By Steven Roll
ASBPE Past President

The Wall Street Journal has one, the New York Times has one, Bloomberg has one. What about your publication? Does your publication have a social media policy?

Like many B2B publications, chances are your publication has been dipping its toes in the social-media ocean, but hasn’t jumped in yet. Maybe you’ve set up a Twitter account or a fanpage on Facebook, but nothing more.

Even if your publication is still in the exploratory stage, it’s probably a good idea to adopt a social media policy.

After making a few informal inquiries last week to some tech-savvy editors, I was somewhat surprised at how many publications still haven’t adopted a policy for how writers and editors should conduct themselves when communicating in a professional capacity on social media. Many of the people I spoke with said they were in the process of developing one. (Of course, the reason I was asking is because I'm drafting a policy for my company.)

Maybe editors are reluctant to adopt a formal policy because they feel social media initiatives are something that should be built from the “ground up.” After all, it’s mostly the younger people who have fully embraced it. Perhaps adopting a formal policy might somehow inhibit the free flow of conversation on Twitter etc. Both the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg were criticized for adopting overly rigid policies.

It seems like the danger of off-message or inappropriate communications outweigh the awkwardness of adopting a policy concerning a medium many of us don’t fully understand yet. But it seems like it would be a lot easier to change an misguided policy, than to try to somehow compensate for an offensive Tweet or misguided blog post.

The social media policy I’m working on has two levels. The first level is a set of broad principles that outline some basic rules of conduct. Here are a few:

• be honest and transparent;
• coordinate your messages with your publication;
• add value;
• blog about what you know;
• if you make a mistake, admit it, and correct it; and
• be diplomatic and professional — especially with the people who are behaving rudely or with whom you disagree.

The second level reads more like a style guide. It will include more specific information such as:

• a sample blog post;
• what a typical Tweet should look like; and
• best practices for sharing a blog post on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

To be sure, the policy my company ends up adopting is likely to look entirely different than my conception of it. But even if that turns out to be the case, I think it's a worthwhile exercise to start establishing some guidelines. Otherwise, how else will you be able to identify inappropriate conduct. Like old age, having a policy to point to sure beats the alternative.

Through a colleague, I found the following gem at the Online Database of Social Media Policies: Chris Boudreaux, author of the upcoming book Social Media Governance, has assembled 82 such policies on the book’s website. From companies to charities to military organizations, it’s a treasure trove for those struggling with social media guidelines.
Source: Social Media Governance (via Mashable)

Labels: Blogging/Blogging Strategy, Career/Employment, Digital, Electronic Style Guide, LinkedIn ASBPE, Management, Productivity, Social Media, Steven Roll, Technology, Twitter, Work Life

By Howard Rauch

When it comes to e-news delivery, many articles don’t adhere to published recommendations pertaining to brevity and originality. I alluded to the brevity problem in my previous blog post. Now, with two e-news studies completed, there’s more evidence that room for improvement exists.

During the past month, I conducted two separate e-news studies. The first was a pilot project involving seven e-newsletters. Each newsletter carried blurbs for five or more top news articles. I followed each link – 46 in all – to the full article appearing on the website.

Each e-news item was judged against eight factors. I’ll provide details here on the four most critical considerations: high relevance, enterprise, lead value and average sentence length.

Regarding the first factor – high relevance – various degrees of relevance exist. News items exhibiting the “high” quality provide information that conveys an important benefit or threat. Of the 46 articles reviewed, 32 made the grade, 12 earned a “no” and another four were doubtful.

Enterprise reflects evidence of original writing as opposed to reshuffling a press release. Only three of the 46 articles involved extra digging.

Lead value indicates the number of words required to arrive at a key story point. Because website visitors reportedly are scanners, each article must corral their attention within the lead’s first 10 words. Thus . . . a lead falling within the -21 to -30 range wastes 20 or more introductory words. A -5 lead would be dynamite, especially if you could do it every time.

Among the 46 article leads reviewed, 27 stayed below -10. Another 12 were in the -11 to -20 range. The other seven were higher. As an aside, some feature article evaluations have encountered several cases of -100 leads or higher. How come? It’s those verbose opening anecdotes that invariably have difficulty connecting to the story focus.

Average sentence length traditionally is a high hurdle. In my sample group, only 16 articles had ASL of 20 words or lower. Another 12 fell into the 26-30 word range. Six more had discouraging ASL’s exceeding 30 words.

Most recently, I finished a more extensive study involving 67 websites. In this case, evaluations covered the top news story highlighted on each site’s e-newsletter connection. There was evidence of enterprise in only 10 cases. This study involved Fog Index calculations, where the preferred grade-level of writing falls into the 10-12 range. Over half of the articles reviewed could not meet the challenge. Several articles clearly ran amok, ending up with grade levels above 17.

Even articles that stayed within the 10-12 range reflected too high a preference for long sentences (25 words or more). The 67 articles reviewed collectively used 975 sentences. Of that number, 336 sentences – 34.5 percent – ran 30 words and beyond.

Obviously you can’t draw a hard conclusion about lack of merit based on one news item per website. However, the four factors used for review purposes are worth employing during your next website news section post-mortem.

Howard Rauch is president of Editorial Solutions Inc., a consultancy focusing on B2B magazines. Rauch is the 2002 recipient of ASBPE’s Lifetime Achievement Award. You can contact him directly at howard@editsol.com.

Labels: Electronic Style Guide, Howard Rauch, Writing

Erin Erickson
ASBPE Chicago Chapter

As a follow-up to this post about blog and website style guides, you should also be thinking about how you can update your style guide in a more timely manner.

You may want to consider transferring your print style guide to an electronic one. Here's how:

• Take blogging software. Platforms like Blogger and WordPress offer easy-to-use software at absolutely no cost.


• Both platforms offer a privacy setting so you grant access only to those staff writers and contributors who write for your publication.

• Begin uploading your style guide. For each section, create a new post, a new post headline, etc., and a label (Numbers, Tone, Audience, Contributor Requirements).

• Consider adding links to commonly used resources (both within the body of the entry and in a link list on the side of the page). For example, if you use an ftp site for uploading images, place a link on the blog that directs users to the ftp site. You can make your style guide as elaborate or as simple as your needs require.

• What also makes this kind of style guide more efficient is the ability to apply an RSS feed to it. Rather than resend a print version to your writers every time you would like to update, include a feed and the new information will populate your user's readers instantly.

Labels: Digital, Editing, Electronic Style Guide, Erin Erickson, Productivity

Erin Erickson
ASBPE Chicago Chapter

Does your website or blog have a style guide? Should it?

Jonathan Bailey's post on BlogHerald raises a great point about the importance of an online style guide.

I have seen style guides for print magazines become so elaborate that they have subsections of subsections. Yet when discussing resources and writing styles for online, these mammoth guides only devote a page to acceptable and non-acceptable sources or how to write web-related words.

If we're striving for brand recognition both in both print and online, shouldn't we devote the same thought to our web style as we do our print style?

It is worthy to note that this post is geared mainly toward bloggers and not necessarily j-school trained writers; however, it offers a few bulleted items to consider for your own website/blog style guide. Notice the similarities between this and what your print style guide suggests (see the post for the entire list):

• What is your post frequency?
• Do you standardize your post titles? (capitalization, punctuation)
• Attribution
• Artistic contributions

Once you have decided on your web style, how do you deliver it to your writers? We'll cover that in the next installment of "Does your website or blog have a style guide?"

Labels: Digital, Editing, Electronic Style Guide, Erin Erickson