Sarah Meaney was the guest speaker tonight and she talked about writing for social media. She works at a company called Comet Branding which basically writes blogs and other social media for companies. The company is very small with only 5 employees. Some of the information that was covered in her lecture was how people consume information online, things to strive for when writing online, and also things to avoid when writing online. One of the most interesting parts of her lecture was when she showed an example of eye tracking studies. These eye tracking studies provide information about what people look at when they visit websites. It's very important to grab people's attention right away when you write, especially online. She gave examples of good headlines and examples of bad headlines. You can clearly see which ones worked well and which ones didn't by looking at the eye tracking studies. When writing online it's very important to use the inverted pyramid method of writing which means you need to put your most important information in the beginning. It's all about grabbing people's attention as fast as you can when writing online. The last thing that I found interesting was the differences between print media writing and online media writing. They are completely opposite ways of writing. In print media you want to use full sentences and tell a story, whereas in online writing you can use fragments and you want to get to the point as soon as you can. All in all I think the lecture was very interesting and provided me with a lot of good information.
Here is a link to the Comet Branding website.
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Its quite odd to have to unlearn everything you've been taught just so you can grab peoples attention on the web. Its almost like the internet requires you to write for children, using hooking keywords and flashy imagery.
ReplyDeleteI agree about your points with Sara tonight. She was a great speaker and here points she made about writing were great.
ReplyDeletei agree it is very odd to have to almost unlearn everything. Thats how i felt in my journalism class this past semester with all these new rules and guidelines. regardless it makes sense though, i mean think of all the distractions we have already when we are online. We usually have some sort of instant messenger in one corner, pop up ads, ads on both side bars etc. so you really do have to step it up and keep things flashy and attractive to maintain our attention. I really enjoyed her presentation and feel I personally took a lot from it.
ReplyDeleteI liked what you wrote in your blog....but it's one huge paragraph so it was hard to read.
ReplyDeleteThe eye tracking cameras were defiantly a highlight. It really illustrated how important that inverted pyramid is, get your punch line and key words out in front to draw people it! Bore them with the details a little later if they are interested.
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