It seems as though I’ve spent much of the last couple of years that no, you don’t always want a press release. What you actually want is a webpage, a series of tweets on Twitter or an audio clip.
Earlier in the year I presented this rather fine deck of slides to LGComms in Manchester and wrote a blog post around the subject of Die Press Release, Die! Die! A post partly inspired by the rather fine Tom Foremski post of the same name from way back in 2006. A whole load of text words and images.
It turns out I was wasting my time. What I really should have done was to just show this table from Fred Godlash from the BusinessWired blog. It talked about a post they wrote in 2007 that put the price of a press release at $5,000. The equivalent price is $7,500 they surmised. Oh, how I wish that was the case for the corner of the public sector that I work in that collectively put out more than 1,000 in the previous 12-month period. You can read the full post here.
But what really caught my eye was a table that set out the reasons for writing a press release in 2007 compared to 2013. I’ve reproduced it here:
Why? Because it really nails the motivation behind getting a message out. In the past the aim was ink inches and coverage in the local newspaper. Today, the aim for any communications person is to think both print and digital.
The question is, are you? And how are you doing it? If you are not what are you doing about it?
Creative commons credit
Helvitica http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicksherman/8663411512/sizes/l/
I don’t think the aims have actually changed all that much. In the past, we were striving for what’s in the right-hand column but were at the mercy of editors and journalists (the channel gatekeepers). The difference is that we now control those aims, which in turn changes the way we must operate.