Those PR practitioners who are spreading these death rumours would have you believe that press releases should never be written, nor distributed. I take issue with this old school thinking.
Let’s talk about the evolution of the press release into a solid tool for helping organizations deliver key massages to multiple audiences in the digital age.
In the not-so-distant pre-internet past, press releases were aimed solely at trade and consumer media outlets. The media acted as the gatekeepers, taking your information and making decisions about how, or if, to use it.
Organisations today are able to bypass the media filter in a manner of ways thanks to the net.
Consider this: both journalists and consumers use the web for research. More than 550 million searches are done daily at Yahoo! News, Google News or other news search engines. According to recent survey by Middleberg/Ross and the Pew Internet Project, we learn that:
98 percent of journalists go online daily.
92 percent do it for article research.
Percent to find new sources and experts.
73 percent to find press releases
68 million Americans go online daily
30 percent use a search engine to find information
27 percent go online to get news
But you need to think differently about writing your releases at this new age. You can extend the power of your releases beyond the media by positioning them for search engine pick up. In effect, your press releases become a long-lasting, online, searchable database of your organization.
Once properly written with both readers and search engines in mind, you need to distribute the release. PR WebTM and PR Newswire are my two favourite ways to get the message out. Both services help you reach into the news room and beyond.
PR Web emails press releases daily to between 60,000 to 100,000 global contacts point. Journalists, analysts, freelance writers, media outlets and newsrooms, as well as average web users are signed up to receive this information. Also, it distributes releases via FTP, XML feeds and through a network of its own websites. PR Web-related sites are in the top 2,500 most visited sites. Every release sent out through PR Web is optimized for search engines, and PR Web guarantees your release will be picked up by Yahoo!
A granddaddy of press releases services is PR Newswire, which distributes directly into the central editing computers at daily newspapers, newsweeklies, national news services, trade publications and broadcast newsrooms.
It reaches a total of 22,000 media points in the US alone. All releases are distributed to and archived in more than 3,600 websites, databases and online services. Additionally, PR Newswire’s website is in the top 2,000 most visited sites on the internet.
Finally, let’s take a look at the online media room. Its primary purpose is to provide journalists with accessible data about the organization, such as executive bios, earnings figures, key contacts and other solid, factual information. An organization also should place news releases here, particularly those aimed at key stakeholders like employees, strategic allies and investors.
Technology savvy consumers often visit online media rooms for the same reason journalist do: they expect to find factual information there.
Churning out releases and dumping them willy-nilly on the media is a dumb practice. But using releases as a strategic weapon to reach key audiences across the digital divide is smart PR. Practitioners who believe the news release is dead need to evolve, or they will be the moribund ones.
