These days, you don’t need a gigantic printing or advertising budget to get your message across. Facebook, Twitter and e-mail marketing services such as Constant Contact have made it easier and cheaper than ever for everyone – from small businesses and nonprofits to large corporations – to communicate directly with people who care about what they have to say.

Having the tools doesn’t mean knowing what to do with them, however, as we have ample proof. In an instant, you can just as easily damage your organization’s reputation as enhance it.

With so much garbage out there, it’s more important than ever to stand out from the crowd. Good writing and useful, accurate information can make sure your communications are read instead of deleted.

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Even if you aren’t a communications professional, here are a few things you can do to improve your writing for electronic media, whether it’s an email, a Facebook post, a Tweet or an online newsletter:

• Realize that on-screen reading is different. People read slower, and their eyes scan for information instead of reading from beginning to end. This means you have to work harder to capture and keep their attention. Be brief. Use bullet points. Say it with a list or a chart.

• Acknowledge that people are overwhelmed with information. With hundreds of e-mails to read, why should they read yours? Tell them up-front why it’s important and what you want them to do.

• Write like a reporter. I started out as a journalist and, like a lot of public relations professionals, I find my old newsroom skills give me an edge when writing online. These days you can’t expect people to read all the way through an article to find out what it means. The journalist’s inverted pyramid writing style – which says what a story is about at the beginning and gets to the details later - is ideally suited to electronic communication. Invest in yourself and take a journalism class if you aren’t familiar with the style.

It’s also smart to make sure your writing adheres to the grammar and spelling conventions of the Associated Press Stylebook. This will give your writing a professional polish. It will also increase the chances that it will be passed along, quoted or printed elsewhere. The less someone else has to do to it, the better chance it has.

If your writing is riddled with spelling or grammatical errors, your entire message is suspect. Make it perfect.

When writing online, every word counts. If you can say it in 10 words but take 15 to do the job, you’re making your reader work too hard. If you write “due to the fact that” instead of “because” you increase the chance your reader won’t stay with you. Flabby writing takes more energy to read and is easier to misconstrue.

It may sound silly, but those extra words add up – and not just if you’re operating under Twitter’s 140-character limit. Getting to the point and expressing yourself clearly are always good writing habits, but they’re essential on-screen.

If you don’t have one, pick up a copy of Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style” and commit its “Omit Needless Words” section to memory. Even though it was written decades before the invention of the BlackBerry, it’s the best guide to writing short and sweet that I know.

Finally, remember when you’re communicating directly – instead of, say, sending out a press release and hoping the newspaper runs it – you’re operating without a net. Those cranky editors and pesky reporters ask questions we don’t always think to answer, or don’t want to. Make sure your reporting is complete. Before you send anything, get somebody who doesn’t know anything about it to read it.

Remember that what you say is as important as how you say it.

For more information, don’t miss the Southern Arizona Chapter of Public Relations Society of America’s upcoming “PR102 for Nonprofits” social media seminar. The half-day seminar will be 7:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. Friday (Oct. 16) in the Amethyst Room of Pima Community College’s Downtown Campus, 1255 N. Stone Ave. A registration fee of $15 includes a continental breakfast. Register at www.prsatucson.com.

Contact Angela Hagen, director of Communications & PR Manager for Our Family Services, ahagen@ourfamilyservices.org. Hagen, who is a former editor at the Tucson Citizen, is the 2009 president of the Southern Arizona Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America. PR Corner appears the second week of each month and is written by members of the PRSA chapter.