WeetPR » press release

Leave press releases to the professionals

John Weet — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:28:19 +0000

I was reading a local business magazine last night and was amazed at the quality (or should I say lack of quality) of the editorial. One article that particularly caught my eye was a one paragraph story in a sidebar announcing that a particular company was doing very well. I read the story through twice and still did not understand what sort of services the company was offering.

I am making a big assumption here that the person who wrote the press release was not a professional PR person. If they were then shame on them. If a writer fails to get across, in words that a layman can understand, what the message is then they should not be writing press releases.

I suspect that what happened in this case was that the person who wrote it is internal to the company and is used to the way they talk about themselves. To them I am sure it made perfect sense. What they failed to do was to put themselves in their audiences place and ask whether they would understand it. A very common error and one that should not happen if they were to employ a professional writer.

Something different

John Weet — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:56:32 +0000

My brother Chris has stammered for all of his life. There is no doubt that it affected his education and also his social life. There were times that his stammering was so bad that, as a brother, it was painful to watch.

He hasn’t “got over it”, that is something most stammerers never do, what he has done is to learn to control it.

He has been attending group therapy sessions for a while and he suggested that they stage a public speaking event. this would have the double benefit of giving members of the group the opportunity to face some of their fears by speaking in public. It would also give them the opportunity to explain to others what it is like to live with a stammer and how they should deal with people that stammer when talking to them. Chris was given the task of arranging the event.

I was asked to help out by writing and issuing a press release, which I was of course happy to do. I wrote two releases in the end. One aimed at people who may wish to speak at the event and another to attract attendees.

My normal subject matter is engineering and technology products and applications so it was great to get my teeth into something different.

I issued the release to about 20 relevant outlets. The day after sending it Chris received a call asking for an interview, which he duly gave. This interview resulted in almost a full page of coverage. I believe there was more print coverage too and also radio mentions. Had I had more lead time prior to the event I would also have reached out to a couple of bloggers and a UK stammering group on Face-book.

Cutting courtesy of KM Media

The event itself was well attended and seemed to go very well (unfortunately due to other commitments i was unable to attend). Chris sent me a letter telling me about the event. Some of the experiences that stammerers have to contend with are dreadful. One guy was on the bus trying to ask for a ticket when the driver laughed at him. He was so embarrassed he had to get off. Another was once punched in the face just because he stammered.

My brother worked hard to stage this event and will be putting on more. I was just pleased that I could contribute in some small way to it’s success and also pleased to be able to extend myself by tackling an unfamliar subject.

Is it acceptable to take a press release written for a North American audience and issue it in Europe without any changes?

John Weet — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:59:00 +0000

I work for an agency that regularly receives press releases in from an American Multi National. What we do with these is to “Europeanise” them. We put them into Queens English and take out any American Phraseology.

The releases are sent to English language trade journals that cover Europe and the UK.

What is your view? Is this something we should be doing or are we wasting our time, will the editors use our material regardless, if they deem the story to be newsworthy enough?

When will PR professionals learn

John Weet — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 09:26:00 +0000

As PR professionals our job is to get our news out and to get it covered in the media that matters. I’ll repeat that last bit “to get it covered in the media that matters”. We should not judge ourselves on the number of releases we write and issue it is the amount of times our messages appear in the media that our target audience reads that matters.

This was brought home to when reading an interview in PRWeek with the editor of a web site. He says that his pet peeve is receiving emails saying “this’ll be good for your news section” when he doesn’t have a news section.

This is one thing that I keep stressing to the people I work with. If you want to get coverage you need to know who your audience are, you need to know what media to use to reach that audience and you need to have a clear idea of what you need to do to get coverage in that media. The scattergun approach is just not effective.

Approaching editors in the right way and only giving them news that matters to their audience establishes your credibility and makes it a “no brainer” when they receive material from you.

This works both ways of course. Within my sphere of technical communications I often get magazines calling me and asking if they can reproduce my press release for a small fee. My first question is always, so tell me about your readership. Occasionally I get, “I don’t know somebody else deals with that” or more often I get “our magazine goes to senior managers and decision makers in xyz industry” to which my response is generally “so tell me why a senior manager would be interested in reading about my widget”. That normally throws them.

If these people want me to pay for a placement with them they need to do their research, they need to understand what audience I am trying to reach with my press release and modify their pitch accordingly. Without that they have no credibility with me.