Your PR Architect

PR.com houses a wealth of executive-written news releases. If you're a CEO with a do-it-yourself gene, you'll find plenty of friends here. Their writing's not brilliant, but someone at PR.com appears to edit them. The weakest element of the writing? Most rely on passive voice, or over-dependence on “to be” verb phrases. Unless you're auditioning for Hamlet, I'd excise any use of the "to be" verb phrase. A simple example: By Stephan Czuratis (Jazz-face) (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons Passive Voice:  “It was announced today that a new ergonomic drum stick is being launched by Chicken Percussion, Inc.” Active Voice:  “Chicken Percussion today launched a new line of ergonomic drum sticks.” A reliance on weak to-be verbs kills any energy in your news story. “It was announced…” and “is being launched” sounds as if everything’s after-the-fact. Remember, news releases should deliver  news – and in today’s 24/7 news cycle, immediacy (or conveying ...

I read about a women's electric vehicle team at the Kate Gleason College of Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology. I thought it was interesting, and used Shareaholic to post it to Twitter and Facebook. Here's what appeared on my Facebook timeline: Notice anything? Facebook defaulted to the second image on the RIT news story, showing the men's team. The women's team (see the second screen shot below), while visible in the original story, wasn't promoted when shared via social media. Why did the second photo appear in my timeline, and not the first? There may be a coding trick or algorithm that easily explains this occurrence. I'd love to hear more about it. But from my side of the screen -- the side most of us see -- this feels a bit biased. Men in engineering? Run the image. Women in engineering? Not interested. Which is baloney. Especially if the women aren't getting equal recognition. If Facebook arbitrarily selects photos of peop...