About Bill Delaney

Bill Delaney is a Senior Vice President at Ketchum specializing in communications training, media strategy and writing. He spent more than 25 years as a reporter in network television, print and radio, working worldwide. For the past several years, he has counseled executives at dozens of the world’s top global companies.

Author Archive | Bill Delaney

How to Be Quotable

By on January 30, 2013

In the realm of PR, a multi-billion dollar global industry employing tens of thousands of people that encompasses multitudinous platforms to convey the messages of the world’s most important companies, it still boils down to a few words.

The quote. For all the changes in PR since the digitization of, well, just about everything, and amid  the multi-media sweep of new possibilities to promote and persuade, the coin of the realm is still the publication or broadcast of something positive that someone said about a company.

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Talking Isn’t Writing (Part Two)

By on July 20, 2012

Part two of a two part series.  Read Talking Isn’t Writing Part One here.

Talking isn’t writing.

That may seem obvious enough, as I said in Part One of this post. But mixing up the two is perhaps the single most common mistake business communicators make.

Speakers too often don’t really speak to their audiences. They in effect write out loud. A reporter’s question is answered by unreeling sentences loaded with commas, clauses, asides and afterthoughts. That’s writing out loud. On a page, it may read as a rather impressive march of swooping, diving, bobbing, weaving, very intellectual point making. It’s not, unfortunately, what a journalist needs – a quotable, declarative sentence. You can’t quote a sentence that’s eighteen words long. You need about eight words.

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Talking Isn’t Writing (Part One)

By on July 11, 2012

Talking isn’t writing. Obviously. One comes out of your mouth, the other flows (assuming you’re on your game as a writer) from your fingers. Even the regions of the brain that control talking and writing differ. We read with the visual cortex, which is toward the back of that two and a half pounds of gray gelatinous matter afloat between your ears. Speech, on the other hand, is understood – whether admiringly, you put that so well, or with horror, you said what, are you kidding me!? – via the auditory cortex, which is located more or less in the center of the brain. Nestled in front of that is Broca’s area, the switchboard for what we actually say, for our gems, jokes, gibberish.

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The Power of Negativity

By on May 16, 2012

If it bled, it led.

I learned that early in my journalism career, producing a local morning show in New York. A heroic rescue of a cat in a tree by a Grandma with a bad left knee in a calico dress?

Save it for the kicker, the back end of the show meant to send viewers off with a smile.

A headless body in a topless bar?

Now that’s a lead.

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