Does Your Press Release Pass the “Who Cares?” Test?

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If you’ve followed this blog for any period of time, you know I’m a firm believer in the “leaky faucet” approach to press release distribution. This approach involves sending high quality, newsworthy press releases out on a regular basis with the hope that you’ll eventually find your press release in the right place at the right time.

Admittedly, the leaky faucet approach to press release distribution can prove to be challenging for some businesses. Coming up with newsworthy material on a regular basis can be difficult. That’s why I posted a huge collection of press release topic ideas for you to pull from.

But regardless of what idea or angle you choose to take with your press release, you can determine if it’s worth distributing by asking yourself one simple question: “Who cares?”

In other words, does the news you’re writing really appeal to anyone other than yourself? Will anyone outside of your company actually be interested in reading it?

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If your intended audience doesn’t really care about the news, don’t even waste your time distributing it. It won’t get picked up, so you’re just sending it out for nothing.

Here are some simple questions to help you determine if your news really passes the “Who cares?” test.

  • Would the reporters and their readers that you’re sending this to find this information relevant and useful?
  • Is the news something worth picking up the phone and sharing with other people outside of your company?
  • Can you imagine other people actually sharing this news and discussing it with their friends or colleagues?
  • Objectively speaking, if you were the editor of the publication, would you publish the news?

Sometimes, the easiest way to transform a press release from something no one cares about to something that passes the “Who cares?” test is to look at the bigger story and see how it impacts the reader.

For example, say that you’re a contractor who wants to announce that you recently received a special Green Building credential. Rather than making the press release all about patting yourself on the back, focus on the bigger story. Talk about how you can now use green building technologies to save clients money, improve the environment, and so on. Talk about the future impact green building will have on the world. This takes the story from boring to interesting.

Are you in the process of writing a press release? Take a look at it. Does it really pass the “Who cares?” test?

This article is written by Mickie Kennedy, founder of eReleases (https://www.ereleases.com), the online leader in affordable press release distribution. Download your free copy of 8 Shocking Secrets Press Release Distribution Firms Don’t Want You to Know here: https://www.ereleases.com/landing3.html

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Reply

Thank you for the post. I especially liked your suggestion of how to turn a press release that no one cares about into one of great interest. I think the idea is to take news specific to your company and put a twist on it that makes it interesting for everyone. That usually means, finding the trendy bits of your news and highlighting those.

Reply

Some people take the same approach to press release writing as they do to article writing. However, it’s totally different. Press releases need to be newsworthy, whereas articles just need to be informative. A press release isn’t going to be picked up if it doesn’t provide any news.

Reply

Your leaky faucet X 1,000 becomes my hard-to-manage firehose. When there are thousands of PR people sending out their weekly spam–oh, I mean press releases–that I didn’t ask to get and can’t unsubscribe from, we editors tend to just start hitting delete every time. If 99% of the people sending these followed this “Who cares?” advice instead of only about 1% of them (in my experience), there would be far less virtual garbage in our e-mail boxes.

Reply

I’d guess most of the people who really need to read this, the people filling my inbox with crap every day, never will. They’ll just keep churning out the spam, making me delete anything that has a whiff of press release about it unless it’s from one of the rare creatures who has actually read my publication and understands what we do and don’t need from them. When it comes to press releases, that’s maybe one in 500. The rest is useless.

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