes in his book Contagious, “Making things more observable makes them easier to imitate, which makes them more likely to become popular. . . . We need to design products and initiatives that advertise themselves and create behavioral residue that sticks around even after people have bought the product or espoused the idea.

--From "A Familiar Preface", 1912(PR,pp,19-20）： “At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can expect to attract much attention I have not been revolutionary in my writings. The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard, absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things;but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher.

The PR stuff, mostly. Write grants and convince people to fund my research. Network, which is a special kind of hell. Public speaking, or even one-on-one situations where I have to impress people. That’s the worst, actually. I hate it so much—my head explodes and I freeze and everyone is looking at me ready to judge me

millions—often more than the budget of the movie itself—studios regularly write off major releases as complete washes. And when they do succeed, no one has any idea why or which of the ingredients were responsible for it. As screenwriter William Goldman famously put it, nobody knows anything—even the people in charge. It’s all a big gamble. Which is fine, because their system is designed to absorb these losses. The hits pay for the mistakes many times over. But there is a big difference between them and everyone else in the world. You can’t really afford for your start-up to fail; your friend has sunk everything into her new business; and I can’t allow my book to flop. We don’t have ten other projects coming down the pike. This is it.

Putting thoughts into words is vastly different from putting truth into words. For words are not truth. As ardently as writers sort and select and polish their words, at the end of the day they are still words. They are not, in themselves, truth. However carefully we choose our words, no matter how eloquently we compile and conjoin and convey them, they remain just words, merely signposts that point to the truth, as Eckhart Tolle put it. Just as preachers, politicians, PR spin masters and the media can’t create truth by writing or speaking words they say are true, authors can't validate truth by putting it into print. And the rest of us can't know it by simply hearing or reading the words. We can only find our way to truth by following the signposts and ultimately believing. It all comes down to believing, to faith, for there is no proof this side of the big dirt nap.

The other pioneer of political public relations was Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, who sharpened his skills writing prowar propaganda for the Committee on Public Information during World War I. After the war he decided that the word “propaganda” had a negative ring, due to its use by the defeated Germans; he came up with a new phrase, “public relations,” which has a distinctly more Madison Avenue sound. In 1928, in his influential Propaganda, Bernays claimed that manipulating public opinion was a necessary part of democracy. According to his daughter, Bernays believed the common people were “not to be relied upon, [so] they had to be guided from above.” She would later say that her father believed in “enlightened despotism”—a system through which intelligent men such as himself would keep the mob in line through the clever use of subliminal PR campaigns. His clients included not only such megacorporations as Procter & Gamble, the United Fruit Company, and the American Tobacco Company (through clever advertising campaigns, he sought to remove the traditional stigma against women smoking), but also Republican president Calvin Coolidge. Bernays did not feel it would be strategic to allay the public’s fear of communism and urged his clients to play on popular emotions and magnify that fear. His work laid some of the foundation of the McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s. Life magazine named Bernays one of the one hundred most influential Americans of the twentieth century.

One day Spinner, the woman who runs PR tells me, “I like that idea, but I’m not sure that it’s one-plus-one-equals-three enough.” What does any of this nutty horseshit actually mean? I have no idea. I’m just amazed that hundreds of people can gobble up this malarkey and repeat it, with straight faces. I’m equally amazed by the high regard in which HubSpot people hold themselves. They use the word awesome incessantly, usually to describe themselves or each other. That’s awesome! You’re awesome! No, you’re awesome for saying that I’m awesome! They pepper their communication with exclamation points, often in clusters, like this!!! They are constantly sending around emails praising someone who is totally crushing it and doing something awesome and being a total team player!!! These emails are cc’d to everyone in the department. The protocol seems to be for every recipient to issue his or her own reply-to-all email joining in on the cheer, writing things like “You go, girl!!” and “Go, HubSpot, go!!!!” and “Ashley for president!!!” Every day my inbox fills up with these little orgasmic spasms of praise. At first I ignore them, but then I feel like a grump and decide I should join in the fun. I start writing things like, “Jan is the best!!! Her can-do attitude and big smile cheer me up every morning!!!!!!!” (Jan is the grumpy woman who runs the blog; she scowls a lot.) Sometimes I just write something with lots of exclamation points, like, “Woo-hoo!!!!!!! Congratulations!!!!!!! You totally rock!!!!!!!!!!!!” Eventually someone suspects that I am taking the piss, and I am told to cut that shit out.

Recipe for a Perfect Wife, the Novel INGREDIENTS 3 cups editors extraordinaire: Maya Ziv, Lara Hinchberger, Helen Smith 2 cups agent-I-couldn’t-do-this-without: Carolyn Forde (and the Transatlantic Literary Agency) 1½ cup highly skilled publishing teams: Dutton US, Penguin Random House Canada (Viking) 1 cup PR and marketing wizards: Kathleen Carter (Kathleen Carter Communications), Ruta Liormonas, Elina Vaysbeyn, Maria Whelan, Claire Zaya 1 cup women of writing coven: Marissa Stapley, Jennifer Robson, Kate Hilton, Chantel Guertin, Kerry Clare, Liz Renzetti ½ cup author-friends-who-keep-me-sane: Mary Kubica, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Amy E. Reichert, Colleen Oakley, Rachel Goodman, Hannah Mary McKinnon, Rosey Lim ½ cup friends-with-talents-I-do-not-have: Dr. Kendra Newell, Claire Tansey ¼ cup original creators of the Karma Brown Fan Club: my family and friends, including my late grandmother Miriam Christie, who inspired Miriam Claussen; my mom, who is a spectacular cook and mother; and my dad, for being the wonderful feminist he is 1 tablespoon of the inner circle: Adam and Addison, the loves of my life ½ tablespoon book bloggers, bookstagrammers, authors, and readers: including Andrea Katz, Jenny O’Regan, Pamela Klinger-Horn, Melissa Amster, Susan Peterson, Kristy Barrett, Lisa Steinke, Liz Fenton 1 teaspoon vintage cookbooks: particularly the Purity Cookbook, for the spark of inspiration 1 teaspoon loyal Labradoodle: Fred Licorice Brown, furry writing companion Dash of Google: so I could visit the 1950s without a time machine METHOD: Combine all ingredients into a Scrivener file, making sure to hit Save after each addition.

In my experience, the books that tend to flop upon release are those where the author goes into a cave for a year to write it, then hands it off to the publisher for release. They hope for a hit that rarely comes. On the other hand, I have clients who blog extensively before publishing. They develop their book ideas based on the themes that they naturally gravitate toward but that also get the greatest response from readers. (One client sold a book proposal using a screenshot of Google queries to his site.) They test the ideas they’re writing about in the book on their blog and when they speak in front of groups. They ask readers what they’d like to see in the book. They judge topic ideas by how many comments a given post generates, by how many Facebook “shares” an article gets. They put potential title and cover ideas up online to test and receive feedback. They look to see what hot topics other influential bloggers are riding and find ways of addressing them in their book.* The latter achieves PMF; the former never does. One is growth hacking; the other, simply guessing.

Amazon, for its part, has a couple of other easy suggestions for you if the advice “write a hypothetical press release” doesn’t quite work for your situation. Their CTO, Werner Vogels, suggests trying to write an FAQ for this product you’re developing. (That way you can address, in advance, potential user issues and questions.)9 Or try to define the crucial parts of the user experience by making mockups of pages, writing hypothetical case studies so you can actually start to see what it would look like and who it would work for and how. Finally, try writing the user manual, which as Werner explains usually has three parts: concepts, how-to, and reference. (Defining these means you understand your idea in and out from the customers perspective. Also, he says, if you have more than one type of user then write multiple manuals.)

heartful.   PR: You really did it. Music is an amazing art, to me. I love to recount to myself the number of human beings it takes, each skilled in a different area, to make possible a symphony concert. The composers, and those who copied and preserved the compositions, the instrument makers, skilled at their crafts—tubas, trumpets, timpani, woodwinds, strings—the music teachers who taught the performers, the performers who studied their instruments and practiced and rehearsed, all the builders who erected the concert hall—carpenters, electricians, etc.—the architect who designed it, the conductor who studied, who learned the language of music, the languages of all the instruments, the members of the audience who bought tickets, got dressed, came to the concert hall to be transported, to be informed, by sound, came for an experience that had nothing to do with physical survival. Most amazing. Always makes me certain absolutely without doubt that something is going on with the human species, something good. Two heroes to me are my middle school music teacher and my son’s middle school music teacher. What courage! All those twelve- and thirteen-year-old children, each with a noise-making instrument in his hands and these two enormously courageous teachers are attempting to teach them how to make music together. At my son’s first sixthgrade band concert, the music teacher turned to the audience of glowing, proud parents and said, “I’m not certain what’s going to happen here, but I’m just hoping that we’ll all begin at the same time.” It brought tears to my eyes, literally. And they did it! One step forward, in my opinion, in understanding what it means to be human.

Her biggest clients were transportation companies. She helped plan their PR campaigns, write white papers, and set up “Astroturf” organizations to give corporate messaging the appearance of grassroots support. A

The Instagram versus Hipstamatic story is perhaps the canonical example of a strategy made famous by Chris Dixon’s 2015 essay “Come for the tool, stay for the network.” Chris writes: A popular strategy for bootstrapping networks is what I like to call “come for the tool, stay for the network.” The idea is to initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network. The tool helps get to initial critical mass. The network creates the long term value for users, and defensibility for the company.40 There are many other examples across many sectors beyond photo apps: The Google Suite provides stand-alone tools for people to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, but also network features around collaborative editing, and comments. Games like Minecraft or even classics like Street Fighter can be played in single-player mode where you play against the computer, or multiplayer mode where you play with friends. Yelp started out effectively as a directory tool for people to look up local businesses, showing addresses and phone numbers, but the network eventually built out the database of photos and reviews. LinkedIn started as a tool to put your resume online, but encouraged you to build up your professional network over time. “Come for the tool, stay for the network” circumvents the Cold Start Problem and makes it easier to launch into an entire network—with PR, paid marketing, influencers, sales, or any number of tried-and-true channels. It minimizes the size requirement of an atomic network and in turn makes it easy to take on an entire network. Whether it’s photo-sharing apps or restaurant directories, in the framework of the Cold Start Theory, this strategy can be visualized. In effect, a tool can be used to “prop up” the value of the network effects curve when the network is small.

A good product manager will do a little of everything and a great deal of all this: Spec out what the product should do and the road map for where it will go over time. Determine and maintain the messaging matrix. Work with engineering to get the product built according to spec. Work with design to make it intuitive and attractive to the target customer. Work with marketing to help them understand the technical nuances in order to develop effective creative to communicate the messaging. Present the product to management and get feedback from the execs. Work with sales and finance to make sure this product has a market and can eventually make money. Work with customer support to write necessary instructions, help manage problems, and take in customer requests and complaints. Work with PR to address public perceptions, write the mock press release, and often act as a spokesperson.

Bezos noted that when a project is successfully completed and it’s ready to be publicly announced, the conventional last step is to have the communications department write two documents. One is a very short press release (PR) that summarizes what the new product or service is and why it is valuable for customers. The other is a “frequently asked questions” (FAQ) document with more details about costs, functionality, and other concerns. Bezos’s brainstorm was to make that last step in a conventional project the first step in Amazon projects.

To pitch a new project at Amazon, you must first write a PR and FAQ, putting the goal smack in the opening sentences of the press release. Everything that happens subsequently is working backwards from the PR/FAQ, as it is called at Amazon. Critically, the language of both documents must be plain. “I called it ‘Oprah-speak,’ ” says Ian McAllister, a former Amazon executive

The invention approach required the endurance to evaluate and discard many options and ideas. So, as we were considering which path to take—build or buy—we took countless meetings with different companies in the digital media business. In addition to enabling us to understand our options for potential acquisition, it was a productive way for us to get up to speed quickly on different aspects of the digital media business, as the founders and leaders of these companies shared their experience and insights from working on a variety of product challenges. In parallel, we were writing some of our first PR/FAQs for digital media products, which we would review and discuss with Jeff. The two processes reinforced one another, and by the end of 2004, our thinking and vision had become clearer. As

The Working Backwards process is all about starting from the customer perspective and following a step-by-step process where you question assumptions relentlessly until you have a complete understanding of what you want to build. It’s about seeking truth. Sometimes the Working Backwards process can uncover some surprising truths. Some companies, in a rush to get a project to market, ignore that truth and keep building according to the original plan. In their attachment to the modest gains of that plan, they motivate the team to pursue it aggressively, only to realize much later that there was a much bigger gain to be had if they’d taken the time to question their own assumptions. The cost of changing course in the PR/FAQ writing stage is much lower than after you’ve launched and have an operating business to manage. The Working Backwards process tends to save you from the expensive proposition of making a significant course change after you’ve launched your product.

There are many modern biographies and histories, full of carefully authenticated fact, which afflict the reader with a weight of indigestion. The author has no right to his facts, no ownership in them. They have flitted through his mind on a calm five minutes' passage from the notebook to the immortality of the printed page. But no man can hope to make much impression on a reader with facts which he has not thought it worth his own while to remember. Every considerable book, in literature or science, is an engine whereby, mind operates on mind. It is an ignorant worship of Science which treats it as residing in books, and reduces the mind to a mechanism of transfer. The measure of an author's power would be best found in the book which he should sit down to write the day after his library was burnt to the ground.

With tools like Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa, it was easy to research potential sites we wanted to appear on, cross-check their traffic, and then reach out. And as I explained earlier, when your product is actually relevant and designed for a specific audience, bloggers love to write about you. Writing articles about you means more pageviews (and advertising revenue) for them!

As he writes in his book Contagious,

Putting thoughts into words is vastly different from putting truth into words. For words are not truth. As ardently as writers sort and select and polish their words, at the end of the day they are still words. They are not, in themselves, truth. However carefully we choose our words, no matter how eloquently we compile and conjoin and convey them, they remain just words, merely signposts that point to the truth, as Eckhart Tolle put it. Just as preachers, politicians, PR spin masters and the media can’t create truth by writing or speaking words they say are true, authors can't validate truth by putting it into print. And the rest of us can't know it by simply hearing or reading the words. We can only find our way to truth by following the signposts and ultimately believing. It all comes down to believing, to faith, for there is no proof this side of the big dirt nap.

In fact, any black-and-white image on the plane can be thought of as a subset of R^2, where the black points belong to the subset and the white points do not. So the text “INFINITE” in Figure 1.4(c) is a subset of R^2 and therefore an element of P(R^2). By that token, P(R^2) contains a copy of the page you are reading now. Thus in addition to containing every imaginable function and every imaginable black-and-white image, P(R^2) also contains the full text of every book that was ever written, those that are yet to be written and those that will never be written. Inside of P(R^2) is a detailed biography of your life, from beginning to end, as well as the biographies of all of your unborn descendants. It is startling that the five symbols used to write P(R^2) can express such an incomprehensibly large set. Homework: Think about P(P(R^2)).

Culture stems from founders, but it is best reflected in the trusted team the founders form to launch their venture. So ask that team: What do we care about? What do we believe? Who do we want to be? How do we want our company to act and make decisions? Then write down their responses. They will, in all likelihood, encompass the founders’ values, but embellish them with insights from the team’s different perspectives and experiences. Most companies neglect this. They become successful, and then decide they need to document their culture. The job falls to someone in the human resources or PR department who probably wasn’t a member of the founding team but who is expected to draft a mission statement that captures the essence of the place. The result is usually a set of corporate sayings that are full of “delighted” customers, “maximized” shareholder value, and “innovative” employees. The difference, though, between successful companies and unsuccessful ones is whether employees believe the words.

Sleep gets some really good PR from poets, who are used to talking clearly about things we don’t understand.

Taylor Markarian has such a unique voice and a keen understanding of the musical scenes she’s been documenting during her writing career. It was only a matter of time before she told a larger story via a book format. I’ll be reading cover to cover.

Sell your art, crafts, or any handcrafted item on etsy.com Develop a travel concierge service to help people when they miss their flights Offer online tutoring services in your field of expertise Host a networking event (charge a low ticket price and get sponsors to provide food) Create and sell a visitors’ guide to your town or city, or build a web resource for tourists, supported by advertisers Create an online (or offline) course in some quirky subject you happen to know a lot about Publish a blog with a new lesson on a specific topic every day Start a podcast and sell sponsorship Visit yard sales or thrift shops and buy items to resell Offer a simple freelance service—anything from fact-checking to tech support or something else entirely Become a home, office, or life organizer Manage P.R. or social media accounts for small businesses Buy and sell used textbooks to college students Sell your musings on business, art, or culture as a freelance writer Start a membership website, where people pay a monthly or annual fee to access useful information about a specific topic Write and publish a book (if I can do it, you can too!)

It all began when I was asked to write an essay for a new radical magazine called Strike! The editor asked if I had anything provocative that no one else would be likely to publish. I usually have one or two essay ideas like that stewing around, so I drafted one up and presented him with a brief piece entitled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” The essay was based on a hunch. Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers, or the sort of people (very familiar in academic contexts) who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. The list was seemingly endless. What, I wondered, if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are aware of it?