When press releases kill their owners

Brian Fuller did an interesting post Wednesday about his favorite subject, vendor as publisher, but also got into a discussion on press releases and their relative value... which he and I agree is pretty low right now. What got me started on this post was a call I got from a small publication publisher who was thinking about offering a news release writing service for companies, cutting out the PR professional from the mix.  


I did my best to dissuade him from the idea, simply because press releases are just a huge waste of time and money for the most part.  Companies big and small put hours and hours of time and money into these documents because they think it is giving them "visibility" on the web.  They never stop to think that almost every release reads exactly the same, whether it's a plain old vanilla release or a fancy schmancy social media release with a bunch of bold words and links.  Most release provide no real information and are "committeed" to death to make sure it says as little as possible.

Moreover, hardly anyone outside of the marketing departments, exec staff and board of the companies, and the sales departments of the competition actually reads them.

There are other ways, as Brian points out, that are much more valuable to the industry.  It's about time everyone realized that.

With that in mind, a new podcast with Paul Miller of Techinsights will be coming to this site soon.  

Comments

  1. rgellerJanuary 16, 2009 at 4:17 AM

    It may be a tough position to be press release apologist here, I agree many if not most are not well written. But it has been proven that they can be drivers of online conversations, the TechMeme 100 has the press release wire services listed as major buzz catalysts. The press release wires do a great job of getting information out and across the Web and into search engines, and at a reasonable cost (just consider what it would cost to do this with advertising, yet many might think a press release is more credible). It is up to the users of these services to make sure the information really is newsworthy and tells a compelling story.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lou CoveyJanuary 16, 2009 at 9:41 AM

    I'm not sure where you are looking on TechMeme for that info because I don't see any wire service (top two are Business Wire and PR News Wire and neither are on the list). That being said, I don't believe that news releases are completely useless, but MOST companies are over reliant on them and they don't do for the company what they think they do. Most releases get between 150 and 500 readers, according to the stats I've seen from leader Business Wire. Most of those readers are either people from the company that issued the release or their competitors. MOST news releases are horribly written and everyone knows they are horribly written, so even those that are actually well done get lost because of the bad rep they have.

    I completely agree that it is up to the producers of the releases to change this, but I don't see it happening, simply because MOST companies have people with degrees in anything but communications directing the PR program. And maybe not MOST but definitely A LOT of companies use press releases as leave-behind collateral for sales calls, not for getting a conversation going in the market.

    There is nothing wrong, inherently, with the concept of press releases, but there is SO MUCH wrong with how they are created and used..

    And Bob, knowing you, I know you can probably agree with that.

    ReplyDelete
  3. rgellerJanuary 18, 2009 at 10:57 PM

    Hi, Lou
    Yes, I can agree with that for sure.

    (Here is the TechMeme 100 from last month, http://www.techmeme.com/081219/lb, PR NewsWire and BusinessWire are there. The list of buzz drivers changes, there is not a wire service represented on the latest list).

    ReplyDelete

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