In part of his response to my post on the press release meme, Eric Schartzman wrote, “…it’s tough, in today’s 24/7 news cycle where everyone has access to the newswires online, the segregate a news releases to just the news media.”
Yeah, it’s tough. That doesn’t mean that it’s never desirable.
I encountered two instances of organizations that embraced this notion that press releases are for everybody, although they were oppositve examples. In the first, a high-tech company explained that their primary audience-sophisticated programmers and systems engineers-were far better versed in their field than the average reporter covering the company. Therefore, they wrote their news releases over the heads of the average journalist, unconcerned that they might get less coverage. Since their primary audience found releases on their site as well as other news release venues (Yahoo!, for instance), it was more important that they get news that was meaningful for them.
The other company, a telecommunications outfit, explained that their typical customer could live in a trailer park and have the IQ of a 10-year-old. In order for their news to be comprehensible to the lowest common denominator, they had to dumb down their press releases despite the fact that this rendered them far less useful to the media. (My friend Pete Shinbach wonders if an SEC violation might lurk in this line of reasoning.)
I don’t think either are good solutions. The goal of a press release is to get press. Not coverage in blogs or bars or parks or beauty salons. (If the press release does its job, people will read it in the press and then talk about it in blogs and bars and parks…) You have to love the web because, more than any other channel, it enables the kind of narrowcasting required to craft messages designed to meet the needs of different audiences. Note I didn’t say spin the messages differently. The simple fact is that different audiences have different needs and interests. Employees, for instance, have a different take on news than, say, the investment community because their context is different.
I recall the first time I produced an annual report. Having never done one before, I sat down and listed the various audiences the annual report would reach. The list reached something like 13 or 14, including individual investors, institutional investors (like fund managers), employee-shareholders, prospective employees, key customers, strategic partners, investment analysts…you get the picture. The perspectives of each audience differed, but I could produce only one version. It was a classic case of one-size-fits-all, even if it doesn’t.
So I was intriguted the first time I saw a web-based annual report with two distinct paths: one for individual investors and one for institutional investors. The only difference was jargon. Fund managers got the version laden with financial terms they inherently understood, while individual investors got a version that spelled out the meaning of each term. Brilliant.
So why not produce press releases for the press, written in news style (inverted pyramid) so they can be adapted quickly to trade publications and other vehicles, then produce a consumer version for the company website (or even delivered via a corporate blog)? The press release version would be readily accessible for anyone who wanted to read it on the media site, addressing any concerns about transparency. In fact, it increases transparency, since any discrepancies between the two (or three or four) versions would be instantly visible.
Which leaves only the issue of all those venues where the press release will appear over which the company has no control (Yahoo! jumps to mind yet again). That, ultimately, is no big deal. Press releases come with a nifty little feature called a “boilerplate,” the last paragraph that lists company particulars. How hard would it be to insert the following into the boilerplate: “This release was prepared for media use. To read a consumer version of this news, please visit our website at…”
Thus we can narrowcast, satisfying the differing needs of our diverse audiences, while increasing transparency and embracing all appropriate channels. Kinda like having one’s cake and eating it, too.
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
