360DigitalInfluence

12 years ago I had my first job in PR and vowed it would be my last. It was a summer internship at the Cartoon Network down in Atlanta and was a role I was thrilled to get. Even today, there is something nice about being able to say I spent a summer working on planning and promoting the Bugs Bunny Marathon. We can all use more Bugs Bunny. The only problem was, it was my first role in PR and the majority of my role consisted of writing press releases. It was my first taste of ghost writing - where I would spend hours crafting the perfect sentence to describe Cow and Chicken and send it out on a release, only to see that phrase quoted in the TV Guide with no credit or attribution.

Ghost writing is tough - and it is something that many PR pros know too well. From writing releases, to helping author books, to crafting speeches, much of the communications industry is writing things that you cannot take credit for. To some degree, a communications pro must make his or her peace with that. The only problem that remains is, when you are not able to share what you are writing, how can you get feedback to improve it?

Last week I spent Thursday at the Social Networking Conference in Miami doing a presentation titled “The Secrets of Creating Talkability.” After my session, I met Lindsay Preston - founder of a new community called Writing Room. Inspired by her experience of being a ghost writer, the newly launched site is meant to be a resource for writers to help them get feedback privately on things they are working on. For many of my colleagues, it is probably a site we have wished for many times in the past.

Though it is a very new site, the idea behind it is one that many writers will be able to relate to - getting help from a community of folks in a similar situation to yourself. If I had to pick one core lesson to come out of this event, it was summed up in the idea behind WritingRoom.com … that the real power behind any social network is to connect people so they can help one another. The more effectively you can do this, the better your social network will be.