Want Better Media Coverage? Consider Using “A,” “B” and “C” News Releases

I just came across a blog post from Janet Meiners (NewspaperGirl.com) where she writes that PRWeb told her that “you’ll start to see diminishing returns if you publish press releases too often.” Interesting.

I suspect that if an individual / company is using press releases as a way to boost one’s search engine rankings, then yeah, that’s probably correct.

Janet goes on to correctly state that “The releases go to Google News and Yahoo News first and stay there for 28 days. You’re basically spamming those news sites if you distribute a release too much more often than that.”

However, there is another side to this issue.

Readers should understand that NewspaperGirl works for OrangeSoda, a company that specializes in helping companies promote-market themselves online to reach customers in their hometowns and areas.

As such, OrangeSoda primarily focuses (today) on helping small businesses get online (if they’re not online already) and then helps drive greater sales in their local markets by boosting their visibility on the Internet through a mixture of PPC (pay per click) and search engine optimization / search engine marketing (SEC & SEM) campaigns.

I am confident in describing OrangeSoda in this manner because I spent more than two months working closely with two of OrangeSoda’s execs – COO (Derek Miner) and CFO (Sam Clarke) — to help them prepare for an investor presentation at the Investors Choice venture capital conference this past February. On top of that, Politis Communications is in the process of signing up to become a reseller/master reseller of OrangeSoda’s products and services.

So to be clear about this, I am a true believer in OrangeSoda. You could even go so far to say that “I’m drinking the soda” (as opposed to drinking the kool-aid).

First and foremost, press releases should be about real news

Probably the most important thing to remember when considering a press release is that you must begin with an honest understanding of what constitutes news to a journalist.

We tell our clients that most news announcements can be broken into one of three categories: A, B or C news.

• An “A” News Release is one where almost every journalist in your industry or geographic region would be interested in covering your announcement.
• A “B” News Release is where many journalists in your industry or geographic region would be interested in covering your announcement.
• And a “C” News Release is where only a select few journalists in your industry or geographic region would be interested in covering your announcement.

An example of an “A” release might be news about major acquisition or merger within a particular industry, such as Microsoft’s recent (and some might say online) attempts to acquire Yahoo! probably fall into this category. Here’s the link to Microsoft’s initial press release announcing its proposed acquisition of Yahoo!.

An example of a “B” release might be something like the news release Politis Communications distributed on 1-30-08 for client Public Engines and the Utah Attorney General’s office which announced a “New Pilot Program Lets Utahns Get Neighborhood Crime Reports by E-Mail.” If you conduct a search on Google for CrimeReports & Shurtleff, you’ll find more than 1,100 different links on this story, many of them journalistic write-ups.

Conversely, an example of a “C” news release might be this very first news release we distributed in February 2008 for Debut Broadcasting the FCC had approved increased boosting the tower height of one of Debut’s radio towers, important to Debut but realistically only important to a few journalists and media outlets.

Once marketing professionals and corporate executives begin viewing news announcements from this “A,” “B” and “C” perspective, the range of news release topics begins to expand exponentially.

Hence, we advise clients that at a minimum they should plan for at least one news release per month. Beyond that, certain organizations can have realistic press release schedules that have not only one release per week but in some instances, can have multiple announcements per week.

At the end of the day it comes down answering the basic question, “Is this newsworthy?” and being able to muster the intellectual integrity to know in your gut if an announcement is really worthy of being called an “A,” “B” or “C” news release.

McClellan, the Disenfranchised Flack »« Five Marketing Lessons Learned from Watching Movie Trailers