10 Top Press Release Mistakes

1. Clunky headlines: Don’t try to get everything, including the name of your company, in the headline. The name of your company is a turn-off anyway. Keep it short, sharp and to the point.
2. Written in the first person: You’re verging on the advertorial if your press release is a ‘Me, me, me’ or ‘We, we, we’ document. Think about how you’re adding value to the reader’s life.
3. A press release with no news: To be fair, what can the press do with that? Journalists are looking for something newsworthy and meaty that they can their teeth into.
4. Full of jargon: You may have news but it might be buried under jargon that is industry speak but alien to journalists. They’ll bin a press release like that.
5. Grammar and spelling mistakes: Journalists receive tons of press releases and reject those that look unprofessional. Anything that’s badly put together with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors or typographical howlers is not going to get their attention. Proofread, proofread and proofread again.
6. No quotes to back up the news: If you’re going to suggest that doing such-and-such saves money, for example, get someone to explain how they made it work. Again, it’s all about getting away from the advertorial slant and making your story proper news.
7. Too many exclamation marks!: There isn’t a place for them in the serious world of hard news.
8. Sending to the wrong media: This usually means a bit of extra work for you because you’ve got to tailor your press release to fit and can’t send a blanket release to a bunch of titles. But in the long run it’s a bigger waste of time sending exactly the same release to Nursing Times as the one you’re sending to Construction News – for example.
9. Bad timing: It can make or break a story. Talking about Easter in August isn’t going to find many takers – an extreme example, but you get the point.
10. No follow-up: What a waste of time if you’ve done all the right checks but then sit back and never find out what happened to all that hard work. Having been a journalist on many titles, I can let you into a secret – it’s all too easy to overlook a press release particularly if a zealous PR person isn’t on your back, checking whether you need more info/more pictures/more quotes/more figures/more anything, frankly, just so they can make sure you use their story. That’s what you need to do.

Scraping the World Cup barrel!

The World Cup’s been forced on me like never before this year – the new man in my life is football bonkers and has done his utmost to try to interest/educate me in the event.
But I don’t mind. To be honest I find the whole fiasco quite funny – if a bit sad at times – and I could always go and do something useful if I was really that bothered.
Actually it fascinates me: footballers crying because they’ve fallen over, fans crying because the ‘wrong’ team has scored too many goals, commentators getting stupidly excited when a goalkeeper saves a goal (isn’t that the one and only job goalkeepers have to do???)
Anyway, safe to say, I’ve watched a fair bit of the competition which of course has hit news headlines as well as dominated sports pages.
However I think it’s a bit much – and scraping the barrel – when the media looks at the World Cup in terms of fashion! I came across a blog today detailing World Cup kits http://bit.ly/U5jXqc. There were 53 photos in all – captioning AND rating kits. While I didn’t study them, it seems that others may have judging by comments such as ‘I like the Russian one, the French one doesn’t do much though.’ I can just about get my head around people loving the sport but not caring about the kit!
And hot on the heels of seeing that, along comes another blog about World Cup footballers’ tattoos. I skimmed that to see if there were any interesting ones. I’ll give you the link and leave it to you to decide. http://bbc.in/U5kad4
But what’s odd there is that while they headline the piece ‘tattoos of TEN World Cup stars’, they only find NINE. Now that’s what you call a scraping-the-barrel type of feature!

Do you know about Bowler Hat?

Actually I don’t mean do you know about Bowler Hat Media, the agency, but do you know about bowler hat, the hat? I confess I didn’t until just now when I was looking though a new book I bought the other day, Bloomers, Biros & Wellington Boots – How the Names Became the Words.

It talks about the famous one we all know, for example – Hoover – which is a word many of us tend to use for a vacuum cleaner but was in fact handed down by Henry Hoover who invented a contraption to suck up dirt so should really only be applied to that specific brand.

Bloomers, biros and wellington boots are similarly named after their inventors and, I was surprised, to see, so is the bowler hat. Well, sort of – I’m not sure how convinced I am about this one. I thought the hat got its name from being bowl-shaped but the book maintains that bowler is a derivative of Beaulieu, the surname of feltmakers Thomas and William who were involved in its production.

This book by Andrew Sholl is full of gems and some others I liked  were:

• mentor – in Greek mythology Mentor was an old friend of Odysseus who acted as an adviser to his son;
• plimsolls – English politician Samuel Plimsoll (late 19th century) campaigned against unsafe conditions at sea. He became known as the sailor’s friend and gave his name to new rubber-soled footwear introduced on boats;
• mesmerise – Austrian physician Frank Mesmer used hypnosis as a therapy back in the 18th century and gave his name to the word;
• galvanise – Luigi Galvani, a professor of anatomy in Italy discovered that frogs’ legs would move and twitch when they came into contact with metal during a thunderstorm;
• biro – it was Lazlo Biro, a Hungarian journalist, who hit upon the idea of a pen with a steel ball to control the ink flow and he registered his first patent in 1943;
• bloomers – womens rights campaigner Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818-94) saw the baggy knickers as good, comfy wear for women;
• wellington boots – it was the Duke of Wellington (1769-1852) who made them popular and gave them his name.

It got me thinking, what legacy have I left that should be named after me in years to come? But, you see, there’s a major flaw in that thought, nobody can pronounce the name, Lefebve and that includes some of my own family…..