Focus on our audience, not your client. What is it about your story that suggests ways service providers could make more money, attract new customers, hold on to their current customers, invent new IP-based services, or fend off competitive threats?

Bring on the research. Once you nail tip No. 1, please provide (or help us find) some supporting research. Our Pyramid Research and Heavy Reading groups track dozens of tech trends and hundreds of geographic markets, so those are the best places to start. Other sources we frequently cite include TeleGeography Inc. , Infonetics Research Inc. , IDC , consumer surveys from various groups, and venture capital market data from Dow Jones and Thomson Reuters .

Conflict is king. If NFL games involved only one team, running practice drills with their teammates and not keeping score, no one would watch nor care. If you want any audience in any field to care about anything you're doing, you have to crack some skulls and score points. It helps, too, if the other team hates you.

Characters are welcome. The great Flannery O'Connor wrote: "If you start with a real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen; and you don't even have to know what before you begin." O'Connor's words were aimed at fiction writers -- please write your own "PR people are fiction writers" joke in the margins of this column -- but they have meaning in this context because a lot of times the only reason a company or technology is interesting is because of the people involved.