"Promoting
Your Business By
Sharing
Your Opinions" "
by
Pauline Bartel, M.A.
Building and maintaining a strong, appealing brand image
that differentiates your company from your competitors takes time and
creativity. You must raise the
public’s awareness of your enterprise, create a favorable impression in the
public’s mind, and then sustain your visibility as your business grows.
Sustaining visibility can be accomplished through a variety
of strategies, including sharing your opinions in local newspapers.
Writing letters to the editor and opinion essays gives you the
opportunity to stand apart from your competition; gain no-cost publicity for
your business, product, or service; and put a “face” on your company through
your words. Here’s the strategy:
Monitor the News
Read local newspapers regularly, noting especially any news
or information that is directly related to your business or industry and to
which you can respond.
Look for opportunities to contribute valuable information
that may have been omitted from a feature story. For example, during Fire Prevention Month, perhaps the local
newspaper runs an article that offers tips for preventing fires in the home but
doesn’t mention anything about keeping fire extinguishers handy.
The owner of a fire extinguisher company could respond to the omission by
drafting a letter to the editor, explaining the benefits of having a fire
extinguisher in the kitchen and sharing hints for selecting the most appropriate
type.
When published, the letter will bear the writer’s name
and the name of the company, offering visibility to the enterprise in a section
of the newspaper that eschews traditional advertising. Thus, the company will stand apart from the competition.
Look for opportunities to set the record straight when
inaccuracies creep into news stories. Many
local newspapers carried news of Laura Bush’s plans to promote literacy during
her time as First Lady. During a
White House ceremony launching the campaign and honoring American writers, one
of the honored guests misquoted a line from Margaret Mitchell’s novel about
the Civil-War. I reacted to the
news story in a letter to the editor that congratulated Mrs. Bush on her
initiative, corrected the misquote, and cited my authorship of The
Complete GONE WITH THE WIND Trivia Book.
When published, the letter brought visibility to my book, resulting in
no-cost publicity.
Look for opportunities to draw attention to issues related
to your industry that are not but that should be discussed in the broader
community. A colleague whose
company specializes in public relations for technology companies attended a
technology summit. This experience
prompted her to write an opinion essay in which she challenged the region to
address issues of branding, marketing, and growing the needed infrastructure to
support those activities in a Tech Valley area.
When published, her essay brought visibility to her
company. Her words put a “face”
on her company, and her views sparked the beginning of a community conversation
about the issues she raised.
Craft Your Statement
When you have an issue to which you can react, consider the
overall purpose of your letter to the editor or your opinion essay.
Do you wish to inform, argue, or persuade?
Once you know your purpose, state your central idea in a complete
sentence.
Called a focus statement, this sentence narrows the
subject, dictates the evidence you will include and exclude, and states the
point of your letter or essay. If
your purpose is to inform, your focus statement should summarize the information
you plan to explain. If your
purpose is to argue or to persuade, your focus statement should state your
opinion or your judgment.
The focus statement demands adequate supporting evidence.
Thus, the evidence you select must be reliable and logically related to
the focus statement. Reliable kinds
of supporting evidence include information from surveys, informed opinions from
experts, observations, analogies, and logical reasons.
Gather the best supporting evidence you can find then, as
you outline and draft your letter or essay, consider the logic of your ideas.
Avoid shifting to irrelevant issues or breaking the chain of logic
between evidence and conclusion. Informed
readers will reject a position reached through faulty reasoning, and this will
reflect poorly on you.
Keep in mind the content lengths for letters to the editor
and opinion essays. While content
lengths vary from newspaper to newspaper, letters to the editor range generally
from three to six paragraphs or between 200 and 500 words.
Opinion essays run longer and range generally from 750 to 1,500 words.
Review your target newspaper to gauge the acceptable content length for
submissions. You could also
telephone the staff member in charge of the letters-to-the-editor page or the
opinion section to confirm maximum content lengths.
Submit For
Publication
After completing the draft of your letter to the editor or
opinion essay, revise and polish the content until you are satisfied with the
presentation. Then check for
correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation before submitting the typewritten,
double-spaced material for publication in the local newspaper.
Newspapers will accept letters to the editor and opinion
essays by regular mail, fax, or electronic
mail. You’ll find contact
information on the editorial page of most newspapers.
Be certain to include your full name, the name and address of your
business, and a daytime telephone number. The
telephone number is necessary so that the editor can verify that you are the
writer of the material and that you grant permission to have your name published
along with the letter or essay.
When your letter to the editor or opinion essay is
published, you may discover that the text is slightly different from the content
that you submitted. Why?
Letters to the editor and opinion essays are edited routinely for length,
accuracy, and appropriateness.
Share Your Opinion
Publication of your letter to the editor or opinion essay
brings your point of view to the readers of the newspaper.
You can extend the reach of your letter or essay by sharing your opinion
in other venues.
Make photocopies of your published letter or essay, attach
a handwritten “In-case-you-missed-this” note, and send to those individuals
whom you wish to influence. Incorporate the letter or essay in the newsletter
that you send to customers. Post the text of your letter or essay on your
company’s Web site. Include your
letter or essay in prospective client packets, citing the name of the newspaper
and the date the material appeared.
Sharing your opinions in local newspapers gives voice to
your views and promotes your business. Invest
some time and creativity and use this strategy to sustain the visibility of your
company’s brand. You’ll be a
page ahead of your competition.
Copyright © 2003 by Pauline Bartel
All Rights Reserved
Author Bio:
Pauline Bartel is the owner of Bartel
Communications, a Waterford, NY-based company that builds the image of companies
with words. Pauline specializes in
corporate communications, including writing and editing, public relations and
marketing, training and professional development and in commercial writing and
publishing in the magazine and book fields.
For information about obtaining reprint rights for use of the above article,
please contact Pauline at paulinebartel@compuserve.com
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