…from Blipfish

Why you need them, why you should care, and how to begin.

Alright. Here’s the deal…

I know many people know about Press Releases. I know some have toyed with the notion of writing one. I also know that a few people tend to be scared-off by the mystery of the Press Release and the one person that remains… just doesn’t understand them enough to even bother sending one out.

That is a shame and we’re going to change that today!

Press Releases are valuable and critical elements of a successful marketing model. They’re not the end-all-be-all – but nothing is. They are, however, as important as paid advertising, link exchanges, and word of mouth for your story, business, product, event, or cause. If you don’t have a marketing machine that uses multiple avenues of gaining exposure… you’re missing out. If Press Releases aren’t a major gear in that machine… you’ll never know how much more you could be achieving.

From my perspective, there’s a few ways to handle Press Releases. There are rights and wrongs – like anything else. There are methods that are appropriate for some situations but not others. The problem is – we’ve finally hit a point where conventions established 80 years ago no longer apply, but that doesn’t mean that completely “modern” adaptations are the way to go. There are still “old school” media outlets out there that respond better to tried-and-true methods just as much as the internet has brought a new twist on things.

My goal is to give you, what I’ve come to know, is an effective balance between these approaches but still produce a Press Release that demands the attention of the right people in the right manner. It’s a departure from some of those “how-to” marketing books that seem to be printed and re-printed for the last 80 years – so this isn’t your father’s old Press Release.

A good Press Release:

1. Is awesome leverage for time and effort. A single piece of paper (the Press Release) can be faxed (or mailed, or emailed) to multiple media outlets in the offline and online world. You could potentially reach dozens, if not hundreds, of interested individuals in the media – all from a single Press Release.

2. Is also something you can post within your own company’s website or media portfolio. You don’t have one, you say? You should! Every time you craft a Press Release the first place it should go is in a publicly accessible publicity page on your own site or related sites. It’s yours… use it!

3. Is your first, best tool for gaining the attention of those who can get you PUBLICITY. Publicity is great because it’s like advertising you could never afford even if it could be bought. Imagine how expensive a half-page ad would be in the Wall Street Journal? Now, imagine how much more powerful a front-page article written about you would be in the Wall Street Journal! A paid ad, no matter now big, is always going to be perceived as a paid ad. An article written (even though free of charge) brings with it so much more… credibility, impact, interest, and gains the attention of people that an advertisement never gets.

4. Can repeat the above benefits again, and again, and again. Press Releases are about newsworthy stories. You’re not limited to one moment under the Sun. If you can look around and find (or create) a newsworthy story, event, cause or issue – time and again – you can craft a Press Release to help gain exposure to it via the media.

5. Gets the reader (likely to be an editor or inbound media manager) to get off his or her butt and get on the phone to arrange an interview.

To detail the benefit of a successful Press Release again:

1. The exposure you get (publicity) is free.
2. The amount of exposure you get can be greater (by most measures) than if you’d paid for that same exposure: word count, placement in a publication, reader visibility, etc.
3. The exposure you get is likely to be such that there is no, paid equivalent. It’s possible that no amount of money could produce a featured story the way a Press Release could.
4. Your credibility is improved because the general readership regards articles and stories on subjects with an interest typically not given to advertisements. Ads look and read like ads – and people’s defense mechanisms often filter advertising messages in a way that researched stories don’t suffer.
5. Repeatable.
6. Archived in an online format the search-engine-benefits of previous (and current) Press Releases (even if not picked up by a news agency) go on. Search engines love fresh, meaningful, robust content and having them viewable online gives more ways for online searchers to find information about you.
7. Press Releases are under your control. Even when not picked up by a service your readable (and searchable) Press Releases paint a picture of you, your event, service, or cause that you control – because you’re the one that wrote it. PR’s bolster your public image.

Okay, so let’s assume I’ve convinced you that there are multiple reasons to step up to using Press Releases? Let’s move on to demystifying them a little. They’re not as scary as you might think.

Okay, the basics. Here are, what I consider, to be the ground rules… and really things you shouldn’t try to alter because accepted format and standards for Press Releases haven’t changed all that much over the years. So, alienating an editor or media manager with goofy adaptations isn’t going to do you any favors.

1. Format. Format is king. Capitalization, brevity, specificity, sequence, information, spelling, grammar… they all must be correct. Let’s just lump these things into the category of “format” because, once established, one really doesn’t want to mess with it.

2. Fancy paper. Don’t. Even if you are submitting a Press Release about a classic car show to a car enthusiast magazine don’t do it on paper that has little hotrods driving around the borders. This isn’t the time to be cute. White paper – plain – 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper or a standard, computer text edited format free of graphics, colored backgrounds, or spiffy fonts.

3. Fancy fonts. Don’t. Times Roman, Courier, Helvetica, Arial, Verdana… plain-vanilla, readable, or (to play it safe) generally standard-issue fonts that you’d find on a typewriter (remember those things?) are the way to go. No comic-sans, no dingbats, no script, no handwriting, none of that.

When you’re writing a Press Release you’re in the media’s house and their rules say that they want to see standardized submissions and they don’t include colored paper with a colorful font. Don’t screw around here – it’ll get tossed into the garbage.

4. Don’t blanket bomb Press Releases. If you send a PR out to three online PR services, six magazines, two radio stations, and 40 medium-sized daily newspapers… don’t send it to a single one of them a second time. This isn’t to say you can’t hit them up later, with another PR for another topic, but a mistake people make is thinking that if they didn’t get a phone call it must mean the editor didn’t get it – therefor send it again for good measure. No. Don’t. It’s a big world out there and, although we’re going to improve your chances of getting noticed, the fact remains that not every PR sent to every outlet will be met with an instant response. Don’t annoy the outlet by bugging them a second time. If you send or submit it properly – assume it was received and the ball is in their court.

…this also means don’t call or write them to ask if they got it. You’ll find out very quickly that the quiet truth is that people do get blackballed and you’ll find it hard to gain that outlets attention in the future.

5. Write in the third person. This means not as yourself about yourself. Pronouns are “he” or “she,” for example.

According to blipfish you should write your Press Release in the third person.

Okay… on to the layout of an actual, honest-to-goodness Press Release…

Here’s a breakdown of the above guide Press Release – feel free to use it as a reference:

“FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:”
This can be left as-is if it’s acceptable for it to be used now, tomorrow, five years from now, or never. If you leave directed “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE” it’s up to the media when to use it. The only other – only other- way to format this is a date or event.

Examples:
“FOR RELEASE ON OR AFTER FATHER’S DAY 2008″
“FOR RELEASE AFTER U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION CONCLUDES”
“FOR RELEASE BEFORE 12/25/2008″

Again, be specific and don’t mess around here. The “for release” statement must be clear, concise, and specific. It also means that any parameters you leave open (“after” for example) could be soon after or many years after. There’s a point where it’s unreasonable to expect a story to be newsworthy in some cases but a media manager may decide that a PR from six months ago is still worth pursuing. It’s also written in capital letters, bolded, and left-justified.

There is one, additional release date modifier – a time modifier. It follows the same format, location, and purpose: defining a specific time if such a need arises. An example might be “FOR RELEASE AFTER 3PM MONDAY, JUNE 25th, 2006″ …such as when a shareholder meeting might conclude. It’s a little rare, but still a valuable modifier if needed.

Headline:

“Descriptive Headline Knocks Socks Off Editor”

Feel free to be creative and bold – but make it one sentence and one sentence only. This is it. This is where the curtain rises, the spotlight turns on, and it’s your moment to get the attention of someone that might be a little jaded and hard to impress… do your best dance right here, right now. Craft a headline that is genuine but attention-getting.

Do NOT use exclamation marks. Don’t do it. Just walk away from them. Sensationalistic nonsense will look and smell like either a rookie approach or like a spammy attempt at advertising instead of something truly newsworthy.

Left justify this line, bold it, but use only capital letters for the first letter of each word… not the entire word.

Body of Press Release:

Paragraph 1
Either the physical location of the event, story source, or you – as the subject. Format the city in all-capitals then capitalize only the first character of the State. Give the date in full format (eg. January 09, 2008).

This is to be your masterpiece within the masterpiece. This paragraph needs to be so strong that, if nothing else was read, it could still convey the important points and key information (Who, What, Where, When, and Why?). If nothing else, grab attention here, create an angle the media could latch on to and make this paragraph shine.

Additional Paragraphs
This is where you get into the details you made so fascinating in the above paragraph. You’ve got some room to move here because this is the primary body of your Press Release. If you’ve got specifics (and you should) this is the place to put them… quotes, numbers, facts, dates, locations, etc.

Don’t skimp, though. This is not the place to slack off the format, grammar, or sentence structure (I know, I’m one to talk, huh?).

Don’t forget who your audience is, either. The people or person who is most likely to read your Press Release probably gets hundreds a day (conservative estimate in larger markets). They check their fax machine, online account service, email, and mail in pretty quick fashion. They likely disqualify bright, colored sheets of paper, crazy font headlines, puppy paw print clipart, headlines with exclamation points, too-good-to-be-true sales-pitchy headlines, improperly formated pages, multiple pages, you name it. They can, and will, sort through stacks (virtual or otherwise) of PR’s with a callous and unforgiving eye. Not every reader will try to see the diamond in the rough. They’re looking for the more obvious, shining pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The likely audience is also probably hard to impress. After all, seeing hundreds of “look at me!” documents every day can make one a little jaded just as much as a little “psychic” toward picking winning Press Releases. Do yourself a favor and remember that you walk that fine line between dazzle and spam.

Your purpose is to convince the media source that there is a gem of a story in that Press Release and their readers, listeners, or viewers would really be interested to hear more – so they need to contact you right away and set up an interview. If you keep this objective in mind… you’ll do fine. Just keep the “So what?” mantra running through your head. If you can honestly say your Press Release answers a crabby reader’s question of “Yah, so what? Why should I care?” then you are doing well.

If you can finesse a few paragraphs, somewhere around 500 words, that detail and elaborate on the key points then you’ll have concluded the informative body of the Press Release. You’re past the halfway point!

At this point, do a quick check… do you need to provide sources for anything else? Now is the time to write shorter paragraphs that quickly and efficiently note any sources of additional information (websites, books, other articles, etc.)?

Do you need a quick paragraph to acknowledge intellectual or trademark rights? Is a quick statement about the company, organization, individual, etc. in order? Will a very quick history shed light on anything important?

Special Note: This is essentially the point where you put up or shut up your credentials. Everyone has credentials – even if you don’t know them. Make sure, however, that your credentials actually mean something to the scope of the Press Release. Nobody cares if you’re a physician writing a PR about fly-fishing in Oregon… but if you’re a 12-year veteran of the sport – that can be interesting!

If you don’t think you have credentials then think outside the box – but within the scope of the Press Release: your age, your height, a disability, neighborhood you live in, residence, career, hobby, diploma, college degree, family genealogy, accent, past employment, proximity to area, sensitive hearing, sufferer of migraines, animal lover… you name it. If you can bolster your position, honestly (if not creatively) by credentials that are relevant to the desired story – then include them here.

Contact Information:
Finally. You’re ready to lean forward to break the tape at the finish line. However, don’t relax, yet. Your contact information is still no place to fool around. Include the following, if applicable, and do not (I repeat: do not) play the game of “phone number provided upon request.” If you got a phone number (and it’s 2008 so you darn-well should) then put it down. Now is not the time to hold back on contact info. Your goal is to have the reader holding your Press Release in his or her hand and heading over to the quickest, best way to contact you… paper in hand at the phone, paper in hand at the computer – ready to send you an email.

Include direct information to you or the person who can answer the most questions about the Press Release subject. Don’t give a number to an answering service, don’t give an email to an auto-responder, don’t give an address of Mailboxes Etc. Give real, authentic, and direct contact info to a real human being that will hit the ball out of the park when the media calls or writes the information below.

Contact: Use this word just like you see it – left justified like everything else.
Include your first and last name. Remember, real human being – not a public relations department, not y our dog, not your Grandma (unless Grandma is the logical contact for the purpose of the Press Release).

Include an email address – preferably not a disposable one. I know, it’s 2008 and this means email is now a valid form of contact but you and I both know some free emails services (which I won’t name) just have such a bad reputation that nobody wants to risk passing over their email to reach you. Your internet service provided email or more “respectable” free services are really the way to go.

A physical address is acceptable as long as it has a purpose. Your privacy may be a concern (eg. a home address as opposed to your office’s workplace address) so it’s not essential. However, again, this is for additional contact information – not a mail service address.

Phone number. Come on… give a phone number you, or a real human, will actually answer – and include an extension if necessary. Don’t give a number to a switchboard, message service, or recording – do whatever it takes to ensure that when it rings it’s answered by a human who can bring it all home.

[Drumroll please...]

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…those three pound signs. There’s just three of them… and they’re separated by a space, each. Notice they are NOT the word “END” or anything else like you may have seen. In case you’re wondering, it’s a top-secret code that journalists (new and old-school) love and respect. They mean “The End” – “There’s nothing more” – “That’s it – you have it all.”

There’s not magic formula for a Press Release. There are formats, layouts, and conventions to be observed… but the real art of crafting a good press release is something you’ll have to develop by writing them. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t aspire to do just that – practice makes perfect. However, there’s no reason your first PR can’t be a quality one that meets with success.

Make this one of those things that, for the sake of your business success, you do – even if it’s unfamiliar. I’m confident you’ll be glad you did.