4 posts tagged “press release”

Over at Branding & Marketing they have a short piece on writing press releases. The solution: five paragraphs, the five "Ws" and "how." "Why" and "how" do not belong in the first graph. Get a quote on your bang for the buck. And nowhere to be seen is providing the reader ANY contact information at all. Pity, had me going there for a moment. Otherwise, not bad. Good advice can also be found at (LINK) or at any of dozens of other links. I like the five paragraph advice, though.  

Lee Odden at the Online Marketing Blog notes that press releases have fully transcended their traditional role of just getting information out and into the media. Essentially, he says, they are now a full-on part of the promotion/marketing effort and "...press releases can be effectively used as a direct to consumer communication tool" because of their availability via Google News or Yahoo! News. Odden also points out, ". . .comScore has reported that half of all internet users visit an online news site in a given month." Here is a link to Odden's 10 tips for maximizing the visibility of press release content.  

Press Release Writing has the derivation of these traditional endings for a press release. Civil War era telegraphers would tap "XXX" to signal the end of their transmission. That, of course, is the Roman numerals for "30." Why the dashes? PRW does not say. Nor do they say anything about # # #.

I plan on resuming the newsletter after the holidays so, here is the last one written before my hard drive descended into madness and started spewing forth a lot of incomprehensible stuff. Most of the material exists in PDF and that does not translate well into this space. So here is the source document.
Jim Lane's Marketing Canapes

Marketing Canapés

October 9, 2006 #27

Some of the following morsels require registration and/or subscription. We only cover the freshest of news and should there be nothing in the market we think is good enough, any given category may not have any listing.

Marketing - Product

Crocs are interesting sandals (at least until the tread wears smooth on the bottom and then they get REAL interesting on wet surfaces). Here’s a couple that figured out how to make additions to Crocs and have reaped the benefit. MSNBC News

Artisanal cheese making moves underground. Yep, those hand-crafted wheels of cheese are going into caves to pick up local micro-stuff that should make the same cheese produced in different locations taste slightly different than their commercial competitors – richer and nuanced. NYTimes

Marketing - Place

From the realms of science fiction comes teleporting goods from one place to another. If you think that is still the stuff of pipe dreams, try this report out and try to wrap your mind around a product line with NO physical distribution at all – just, “Beam me a dozen, Scotty!” CNN

Marketing - Promotion

Great pizza boxtop adverts, more at Twenty Four: (cannot load it, so go to the source).

If you bat an eye, chances are you may start missing some of television’s newest short format commercials. Called “adlets,” “blinks” or “winks,” these last only five seconds or less. The question is, just what can you get across and through all the noise in that time and will any marketers want these. So far, Clear Channel has few takers for their one-second spots. There are some longer, five-second, spots running. WSJ Online

Okay, Dick Tracy, where are you? No, we don’t have a wrist radio, but would a phone watch do? TechDigest How about Levitra’s sponsoring elevator UP buttons? AdRants

Marketing - Packaging

Oh what a difference a change of color can make – and tying the change into a non-profit fundraising event. Campbell’s Soup lost its red label and went pink, allying itself with Kroger’s Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and doubled Kroger’s October unit buy. AdAge

Marketing - Target Market

"You can slice and dice by demographic data all you want, but each individual person will always constitute a market segment of one. You can run a campaign that will, you're confident, connect with the "Positive and Responsible" group but you will never achieve 100% positive results. That's because people ultimately make up their own minds. And with more and more choices available to them they're going to be swayed by the information they *can find* much more than the messaging that's *pushed to them*.” AdJab

Here’s an interesting question and accompanying concept. Are you eating out more often than you have in the past? Turns out that when you compute the cost of your time in preparing your own food, it is about the same as going out and you do not have the mess to contend with. Another life-style consideration to be taken into account. Yahoo!News Of course, you should take that “pay yourself” into account the next time you drive a few extra blocks and wait in a line at a gas station to save two cents a gallon.

Apparently, media and big advertisers/marketers have made a fundamental shift in the way they view the customer. SHE has been recognized. RealMediaRiffs

Management

An article on “plateauing,” says many people in middle management are no longer willing to pay the price of moving up in the company. No kidding? Colleagues of mine have been negotiating for life-style concessions for more than ten years. “This plateauing is part of a bigger phenomenon in the workforce -- one that also includes people putting higher priorities on activities outside their jobs, from family to volunteer work to hobbies.” Nothing like timely. Knowledge Wharton

Are job interviews going the way of dinosaurs? Can you tell as much about a candidate by their handshake? BusinessPundit

Media Matters

British newspapers are downsizing and not only in terms of distribution. Many have gone tabloid in an effort to become friendlier to commuters. There are other changes happening – for instance free newspapers that will be home-delivered. Other changes include dynamic layouts and reader-generated information instead of reportage. Is the writing on the wall for US newspapers? American Journalism Review and Media Life

Music used to be the generational divide. The digital divide separates the generations today. David Cohen concluded "there is no doubt that we are moving rapidly from a world of passive receptivity to active engagement. No longer can we simply broadcast our messages to a mass audience and hope that our standard metrics of reach and frequency will guarantee success. Accountable engagement innovation is the battlefield of the 21st century..." Research Brief

Public Relations, Press Releases and Spin

Here is a Top 10 list about how to drive traffic to your website via press releases. First on the list is content. Larry Chase

International

Mexico’s “competition czar” looks forward to the next eight years to make Mexico’s economy more competitive and productive by cracking down on the nation’s monopolies and duopolies. Yahoo!News

If you are marketing internationally, one of the things you need to remember is that consumers like hearing/reading your missives in their own language. For starters, more than half of ALL consumers regardless of their language ability buy only at websites in their own language. BizReport

How would you feel if your local businesses dumped a load of absolutely smelly and sickening garbage on your lawn? It is doubtful you would be very happy about the situation and would seek immediate legal remedies. Think about that situation for a moment and then take a look at what happens when industrial waste gets dumped in the backyard of people in developing countries. NTTimes

Finally, here is a webpage that does have some good points, albeit with some moralizing. If the world’s population were 100 people . . .

jim