I haven’t posted anything for a while and it’s been bugging me. It means I’m not practicing what I preach when it comes to social media policies. When I tell my clients that you should be updating your blog at least once a week, it doesn’t look good when I’m reduced to updating my own company blog once a month.

As I hang my head in shame, I can only say that my negligence in this area is because we’ve been very busy lately. In fact, we’ve been so occupied with various projects that we’ve had to bring in additional help to get it all done. On our plate right now is ongoing media relations and grassroots outreach for a major manufacturing and retail client, some media relations and crisis communications planning for another client, ongoing corporate communications, social media and advertising for our friends at Keystone Processors and the Manitoba Cattle Enhancement Council. And we’ve been busy with writing copy for Wellington West and Access Credit Union.

It’s fantastic that we’re able to call on the services of experienced, seasoned colleagues such as Karen Ilchena and Caroline Traweger. And I’m really looking forward to welcoming our intern from Red River College’s Creative Communications program, Lisa Bernstein, next week.

All told, it’s been a very busy spring and we look forward to keeping it all rolling with our customary attention to client service and results.

It’s always a good practice to read your writing aloud before publishing it. Why? Because sometimes you can write things that “look” fine, but “sound” awful.

Here’s a case in point: the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has named its blog “The PETA Files.” That’s right. Read it out loud and you’re left wondering whether PETA has. No one would ever accuse PETA of subtlety, so maybe the extremists who run the show there like the title. Like so much of what PETA does, it is in shockingly bad taste.

I was just talking to an old friend of mine, Mark Rayner, who is in the beginning stages of publicizing his latest novel, Marvelous Hairy. Mark’s a great, funny writer - though under appreciated by way of sales and fame. That doesn’t matter though. He loves to write and through his books the world is a little sillier, intelligent and better.

He and I were discussing ways he could drive more interest in his book. He’s with a small publisher with a small budget. So - as often happens - much of the actual  work of publicizing the book has fallen to him, the author.

We reviewed the usual ways books are marketed: advance copies to reviewers, build buzz for distributors and book shops, pitch the media, hope for some interviews.

That’s all fine. They’re all good things to do, but unless he’s extremely lucky, he won’t break through doing only that.

We started talking about ways he can differentiate his book from all the other books coming to market this fall. Jobs like this call for creativity strategy and tactics. It will also mean targeting people other than just the regular book industry insiders. In fact, they’re a secondary audience. The primary audience is actual readers.

The trick will be how to reach those readers without relying on the traditional machinery of the industry. The answer lies partly with social media - Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube. It sounds like a terrific challenge and I wish him all the luck in the world. We’ll lend a hand wherever we can.

If you want to get noticed, your communications and PR needs to zag where everyone else is zigging.

I marvel at my bookkeeper. She was at her desk the other day swiftly and effortlessly moving through my receipts, dispatching them to their correct resting places. If it were me, I said, my back would be a giant knot of stress.

It’s not that bookkeeping is especially hard, but it’s hard for me. I’ve never studied it. I do it infrequently and reluctantly, and usually only after I’m finished an already hard day’s work. I recognized I needed a pro to do it right, so I hired her.

She looked up at me, smiled, and said it’s the same for her with writing.  She’s gone to school to be a bookkeeper; she’s done it professionally for years; and she likes the nature of the work. But when she’s called upon to write something, she freezes up and needs to struggle mightily to get her thoughts down.

I know very well how important good writing is and how hard it is to do. I learned the craft first as a journalist, working for a series of newspapers in Southwestern Ontario where I was called upon to write 20 to 30 stories per week. That boot camp taught me how to churn out lively, error-free (or very close) copy quickly. I learned how to write in a variety of styles. I mastered how to write leads and how to lay down words in a way that helped my readers get all the way to the end of the story.

Armed with those skills, I moved into the corporate world where I discovered how rare they were. Even as a junior in the communications department, I was commonly cleaning up the writing of senior executives and board members. They couldn’t get their tenses right to save their lives. They excelled in using the latest business buzz words (and thought themselves erudite for doing so). Spelling was bad. Styleguides were non-existent. And don’t get me started on the difference between passive and active voices. As skilled as some of them were in their own fields - law, accounting, sales, management - they were incompetent as writers.

One of my colleagues was notorious throughout our organization for his inability to conjugate even basic English verbs. His work was embarrassing, but he was a prolific senior executive. Barely literate letters went out under his pen to our suppliers and customers. A grade school student could have done better. The result was ongoing harm to our corporate reputation.

I recall the effect his letters would have on employees in particular. His memos were so garbled and full of inexactitudes and obfuscations that they regularly caused the rank and file to huddle together to decipher their true meanings. My department staffers would tiptoe into my office, close the door and ask for a translation. It was an ongoing distraction that needlessly hurt morale and productivity.

I’m a firm believer that the quality of a firm’s communications is a measure of its whole. If its marketing and public relations tools are bad, what are we to make of its accounting, its finance, its logistics, its governance, its human resources, etc.?

So the next time you’re putting together a communications piece for your organization and you’re cursing the stress it’s causing you, ask yourself if you’re a writer trying to be a bookkeeper. If the answer is yes, then pick up the phone and call a pro. Whether it’s a speech, an annual report, a blog or a newsletter, we’ll make sure your message is communicated effectively.