Last week’s blog post looked at some of the reasons why this journalist and analyst prefers press releases over alternatives such as Twitter and Facebook. But that’s not the same as saying all press releases are effective.
Here are five suggestions for improving the chances that your release will get noticed and covered by journalists, analysts and bloggers.
- Don’t offer what you can’t deliver. Make sure the executives quoted and customers referenced are willing and able to do interviews starting the day the release goes out. Journalists, analysts and bloggers don’t like to wait, especially when they’re on a tight deadline. Obvious advice, right? Yet it’s not uncommon to get an intriguing release and find out that no one whose title carries weight with readers is available anytime soon. By then, it’s old news, which means coverage will be limited to features, if even there.
- Put at least one PR contact’s name, email address and phone number on every distribution of the release. This is another recommendation that shouldn’t have to be made, but it’s shocking how many releases on PR Newswire or even a company’s own website that don’t include a PR contact. This tells me the company isn’t that interested in talking, so I respect that wish and move on to its competitors. I can afford to because there are very, very few companies whose input is critical for a story or report.
- The larger your company is, the more it needs to provide journalists, analysts and bloggers with options for the types of news they receive. ESPN shows how to do it right. After I stopped covering cable, I asked ESPN to send me only releases regarding mobile, and it immediately made the change. A side benefit of this flexibility is that your releases now become more relevant.
- Think first, not leading. Nearly every release claims that the company is “a leading provider of,” but tech isn’t Lake Wobegon. Unless you’ve got an analyst report or some other independent validation that you really do lead in terms of sales revenue, market share or some other metric important enough to care about, the claim is meaningless. It also smacks of desperation. When was the last time you saw an Apple or Microsoft release that used “leading provider”? If you are, people already know, so you don’t need to remind them.Instead, highlight how the product, partnership, certification or whatever is an industry first. If it isn’t, why bother to issue the release? Because your board wants at least one release a month? Journalists, bloggers and analysts don’t care about “me, too” announcements.
- Get to the point – literally. For decades, newspapers and magazines have used bullets to make it tough for readers to miss important points, especially when the story is about a complex topic. In press releases, bullets make it tough for journalists, analysts and bloggers to miss important points – the ones you want to get into their coverage. Ericsson, for example, leads with two to four bullets, while releases from Oracle are almost entirely in bullets.Going all bullets might seem counterproductive. After all, when everything is highlighted, how can anything stand out? But Oracle makes it work by grouping them into easy-to-skim sections such as “Facts” and “Supporting Quote.”