New kid on the blog? Not exactly. More like old blogger in new clothing. And no, not pyjamas. It’s good to be back.
I thought of issuing a press release to celebrate but as I recently banned both words from appearing within twenty syllables of each other in this house, a virtual bottle of champagne cracked over the bows will have to suffice.
It’s not that I hate press releases but put it this way, I have four kinds of colour-coded bins outside my house: black for general refuse, blue for recyclable stuff, brown for garden rubbish – and five large orange bins for my daily dose of press releases.
The cleansing department arrived this morning but refused to touch the press releases. Said there was an embargo.
News wire service
One of my projects this year has been the launch of an online wire service for the UK travel industry. The idea was simple. Public relations companies send me their news, I prop it on the site and journalists receive it hot off the virtual press, preferably by subscribing to the RSS feed.
As an alternative to a printed document flopping onto the floor or email cluttering your inbox, this is manna to journalist heaven (a place more usually associated with the bottle bank). And for reputation strategies, such as crisis management, it’s far more efficient, delivering your message almost instantly directly to the press with no concern it will get caught up in spam filters.
As each item is stored in searchable form online, the service extends the life of the release and also exposes it to the internet, increasing its range to a global audience.
Stumbling block
One problem has been persuading the public relations people that travel writers don’t need a full and formal, traditional press release – a document so archaic it increasingly resembles ye olde town-crier’s scroll.
Update: I thought that was quite clever until I just stumbled on Steve Broback’s description of press releases as being like doilies. “Quaint yet useless historical artefacts.” Which is much funnier. And given I often rest my coffee cup on an unusable release, more apt.
Instead, I usually plead for shorter snippets, perhaps just a paragraph or two of news. Journalists want story ideas, I say, a steady stream of them and preferably in easily digested chunks. And RSS is the ideal technology to deliver them.
I explain how it works: a story comes in, the journalist glances at it. He can use it immediately or ignore it or he can save it for later. The meat of the story is at the top, the extraneous rubble – the usual background note for the editor – is a clickable link at the end.
Tone of voice
But while size counts, the key difference ought to rest with the voice. I constructed the wire service on a blogging platform, which is not entirely incidental, convinced most journalists prefer news releases which are short and part of an ongoing conversation, part of an unfolding story rather than a formal one-off despatch.
In a post earlier this month Stephen O’Grady suggested
Press releases have become so sterile, so regimented, and so formalized that they are nearly unreadable to the average person
He refers to the enforced voice of the press release and that rings true. But I don’t entirely blame the PR industry for speaking in bland corporate tongues.
Evangelising the form
Outside agencies in particular have at least one and a half eyes over the shoulder at the clients as they type. One PR told me she was worried the people who pay the bills would think she was unprofessional if she veered from the formal release.
That seems to me to be a challenge for the future. Her industry needs to take a lead in educating clients about the potential of a different platform for news delivery and a different sort of voice.
But not just clients.
Andy Lark hit the nail on the head when he wondered:
How many communicators take the time to ask those constituents how they want to receive news?
Precious few I suspect. But I would also like to know – how many journalists realise there are alternatives?
UK journalists have been slow to grasp the potential of RSS.
Charles Arthur, who writes for the Independent, is one who does.
Many journalists haven’t heard of RSS; many PR people haven’t. But I think both should – and will be amazed at how much easier it makes the nuts and bolts of their lives in future. Press releases by RSS? Why not? I could choose which ones to receive, and to read, a hell of a lot more easily.
Give it a few years. After all, how many PR companies sent out press releases by email in 1995? And how many don’t in 2005? RSS has so many benefits to both sides of this dialogue that it deserves rapid adoption. Journalists are pulling; PR people should push.
Exactly. Often the media relations business here is based on just that: relationships. But with an increasingly fractured media and a decline in the influence of the mainstream, public relations professionals can no longer rely on their relationships with established journalists to disseminate their client’s message to the widest possible audience.
They have to address a broader range of influencers and amplifiers and the press release needs to adapt to reflect this.
Make it shorter, pithier, make it part of an ongoing story. Use a natural voice to build relationships with a wider audience. And make it compelling enough people will subscribe to your feed and stay subscribed.
Tags: reputation management, public relations, press releases, rss
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