Subbing Copy - time to revive a lost wordsmithing art?

The National Union for Journalists in Scotland have produced a bargain (imho) online course designed to teach how to produce intelligible and attractive copy, with headings that are fit for professional publication.

Why Connecting is the New Networking

Most people would do anything other than walk into a roomful of strangers. Yet making worthwhile connections in business is the single most powerful form of publicity you can achieve. Not ‘working the room’ touching base with everyone, exchanging cards and connecting with nobody. Connecting is finding people you genuinely like: people you can do business with.
Heartfelt recommendations from people that know you really does bring in new business. It works because the people that like you, tend to gather similar people, so their contacts are also likely to like your approach.
That experience of walking into a roomful of strangers, along with public speaking were both famously ranked before death itself in a study of things people feared most. And that was a study run in the US. We in the UK tend to think they do communications better over there.
Yes, many Americans are good communicators, and I promise you there’s a very good reason for that. Toastmasters International. Portland, Oregon is a US city with a population equivalent to my hometown of Edinburgh, UK. Portland has 125 Toastmasters’ clubs to our two – and one of those is very new!
Toastmasters is a not-for-profit self-help that offers a ridiculously good public speaking training plus impromptu speaking practice (ideal for connecting with people) and a leadership skills programme that is ludicrously good value for money. It costs around £100 a year (clubs vary according to the costs of meeting rooms etc) for fortnightly 2 hour training and practice sessions.
There are great 1-2-1 trainers who’ll get you faster results, but without the practice opportunities, how long will that last?
Toastmasters offers regular practice along with proven training resources and powerful feedback.
There’s a reason Toastmasters is the world’s largest public speaking training organisation, with over 4 million people trained in most countries throughout the world.
Go onto toastmasters.org and find a club! (scroll past the map which shows the UK HQ to find results for your area).

Seeing the online PR light through training

PR people often ask me about how to get on top of online PR quickly.



I usually recommend David Meerman Scott's book: The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

I think that book is a great starting place, and they'll find that online PR and marketing are converging online, so the whole ballpark just got a lot bigger. But the truth is, one book, no matter how good, doesn't give you a licence to practice. I've also put in a major time investment in training.

My CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations) CPD Excellence log shows I've clocked up an average of 250 hours a year, each year for the last 4 years. That's currently 1,000 hours of formal training logged, not counting at least 10 times more time refining that training through practice.

They say it takes 10,000 hours to develop an expertise in a subject, and I reckon I must be getting close to that by now if you add the "putting it into practice" element.

If you count on around 240 working days a year after subtracting weekends and holidays, I'm spending over an hour a day on logged training. Not all of it is online PR and marketing. There's useful stuff about business processes and public speaking skills in there too. But I'm always picking up online PR and marketing tips while I'm working. Twitter sends me off on all sorts of interesting links and that's not logged, nor is watching the world's top experts on TED.

So why don't I feel an expert on anything? I think the explanation lies in something my tutor in the philosophy department said over 30 years ago. Bear in mind that he was a renowned professor close to retirement: he said, "The more I know, the more I discover there is to know, so now I feel I know less than I did when I started". I can relate to that!

Sometimes you just have to get comfortable with the idea that you have put in the spadework and know a lot more than most.

But logging the time spent on training puts good statistics behind you. That's quite an important professional booster, especially for smaller company owners and freelancers that are not in large organisations with structured training and development programs run by development professionals. And it's not just PR professionals. I reckon this could apply to any knowledge-led service providers.

I never thought I would say this as I struggle each year to add up my hours and file my CPD reports, but thank you CIPR CPD Excellence program and CIPR's Debbie Liddle for ensuring that, no matter how busy I am, I plan my training year in accord with my business goals and log my hours.