Matthew Wygant Biotech Writing

When to hire Matthew Wygant Biotech Writing

• When you want to start a newsletter or a blog
• When you need to re-do your web site
• When you need to add some pages to your web site
• When you're planning to introduce a new product
• When you've just acquired a new product
• When you've been invited to contribute a book chapter
• When you need to do a press release
• When no one in your department has time
• When you want to highlight a customer's success
• When it's annual report season
• When you're getting ready for a sales meeting
• When you need a white paper to explain technology and applications
• When you want to publish a journal article

PR Services Referral

Here's a nice endorsement from Howie Goldstein from a couple of years ago. He was writing to the CEO of a Palo Alto biotech company, and has kindly allowed me to post his recommendation:

"With respect to the PR, I think the best thing for a company to do is to get Matthew Wygant involved in the writing and placement of the PR.  I know Matthew can help both in writing revising any support materials, but also in making the whole corporate PR package better."

How to Hire Me

There are two different ways to hire me:

1. If you need me to write a defined, one-off piece for you, such as a journal article, a few web pages, or a press release, I'll provide a quote for your approval.
2. If you want to launch or support an ongoing, dynamic marketing program with components such as a blog, an e-newsletter, press releases, customer profiles, and application notes, we can do a consulting agreement.

Usually, I have two or three of each of these two arrangements going at the same time. Right now, I have three consulting agreements with three different companies, and two short-term projects with a fourth client.

To discuss an assignment, call me on (408) 205-7630 or send e-mail.

Professional Writer's Journal: Getting on the First Page of Google Results

Investor relations professionals are abundantly aware that a publicly traded organization does not have direct control over the price of its stock. But they also know that there are certain things their company can do, such as being honest with analysts and investors, and posting positive earnings, that will move the stock upwards toward a targeted level. They also know that achieving a specific stock price is not necessarily a constructive primary objective, because cause and effect are connected by the loosely tied and strangely elastic string of investor psychology.

With SEO (search engine optimization, or, getting your web SitE On the first page of Google results) it's the same thing. Except the IR pro is your company's internet content writer, your stock price is the position of your web site in Google's search results, and investor psychology is the secret algorithm that Google uses to determine search results.

More and more of my clients are aware of the importance of getting on the first page of Google results. They disclose this awareness in a variety of ways, from, "Why can't anyone find us on Google?" (start-up company founder), to "Can you help us improve our Google results?" (director of marketing), to "WHY AREN'T WE #1 ON GOOGLE!?" (CEO, who has just Googled a future product category and is enraged to find his or her company's URL missing from the top position).

SEO should, in fact, be a top marketing objective. Due to the lack of a direct relationship between cause and effect, coming up from the bottom of search results to grab the very top position in the space of a few weeks is not necessarily a constructive primary objective (though it has been done). Rather, you should aim to get on the first page of Google results for key words and descriptive phrases such as your company name, product names, product categories, and key applications. The first page contains the top ten search results by default. It's even better to get into the top five, which places your URL on the screen where your target eyeballs will see it without having to scroll down.

So how does one optimize search engine results? Although Google does not reveal its site-ranking algorithm (if they did, it would cease to be useful), the people-of-the-internet have pretty much figured out what does and doesn't work. These findings aren't really facts, so I'll call them beliefs. Here are five SEO beliefs. Believing in these has caused the light of Google to shine favorably upon me and my clients:

1. The content of titles and subtitles appearing near the tops of top-level pages should contain target search terms. The content of these positions, especially when appearing in header typeface, is more important in terms of SEO than content farther down the page, and farther down within the structure of the site (subordinate pages).

2. Target search terms should appear in searchable type. A graphic that contains the search terms, even if it's completely legible, doesn't count. If you can copy and paste the actual letters and words, it's searchable. If you end up with a graphic (or nothing) in your clipboard, it isn't.

3. Meta-tags are still important. I think the reason for confusion on this point is that, overall, meta-tags are less important than they were a few years ago, and, meta-tags are relatively less important for blogs than they are for ordinary web sites. Meta-tags help Google index sites accurately, and every non-blog web site should have them.

4. This one's my favorite. There is just no getting around the requirement for interesting, original, searchable, stable, and frequently updated content. By analyzing web traffic and link utilization, Google can tell if your web site content is interesting or not, and ranks it accordingly. The content must be original, so that its search engine ranking impact is not diluted by duplication on another site. The content must be searchable, with the most important key words or phrases in the header copy, and with other likely search terms appearing within the body copy. The content must be stable -- Google hates being a liar, so leave your content where Google first finds it. And just as advertisers know that people are going to be more interested in the new episodes of a popular TV show than its re-runs, Google knows that people are going to be more interested in search results that bring up sites with frequently updated content. Just remember that updating while maintaining stability means adding new pages rather than replacing old ones.

5. Avoid broken links and avoid the ham-fisted ploys that some webmasters use to try to trick Google into assigning a higher ranking to a site than it deserves. These things will degrade your search engine results, or worse. You know what broken links are, but what are the ham-fisted ploys? Among others, they are: meaningless repetition of key words and phrases, attempting to hide meaningless repetition of key words and phrases by using the same color for the type and the background, and using link farms (sites that just sell links to other sites) in an attempt to create a backlink structure. Google is way ahead of this trick.

Writers must now understand that their most important "readers" include search engine algorithms and be practiced in the art of writing web page content that achieves high search engine rankings. If your web site is about medicine or biotech, contact me for an evaluation of its search engine performance and recommendations for improvement.

About the Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

In my August 9 entry ("Tag This Page!"), I quoted a section of Clay Shirky's "Ontology is Overrated" essay about how social bookmarks ("tags") increase the value of items that have unique identifiers, such as the ISBN number of books and the URLs of web pages.

URLs as a way of identifying content may indeed be unique, but they aren't particularly persistent. That's why people formed the International DOI Foundation. A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) uniquely identifies an item of intellectual property on the internet. It sticks with the item, so that if the network location of the item changes (as often happens on the internet), the item can still be found.

So what sort of intellectual properties can be identified by a DOI? According to the International DOI Foundation, pretty much all kinds:

"DOIs can be used to identify, for example, text, audio, images, software, etc; and in future could be used to identify the agreements and parties involved. While the scope of intellectual property transactions is quite broad, it is unlikely that DOIs would be appropriate for identifying entities such as people or natural objects or trucks unless they are involved in such a transaction. Intellectual property transactions don't necessarily involve money: DOIs can be used to identify free materials and transactions as well as entities of commercial value."

An auxiliary institution, CrossRef, maintains a doi-to-URL database so you can pull up a digitally identified object in your browser window, as long as it's research content and not a truck or a mountain that was involved in an intellectual property transaction.

DOIs are used to identify individual articles in research publications. Nature Publishing explains how in their Q&A on DOIs:

DOI Numbers Q&A at Nature Publishing

More DOI info from Nature, including how to cite papers by DOI
The International DOI Foundation page on DOIs
Digital object identifier in Wikipedia
CrossRef

Professional Writer's Journal: Write Effectively for the Web

Gina Trapani, editor of Lifehacker, has posted an excellent article on writing for the web in her twice-weekly "Geek to Live" feature.

"If your message is boring, long-winded or useless, they'll surf away and never come back."

Geek to Live: Write effectively for the Web by Gina Trapani
Geek to Live: Gina Trapani's twice-weekly feature at Lifehacker
Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide

Worth the Hype

Backbone Media, an internet marketing consultancy, has conducted a survey that says corporate blogging is worth the hype.

Backbone Media, Inc.

"Our last resort is an ad, if we can't think of anything else."

Stuart Elliott has written a piece for the New York Times describing an upside-down advertising environment where clients push their agencies to try daring new ideas, and no one wants to work on an ad.

According to Mr. Elliot, "the dot-com bust, the fallout from 9/11 and the explosive growth of technologies that help consumers avoid ads" are among factors driving the changes and causing problems for traditionally minded agencies.

Clients are also pushing their agencies for much less expensive campaigns ("economizing is the new black") and assigning responsibility for agency relationships to procurement.

Mr. Elliot procured the headline quote from Carl Johnson at Anomaly.

Advertisers Want Something Different in the New York Times
Stuart Elliott at The New York Times
Anomaly ad agency (Warning: site navigation entails long, slow animations) 

Tag This Page!

I promised to follow up the last entry with an explanation of why social bookmarking is important.

Going back to the Wikipedia definition of social bookmarking, the author says,

"Drawbacks of current implementations include: single word categories, although many services allow multi-words to be enclosed in inverted commas, no mechanism to define or refine categories, no synonym/antonym control or related terms and no hierarchy."

While some of these named issues do qualify as drawbacks (single-word categories really are limiting), others, such as "no mechanism to define or refine categories," and "no hierarchy" are precisely what make social bookmarking great.

Clay Shirky makes a great case for non-categorized, non-hierarchical organization methods in Part I of his essay "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags." Mr. Shirky cites the limitations and failures of several classification systems:

• The noble gases in the periodic table of elements
• The Soviet library system, which starts at the top with "Marxism-Leninism," then proceeds down into the subcategories "Classic works of Marxism-Leninism," "Life and work of C. Marx, F. Engels, V.I. Lenin," etc.
• The Dewey Decimal System's categorizaion of world religions, which lists seven categories based on Christian Theology before getting to "Other religions"
• Yahoo's attempt to categorize the world's internet content in a category system that is only three layers deep
• Everything organized under the category "East Germany," such as the city of Dresden

In Part II, Mr. Shirky asserts that "The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody," and notes that schemes such as ISBN numbers on books and URL's for web pages demonstrate a model of how we can create globally unique identifiers for anything.

"And once you can do that, you can label those pointers, can tag those URLs, in ways that make them more valuable, and all without requiring top-down organization schemes. And this -- an explosion in free-form labeling of links, followed by ways of grabbing value from those labels -- is what I think is happening now."

Tags (another term for social bookmarks), which are essentially free, add value to the tagged object by making it, for instance, easier to find by those who wish to find it, and by enabling those people to see how others have categorized it. They expose the collateral interests and biases of the individuals that tagged the object, and allow others to follow up on, or exclude, those areas of interest, or ways of thinking, from subsequent queries.

Tags also enable fast retrieval of the myriad one-off items that don't fit well into conventional classification schemes and are therefore badly categorized and hard-to-find. A tag can be whatever the tagger thinks will help him or her remember the object later and is therefore infinitely flexible.

Marketers can derive the same benefits from tagging, and tags, as everyone else. But tags should be of specific interest to marketers because they allow insight into how others actually experience products, positioning concepts, communications messages, and other topics of commercial interest. Life science marketers should look at del.icio.us to see what the most popular social bookmarking system looks like (by the way, the del.icio.us search box has a simple URL but it's ridiculously hard to find unless you're already familiar with the system -- it's here), and then look at the scientific social bookmarking systems CiteULike and Connotea, which are the ones their customers are using.

Does all of this also mean that you should tag your own pages and others of interest to your customers in ways that will help them find the information you want them to have? Yes it does, but please don't be the person that starts social bookmarking spam.

What Is Social Bookmarking?

Trying to figure out what social bookmarking is by looking at social bookmark software sites, such as del.icio.us, or a bookmark consolidator such as Technorati, is not very productive. But as is so often the case, Wikipedia has a good definition:

Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize (see folksonomy) a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others.

Free social bookmarking software lets you create bookmarks, such as the ones you save in your browser, but your social bookmarks are saved in an on-line database where you and others can access them. Also, you can attach tags -- single-word descriptions of the bookmarked page -- to help you and others find it in the future.

So let's look at a web page and see if anyone has bookmarked it. Here's a screencap of the web page I chose for this example:

When you install bookmarking software, you get a button in your browser (actually it's a regular browser-based bookmark that you can access without going into your bookmark menu) that lets you see the social bookmarks on the page you're viewing. Let's push the button and see if anyone using the most popular social bookmarking software, del.icio.us, has bookmarked the PLoS Biology home page:

We can see that eight people have bookmarked the PLoS Biology home page to allow themselves and others to find it easily in the future. If we look at the third line of the list, we can see that the del.icio.us user "szarka" has bookmarked the page and has tagged it with the words "biology," "research," and "periodicals."

If we click on szarka, we can see all of szarka's other bookmarks. The names of szarka's bookmarked pages are in large letters on the left-hand side of the screen, and all the tags szarka has applied to those bookmarked pages are in small letters along the right-hand side of the screen:

Szarka has been busy and has bookmarked 3751 pages. If we look at the most recently bookmarked page, the link to IKEA, we can see that Szarka has tagged it with the words "shopping" and "furniture," and that 63 other people have also bookmarked IKEA's home page.

Going back to the list of PLoS Biology home page bookmarks above, we can see a smaller list of "common tags" in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Four people have tagged the PLoS page with the word "biology." If we click on biology, we then get this page of other bookmarks that people have tagged with "biology:"

There are hundreds of pages tagged with "biology." The list is presented with the most recently bookmarked pages at the top, but we can also sort the list by popularity:

And so on. Next, we'll find out why people are bookmarking and tagging web pages, and what's so great about social bookmarks.

PR Tips

My web stats are telling me that I need to re-post the PR Tips from my old site. Even though the old PR Tips page is not linked to my new home page, it's still the second most popular entry page of all my old and new pages (the DEVONThink entry comes in third).

Press Release Tips Even if your department or company puts out only a few press releases a year, you're taking steps to establish a rewarding relationship with the press. Well-written, effectively distributed press releases get your message out to a broad audience at a small fraction of the cost of equivalent advertising exposure.

Tip #1.  Consider Your Audience
Perhaps the most common press release writing error is forgetting that the first audience is composed of news editors, and they must be won over if your press release is going to do any good. Editors need news and will show their appreciation for a well-written, newsworthy press release by running yours in their publications.

Tip #2. Use Press Releases for News
Press releases are effective only when an editor at one of the publications read by your target audience believes that the information in your press release will be of interest to his or her readers. A press release trumpeting the publication of your latest application note or the marketing release of a ninety-dollar consumable item is not going to stop the presses. Paid advertising for your literature and small items can be a very effective lead-generating device, but we're unlikely to see a news article entitled "GreatBigBio Inc. Releases App Note 93" in BioCentury, or Forbes, or on GenomeWeb. Non-newsworthy press releases are chaff to news editors, who might become too accustomed to overlooking submissions from certain companies. PR plans that stipulate artificial production schedules ("I want us to be putting out press releases every week!") can be counterproductive.

Tip #3. Find the News Angle
Instead of sending out an easily overlooked press release about the publication of a new application note, think about why your company produced the data for that note and wrote it in the first place. If you did it so you and your instrument system could barge in on an unlikable competitor's formerly exclusive market position, send out a press release about how your company will be providing scientists with an alternative to the "currently limited options" for addressing that application. An editor can easily turn that into a "Market for (Target Application) Heats Up," or "GreatBigBio Enters (Target Application) Fray," or "GreatBigBio Leverages (Instrument Name) Technology to Take On (Unlikable Competitor)." Don't forget to mention in your press release that your company is making a write-up of all the supporting data (the application note) available by request.

Tip #4. Start in the Middle
Editors work on tight production schedules. They cannot delay the time or date of their publications just because they are not ready with their stories, so they cannot take time to extract the newsworthy information, if there is any, from a badly written press release. Go straight to the heart of your news item in the headline and in the first two sentences. Consider the journalist's inquiries (who, what, when, where, how, and why), and answer them as directly as possible. If your press release begins with a lengthy prelude covering the fact of your established leadership of some market sub-category, your expert application of proprietary, patented, state-of-the-art technologies to the development of solutions that help research scientists accelerate the discovery of medicines that may someday address the unmet medical needs of the sick, and information on how pleased you are to be announcing the news that you are preparing the reader to encounter, then the time, money and effort you put into your press release will be wasted.

Tip #5. Do Not Write an Advertisement
Have you produced an exciting breakthrough in enhanced performance utilizing proprietary, state-of-the-art technology that optimizes your application solution? I hope so, but you must try to leave all of that out of your press release. Do not bore or insult a news editor with promotional copy. Remove words and phrases such as "exciting," "enhanced," "state-of-the-art," and "unparalleled," and stick to the facts. If you want to run an ad, you will probably have to pay for it.

Tip #6. Target Your Distribution
Your company probably already has an account with PR Newswire or Business Wire, and when you put out a press release, you spend one- to two-thousand dollars distributing it to general media outlets in major markets and to an additional list of pharmaceutical and biotech trades. The wire services provide broad, simultaneous distribution and satisfy fair disclosure requirements. But in the newsroom, your press release is only on even footing with dozens of press releases put out by other companies at the same time. To help your press release get noticed, e-mail it or fax it directly to the news rooms of publications where you think your news ought to appear. Address it to the reporter who covers your beat, or to the publication's editor.

Tip #7. Follow Up With a Phone Call.
If you think you have an especially worthwhile story for one or more publications, you'll do some editors and yourself a service by following up your press release with a few phone calls. Let key contacts know that you've just released news, what it's about, and why you think it would be of interest to the publication's readers. Offer to answer questions or send the press release again if needed. Your press release will have a better chance of leading to some positive coverage than all the others that arrive without any support.

Tip #8. Be Available.
If you're the listed "media contact," do not leave on holiday or even go into a long meeting right after you put out a press release, unless you're willing to be interrupted for calls from journalists. If a journalist calls for more information, clarification, or comment, and the listed contact person is not available, you will have lost a key opportunity to influence an article and gain credibility with the press. Help journalists meet their deadlines, and they will help you get your news out.

Tip #9. Measure Your PR
Assess the reach of your PR program and the quality of your media coverage by using a clipping service. Clipping services scour the media for stories bearing your company name, product names, and related terms. You can assign a clipping service to review print publications, on-line news sources, and broadcast programming for certain terms that you provide. Various levels of service are available, with pricing based on the number and type of media outlets covered, number of terms searched, and reporting frequency.

  Tip #10. Form Your Own Press Relationships
Each press release, phone call with a journalist, or direct meeting with a reporter or editor is an opportunity to gain credibility and exposure. The more well-known you and your company are, the more likely it is that you will receive good, consistent coverage. Becoming a reliable source of information and comment on industry trends and events gives you an opportunity to frame public discussion to your advantage. And if you have your own relationships with the press, the goodwill and level of coverage you've won become your own assets, so you won't have to rely on outside agencies for help reaching journalists.

PR Newswire's "Blogging vs. the Mainstream Media"

PR Newswire's "Blogging vs. the Mainstream Media" event, held last Friday morning at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, was definitely worthwhile. Panelists included Tony Perkins from AlwaysOn Network, Christopher Alden from Rojo Networks, Rob Hof from BusinessWeek, Dan Gillmor from Grassroots Media, and David Whelan from Forbes. Tony Perkins and Dan Gillmor were seated next to each other, allowing the audience to rubberneck a guaranteed collision of worldviews.

Chris Alden led the discussion, asking the other panelists questions such as:

Is mainstream media complacent about blogging? Can bloggers do primary reporting? Can blogs produce a mob mentality? Do blogs reflect or shape public opinion? Who are the influencers of the blogosphere? How can a company deal with news leaks coming from its employees' blogs? What makes a high-quality blog?

Tony Perkins came out as a strong advocate of blogging. He described blogging as a form of social networking and noted that the blogging improves web site "stickiness," citing an increase in average site visit length from three minutes to twelve. He also noted that while Red Herring had access to the minds of investors for ten years, one must now read blogs to achieve the same perspective. Later, Tony said that to compete with blogs, mainstream media publications such as the New York Times and others will need to "come out from behind the puritanical mask of objectivity," and that blogging offers a free market exchange of information where the "phony facts" repeated over and over by the mainstream media can be examined and challenged in a public forum.

Dan Gillmor, while suggesting that readers "turn up the BS meter" for blogs, predicted that blowhards and other axe-grinders trying to pass off their opinions as news or insightful analysis in any medium will be "outed" by bloggers.

David Whelan of Forbes offered some "gentle skepticism" about blogs, saying that the medium has a "packaging problem," and that readers relying on blogs for news "might miss something."

Rob Hof admitted that within the mainstream media culture, it's still more prestigious to write for print rather than online publications. However, the distinction is fading as more content is distributed through both print and online media.

The panelists also discussed the relative value of pitching news to mainstream publications, such as the New York Times, vs. releasing it into the blogosphere via blogs such as Slashdot. While the panelists expressed opinions on both sides of the issue, they seemed to agree that a few of the most popular blogs will take on some of the characteristics of mainstream media outlets.

The meeting was recorded, but PR Newswire has not yet provided a link. I'll post it here when I get it.

BioSF Presentation by Joe DeRisi, PhD

Last night's BioScience Forum presentation by Joe DeRisi PhD was about his lab's work using DNA microarrays to study two areas of research: elucidation of biochemical and transcriptional pathways of the malaria pathogen Plasmodium falciparum, and viral pathogen discovery. In both areas, the research involves chips spotted with 70-mer oligos. In the P. falciparum research, the 70-mer arrays allow the lab's researchers to target the most unique regions of genes and provide the hybridization sensitivity needed to study the AT-rich genome of P. falciparum. In the viral pathogen research, the 70-mers enable detection of imperfectly matched conserved viral genome sequences.

Data from the P. falciparum research have disclosed that a highly canonical transcription schedule drives the organism's 48-hour life cycle. Dr. DeRisi compared the P. falciparum life cycle to a JIT factory; the components of cell functions are produced only immediately prior to their use and not at other times. Dr. DeRisi pointed out that this feature may prove to be the pathogen's Achilles' heel. In the lab, any perturbation in bioreactor conditions results in "catastrophic failure" of a P. falciparum culture, as the organism does not have any of the machinery on hand needed to recover, or do anything other than what normally would occur next in its life cycle.

The viral pathogen discovery data Dr. DeRisi showed us was formed by hybridizing DNA from infected tissues with a comprehensive array of conserved viral sequences from the NCBI database. In addition to enabling discovery and preliminary characterization of previously unknown viruses, the approach also can match viral DNA from infected tissues with known viruses. In one case, an investigator using the approach discovered that for years he had been passing cultures infected by the foot-and-mouth disease virus. Upon being informed, the CDC arrived and neutralized the previously unsuspected biohazard.

Ben Borson JD PhD, BioScience Forum's President, started the presentation ahead of schedule to allow Dr. DeRisi to finish early and get back to grant writing.

No More Blockbuster Drugs?

Even though genotyping will segment the market for new drugs into narrowing, predictable sub-populations of responders and non-responders, capital investment in drug discovery and development is still based on the assumption that the occasional multi-billion dollar blockbuster drug will return, in multiples, the capital risked on an entire drug portfolio.

In the Q&A session following his presentation to BioScience Forum last night, Genentech's chief medical officer, Hal Barron, MD, explained that the expectation of blockbuster returns from smaller markets is not the paradox that it seems. Dr. Barron pointed out that although Herceptin (Trastuzumab) is known to work on only 25% of patients with metastatic breast cancer (those whose tumors overexpress the HER2 protein), the drug offers a very prominent treatment effect for that segment. Therefore, the market penetration within that segment is very high.

Drugs that only "sort of" work have weak penetration. But doctors will prescribe enthusiastically when the intended effect is much more certain. Dr. Barron predicts that in the future, drugs won't be viable unless they offer robust treatment effects.

According to Genentech's 2004 10-K, net sales of Herceptin were $483 million last year, rising 14% from 2003.

Professional Writer's Journal: Researching a Project

When hiring a writer, you probably take care to select one with specialized training and experience in, or near, the subject matter of the material you need. A writer serving your industry will already be familiar with the typical buying behavior of your target audience, and have existing knowledge of sales cycles, distribution channels, regulation, product categories, technologies, applications, and so on. But unless the writer has specific and recent experience writing for your company and the topic at hand, he or she will not know all the important details that must be considered during the preparation of effective content.

As a client, it is not your job to identify and prepare every last bit of information you think your writer will need. Part of what a professional writer offers is an objective, 3rd-party perspective. The writer should also have a wide capacity for independent research that will save you time and enable you to preserve and benefit from that perspective.

The writer will select research materials based on the format and intended audience of the final work. For an annual report, for instance, the writer will collect and study the client's previous reports, all press releases distributed during the previous year, any audio or video recordings available from quarterly conference calls, slides and handouts used for meetings with investors, and current analysts' reports. Analyzing these materials at the outset saves the time of the client's executive staff in at least three ways: First, the initial strategy meeting will be short because the client will not be required to go over the basics of the company's technologies, operations, recent performance, and value proposition for shareholders. Instead, the group can jump ahead directly to a discussion of the company's key messages for the report. Second, subsequent creative strategy meetings may be unnecessary because the writer can get enough information from the first meeting to proceed directly to an outline. Third, the outline and the first draft will be more likely to hit the mark, or land near it, reducing the number of document review cycles needed to achieve a final draft.

In the case of a marketing communications piece such as a product brochure, it is fair for the client to expect the writer to analyze all of the client's existing print literature and web site content pertaining to the product. If the product is new, the writer will ask for product planning documentation outlining the marketing rationale for the product and should review any academic literature available describing new technologies incorporated in the product design. The writer will also study copies of any competitive literature the client has on file, and visit the web sites of those competitors for the latest product information. The writer will ask the client to identify key competitors and review effective and ineffective competitive positioning strategies. Finally, before outlining the marketing communications piece, the writer should try to reach one or more of the company's sales representatives, and know how to filter and apply any new information received from the field. By doing these analyses, and making these inquiries, the writer will obtain the detailed product and market information essential to the development of effective communications.

Eksigent's Setup at PittCon

Eksigent's space on the exhibit floor at PittCon is the smartest I've seen. The big panels make a protected area for talking with customers, look like they set up easily and ship cheaply, and provide lots of room for lettering and graphics.

Thanks to Lisa Mahar at Eksigent for the photo.

Professional Writer's Journal: Style Guides

At the beginning of a writing project, I always ask new clients they have a corporate style guide. A style guide is a reference document that includes rules and suggestions for writing style and document presentation. See this article for an excellent description. You don't have to have a style guide to prepare effective communications, but writing according to an agreed-upon style helps keep the body of written work that every company produces clear, consistent, and professional.

In my work for clients, I use a hierarchy of style guides. First, the client's own guide, if they have one. Second, the AMA Manual of Style, or the ACS Style Guide, depending on the client's audience. Both references are very complete; the ACS Guide's chapter on grammar, punctuation, and spelling uses scientific examples to illustrate grammatical rules such as subject-verb agreement ("The mixture was stirred, and 5 mL of diluent was added."). Chapter 5 is my favorite (Numbers, Mathematics, and Units of Measure). Finally, for anything that isn't covered in the client's own guide or the AMA or ACS Guide, I refer to The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.