Whether you access information from a website, an RSS feed, a social media platform, or traditional print media, it’s pretty safe to assume that the data you’re interacting with began as a digital file of some sort. Today’s press release or media advisory has more reach than it ever did in the past. Now, more than ever, it’s crucial that your communications are letter perfect before they’re released into the world. To ensure that a message doesn’t get lost in all of the noise and static of the 21st century, it’s critical that your communications are streamlined and properly formatted to flow through as many communication channels as possible.While a lot of information is disseminated via a variety of aggregators and automated processes, there’s often still a person manually posting your message to a website or blog. It behooves us to make it as easy on them as possible so that our message goes as far as it can. Avoid sending your message as an attachment if you can. Attachments require the recipient to take the extra steps of downloading and opening files with an application they may or may not have. Today’s best practice is to send a press release in the body of the e-mail with as little formatting as possible. Ideally, a media liaison will simply copy and paste your message into their system, coding your information with their styles and making the information available to the appropriate audiences.However, copy and paste is sometimes more difficult than it seems. To ensure that your message is reproduced correctly, it’s imperative that your content isn’t overburdened by unnecessary formatting. Before sending a message through Outlook, for instance, it’s important to check that your text isn’t carrying formatting information from your word processing program. Unnecessary formatting information can slow down search engines and site indexes, making your message less accessible to those searching for it on the internet. It can also cause conflicts with a website or word processor’s formatting styles. To make sure that you’re not sending around extraneous complications, it’s always a good idea to paste into a basic text editor like Notepad -- bundled free on Microsoft operating systems -- and then copy and paste from Notepad into your e-mail client.Since your content will be formatted according to the style definitions of the website, blog, or print media, it’s a good idea, then, to understand the basic structure of electronic media. Nearly every web page, blog and print publication has a hierarchy of styles that are used to render the product’s unique look. Headlines, secondary headlines, and paragraph text are the bare minimum used by most contemporary media. It’s as important to craft your communications in terms of format as it is to carefully construct the content. In the press release example, you've already stripped out the visual formatting, but you must still communicate the structure of your message. The basic standard is to indicate headlines by centering the text, align body copy left without unnecessary line breaks, and left align secondary headlines on their own lines. Even if the final destination of your message isn't overly stylized or has no stylesheet, these conventions will keep your piece coherent and allow readers to easily find the information that's most relevant to them.These general guidelines not only ensure that your message is easily disseminated via your media outlets, they also make your message more available to search engines and online venues you may not have thought of. Search engines "look" at your site by reading the HTML code. Formatting information can take up an immense amount of code on your page, making it more difficult for the search engine to find the relevant text. Cleanly formatted information also travels further on the internet. Aggregators and data spiders can pick up your message much more easily and disperse it to locations you may not have thought of. Cleanly formatted information will also almost always render properly on mobile devices, provided that the site containing the information is equipped to work with mobile platforms. Properly formatting your communications makes it possible to take your communications even further. By working with formatting standards, you leverage both your professional expertise and the strength of the internet to create communications that are targeted, accessible and effective.