PR professionals are required to produce compelling messages day in and day out.
The success of your clients depends on how well you turn abstract concepts into clear words and images. It is a skill that is hard to attain and requires a lot of practice. There is no workaround. The more you write, the better you get at it.
Somewhere along the road, however, you will inevitably end up in a rut. It happens to everyone, regardless of age and experience. Every idea you come up with starts sounding the same – stale and boring. You start losing enthusiasm.
? Read Digital PR Explained: Best Strategies and Tools
Working in the software industry, and this being the 21st century, I wanted to see how (and whether) technology can help with this problem. I wanted to find tools to help PR people overcome the creative crisis, prevent mistakes and write more clearly.
These top 5 are the results.
1. The Most Dangerous Writing App
One of my favorite quotes on creativity is from Jack London, who famously said “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club”.
This app is the club you need.
The Most Dangerous Writing App is designed to shut down your inner editor and get you into a flow state. All progress will be lost if you stop typing for more than five seconds. After typing without interruption for the length of your session, you’ll be able to save your work. The shortest session is five minutes long. The app is free and requires no login. Data is not stored anywhere, so you’ll have to paste your text elsewhere. The people behind the app are just sadists, I guess.
How to use it: Initially, I didn’t think I could make it for 5 minutes. I am a slow writer and tend to do tons of edits. But I persisted and then the text started accumulating. Suddenly, among the nonsense, I made a couple of good points, which I did not want to lose. So I continued typing until the end, and my writer’s block was over. It is an excellent app if you are starting from scratch on some text. If you are a procrastinator, you know this is the hardest part.
The app circumvents that easily. You write for 5, 10, or more minutes without worrying about how you sound. The inner editor will take over later.
Read 5 Essential Elements of a Press Release
2. Answer the Public
Answer The Public will kick-start your inspiration when you’re stuck finding a PR topic or your next content marketing article. The premise is quite simple: the tool enables you to find out what questions and queries your consumers have by getting a free report of what they’re searching for in Google. For example, the term “refrigerator” provides me with possible topics of “refrigerator is not cold”, “refrigerator for office,” and “refrigerator organization hacks”. These are just three examples among hundreds of suggestions you are getting on virtually any term. If I were working in the refrigerator industry, I definitely would have written something on these topics.
How to use it: Go to the website and type your topic. The tool will generate results. It works for all languages and is free to use (unless you need to export results or search by country, but most of the time, you’ll be able to gather enough information from the website).
3. Hemingway Editor
The Hemingway Editor is a web-based app that aims to make your writing “bold and clear”.
It highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors; if you see a yellow sentence, shorten or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic. The tool also advises you to cut out weakling words such as “maybe”, “very,” and other things that indicate you are not 100% sure in what you are saying.
How to use it: Paste your text into the app. You don’t have to log in or pay anything for the free version. The most significant benefit of this app was that it forces you to shorten sentences and think about whether there is a more straightforward phrase to use. I didn’t agree with some of the suggestions, but that is normal. If you want your writing to be clear and concise, especially if you are writing for the web, Hemingway is an excellent way to go.
For the time being, it seems to be only working for English. However, if you write in a different language, you can still use it to check for sentence length.
Read PR Automation: Best Tools Which Do The Work For You
4. Determ
Writing inspo is not the first thing that would come to mind when we think about media monitoring tools like Determ. But when you dig a bit deeper, you’ll soon realize that it can be of great help in all stages of your writing process. Determ enables you to track specific keywords (mentions) online (websites, social media, forums, etc.) and get their entire context in a single feed. What is more, it provides highly valuable metrics that enable you to see which content had more influence, which is more liked, which websites have the highest engagement rates and most importantly how the audience reacts to it. So it can be used to spark new ideas, but also to determine the direction your content should head.
How to use it:
The most important step while using a media monitoring tool is to set up the right keywords on tracking. You may start by setting up industry-relevant keywords to stay in the loop on the newest trends. Also, make sure to track your competitors to see what kind of content they produce and how it works. And last but not least, track your own brand/company to see which websites are publishing your content, if it has the effect you wanted it to have and what people are saying about it.
Read 6 Ways to Come up with Content Ideas Using Determ
5. Writer App – Typewriter Mode
Changing your writing environment sometimes means moving to another room, but have you ever tried switching your word-processing app? For me, something as simple as changing the font can get me unstuck – and so does switching from Word to the Writer app. Used by over 851,000 writers, Writer is the coolest, fastest, distraction-free writing app. It’s just you and your words… And some sounds. Before you start writing, you can type to the sound of an old-fashioned typewriter. Every keyboard stroke will resemble a stroke on either the mechanical or electric typewriter. By simply turning on the Typewriter sound, this app will make your writing process… more exciting. You can pretend to be an old-school journalist or a lone artiste in a black-and-white movie, ignoring that you are writing yet another introductory speech for a board member.
How to use it: Go to the site and register (it’s free). The app defaults to dark green text and black background, reminiscent of hacker screens from the 90’s movies. Go to preferences to change it to a white-and-black combo. The typewriter sound is disabled by default, you’ll have to go into Preferences to enable it. You should also consider switching to a typewriter-ish font such as System Monoface to get the full effect.
Conclusion
That’s our complete list of fun PR tools we recommend! Hopefully, these will make your writing a bit less of a hassle and more of a successful project. Writing is one of the critical elements of sustaining a brand’s reputation, and that’s why it’s so important to make sure it’s compelling and straightforward.