Make a good impression with a good press release
Consider the following hypothetical press release:
You’ve got industry-changing news! How EXCITING! You’re company CEO is pleased to announce that you’ve been chosen to lead the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.
In three sentences, there are at least four ways to guarantee you’ve created a press release that no one will read. Press releases can be valuable publicity tools, but editors and reporters won’t even notice one more poorly crafted press release among the flood that crosses their desks every day.
In the example above, the news isn’t industry-changing (few things are). It’s not even terribly exciting for anyone outside the company — certainly not exciting enough to shout about using all capital letters and exclamation points. Additionally, if something is worth announcing, it’s safe to assume the CEO is pleased to announce it. He or she probably wouldn’t be so pleased, however, that nobody proofread carefully enough to see that “your” is misspelled.
If you want to use press releases effectively, you need to distribute effective press releases. That means thinking like a journalist, with releases written and structured to capture and hold an editor’s attention. They must be truly newsworthy, free of superlatives (which are certain to alienate skeptical news editors and reporters), and contain no typos or grammatical errors. And comments — even from the CEO — shouldn’t be the first thing on the page.
In many companies, the job of drafting press releases falls to someone’s assistant or an already harried human resources staffer. In either case, the person’s only qualification for the task may be that he or she did some writing in college.
In other firms, the HR person assigned to write press releases may outsource the task to one of the self-proclaimed experts who populate the Internet. These gurus may be nothing more than people who did some writing in college, but they profess to have uncovered the secrets of the newsroom and promise remarkable results.
If you don’t have your own trained marketing team, you’ll be better off hiring professionals to do your press releases. Agencies deal with the media regularly. In the best agencies, many of the staff are former reporters themselves. They know not only how to write a press release, but also how to sell it, and they can devote their full attention to both.
An attention-getting headline, followed by two or three concise sentences that immediately convey the most important points enable editors to tell at a glance whether a release would be of interest to their readers. Additionally, because professionals understand news, they can make sure press releases contain all the information reporters are likely to want, and state it clearly. This minimizes delays due to follow-up phone calls requesting clarification or additional information.
Lastly, professionals will make sure every release goes to the proper person, in each publication’s preferred format. They’ll call ahead to verify they have the right contact and to alert that person that the release is coming. And, a week or two later, professionals will canvass recipients to learn which publications used the release, which didn’t, and why.
Press releases are valuable tools, but they are only tools. You can’t send out flurries of releases and then sit back and wait for the phone to ring. It may appear that anyone can write and distribute press releases, but the truth is that when it comes to news, there’s always more to it than meets the eye.
