Screenwriter Nora Ephron long remembered the first day of her high school journalism class.

Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment: to write the lead for a story to appear in the student newspaper. He told them the facts:

Ephron and the other budding journalists condensed the who, what, when, where and why of the story into a single sentence:

“Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento …”

The teacher reviewed the leads, then paused for a moment.

“The lead for this story,” he said, “is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’”

Not ‘just the facts, ma’am’

What’s the point of your news story? It’s probably not really the five W’s and the H. Instead of focusing on the event, focus in the impact, or how the news affects your readers.

Covering a:

• Speech? Write about the most valuable thing the speaker said, not the fact that she spoke.
• Event? Focus on what people will be able to see and do at the event, not the time, date and place.
• Meeting? Center the piece on what was decided at the meeting and how it will affect the reader, not on the logistics of the meeting itself.

What would Miss Piggy do?

To reach readers, think like Miss Piggy and write about MOI, counsels management consultant Alan Weiss. That’s “My Own Interests,” from the reader’s perspective.

One way to do that is to shift your focus from event — what occurred, when, where and why — to impact. That will make your copy more interesting, relevant and valuable to your readers.

___

Sources: Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Random House, 2007, pages 75-76.

Lorraine Glennon and Mary Mohler, Those Who Can…Teach! Celebrating Teachers Who Make a Difference, Wildcat Canyon Press, 1999, 95-96

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Having trouble finding reader benefits? Maybe you need to ask different questions.

Ask your subject matter experts:

• What happens if our customers buy this product or service?
• What happens if they don’t?
• What happens if members of the community get behind this public policy?
• What happens if they don’t?

Or take a tip from Kelly Parthen, PR manager at Agilent Technologies. She keeps asking her subject matter experts: “So what?” “So what?” “So what?” Eventually, they get to the benefit.
Keep asking, and you’ll hit benefits like:

They’ll be able to watch twice the TV in half the time.

They’ll ensure that their children’s school buildings aren’t constructed of corrugated cardboard.

They’ll get the body of Kendall Jenner while following an all-Twix-bar diet.

However you find them, benefits will make your products, services and ideas — not to mention your copy — more relevant and valuable to your reader.

That means you will…

Having trouble finding your benefits?

Try prompting your subject matter expert with the line “that means they will …” The end of that sentence is likely to be a benefit.

Your subject matter expert says, “We can handle our client’s internal audit functions.”

You say, “That means our clients will …”

Your subject matter expert says: “That means our clients will free up their own employees for bottom-line projects and better control the costs of producing internal audits.”

Now you’re talking benefits.

Present your benefits, too.

“That means you will …” also makes a great way to present your benefits:

Try it.

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If you were giving away a Hawaiian vacation to people who signed up for your webinar, which would you lead with? The vacation, or the webinar?

From what I’ve seen — from training more than 25,000 communicators in more than 1,000 organizations over 20 years — most folks would choose the webinar.

Sign up for our webinar
and get a dream trip to Hawaii!

But leading with the webinar won’t grab your readers’ attention and move them to act.

Instead, lead with the benefits and substantiate with the features. Focus on your reader’s wants and needs first, then follow up with your organization and its products, services and ideas.

Steal a trick from these Silver Anvil winners.

These benefits leads from PRSA Silver Anvil-winning campaigns are great models of leading with the benefits and substantiating with the features.

Make the switch.

Sometimes, a small switch is all you need to put the benefits first. Check out these before-and-afters:

Next time you write a press release, brochure or newsletter article, put the reader benefits first.

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“Clean your face,” demands a hotel soap wrapper. No, YOU clean YOUR face! I want to respond.

I’ve been seeing a lot of messages like these: messages that sound like benefits but that really are not. Fake benefits.

These fake benefits mirror the structure of benefits messages — Do/this (Save/money) — but not their spirit. Instead, the structure of fake benefits is “Non-benefit-focused verb/feature.”

The structure of benefits messages is:

Do/this

For instance:

Save/money

The structure of fake benefits is:

Non-benefits-focused verb/feature

For instance:

Enjoy/our new product

To move readers to act, avoid these three types of fake benefits.

1. Get our product.

Yesterday, I received an email with this subject line:

“Learn more about New Media Gateway”

While that looks like a benefits statement — it starts with a verb and the implied “you,” after all — it’s actually a fake benefits statement. Its real subject is not the reader, but the communicator’s organization.

Instead of using your verb to point to your product, service, program or idea, write about what readers can do with your product, service, program or idea.

2. ‘Congratulations on choosing us.’

We tend to send these messages out after we win an award: “Pat yourself on the back for choosing us.”

With these benefits, we’re really writing about how great we are:

Get XYZ feature.

Reap many rewards.

Rely on our 75 years of experience.

Value the attention we pay to detail.

Appreciate our dedication to accuracy.

Pat yourself on the back for choosing us.

Instead, write about how the readers’ lives will be different because they chose you.

3. Go to your room.

We learned the imperative voice as the command voice in high school. And it can be a command: Go to your room. Make your bed. Take out the trash.

But you use the imperative voice to move people to act, make it the invitation voice — not the command voice: Save money. Make money. Save time. Avoid effort.

Avoid the command voice. These messages are actually tasks:

Take our class.

Stop by our booth.

Attend our conference.

Subscribe to our ezine.

Sign up for our webinar.

Make it the invitation voice instead. Rather than tell readers what to do, let them know what they’ll get when they do it:

Learn to double your income when you take our class.

Get a chance at a free Apple Watch when you stop by our booth.

Network with peers — maybe even meet your next boss — when you attend our conference.

Nix ‘get our feature.’

The hardest part of crafting a benefits statement is finding the benefit, not writing the line.

So dig in. Think. Don’t be satisfied with a statement like “Get our feature.” Learn enough about the subject you’re writing about and your audience members to figure out what the former will do for the latter.

Remember what you learned in kindergarten: When you cheat, you only hurt yourself. But when you cheat on benefits statements, you hurt yourself, your readers and your organization.

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You. It’s a power tool of communications.

The second person increases readability, boosts opens and clickthroughs and is the most retweeted word in the English language.

So lead with you whether you’re writing for clients, employees, reporters or visitors. Indeed, use the Y word when you’re writing:

1. Marketing communications

The second person was, is and always will be the recognized standard for brochures, sales collateral and other marketing pieces. That’s why the best marketing communications are verb-based benefits lists that sound like this:

Grow bigger, lusher plants — and never have to water again — with XYZ’s SuperPlantGro.

2. Employee communications

C’mon. You’re not still referring to employees as employees in employee communications. Right? Overcome the distance between employees and the organization by writing directly to employees, using you or the imperative voice.

So instead of:

Employees must pick up new car stickers by Sept. 25

Write:

Don’t get stuck at security: Get your new car stickers by Sept. 25

3. Public relations

Communicators have long believed that there’s no place for you in media relations. Why? Two reasons:

1. News releases, conventional wisdom goes, require the third person for an objective, journalistic tone. But have you looked at a news outlet lately? Even the stodgiest now often use the second person.
2. Who’s you? Is it the reporter who receives the release or the reporter’s reader who actually reads the story? However, given organizations’ goals for releases today, this seems like a non-problem too.

I’ve seen enough PRSA Silver Anvil Award-winning releases use you that I’ve almost come around to the idea. But I still think there’s a better choice.

If you don’t want to use the second person in media relations pieces, you can still focus on reader benefits by using a placeholder for you in the first position in the release. That’s what makes this lead from a Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign lead so effective:

4. Multiple audiences

Remember back in the day, when Step 2 of the five-step communication planning process was “target your audience”? A whole step — 20% of the process — devoted just to answering the question, “Who’s you?”

But then — and, yes, I am aware of just how old this makes me sound — [read in creaky, old-lady voice] the internet came along, Sonny, and suddenly, our audience was everyone.

So how do you write to you when you’re not sure who you is? You have three options:

• Segment audiences. This remains the best practice. If you’re reaching out to investors, employees and consumers, you have three pieces. The bulk of the piece might be the same, but the top two or three paragraphs will change with the audience.
• Call out to readers. Not possible to segment? Then take David Ogilvy’s advice, and call out to your segment in the headline. Just add, “Mothers of Kindergartners:” or “Asthma sufferers:” or “Kansas City residents:” to the front of your headline.
• Let readers segment themselves. The National Institutes of Health used to have two doors on its home page: Doctors and Patients. That way, NIH could be sure that I never saw my doctor’s content, and that my doctor never saw mine.

Because the minute my doctor gets a high blood pressure article intended for me, she decides the NIH site is not for her. And the minute I get the hypertension piece slanted toward my doctor, I decide the NIH site is not for me.

That’s the problem with failing to segment audiences: Give people information that’s targeted to someone else, and you may lose them altogether.

This also works with social media. I live in Portland, a city divided by the Willamette (rhymes with damn it) river. A dozen bridges connect the east and west sides.

If my bridge is down, I want to receive updates from ODOT every five seconds. If your bridge is down? I never want to get bothered by it at all.

The solution? Let people sign up for the bridge feeds they want to follow.

Then you know who your reader is. Then you have no trouble talking to you.

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It feels so good to talk about ourselves.

Talking about yourself activates the same pleasure centers in the brain as food, money or sex, according to Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir and her colleague Jason Mitchell, whose research on the topic was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

No wonder some 40% of everyday speech is devoted to telling others about our favorite subject.

Some 40% of everyday speech is devoted to telling others about ourselves. — Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell, Harvard researchers
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For the study, Tamir and Mitchell used an MRI scanner to see which parts of the brain responded when people talked about themselves. When participants were sharing their own pizza preferences and personality traits, researchers saw heightened activity in regions of the brain associated with the rewards we get from food, money or sex.

Avoid institutional narcissism.

I don’t know whether institutions also have pleasure centers, but they certainly seem to suffer from the same self-centeredness that afflicts we mere mortals. Consider their messages:

• XYZ Company today announces that …
• Our ABC is the leading doohickey in the blah-blah market …
• At LMNOP, we believe …

The problem with writing about us and our stuff is that, as Tamir and Mitchell’s research shows, your readers don’t want to talk about you. They want to talk about themselves.

So stop We-We-ing on your readers.

Readers don’t want your We-We.

We’ve known since 1934 that readers don’t respond to We-We. That’s the year Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale conducted a study that proved that first-person pronouns (I, me, we, us) reduce readability.

First-person pronouns (I, me, we, us) reduce readability. — Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale
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Fast forward to 2015, when Return Path proved the same thing: People are less likely to open and click through emails with first-person pronouns (I, me, our, mine) in the subject lines.

(I love how we keep “discovering” the same readership habits the classic researchers learned back in the day. These reader traits remain the same — over the decades, across media, throughout channels — because whatever else changes, our readers remain human.)

Top companies 57% less likely to We-We on readers.

No wonder high-performing organizations avoid We-We-ing on their readers. According to IABC UK’s research into how top organizations communicate:

• 71% of high-performing organizations focus on the audience’s point of view in their messaging. Just 45% of average organizations do.
• Top organizations are 60% more likely to focus on the audience perspective in communications than average organizations.
• Some 88% of average organizations say they like to talk about themselves; just 63% of top organizations do.

Focus on the reader’s favorite subject.

Instead of writing about your favorite subject, write about the reader’s.

They’ll love it. They’ll read it. They’ll open it, click through it and retweet it.

And that feels so good.

___

Sources: Robert Lee Hotz, “Science Reveals Why We Brag So Much,” The Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2012

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Richard Roll, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies narcissism in CEOs. Turns out the more narcissistic executives are, the more likely they are to overrate their skills and make bad business moves.

In one study, Roll used a simple technique that’s been validated by psychologists to gauge executive narcissism: He counted the number of “I’s” they used in their communications.

The first-person pronoun — “the vertical pronoun,” as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jacqui Banaszynski calls it — is bad enough. Its cousin, the first-person-plural “we,” is a symptom of another disorder: We-We Syndrome, or organization-focused, not reader-focused, writing.

Are you suffering from We-We Syndrome? Here are three techniques for diagnosing your copy:

1. Run the we-you test.

Use Microsoft Word’s “find” function to search for instances of company references versus reader references. Aim for a ratio of at least two reader references to one company reference.

Here are the results I got on one of my clients’ proposals:

It’s a good thing we had a chance to edit the proposal before it went out: We-We Syndrome can be fatal to business development.

As one of my clients says, “You’ll go ‘We, We, We’ all the way home — without the contract.”

2. See what you say.

One way to visualize We-We Syndrome is to create a tag cloud for your copy. Tag clouds display the words you use the most frequently in the largest type, those you use less often in smaller type.

You’re looking for your customer, the word “you” and benefits-oriented verbs to show up in large type and your own company and product names to be smaller. Here’s the tag cloud for a Federal Home Loan Bank release about apartments for special-needs residents:

Remember, write about your readers, not your topic. If you find results like these, rewrite your copy to focus more on your customers and what they’ll be able to do with your product and less on the organization and the product itself.

3. Put the reader first.

Did these diagnostics reveal a bad case of Institutional Narcissism? One way to cure the disease is to lead with the reader, not with your company. Check out this before and after by Melanie Allen, Marketing & Public Relations manager at Inova.

Before:

Inova Loudoun Hospital has multiple emergency rooms around Loudoun County.

After:

Spend less time in the car and in pain with Inova Loudoun Hospital’s three conveniently located emergency rooms.

Can’t use “you”? Use a placeholder instead. Start your headline, lead, paragraph or sentence with your target reader: “Asthma sufferers,” say, or “PR professionals.”

Take the cure

We-We Syndrome is contagious, so be careful out there. Don’t let We-We spread. The minute you’ve diagnosed the patient, apply the remedy: Rewrite your copy to focus on the reader, not the organization.

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I was coaching a communicator for a California health insurance plan the other day. The headline for her news story:

Provide Care to XYZ HMO Members

Oy! If only “Do it ’cause I said so” messages actually worked. That would make my life a lot easier! But nobody’s swayed by a scream. So I reminded my client of Dale Carnegie. In 1936, the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People wrote:

“There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything. By making the other person want to do it.”

So, Carnegie wrote:

“Before you [communicate], pause and ask yourself: ‘How can I make this person want to do it?’”

How can you make your readers want to do what you want them to do? That’s your headline.

Dale Carnegie’s persuasive techniques

Here’s what I learned from Dale Carnegie’s classic techniques in the art of persuasion:

It’s all about the other person.

That’s it. That’s how you win friends. That’s how you influence people.

Forget logical arguments. Forget mirroring your clients’ body language. Just take the other person’s point of view.

People aren’t interested in us and our stuff. They’re interested in themselves and their needs. If you would persuade people, Carnegie writes:

“Remember that the people you are talking to are a hundred times more interested in themselves and their wants and problems than they are in you and your problems. A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people. A boil on one’s neck interests one more than forty earthquakes in Africa.”

So what are your writing about? Your neck-boil remedy? Or the reader’s aching neck?

“If salespeople can show us how their services or merchandise will help us solve our problems, they won’t need to sell us. We’ll buy. And customers like to feel that they are buying — not being sold.”

It seems so obvious that the topic is the topic. But if you want to change minds and behavior, you need to make the reader the topic.

“People are not interested in you. They are not interested in me. They are interested in themselves — morning, noon and after dinner.”

And on the phone. Definitely on the phone.

“The New York Telephone Company made a detailed study of telephone conversations to find out which word is the most frequently used. You have guessed it: it is the personal pronoun ‘I.’ ‘I.’ ‘I.’ It was used 3,900 times in 500 telephone conversations. ‘I.’ ‘I.’ ‘I.’ ‘I.’”

Any questions?

“When you see a group photograph that you are in, whose picture do you look for first?”

Me too. I’m my own favorite subject.

“‘Talk to people about themselves,’ said Disraeli, one of the shrewdest men who ever ruled the British Empire, ‘and they will listen for hours.’”

Are you talking about the reader?

Highlight the subjects of each of your sentences. How many of them refer to the reader? How many refer to your organization or your products, services, programs and ideas? Write more of the former and less of the latter.

That’s how you Win Friends and Influence People. Make it about them.

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If you wanted to keep teens from smoking weed, what message might you communicate?

One health organization, reports Guy Kawasaki in his book Enchantment, used the message that young people who smoked weed were five times more likely to engage in sex.

Have you ever met a 17-year-old football player? For that matter, have you ever met a 58-year-old writing coach?

Many humans — except perhaps for those who work for this one particular health organization — actually enjoy sex. I myself have met several people who feel their lives would be much less interesting without it.

One group tried to cut teen weed use by saying that weed smokers were 5 times more likely to have sex. … Have you ever met a 17-year-old boy?
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Not to say that the five-times-less-sex message wouldn’t work on a different audience. If you were trying to convince parents, teachers or school board members to campaign against teen weed-smoking, then that data point might be compelling.

For most other audiences, though, the promise of five times more sex might just convince the most sober among us to wake and bake, nod off on the couch during all-day “I Love Lucy” marathons and come to surrounded by empty Cherry Garcia cartons.

And that’s the problem with this message: It has a WIIFM, or a “What’s in it for me?”

It just focuses on the wrong M.

Answer your reader’s No. 1 question.

The first thing your reader wants to know from your message is “What’s in it for me?” Advertising writers long ago shortened this term to WIIFM, pronounced “wiffum.”

So think like your readers:

• Your customer readers don’t care that your organization is putting $100 million more into R&D this year. They want to know whether that means their computer will be faster and easier to use.
• Your employee readers don’t care that your organization is adding $10 million to the profit-sharing coffers. They want to know whether that means they’ll be able to retire early.
• Your media contacts don’t care that your organization has launched a revolutionary new toothpaste. They want to know whether it’s going to reduce their own readers’ dental bills.

So answer the reader’s No. 1 question: “What’s In It For Me?”

But first, you need to know who Me is.

Whatever happened to Step 1B?

You remember Step 1B of the five-step communication planning process. It’s “Target your audience.” It comes right after identifying the business challenge and before setting goals for, developing, implementing and measuring the success of your communication plan.

So whatever happened to Step 1B?

I’ll tell you what happened to Step 1B. The internet happened to Step 1B. All of a sudden, we weren’t targeting our readers — our readers were targeting us.

Which meant that instead of targeting anybody, we were suddenly targeting everybody. (And remember what Mom said about trying to please everyone.)

There is a solution to this problem, and it is to have readers target themselves:

• Offer separate doorways on your website. For a health care site, for instance, you might offer doors for patients and doctors — and never the twain shall meet. Understand that if I stumble onto my doctor’s web pages, I will decide that your site is not for me. And if my doctor finds herself on web pages targeted at my level of medical expertise, she will decide that your site isn’t for her. Target each of us, separately.
• Offer separate social media feeds. A river runs through my city, and 14 bridges connect the east and west sides of town. If my bridge is closed, I want the DOT to tweet urgent updates every five seconds. But if your bridge is closed, I never want to hear about it at all. The solution: Offer separate Twitter streams for each bridge.
• Offer separate news releases, tag intranet articles for certain departments, segment email blasts. That doesn’t mean you need to multiply your work. Just finesse the headline, deck, lead and nut graph of each piece to focus on your targeted audience’s needs.

But every day, I work with communicators who don’t do that. Instead of targeting audience members or helping audience members target themselves, they target everyone.

Their every web page is for all comers. Their all-in Twitter streams drown disparate followers in irrelevant messages. Their e-zines and newsletters go to employees, to customers, to legislators.

Even if the WIIFM that would compel one audience would repel the rest. (Remember: sex.)

We need Step 1B. Help me bring back Step 1B!

Because not all of your Me’s are the same. The rich, for example, are different.

The rich are different.

I’m not just saying this. It’s true: While most parents tend to teach their kids to prioritize the needs of the group over their own needs, wealthier parents tend to teach their kids to succeed on their own.

It shows up in charitable giving: Wealthy adults are less likely to share what they have with others.

So how do you get the wealthy to give? Frame their giving as a personal accomplishment, say three researchers.

They found in one study that wealthier people — those with incomes higher than $90,000 — were way more likely to click “Donate today!” when giving messages stressed individual achievement (“You = Life-Saver”) instead of emphasizing a common goal (“Let’s Save a Life Together”).

In another study, alumni from an elite business school gave $150 more on average when asked to “Come forward and take individual action” than when they were asked to join their community to “support a common goal.”

That’s their WIIFM.

That message won’t work for everyone. And that’s OK. It doesn’t have to. You can use the common-goal message with your less wealthy givers.

But do target your audience members and focus on what’s in it for them. That’s how you put the M in WIIFM.

___

Sources: Guy Kawasaki, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, Penguin Group (USA) LLC, March 8, 2011

Ashley V. Whillans, Elizabeth W. Dunn and Eugene M. Caruso; “How to Get the Wealthy to Donate”; The New York Times; May 12, 2017

Ashley V. Whillans, Eugene M. Caruso, Elizabeth W. Dunna; “Both selfishness and selflessness start with the self: How wealth shapes responses to charitable appeals”; Journal of Experimental Social Psychology; volume 70, May 2017, pp. 242-250

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You know that the topic is never the topic: The reader is the topic.

You’ve acknowledged that readers don’t care about “us and our stuff”; they care about themselves and their needs. You buy into the notion that the first thing your reader wants to know about your message is WIIFM, or What’s In It For Me.

Now what?

The next step is to find some great WIIFM copy to model. And have I got a piece for you. Here’s Briefings Publishing Group’s promo for a how-to video. The WIIFM copy is well worth modeling.

Here it is — with, of course, my notes:

Say Goodbye to the 60-hour Work Week

The headline starts with the imperative voice — aka the implied “you.” That’s great.

Plus, it’s specific. Not “long hours at the office,” but “the 60-hour work week.” Don’t forget to quantify and specify your own marketing copy.

Here, we move back from the second person to the third. Not a great choice.

A braver, more benefits-oriented approach would be to speak directly to “you,” as in, “You can’t do your sharpest, most creative work when you’re burned out …”

It’s a smart choice to lead with the problem in the first paragraph and follow up with the solution in the second.

But instead of moving into first person plural (“we’ve created”), keep focusing on the reader (“Now you can make time to relax and recharge and ensure that your time spent in the office is creative and productive with our new video …”)

The second sentence is a masterpiece of you-focused benefits writing.

This is a nice list of benefits, but a verb list would highlight the WIIFMs more effectively — and unload 14 words in repeated “How to’s.”

To create a verb list, set up the “how to” in the intro to the list: ” … you’ll discover tips and tactics guaranteed to help you free up your time and get your life back, including how to:”

Now you can start each bullet with a verb. See how much stronger this list is with bullets that begin “Liberate,” “Streamline” and  “Avoid.”

Guideline: Start your lists with verbs whenever possible. It will condense your copy, activate your language and bring the benefits to the front of your list. Here’s how it works:

All right: You’ve got your model; now use it. Reach more readers and sell more ideas when you write in WIIFMs, not about “us and our stuff.”

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