In this episode, I share tips as my own agency prepares to send press releases from one client in America to media in China and Japan. Press release activity requires 3 main considerations: content, channels and timing.
We've issued releases for clients since 1995, and so I share our approach to press release writing, media engagement and when to send out releases; especially as in this case we are issuing across multiple timezones and multiple languages which add extra complexity. The questions I ask though, apply regardless of where the media is, or how many you intend to talk to.
Jim James is the host. Jim is the Founder of the EASTWEST Public Relations Group based in Singapore. He has set up 8 companies on 3 continents, each time from a suitcase!
In return, I will continue to bring massive value with two weekly shows, up to 3 hours per month of brilliant conversations and insights.
Monthly subscriptions start at $3 per month. At $1 per hour, that's much less than the minimum wage, but we'll take what we can at this stage of the business.
Of course, this is still free, but as an entrepreneur, the actual test of anything is if people are willing to pay for it.
If I'm adding value to you, please support me by clicking the link now.
In this episode, I share tips as my own agency prepares to send press releases from one client in America to media in China and Japan. Press release activity requires 3 main considerations: content, channels and timing.
We've issued releases for clients since 1995, and so I share our approach to press release writing, media engagement and when to send out releases; especially as in this case we are issuing across multiple timezones and multiple languages which add extra complexity. The questions I ask though, apply regardless of where the media is, or how many you intend to talk to.
Jim James is the host. Jim is the Founder of the EASTWEST Public Relations Group based in Singapore. He has set up 8 companies on 3 continents, each time from a suitcase!
In return, I will continue to bring massive value with two weekly shows, up to 3 hours per month of brilliant conversations and insights.
Monthly subscriptions start at $3 per month. At $1 per hour, that's much less than the minimum wage, but we'll take what we can at this stage of the business.
Of course, this is still free, but as an entrepreneur, the actual test of anything is if people are willing to pay for it.
If I'm adding value to you, please support me by clicking the link now.
Today, we're going to talk about press releases, the bread and butter of public relations. EastWest PR was actually just in the process of sending out a press release for a client in America into China and Japan. Press releases have a methodology, and this involves content, timing, and distribution, which I'm going to talk about today. Now, imagine that everybody could know about your product or your service. It would be fantastic, wouldn't it? But the only way to do that is to communicate through the broader media, because if you knew everybody already and they're in your database, you wouldn't need media relations. You could reach out to them through email or through their social media accounts. However, most growing companies need to reach new audiences, and that's why public relations focuses as a cornerstone on press relations, and press releases are, if you like, the main weapon in the press release artillery. There are a couple of different stages which I will take you through, because many clients and many companies are looking at how to not just write a press release, but when and how to distribute it, as well select the right spokespeople for the job. Now, the first thing to look at is the content of the release. Take note that no journalist wants to read a brochure, or a financial statement, or a piece of legalese. Most companies end up sending journalists a combination of what the the managing director or the CEO wants to send, modified by what the legal team wants to say, and then with a little bit of gloss or polish from the public relations team who tried to soften it. This is the the safe way to do public relations in press releases, but it's not the most effective way. Content from a press release should be going into the journalist's inbox and should come out of them as being something that's a story. The first point of call in writing a press release is, why is your company issuing this press release? Is that a new product? Is it a new market? Is it a new person? Is it an innovation? Why does it matter to anyone outside of your own company? Ask yourself that question. It's not just that it's important to you. it has to be important to somebody else like your potential customers, and it also has to be important enough for the journalist to want to pick up and write about it. The second element of press releases is that there needs to be a context; in other words, writing about a particular industry, market, whatever it is. How does your product make a difference to that market? Too often, companies issue press releases because they've invented something. That's interesting to them, but how is it interesting to anybody else? What's the context? What business problem or industry problem or environmental problem are you trying to solve? Ideally then, you'd have some facts and figures from your research, of which there are many sources, especially now with the internet. There are websites like Statista, which has lots of statistics on it. There are companies like Gartner, Forrester, OECD, local governments, and many other bodies out there that will provide proof points or validation for the context that you want to be launching your product or service into. The next aspect of a press release is the choice of a spokesperson. Stories on their own need to have somebody to be their evangelist, somebody who is going to be their spokesperson. Companies will usually have the CEO do it, but actually, it's not always the CEO who's the most appropriate person. They might be running the company, but the most appropriate person to speak on behalf of the company could be the product specialist. I've talked earlier on about the Edelman Trust Index, which says that most readers don't really believe CEOs, but they trust product specialists. They trust technical experts. So, within your organization or within your marketplace, who can give credibility to your pitch and make people believe that your product or service will add value to them? Who can demonstrate to the journalist that this is a problem worth writing about? I previously said that the media write stories that will only impact two-thirds of their readership. Otherwise, it's not worth it from an advertising or subscription point of view. So, this is quite a good way of thinking about it if you're looking at writing a press release or asking someone to do it for you. How is it going to impact two-thirds of the readership of that publication? I'm launching a new product for a client from San Francisco into China and Japan from my headquarters here in the UK. Who is the right spokesperson to represent that product that's being launched? Thanks to some new technology updates, the product is now available in Japan and China, while the global release has an American-based VP of Sales. What we'd like to do is to find the local hero. Who is someone in Japan and in China, or in any other country, that could be the local contact? This is important, because people buy from people, and if people are reading about someone who's a long way away telling them that this is a good product or service, they're less likely to want to write the story, and they're less likely to believe that it's relevant to them. If you're issuing an international press release, ideally, the statistics and the context is local. Your spokesperson could also be a local country manager, for instance, or a foreigner who speaks the local language as long as they understand the product well enough to represent it. If you have someone from the headquarters who speaks the local language and is a technology expert, that's a sweet spot. I used to have a client from a company called Quantel, and we had a member who lived in Japan, spoke Japanese, and was a technical expert, and the media loved talking to him, because he was able to joke with them in Japanese, but also get them all the technical updates in Japanese. Now, what about graphics and information? Well, the truth is that the media would like to have as much of the story made for them as possible, because they're all pressed for time, but as I said, the media do not want to publish a brochure. That's not their job, and they compromise their editorial integrity if they do that. That's why we never ask them to publish things that essentially are publicity. A good innovation in the last few years has been the infographic which is the combination of information and a picture. It allows you to embed the market context with the product solution. Companies will try and issue press releases with an infographic from their internal sales presentations that a salesperson gives to key accounts, but that's completely impractical, and the graphics are sometimes poorly done and thus, not visually appealing or eye-catching. However, infog aphics made using Visme or Canva can give the journalist a sto y within a picture. They say a icture is worth a thousand words Well, an infographic may be w rth 5,000 words, bec use if you embed industry sta istics, company facts, and a roposition, then you've tol the whole story. Also, f om a cynical point of view, it' almost impossible for the jou nalist to edit that out, so y u can embed some of your own ey messages into an industry tr nd story represented by an in ographic. It used to be that we could put links into press r leases. There was a trend for a while where we could embed links and hyperlinks, but now that the media is relyi g on page views being on their o n website, they're really cleans ng all releases of those, what w used to call Aside from press releases needing good content and a good spokesperson, it also needs a third party. If it's possible to get a quote from an industry expert, a customer, or anybody that says that your announcement isn't just about you, then that adds a lot of value and credibility. In terms of photographs, we always offer photographs of the person speaki g in the press release, and we caption those pictures. A small ip is to give the file name o the pictures just as you would Another thing to look at is the timing of a press release. ike to have it written, rather than just leave it as "Photo 123.jpg." If you could put th name of the person as the fi e name, it helps with SEO, b t also for the journa ists or publishers, it makes rchiving so much easier, becaus you can imagine how many pictures they have. Reports from Cision say that journalists have up to 1,000 press releases sent to them every week and up to 100 stories pitched. They these are busy, busy people, so you have to have a great headline that gets to the point very quickly and one that sells the journalist on why they should read it. We also need to think about when they get it. By and large, Monday morning is not the best time. Tuesday around 10 till 12 is a good time, so is Wednesday or Thursday. The best time to send a press release to journalists is after they've had a morning rush of emails before they spend their afternoons writing. On Friday, most journalists will either be too tired or will have a deadline, so best to avoid reaching out to journalists on a Friday. For our press release in Japan and China, we'll be sending them out on a Thursday at 10 o'clock in the morning. The client is in San Francisco, so for them, it's the day before, but we will coordinate with the client. What we have to recognize is that a global release going out at one time all around the world really no longer makes sense. There was a time period when people wanted to do a global release, but we have moved on and realized that we should send out press releases to people within their work times. The next thing is the follow up. Of course, it's quite possible that press releases from anybody will go into the spam filter. It's not necessarily possible to follow up with all media, so what we will do is choose a target tier-one media and without trying to annoy anybody, we will ring and make sure that they've received their releases. Another aspect of this is to ensure that the releases are personalized. It's possible to do that with some of these big platforms, like Prowly and Cision. It's essential, because otherwise, it's just a, "Dear editor," "Dear journalist,""Dear sir/ madam." No one likes to receive blanket press releases or blanket emails that way, so why should a busy journalist? If we can, we try and insert something that we know about their media that would find this story particularly interesting. We would tailor the top 5-10 press releases for those journalists, because we know that they don't all write the same story. Making decisions about which media are really important and which ones are, perhaps, tier-two or newsworthy, allows us to focus on personalization. Remember, it's going to be a person getting it at the other end of the email, and it should hopefully lead to a pitch. A press release isn't an end in itself. We do press releases, because they're great for SEO, and many websites, again, have as much of two-thirds of their content created from content syndication. The content comes from press release distribution, but what we really want is to get interviews or editorial opportunities for longer-form stories. The press release really is written to give a taster for the main story, and that's what the phone call is for and why we mentioned the person in the press release, because it is that person we are hoping to get an interview with. So, press releases are definitely the mainstay really of public relations. For anyone who wants to make their new product or service more known, press releases still are an essential part of that process, and today I've shared with you a few key elements which