Press releases

Companies out there can breathe a sigh of relief. LulzSec has put out a release saying it’s disbanding.

“For the past 50 days we’ve been disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could. All to selflessly entertain others – vanity, fame, recognition, all of these things are shadowed by our desire for that which we all love,” the release says.

The statement expresses hope that the AntiSec movement against the computer security industry will continue to swell into revolution. But, it says, “we are just people” who aren’t permanently tied to the LulzSec identity, and it’s time to go.

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To press release or not to press release? Isn’t that always the question? Fact is, no matter how much people talk about the death of the press release, they’re still used by many companies and marketers to get the word out.

According to Laura Sturaitis, EVP of media services and product strategy at Business Wire, press releases are more than a media relations tool. “Other audiences are utilizing them,” she says. “That’s what makes them social and consumable.”

The keys are links and other multimedia components that are built into the press release from the start. According to Sturaitis, “A high number of press releases don’t have any links at all.”

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Business Wire has announced a number of new features for its NewsTrak measurement dashboard. Among them, metrics that are sliced and diced according to location and other categories, details about where traffic is coming from, and tools to compare how press releases are doing.

The release has been coupled with a new white paper, written by Laura Sturaitis, EVP of media services and product strategy (who also designed these upgrades), and a free webinar – Maximizing Your Measurement: Clocking the ROMI [Return on Marketing Investment] of Your Press Release — coming May 18.

Every day thousands of press releases and pitches are sent out across the globe by PR professionals to journalists, all in the hope that the journalists “pick up” the information and use it in a story. Of course, this being PRNewser, one may wonder why we’re even briefly outlining this standard PR practice.

Here’s why: a new website, “Churnalism,” seeks to expose when news outlets lift copy straight from press releases into their stories. Created by the Media Standards Trust, Churnalism will scan content from the UK national press, the BBC and Sky News online. It’s an interesting service and one can but help wonder if it will be rolled out more widely. Read more

About once per week, someone says, types, or thinks that the press release should just go away. Elasticity’s Aaron Perlut has taken to Forbes’ website to rail against the poor, beaten down press release, saying it’s outdated and “should be put out of its misery.” But didn’t a press release just generate a world of buzz for one creative PR pro?

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One public relations issued what they claim to be the “most amazing press release ever written” yesterday, in what we assume was an attempt to bait PRNewser and our counterparts in to a writing a blog post.

We didn’t have time but TechCrunch did, and Chicago-based boutique PitchPoint Public Relations  is enjoying a bit of fanfare for it. They coughed up real money to put it on PRNewswire, knowing PR haters and followers would find it first thing in the morning on Google News.

It reads like the comparably obscure Tenacious D song–it’s not actually the best song ever, but it’s a tribute to that song, because they were too high to write it down in the first place.

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A survey, commissioned by Infocom Group, the company that publishes Bulldog Reporter, found that Bulldog Reporter’s Daily ‘Dog was “the best-read publication in the industry,” according to the press release announcing the astounding results.

PR Junkie takes issue with the fact that both PR Daily, PRNewser and other outlets weren’t even options on the question to determine “best-read” status. We agree. On the list are a mixture of print and online sources from Jack  O’Dwyer, PRWeek, and PRSA.

James Sinkinson, the publisher of the Daily ‘Dog, also notes in a quote in the release that this is the fourth year in a row that they’ve been ranked number one. You don’t say?

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While rummaging through his home office recently, Ray Ozzie found an original copy of the Windows 1.0 press kit.  The monster 32-page package was handed to him by its preparer 25 years ago, a Waggener Group account manager named Pam Edstrom.

Fast forward to today, and Ozzie is chief software architect at Microsoft after the acquisition of his Groove Networks company  in 2005, and Edstrom is President of Waggener Edstrom and head of the Microsoft account which was and is inextricably linked with the success of the now 750-person firm.  Her co-founder Melissa Waggener is CEO.  WagEd (or WE as they started calling the firm) is a mere two years older than the operating system.  Windows 1 turns 25 next month.

The internal contact on the kit is Marty Taucher, who spent fifteen years in PR at MSFT before becoming an angel investor.  Now he calls himself a “winemaking intern” at DeLille Winery down the road from the software behemoth, as well as managing partner at “winery startup,” (first release 2012).

The Windows tide certainly lifted many, many boats.  A scan of the full kit is available on Ozzie’s Docs.com page.

[via Mashable]

Hey look: someone else decided that the press release is officially “dead.” This time, it’s Advertising Age media columnist Simon Dumenco, who says Twitter is the killer:

The long-suffering, much-maligned press release, I’d argue, finally died this summer, thanks particularly to JetBlue and BP, with a little moral support from Kanye West and just about every other celebrity with thumbs. (Of course, press releases will probably continue to stumble along, zombie-like, for years to come, because too many PR folks are still heavily invested in grinding them out.)

Tom Foremski, a former Financial Times reporter who now covers tech and media for his own site Silicon Valley Watcher, wrote a widely circulated post calling for the death of the press release four years ago, and just this past Spring admitted that we’ve gotten nowhere. The old beast still alive and kicking. Read Dumenco’s full story here.

[Image via IR Web Report]

Dominic Jones at IR Web Report has an excellent report on how Google skipped the news wires for distributing their Q2 earnings, and it didn’t seem to receive a bad response from stakeholders.

Says Jones:

I have been unable find a single negative comment about it from an investor or journalist. That’s quite surprising given that it’s the first time Google has not used a PR wire to announce its results, and the fact that the news itself was far from positive.

PRNewser spoke to many of the major newswires back in April about this, when Google first said it would bypass the wires for “future announcements regarding its financial performance.”

Of course, the marketing departments at the wire services have been going into overdrive on this news as it could affect their business model.

However, while many companies may now think that because it worked for Google, it’s a good idea, they should also consider whether the financial press will pick up their results if they came out like this, or if it will only work for big companies like Google.