Elementary Writing

This is the second article in our online course series on the theory, practice, trends and secrets of New Age Public Relations. Other topics that we cover are:

From Public Relations to Public Relationships

Edward Bernays (1891–1995), the founder of public relations, wrote in his 1928 book Propaganda:

“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?”

In 1928, the answer was yes. But today, the answer is no. The Internet changed public relations forever. Now the individual is in control. People trust their peers more than they trust companies. Relationships trump messages.

It’s why Public Relation Arsenal more an more deploys—social media services. Blogs, podcasting, social networks, photo/video sharing and online forums are social media tools that make connections, generate conversations, build trust and form relationships.

New media is forcing the rapid evolution of communications and is reinventing the science of public relations into the art of “personalized” relations. This is the practice of matching our stories with the preferences of those we wish to reach. Yes, it’s what PR should have been all along, but it’s not.

Powerful Media Relations Tactics

If done correctly, PR is capable of reaching a large audience on a small budget. What’s best about PR is that it communicates in a way that advertising can’t…By using its advanced technique, PR is like a third party endorsement of your business, products, and services by a credible, independent source.

There are any number of ways that a company or organization can positively use public relations to enhance their image in the eye of the public. Here we are list some of the advanced tactics:

• Write how-to articles for the media that have the greatest influence with your ideal customers.
• Post your how-to articles in the online article directories, such as www.ideamarketers.com, www.articleteller.com, and www.ezinearticles.com..
• Leverage your “how to” articles in the press with speeches and radio interviews.
• Serve as an expert to reporters that write about your industry.
• Launch and sustain a quality e-newsletter to stay in touch with interested potential clients.
• Stage webinars or tele-seminars or small scale free or low-cost seminars to make your expertise readily available to prospects.
• Share meeting notices with the local papers and valuable information by request.
• Write press releases about grand openings, news, and staff additions/promotions, and other happenings at your company, targeting the correct reporters that cover your industry.
• Enter award contests that are well-supported by the media.

Storytelling and Public Relations

Stories make our messages easier to remember and have been used throughout history to help explain concepts more effectively. Public relations is a form of classic storytelling, but for business. And, in business, whoever tells the best story wins.

The basic premise that attracts a reporter to a story is friction

• two competing agendas
• two people facing off over a contentious issue
• two groups that are at odds with each other.

Friction tends to lead to interest, and that’s what reporters and editors want. Ultimately, they want a story that will cause their readers, listeners, or viewers to sit up and pay attention. If the story isn’t out of the ordinary — if it’s just every-day stuff — it will not be read, heard or seen.

The components of an effective story

The use of fact and emotion in a story is critical – particularly in public relations. In a world cluttered with messages competing for audience time and attention, stories and our messages require both, facts and emotions to be effective.

• An Appetizing Beginning- which is always the hero’s ordinary, believable world.
• The Meaty middle - which is the hero’s journey into some extraordinary world.
• End with Dessert, Not Desert- the hero’s return to his ordinary world, but changed, very changed.
• A compelling point of view - or theme, such as “nothing takes the place of persistence,” or “true love never dies,” or “it’s all in the delivery.”
• Detail, detail, detail: that support storytelling elements such as risks taken (how much money is at stake) and people involved (team members, not spokespeople or top execs)

5 news values or characteristics that identify the newsworthiness of a story

• Proximity - a story of local importance
• Consequence - a story with a large impact
• Prominence - a story featuring an important person or entity
• Human Interest - a story that has a unique or absurd angle
• Timeliness - a story bound to a certain time or tied to seasonality

Good stories tell us something we didn’t already know or thought we knew. You new product may be a big deal to you, but new products are released everyday. Dig a little deeper to find something truly novel about your product and bring that novelty to your story.

The Power of Word-of-Mouth Public Relations

In an environment that bombards consumers with millions of (often conflicting) messages each day, credibility is suddenly the most valuable currency of all, and the greatest credibility of all comes from a source—word-of-mouth, both online and off—few marketers had previously considered and most had considered dangerous and unpredictable.

How do you start a word of mouth marketing PR campaign?

• Establishing Excellence
  First thing is to build an excellent product or service, truly worth talking about and stand-up to every endorsement given.
• Appreciation Approval for Referrals
  Reward customers and employees for promoting products and services. Create contests, discounts, giveaways, cash, etc. Employees and customers go wild for referral rewards!
• Get Free Publicity
  Inform the press about your special giveaway offerings to your customers. The trick here is to get potential customers to become new customers and receive the exclusive offerings available to customers only.
• Communication Follow Up
  The Internet is the hottest engine that every business should have and use. Continually thank customers and employees for loyalty and dedication. Use email campaigns to communicate with customers and employees.
• Blog Control
  Enforcing a blog in a word of mouth marketing PR campaign is a neat way to communicate with customers. This allows you to gather feedback and handle important issues. Always be certain to monitor your blog regularly to correct any damage control.

Word-of-Mouth Practice and Variations

Some word of mouth is not like the others. In fact, the variability on how word of mouth works and what types of outcomes get produced vary even more Between its 9 constituents types than TV, Radio, Magazine and Outdoor do in a traditional world:

The possibilities are limitless when one person tells everyone they know about your products and services.

How to Identify and Engage Influencers Online and Off

Who is influential in our lives today? When marketers and communicators ask this question they often mean who is influential to a lot of people or who “reaches” lots of people. The easiest answer is anyone extremely popular or who commands some type of audience like a celebrity, public official, leaders in industry or someone at the top 10% of their game - whatever that game can be.

Communication experts have always been good at understanding who is influential on a particular subject. They survey a broad number individuals against criteria like this:

• Prominence within organization
• Prominence of organization
• Reach in mainstream media
• Reach in digital media
• Level of investment in the issue
• Level of authority/ connectedness
• Grassroots reach

There are a lot of new influencers out there whose voices are amplified by technology. Understanding how that all works is critical for the communication pro of tomorrow. If you want to decipher who is influential online, you have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and look for the data. Here is a sampling of what we look for:

• Blogs & Microblogs
• Videos & Photo Communities
• Message Boards & Forums
• Social Networks

Quick PR Pilot Programs

Pilot programs are designed to try things we don’t exactly know will work or work as expected.

In the times when environment is changing daily, the effects of the big lumbering PR ventures are more and more liable to the impacts from various undefined variables. Deploying measurable shorter pilot programs first may be an excellent tool in PR toolbar for securing the overall achievement of large PR campaigns.

Requirements of pilots- based planning:

• A simple measurement and reporting model that happens in real-ish time and a decision making process for mid-stream changes (e.g. our outreach to food bloggers isn’t clicking in, let’s expand the incentive or expand our list….)
• Time within an overall campaign. Time to try a few things within a pilot to tweak and find effectiveness before you scale up
• An understanding of how multiple disciplines affect each other - advertising, public relations, search marketing, direct marketing, experience marketing, etc….
• A tolerance of short-term failure. How else do we learn?
• A longer term view. This may seem like a contradiction. To run a pilot, you must be extremely ‘present’ and to judge its usefulness to your business, you must have the capacity to see beyond the immediate results of one pilot.

Effective PR Responses to Each Crisis Situation

In this day and age of online media, rumors, malicious gossip, unfair comments or opinions and other bad online news spread fast! Online Public Relations (PR) plays a vital role in helping companies create the feel good factor for the consumer.

Be ware that here we are anticipating through spectrum of practical actions, from the prospective of effectiveness, not positive ethical norms. Se here are your response options:

• Attack the accuser attempting to eliminate the attacker’s credibility.
• Use denial claiming that no crisis exists.
• Justification where the corporation claims no serious damage was done
• Use ingratiation to appease the publics, such as giving away coupons.
• Use corrective action to right and manage all wrongs.
• Give a full apology asking for forgiveness for your mistake.

All six responses have been used in the past with varying results. If chosen properly, one of the six responses can help mitigate damage.

***

Time-honored tactics like media relations and crisis communications remain in the public relations toolbox. But our clients need more to become irreplaceable brands. What are the best vehicles for your message? How can you get the word out in the most cost-efficient way?

Hopefully, advanced PR techniques presented in here may assist in leveraging your public relations practice in the future.

This is the first article in our online course series on the theory, practice, trends and secrets of New Age Public Relations. Other topics that we cover are:

.

If I was down to the last dollar of my marketing budget
I’d spend it on PR!

Kevin Johnson
group vice president Microsoft
sales and marketing

What is Public Relations

It seems difficult to believe at the dawn of the 21st Century, that there exists a major discipline with so many diverse, partial, incomplete and limited interpretations of its mission. Here, just a sampling of professional opinion on what public relations is all about:

• talking to the media on behalf of a client.
• selling a product, service or idea.
• reputation management.
• engineering of perception
• attracting credit to an organization for doing good.
• limiting the downside when it does bad.

By definition, public relations is the art and science of establishing relationships between an organization and its key audiences. Public relations plays a key role in helping business industries create strong relationships with customers.

There are different types of public relations, some companies call it investor relations and yet others will call it financial public relations, but what companies do not realize is the fact that public relations is an extremely essential and integral marketing tool.

Basically, the general idea of public relations is advertising, branding and marketing. Anything that involves the media is the responsibility of the public relations officer. He encourages magazines, newspapers, radio and TV to print or air good things about the services and the products. This promotion will reach their targeted customers therefore generating an increase on sales and patronage.

People act on their perception of the facts; those perceptions lead to certain behaviors; and something can be done about those perceptions and behaviors that leads to achieving an organization’s objectives.

That leads us directly to the core strength of public relations.

When public relations creates, changes or reinforces the general opinion by reaching, persuading and moving-to-desired-action those people whose behaviors affect the organization, the public relations mission is accomplished.

Brief History of PR

Public relations arrived with the development of mass media. At the turn of the 20th century, “muckraking” journalists were stirring up public dissent against the powerful monopolies and wealthy industrialists who ruled the day. Early public relations firms combated the bad press by placing positive stories about their clients in newspapers.

Former journalists, such as Ivy Lee (considered by some to be the founder of modern public relations), used the first press releases to feed newspapers “the facts” about his misunderstood clients, namely the railroad and tobacco industries, and J.D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. The term Public Relations is to be found for the first time in the 1897 Yearbook of Railway Literature.

Lee and company became so good at whitewashing even the darkest corporate sins that PR professionals earned a reputation as “spin doctors.”

Edward Bernays - the self-appointed Father of Public Relations

Edward Bernays was the profession’s first theorist. He drew many of his ideas from Sigmund Freud’s theories about the irrational, unconscious motives that shape human behavior. Bernays authored several books, including Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), Propaganda (1928), and The Engineering of Consent (1947). He saw public relations as an “applied social science” that uses insights from psychology, sociology, and other disciplines to scientifically manage and manipulate the thinking and behavior of an irrational and “herdlike” public.

In 1950 PRSA enacts the first “Professional Standards for the Practice of Public Relations,” a forerunner to the current Code of Ethics, last revised in 2000 to include six core values and six code provisions. The six core values are “Advocacy, Honesty, Expertise, Independence, Loyalty, and Fairness.” The six code provisions consulted with are “Free Flow of Information, Competition, Disclosure of Information, Safeguarding Confidences, Conflicts of Interest, and Enhancing the Profession.”

Much time has passed since the days of Ivy Lee, and to label today’s PR professionals as dishonest would be to ignore how pervasive and important their work has become to people and organizations of all shapes and sizes — small businesses, authors, activists, universities, and non-profit organizations — not just big business and big government.

Public Relations, Marketing and Advertising ?

You will often find that many people confuse public relations with marketing and/or advertising or vice versa. The most apparent reason for this is that the clear-cut distinctions are disappearing as each strategy’s different awareness building efforts become more and more integrated. While all those components are important they are very different.

Marketing

Marketing encompasses every tool used to help your target audience buy your product and make you money. You can do this through advertising on billboards, TV, radio, in magazines and newspapers, online with Google ads, on banner ads on other people’s websites, on Facebook, etc.

A company’s marketing department could be subdivided into several smaller sections that are responsible for: public relations, advertising, customer service, market share research as well as pricing, distribution and product placement. They all work toward the same ultimate goal - which is the success and growth of the company

Advertising

Advertising, in plain word: putting your product or service where the public can see it. Advertising lets the consumer know:

• What it is that you have to offer
• Why exactly they need it

The cost of advertising is expensive. The most effective advertising campaign also requires that you have several different advertisements in different areas of any one location.

Public Relations

There are two vehicles for having your company’s information show up in a media: pay to advertise or let the press do it for you. The latter occurs as a direct result of public relations (PR) efforts - actively seeking publicity as a form of marketing communications.

Public relations is kind of like advertising’s less obtrusive brother. At the same time it is more effective and cost-saving than traditional advertising methods because it places exposure in credible third-party outlets, thus offering a third-party legitimacy that advertising does not have. In other words if you get someone else to talk about how great your company is then you are much more likely to gain public trust and have an easier time selling your products to them.

Off course to do this you need to make media wonts to tell your story. That is the principal task of efficient PR. As media expert Peter Hannaford, reminds us:

“Reporters want stories to be about what is out of the ordinary,” Hannaford said. “Dog bites man is not a story because it happens frequently – ask any mailman. But man bites dog almost never happens and is news.

If (reporters) didn’t write stories about what was out of the ordinary, if they didn’t write about controversies … then there wouldn’t be an audience,”"

The Role of Public Relations in Branding

Branding is the idea that a particular set of attributes will encourage the public to have positive thoughts about a particular company, product, service, or individual. The job of public relations is to encourage the public to have positive thoughts about a particular company, product, service, or individual. It’s a subtle distinction, but an essential one.

When products are assigned personality traits or attributes by the public-”friendly,” “environmentally aware … concerned with quality … accessible”-it means that public relations, in conjunction with advertising and marketing, has done its job. But because the public is naturally wary of advertising and marketing, and because those disciplines are considerably more visible than public relations, it is possible that PR makes the most honest, and deepest, impact on the public’s psyche.

Public relations practitioners are particularly well suited to the Branding concept, since they are well versed in the techniques and practices that create a public identity very close to the central idea of a brand. And meny experts on Branding espouse the opinion that public relations are a vital part-if not the most vital part-of the Branding process.

Public Relations and Crisis Management Planning

In today’s fast-paced and ever-changing world, business is news. Plant closings, mergers and acquisitions, unemployment, strikes, labor negotiations, company expansions, building projects, construction-related accidents and catastrophes are often the lead story on the front page or the six o’clock news.

Yet many organizations are totally unprepared or at least ill-prepared to handle the public relations and crisis management aspects of these events. This unpreparedness can lead to many negative and undesirable results for you, your employees, your clients and customers, your company and your business and industry sector.

Custom PR Executed Steps in Order to Properly Manage a Crisis

• Address the public immediately following the discovery of the crisis.
• Maintain honesty - the public is more willing to forgive an honest mistake than a calculated lie.
• Be informative - the media as well as the public will create their own rumors if no information is given to them by the corporation in crisis. Rumors can cause significantly more damage to the corporation than the truth.
• Be concerned - show the public you care because people will be more forgiving if it is clear that the corporation cares about the victims of the crisis.
• Maintain two-way relationships - the corporation can learn a lot about the status of public opinion by listening.

In House PR vs Outsourcing

Executives must determine how much of the PR effort should be outsourced, which functions should be retained in-house and which agency is the best fit. Making the decision to use an outside agency to handle all or a part of a company’s communications can be a complex process, but it’s one that offers the chance for adding considerable expertise, professional skills and activity to the company’s PR function.

In examining the value of inside vs. out-of-house public relations staffing, your should consider the following advantages of each alternative and reach a blend of outsourcing and inside capabilities that works best for you.

The Advantages of Handling PR with In-house Staff

• Convenience
  Having someone nearby can mean the difference between getting it done today and waiting for a phone call tomorrow. This also allows for immediate follow-up and quick response time in crisis situations.
• Understanding the client
  In-house PR departments are directly affected by their actions. Aspects ranging from managing their overhead to understanding their organization’s needs are factors that an outside PR firm often cannot provide. The more familiar people are with their client, the more likely they are to aim for greater results.
• Responsiveness to opportunities
  An in-house PR professional is on site when developments occur. A trained PR specialist who participates in company meetings to discuss future programs will be able to point out possible opportunities that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.

Outsourcing PR to an Agency-The Advantages

• A team of professionals
  By outsourcing to these specialists, businesses need not worry about compromising their message for the sake of publicity; because they have well-respected, well-established professionals on their side.
• Media and vendor relationships
  Agencies through their many employees can put a client in touch with a wide universe of media and provide a breadth of media contacts that an in-house PR department cannot.
• The outsider’s perspective
  It’s easier to ask an independent party to sum up the image of the company than to ask an internal PR person, who may paint a picture stamped with bias. Moreover, an outside professional works with a number of clients, generating a wider perspective on an industry and a deeper understanding of the issues confronting it.

What is Media Kit and Why you Need it

A media kit is a folder of information that will help reporters write an accurate story. It should include whatever facts you want them to know about.

Media kits also show that you’re media-savvy and understand how the news game is played, as it help reporters save time and improve accuracy because everything is there in black and white. They don’t have to spend time calling the source to ask for more information, or double-check numerous facts.

Regardless of what your business offers, at the very least your media kit should include:

• A history of your company
• Professional profiles of key executives or officers
• A basic press release detailing the company objective
• A copy of the annual report - tucked neatly into a professionally printed folder
• Press releases on upcoming company endeavors
• Information on the latest product or servise releases
• Black and white or color photos
• A business card

Some companies that want to make big impressions with their media kit will go far above and beyond the minimal. They could trade in the professional, but conservative folder for some bigger, brighter packaging and include things like audio CDs or DVDs along with brightly colored flyers and product samples.

Media kits can be used for far more than just the media. Use them as marketing materials to share with potential clients. Take them to trade shows. Give them to your sales people to use on sales calls.

Public Relations Professionals - PR as Career Opportunity

According to the forecast of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the United States , the field of public relations will continue to reap thousands of job openings in the next few years. With so many fields requiring the expertise of public relation officers, such as medicine, science, finance, etc., many people consider taking public relations careers to gain profits and recognition.

Bachelors’ degree in any discipline preferably with social sciences, liberal arts and humanities is required to take up a course in this field. Apart from this there are also short term certificate courses. Most training programs in Advertising also include public relations. Some institutes have entrance exams while others prefer admission on merit basis.

Most public relations practitioners are recruited from the ranks of journalism. Public relations officers are highly trained professionals with expertise and knowledge in many areas, for example shareholder management during a crisis, in-house public relations, account management, financial public relations, consumer public relations, public relations software etc.

Good public relations professionals network well and have media contacts the rest of us don’t!

He must be skilled in many tactical disciplines. To name just a few:

• media relations
• public speaking
• writing
• financial communications
• organizing special events
• issue tracking
• crisis management
• campaign consulting

What PR professionals usually do for their clients?:

• PR people read and watch and listen to the news, always on the lookout for stories that may dovetail with your message. Then they call the writers, editors or producers responsible for that news with a story angle, suggesting you, your product or your service as a focus point. They answer the question the media always wants answered: “Why you? Why now?”
• PR specialists also push “perennial” or “timeless” stories, those not dependent on an event or particular news story. These feature stories can be invaluable when added to your corporate marketing materials and sent to clients and prospects.
• PR professionals may act as “spin doctors,” - There are times when bad things happen and you need to manage the crisis somehow. With persistent, consistent public relations. “Tell the truth, tell it all, tell it fast” PR professionals may practice the most effective recipe for crisis management.

The Bottom Line

Public relations, usually known as just PR, sounds like such a small thing but is really the cornerstone of any business. Whether your business has its own PR department or contracts that work out, it’s important to have a method of getting information about your company, products, and services to your target market.

On a more personal note, we all have public relations - what opinion people have about us as individuals; what our friends, family, employers and employees think about us…

“It’s in times of uncertainty and ambiguity that good PR becomes ever more critical, doesn’t it? CEO’s have seen the studies that show outreach cuts (e.g., PR, marketing, ads) can cost much more than they save. The large PR shops seem to be about as busy as ever, there doesn’t appear to be a catastrophic drop in PR job openings. Sure, the online sector has taken a hit. But considering the statistical take along with the practical realities, it’s looking like PR overall will weather the current storm well.”

Ryan D. May
Public Relations Society of America

Literature is always collaborative! Whole human Literature is process of serial collaboration defined by borrowing, synthesis and appropriation that flows from the manipulation of existing knowledge and can be widely asynchronous.

Very little of us know that most of the greatest works of literature, across time, across culture, and across language, are explicitly attributed to groups and have been revealed to be the product of collaborations.

Collaborative Writing Models and Definitions

Do you see the book ?

By Wikippedia, the term collaborative writing refers to projects where written works are created by multiple people together (collaboratively) rather than individually. Some projects are overseen by an editor or editorial team, but many grow without any of this top-down oversight.

Collaborative writing is a slippery concept. It is clear that collaborative writing refers to writing in groups but there are as many ways to write in groups as there are possible combinations of individuals. Where does “a little help” and editorial assistance end and collaboration begin? There are no definitive answers.

In discussing collaborative writing in today’s literary world where the dominant paradigm is a single author theory, many models describe collaborations in several different conceptualizations:

• Group of individual authors working in an micro-economy model.
• Group of writers occupying the role and space of a single corporate or collective individuality.
• Complex organizational entities and aggregations of individuals.

For a limited but piratical working definition of collaboration, one can turn to technologists who define collaboration in more mechanical terms. In an article on the technology and processes of collaborative writing, David Farkas offers four possible definitions useful in approaching collaboration through an analysis of processes. For his purposes, collaboration is:

• Two or more people jointly composing the complete text of a document;
• Two or more people contributing components to a document;
• One or more person modifying, by editing and/or reviewing, the document of one or more persons;
• One person working interactively with one or more person and drafting a document based on the ideas of the person or persons.

Collaborative Literature - the broad concept

Collaborative writing tends only to imply synchronous and fully consensual group work. The concept of Collaborative Literature, on the other hand, is more than just the act of putting pen to paper.

While almost synonymous with writing collaborative literature implies connections between, and unity among, different written works over time and between authors in a way that “writing” does not. While not always defensible, these connective acts are always literary. Literature is always collaborative!

Main Benefits and Advantages of Collaborative Writing

• Interchange of ideas - collaborative writing could, in ways that can be tested empirically, produce better work and teach people quantitatively more than in situations where the same individuals write alone. Each aspect of the writing process—including invention, writing, and editing—are inherently social acts that benefit from and thrive in a collaborative environment ([Lefevre1987]).
• Flexibility and freedom - As computer technology appears poised to redefine literary production again, the technology itself is no longer “hardware” like printing presses and movable type but computer source code. As such, our ability to manipulate the terms on which we can communicate and collaborate, as long as we have access to source code, is instantaneously and almost infinitely flexible. We can add a line here, subtract a line here, change a line here and we create a different system and a different environment to shape and control the creation, distribution, or manipulation of literature.
• Fostering of discussion and debate - open collaborator’ eyes to how their work compares to that of their peers, giving them a better sense of their own strengths and weaknesses as writers and thinkers.
• Encourage authors to consider their audience - an important aspect of learning to write effectively and yet a component missing in many traditional approaches.
• By having students write essays and fiction in groups, students produced better work than when they worked alone. Collaborative writings’ effectiveness in the classroom has been repeatedly confirmed in what has become a large collaborative writing and collaborative learning discourse ([Gebhardt1980] [Bruffee1981] [Gebhardt1981]).

Skepticism about Literature Collaboration

In an article written for science-fiction authors on How to Collaborate without Getting Your Head Shaved, Keith Laumer, an author and collaborator, ends his short piece with the advice, “if you possibly can, write it yourself. Collaborations, like marriages, should only be undertaken if any alternative is unthinkable”.

In an article for Writer, Leonard Felder points out that not only should potential collaborators first agree to a division of royalties and payments, but that they must have “a written agreement on . . . the way your names will be listed on the book’s cover”.

It can be difficult to assess each collaborators contribution to the final product, making assigning attributes problematic.

Planning the assignment and meeting with collaborators to discuss their progress or settle problems can be time-consuming. Likewise incorporating interim deadlines into the project, such as requiring writers to submit drafts or outlines, is essential to warding off potential problems.

Collaborative Writing in Practice

In a true collaborative environment, each contributor has an almost equal ability to add, edit, and remove text. It is easier to do if the group has a specific end goal in mind, and harder if a goal is absent or vague.

Collaborative Writing Approach and Strategy

Successful collaboration occurs when each participant is able to make a unique contribution toward achieving a common vision or goal statement. Supporting this common goal are objectives that have been generated by each of the participants.

• Understanding the assignment.
• Defining the major components of the project.
• Agreement on the writing objectives, matters of style, including documentation.
• Delegating the tasks among group members. Each member, however, shares responsibility for the whole product.
• Setting up schedules for updates and revising drafts.
• Double checking all information from sources to be sure all source material is cited and cited correctly.
• Integrating the components of the project so that it reads like a coherent whole.
• Anticipating Troubles.
• Useing Technology.
• Crediting to all members of the group who participate.

Possible Collaborative Roles

It is important for each participant to “feel” as though he or she has a significant contribution to make to the achievement of goals. It is also important that each participant be held accountable for contributing to the writing project.

• Leader - comfortable with assuming responsibility, members of the group respect her/his opinions
• Encourager - responds positively to contributions of group members and encourages less dominant members to express their views.
• Harmonizer - tries to keep conflicts in check and focuses disagreements on the subject of the task at hand. Moves conflict away from the personality perspective and toward the objectives.
• Compromiser - willingly adapts or removes his or her suggestions in order to resolve a stalemate.
• Facilitator - adept at helping keep meetings focused and work-in-process produced in a timely fashion.
• Listener - carefully listens to each member’s opinions and values their opinions.

Collaborative Writing – the present state

Collaborative Writing: An Annotated Bibliography list hundreds of articles establishing the prevalence of collaborative writing in corporate, industrial and academic reviewing, storyboarding, translation, usability testing and the production conference papers, documentation, policies and procedures, proposals, and technical reports as well as more traditional forms of literature like novels, plays and poems ([Speck1999]).

This bibliography reflects an explosion of academic literature around collaborative writing over the past three decades; it covers nearly 1,000 sources written during the seventies, eighties, and nineties. In turn, this discourse reflects the growing popularization of explicitly collaborative writing. It reflects a shift in attention toward collaboration rather than a change in the prevalence of collaborative writing itself.

Collaborative Writing Tools and Technology

Collaborative writing tools are those technologies that facilitate the editing and reviewing of a text document by multiple individuals either in real-time or asynchronously.

Collaborative writing tools can vary a great deal and can range from the simplicity of wiki system to more advanced systems. Basic features include the typical formatting and editing facilities of a standard word processor with the addition of live chat, live markup and annotation, co-editing, version tracking and more.

Google itself has recently entered this field with its Google Docs, a fully-web based collaborative writing tool formerly known as Writely. Documents generated with such tools are always accessible to all the editors and can be easily downloaded and exported in standard word processing file formats.

Make Literature Online website and projects are the brightest example of Collaborative Literature and Collaborative Writing practice and great indicator of the direction in which the whole concept of online collaboration is heading to.

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