10 Sep 09 Why to Write a Press Release

Do you know what PR is? Well, it could mean press release, I can see you are primed by the title, but it doesn’t exactly stand for that. Then what PR stands for? Page Rank? May be, but the PR I am talking about has not exactly to do with Page Rank, so any guess?

Well!

PR stands for public relation, and press release is a very important tool to accomplish the public relation goal. We will not go deep into describing public relation in this blog post, suffice it to say that unlike advertisement, which is a direct communication from the company, public relation is the third party endorsement of a brand or company.

The essence of successful PR campaign lies in the anonymity of the company who created or ran the campaign. Most of the news that you read in the newspaper is actually a direct outcome of PR.

Why should I write a press release

Well, press releases are written to communicate to the general public the recent developments in the company in question. And by development I mean meaningful development, and not developments like these: your boss moved up to another position, or your CEO just sneezed. Developments that make news should be newsworthy. Some eminent personality of BBC (perhaps, I cannot be sure of who he was) once said,

“If a dog bites a man, it is not a story, but if a man bites a dog it is news.”

Following the lead many companies create the artificial “a man biting a dog” stories to get press coverage, and it get covered.

Why?

Journalists get either paid to do that or they are stupid enough to not separate wheat from chaff.

For whom should I write a press release?

As with any form of corporate communication that goes outside the corporate boundary, the ultimate target audience of a press release is the general public, but this is not what we should be primarily concerned with while writing the press release.

If we do so, our press releases will not be taken. The direct target audience of a press release is the journalist who is going to do his story based on the press release that we will send him about us. If the journalist is not impressed, our press release will hit the trash bin sooner than it should.

The general public is the indirect target audience of a press release. Their interest should also be at back of your mind while writing a press release, or else, why would you write one?

A parting thought

When I started writing this post, I thought this will be a single stand-alone post on press releases, but after reaching to this point I felt, I will not be doing justice to the topic, if I do not cover every aspect of press releases, and this gave me an opportunity to write at least three more posts on the topic. So, be on the look, and meanwhile send in your suggestions either here through the comment box or mail me on bikram [at] biksy [dot] com.

Tags: Anonymity, Bbc, Boss, Ceo, Company Public Relation, Corporate Communication, Endorsement, Guess, Journalist, Journalists, Meaningful Development, Page Rank, Personality, Pr Campaign, Press Release, Recent Developments, Separate Wheat From Chaff, Target Audience, Third Party, Wheat