Word counts in public relations and journalism used to be hard and inflexible.
Today, things are changing fast.
When your words -- or photos, or video -- could be used in so many places in so many ways, many of the old rules are getting tossed out the window as we speed down the uncharted waters of social media, blogs and the internet.
So which word counts are still hard and which ones are softer and more flexible?
Broadcast and print still have hard limits on words and airtime.
- Letters to the editor are typically limited to 200 to 250 words.
- Opeds are roughly 600 to 800 words, and the daily papers I deal with are all moving down toward 600; I don't know anybody expanding past 800.
- Twitter posts are 140 characters whether you are Charlie Smith or Charlie Sheen.
- A 30-second TV ad or PSA is still 30 seconds, no matter what magic Steve Jobs is cooking up in Cupertino.
Yet how many words should you limit yourself to when posting comments about a letter or oped on the newspaper's website?
There's no hard rule for that. However, it is smart to keep it short. Less is more.
The proliferation of new options, online and off, are worth talking about.
If your company or organization has a blog -- and it should -- how long should blog posts be?
There's no standard length for blog posts. Those word counts are soft.
A photo with a cutline can be a perfectly good blog post, and a lot more effective than an 1,800-word essay that will scare off most readers. Think about email. Anything with more than three paragraphs seems long, doesn't it?
With more people getting their news not only online, but on smart phones, it's never been smarter to have tight copy and short paragraphs.
What takes up a couple lines in Word could take up the entire screen of a smart phone.
Going Long with Digital Books
On the other hand, changes in the publishing world are opening up the world of public relations to longer word counts.
Amazon is asking for people to upload short e-books, of 10,000 to 30,000 words, that it's selling as Kindle "Singles."
Barnes and Noble is doing something similar.
There are also more options than ever before for regular paper books printed on demand, with the book stores big and small using the Espresso book-printing machine to let people buy a book, right there, and have it printed and bound as they wait.
While some of the old word counts are still valid, there have never been more options in public relations.
You might put up a photo with a cutline, a 140-character Twitter post -- or write a 400-page book that's printed on demand via an Espresso machine, or downloaded for $1.99 on Amazon.com.
Word limits really don't limit you anymore. The only limit is creativity.