You Ask, I Answer: Giving Press Releases More Life?

In today's uh episode, Catherine asks, how do you give a press release more life? We post it on social media, it goes on the website, but then it just fades away. Yep. Let me ask you this, and I've been asking people this for almost a decade now. When was the last time you saw a parent reading a press release to a child at bedtime?

Right? The answer is never. People don't do that. Why? Because press releases are boring.

Of course there's no life in it because it's boring. Nobody wants to read it. It's filled with, you know, here's the the bombastic statement, opening paragraph. You know, so-and-so corporation is proud to announce or pleased to announce or honored to announce their flexible, scalable, agile turnkey integration solution, blah, blah, blah. Then you have two quotes by the CEO that the CEO never said, but you know, some intern wrote.

Uh, and then you have boilerplate at the end. Nobody reads press releases. Nobody wants to read a press release. So of course it fades away. So the question is, what story are you trying to tell?

And is there a format other than a press release that that meets it? Suppose you, you know, you're you're promoting a new executive's book, right? And you got a press release. Nobody cares. What's the book about?

How does it help people? How does it serve the audience better? What are some interesting stories that you can extract out? And then you create content around that. You create content around the stories about the central thesis.

Right? If you're announcing a new product feature, again, nobody cares. What does that feature do? Who does it help? How do people get value out of it?

And that's where you can take the pieces of a press release, remix them as an actual story, and then post them places and and create content around that. A press release and the story that it contains, conceivably, is nothing more than a web page. So how do you drive traffic to a web page? Right? You can post about it on social media, sure.

You can put it in your email newsletter, you can run ads to it, you can make video promos of it, uh, you can text people about it. There's no shortage of ways to promote a web page. The question is, um, is it worth promoting? Right? If your press releases are just fading away, it's probably because nobody cares.

Um, and that's not a reflection on even the content itself, so much as the format. We have been conditioned as content consumers to ignore those things, right? Um, for those folks um who have blogs or podcasts or things where you get pitches from uh public relations professionals, anytime I get a press release, it immediately goes in the trash bin because I have no interest in reading it. It looks like a press release, it goes in the trash bin because it's not going to say anything interesting. I've yet to see actually that's not true.

I've seen exactly one press release that was worth reading, and it was from Opera Software years ago, and it was very cleverly done because they had a little slider that said, How much corporate bullshit do you want? Um, you know, in none, and then and when it was you slide all the way down as opera has a new version of his browser. That was it, right? And just one sentence, and you drag the slider all the way to the right, and you know, this press release gets this long, and it's you know, opera software, uh the world's leading, blah, blah, blah. And and it was funny, it was really well done.

That's the only press release I can think of that I actually wanted to ever read. Everything else has not been great. So, what is the angle? What is the hook? What is the story?

When you're pitching this thing? What is a story that you're telling people? Because I would presume as a public relations professional, you're not just putting out a press release, but you're also pitching reporters on whatever the topic of the thing is. What is that? Right?

What is what is it you're trying to convey? Um if it's high profile quotes uh from influencers, cool, okay. Atomize those, break them up. Um, something that my my friend and former uh colleague Todd Defferin used to say is that content atomization is everything. He said that in 2008.

Take a piece of content, break it into a million pieces. Every one of those high-profile quotes that's in your press release should be its own little social card. Or, you know, if you want to get crazy and creative, find a way to work it into a meme that's actually funny. Um there's no shortage of memes that have sort of a sarcastic angle that would I think would do great with corporate quotes. Um, there's that one of uh the woman looking at two cards, you know, the corporates ask you to compare these two images, and you know the answer is always that you know they're the same.

What kinds of things, what can you do with that? Again, it's the problem with a press release is largely the container itself, right? We've become accustomed to ignoring them. So, how do you take this the pieces of it and distribute them in different ways that people want to consume, that people want to pay attention to? Uh, if you again, if you've got these great high-profile things, do you have video of that?

Is that something you can put up on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or something where people would actually watch it if it's really compelling or interesting? And therein lies the last part. And this is the part that, again, I spent five, yeah, five years at a public relations firm, almost six. Most of the stories that my colleagues were pitching were boring. They were boring, they were uninteresting news from uninteresting companies, which of course is why those companies hired a PR firm in the first place, right?

If they had really compelling stories, they wouldn't need a PR firm, right? Apple, for example, has a corporate communications department, and they probably do have a PR firm, but people actually want to pay attention to what Apple has to say or what Google has to say and so on and so forth. For a lot of these challenger brands, they didn't have anything to say that was interesting. So part and parcel of the work you have to do is there a story there? Is there any actual news?

When you're doing a press release or a news release, there has to be actual news in there. Again, with most press releases, the value in them is entirely to the company that's publishing it. Check out our flexible, scalable, blah, blah, blah product. So what? That doesn't provide me any value, only provides the company value.

What's in it for me as the reader? And if there is no value, if I'm not going to learn something, if I'm not going to find it amusing, if I'm not gonna uh make me laugh, um, then it's not news and it's not worth sharing. And publish the press release because if you need to, you know, you know, adhere to regulations or whatever, uh, or it makes your executives happy, great. Do what you gotta do to keep your stakeholders happy, but expecting and trying to generate performance for something that inherently is a medium that doesn't perform well, and with the tailwind or the headwinds of not very interesting news to begin with, is a is a tall challenge. Um if you come up with a piece of news that's really actually compelling, that's interesting, it's much easier to get people to pay attention to it.

It's much easier to get people to share it, to talk about it, and things like that. Here is my question to you. I would assume that you have close friends of some kind, significant others, things like that. The news that's in your press release, how many of your friends who don't work in your industry have you eagerly told about because you're so excited about it. Right?

If you have a significant other, um, have you bored them to death of talking about this news over dinner? Probably not. Right. Which means it's not news that you find so compelling that you've got to share it with people that you care about, whether or not they care about the news. You're so excited.

Like I've been telling you my friends and my colleagues and stuff about my the new Google Analytics course I'm getting ready to to to launch this week. I'm excited about it. I've told my wife about it, and she's like, uh-huh. That's nice. But it's exciting because it solves a lot of problems for a lot of people, and it's exciting for the company too.

But I'm so enthused about it that I'm telling people who frankly don't care. Like I'll tell my kids about it. You know, they're like, yeah, um, but that's a good indicator for you that you've got some news, that you've got something worth sharing. When you can't contain yourself, you're so excited about it, you're so emotionally engaged in it, then you've got news, right? Because let's face it, if you're not excited about it, your audience for sure is not gonna be excited about it.

So that's your benchmark. That's the question to ask yourself. Um about how to get more life out of your news release. It's gotta have a lot of life and energy in it to begin with. The story's gotta have life to begin with.

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