Does Your PR Read Like This?

Do you want to run a successful business? Communicate effectively with your communities. Employees, customers, partners, developers, investors, whatever the case may be. If both you and the other achieve a mutual goal through communication, then you will be successful in applying social media to business as well.

There are two dangers in communications:

1. you don't have a clearly defined goal, therefore you don't know where you're going
2. you're speaking a different language, therefore there is a disconnect in understanding 

In both cases, you won't be able to take the other with you. In essence, you'll be talking to yourself. No call to action for the first one. Nobody home on the the second - the audience has no idea what you're talking about. You don't believe me?

Let's take a peak at what happens when the press release is written by top consultants used to working with upper management:

Company XYZ Unveils Ground Breaking, Scalable, Value Added,

Solution Driven, Easy to Use Widget

Date -- Company XYZ today introduced an innovative, market-leading, mission critical, world class widget that aligns XYZ and ABC best of breed capabilities, providing customers with cutting edge, turnkey, holistic solutions for their flexible widget requirements across the technology infrastructure enabling peak performance.

See what I mean? It takes sophistication to read this masterpiece. Let's get practical instead, then. See what would happen if sales wrote the release:

Leading Company XYZ Pushes Totally Awesome,

Cheap, Fast, and Good Widget

Date -- Leading company XYZ today announced the best ever widget in the market. It will ensure you never have to worry again about a thing. It will do things you haven't thought about, yet. Want a custom version? No problem. This unparalleled jewel will take you to the next century easily. It uses the most advanced technologies with literally hundreds of millions spent to give you the very best. Now more than ever, you need the thousands of hours of experience we have. Buy now!

Much more down to earth. However, you may be the kind of audience that needs some technical information to evaluate a product. No worries, product engineering comes to the rescue:

Widget 5683372134N is a Right-Sized Product for the Enterprise

from Company XYZ

Date -- Widget 5683372134N by Company XYZ was launched today. Configured with side pockets and right-sized for the enterprise, it meets the specs and requirements of WWW technologies and the NZ784492 ARP systems. It solves complex algorithms when in full load and has a capacity of 7,096 18-bit words, memory cycle time of 3.0 microseconds. It works with DGST, RVO, MNO and M7Ms. It's robust, resilient, and can be expanded.

Better, isn't it? Now we have a lot more technical detail to sink our teeth into. Do we have an ending for this post? See if you can write the press release as if it were for the customer.

Widget will do the Job of Your Old One -- Better and Cheaper!
by Company XYZ

Date -- Widget announced by Company XYZ today. It will be on sale at your favorite online store, do the job you need done better, and be cheaper than the previous one. Need a new widget? Wonder what's out there? We'll make it easy as possible for you to see what everyone already said about it, and buy it with one click. And no, we won't track you for the rest of your browsing history.

That's the final lesson. It's not very sexy, but no matter what you feel your company or product's best features are, no matter how well you communicate between management, sales, and engineering, the language you must really write in is increasingly the one your customers speak.

With social media, you have the opportunity to go direct. You can expand your news to include more technical information for later browsing. You can test to see if stories and other kinds of descriptions work online, definitely include images and comments by others. 

Write your PR like this, or else you're just talking to yourself.

© 2006-2009 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.

Comments

[Carolyn]

I'm in the process of writing my first PR. This article was very timely and beneficial in that it has put me on the right track. Many thanks!

[Valeria Maltoni]

good luck with your release, Carolyn. I'm sure you'll do just fine.

[Jon Buscall]

Brilliantly put. When teaching writing I always refer to these kind of words as "weasel words". They're fluff that are ultimately meaningless. It's amazing how many corporatations still insist on taking this approach, often because that's what their competitors are doing.

Clear concise copy wins everytime.

[Tom Gable]

We've been tracking jargon in PR since 1999 and releases are still full of seamless, end-to-end solutions provided by world class companies that are incredibly excited about their new hire. You mention weasel words. There is a great book by the same name from Philip Howard of The London Times (probably out of print but a good read).

On jargon, here are links to a couple of blogs we posted on the topic.

http://www.gablepr.com/blog/2009/11/05/pr-releases-packed-with-leaders-providing-solutions/

http://www.gablepr.com/blog/2009/07/06/companies-and-pr-firms-thrilled-and-excited-with-just-about-everything/

http://www.gablepr.com/blog/2009/06/23/a-nation-of-leading-providers-and-solutions-pr-releases-full-of-it/

[Tom Gable]

Here's another post on jargon, including data from David Meerman Scott who analyzed 711,123 press releases distributed during 2008 by North American companies through Business Wire, Marketwire, GlobeNewswire, and PR Newswire. He filtered for 325 gobbledygook phrases and issued a report. The top 10: innovate, pleased to, unique, focused on, leading provider, commitment, partnership, new and improved, leverage, and 120 percent. Fun stuff!

http://www.gablepr.com/blog/2009/04/17/pr-jargon-train-keeps-rolling-and-gaining-speed/

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Jon - filler words, aren't they? It's so easy to seek security in them. News announcements is one place where they get inserted. Sell sheets, Web copy, other marketing materials are also filled with them. Good copy of any kind gets to the point quickly and persuasively from the reader's point of view.

@Tom - I'm fairly familiar with a lot of work on weasel or filler words. I'm a linguist and have remained passionate about languages and human expression over the years. Thank you for the many links to your posts.

[Sasha Kovaliov]

Valeria, I still think that the utmost problem is
"1. you don't have a clearly defined goal, therefore you don't know where you're going"

You can change your language, get to understand customer, however, if there are no set goals and measurements defined - no matter how great a PR piece is, it won't get a company anywhere.

I personally has made this mistake several times, before it hit me - plan ahead and know what you are aiming at :)