The New Rules of Marketing and PR

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hours later by reporters from newswire outlets like Reuters and Dow

Jones (and later Bloomberg).

Press releases have also been available to professionals working

within corporations, government agencies, and law ﬁrms, all of

which have had access to raw press releases through services like

NewsEdge, Factiva, and LexisNexis. These services have been deliv-

ering press releases to all kinds of professionals for competitive intel-

ligence, research, discovery, and other purposes for decades.

Of course, since about 1995, the wide availability of the Web has

meant that press releases have been available for free to anyone with

an Internet connection and Web browser.

As I tell this story to PR pros, I hear cries of “Hang on! We dis-

agree! The role of public relations and the purpose of the press re-

lease as a tool are about communicating with the media.” For an

example of this thinking, look to Steve Rubel, one of the most inﬂu-

ential PR bloggers in the world. He responded to my ideas about

press releases by writing a post on his blog, titled “Direct to Con-

sumer Press Releases Suck.”

Let’s take a look at traditional PR folks’ objection. According to

the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA),

“Public Relations is

the professional discipline that ethically fosters mutually beneﬁcial

relationships among social entities.” In 1988, the governing body of

the PRSA—its Assembly—formally adopted a deﬁnition of public re-

lations that has become the most accepted and widely used. “Public

relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to

Web-Based Communications to Reach Buyers Directly

http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/01/directtoconsume.html

http://www.prsa.org/

Millions of people read press releases directly, unﬁltered by the

media. You need to be speaking directly to them!

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each other.” Nowhere does this description mention the media. PR is

about reaching your audience.

I think PR professionals have a fear of the unknown. They don’t

understand how to communicate directly with consumers and want

to live in the past, when there was no choice but to use the media as

a mouthpiece. I also think there’s a widely held view about the “pu-

rity” of the press release as a tool for the press. PR professionals don’t

want to know that tens of millions of people have the power to read

their releases directly. It’s easier to imagine a closed audience of a

dozen reporters. But this argument is based on fear, not the facts;

there is no good reason why organizations shouldn’t communicate

directly with their audiences, without a media ﬁlter, via releases.

Obviously, the ﬁrst word of the term press release throws off some

people, particularly PR professionals. I moderated a virtual debate

for the International Association of Online Communicators (IAOC

)

that touched on this issue. Via the IAOC blog,

people commented

on direct-to-consumer releases. The consensus of the dozens of pro-

fessional communicators who weighed in was to call releases aimed

at consumers “news releases.” This sounds good to me, so from this

point on I’ll refer to direct-to-consumer releases as news releases.

News Releases in a Web World

The media have been disintermediated. The Web has changed the

rules. Buyers read your news releases directly, and you need to be

speaking their language. Today, savvy marketing and PR profession-

als use news releases to reach buyers directly. As I mentioned in

Chapter 1, this is not to suggest that media relations are no longer

important; mainstream media and the trade press must be part of an

overall communications strategy. In some markets, mainstream media

The New Rules of News Releases 63

http://www.onlinecommunicators.org/

http://www.iaocblog.com/blog

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and the trade press remain critically important, and of course, the

media still derives some of its content from news releases. But your

primary audience is no longer just a handful of journalists. Your au-

dience is millions of people with Internet connections and access to

search engines and RSS readers. Here, then, are the rules of this new

direct-to-consumer medium.

The New Rules of News Releases

•

Don’t just send news releases when “big news” is happening;

ﬁnd good reasons to send them all the time.

•

Instead of just targeting a handful of journalists, create news

releases that appeal directly to your buyers.

•

Write releases that are replete with keyword-rich copy.

•

Include offers that compel consumers to respond to your re-

lease in some way.

•

Place links in releases to deliver potential customers to land-

ing pages on your Web site.

•

Optimize news release delivery for searching and browsing.

•

Add social media tags for Technorati, DIGG, and del.icio.us

so your release will be found.

•

Drive people into the sales process with news releases.

You need to fundamentally change the way you use news releases.

If you follow these speciﬁc strategies for leveraging this once-lowly

medium by turning it into one of the most important direct marketing

tools at your disposal, you will drive buyers straight to your company’s

products and services at precisely the time that they are ready to buy.

If They Find You, They Will Come

In late 2005, I was preparing a keynote speech called Shorten Your

Sales Cycle: Marketing Programs that Deliver More Revenue Faster for

Web-Based Communications to Reach Buyers Directly

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the Software Marketing Perspectives Conference & Expo.

To be

honest, I was kind of procrastinating. Facing a blank PowerPoint

ﬁle, I decided to hit Google in search of inspiration.

I entered the phrase “accelerate sales cycle” to see if there was

anything interesting I could use in my presentation. The highest-

ranked listings for this phrase were from WebEx, a company that

provides online collaboration services. What was most interesting to

me was that the links pointed to news releases on the WebEx site.

That’s right; at the top of the Google search results was a news re-

lease about a new WebEx product, and right there in the ﬁrst sen-

tence of the news release was the phrase I was looking for,

“accelerate sales cycle”:

WebEx Launches WebEx Sales Center: Leader Expands

Suite of Real-Time Collaborative Applications

Enhance Team Selling Process, Engage Prospects Throughout

Sales Cycle, and Enable Managers to Monitor and Measure

Web Sales Operations

SAN JOSE, Calif., September 20, 2004—WebEx Communications,

Inc. (NASDAQ: WEBX), the leading provider of on-demand

collaborative applications, today launched WebEx Sales Cen-

ter, a new service that helps companies accelerate sales cycles,

increase win rates, and close more deals by leveraging online

sales calls . . .

Then I went over to Google News

and checked out the same

phrase. Sure enough, WebEx also had the number-one listing on

Google’s news search with a very recent news release dated Septem-

ber 28, 2005: Application Integration Industry Leader Optimizes Mar-

keting and Sales Processes with WebEx Application Suite. The news

The New Rules of News Releases 65

http://www.smpevent.com/

http://www.Webex.com/Webex/press-Webex.html

http://news.google.com/

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release, about a WebEx customer, had been sent through

PRNewswire

and had a direct Web link to the WebEx site to provide

additional information. WebEx also provided links in some news re-

leases directly to free trial offers of their services. How cool is that?

“That is exactly our strategy,” says Colin Smith, director of public

relations for WebEx. “Google and news keywords have really trans-

formed the news release as a distribution vehicle. Our thinking is

that, especially for companies that have an end-user appeal, news re-

leases are a great channel.”

It’s certainly no accident that I found WebEx; I was searching on a

phrase that Smith had optimized for search. His research had shown

that buyers of the communications services that WebEx provides

search on the phrase “accelerate sales cycle” (and also many others). So

when I searched on that phrase, WebEx was at the top of the listings.

As a result, WebEx provided me with an excellent (and real) exam-

ple of a company that had optimized the content of news releases to

include relevant terms such as the one I was looking for. And WebEx

has greatly beneﬁted from their efforts. In addition to the consumers

they already reach online, they’ve added to their audience by getting

the information to someone who tells other people about it (me!);

I’ve used this example in speeches before well over 10,000 market-

ing and Web content professionals and executive audiences, and it

was also downloaded more than 200,000 times as part of my New

Rules of PR e-book. And now you’re reading it here, too.

“People are saying that press releases are dead,” Smith says. “But

that’s not true for direct-to-consumer news releases.” As Smith has

developed his news release strategy to reach buyers directly, he has

had to reﬁne his writing and PR skills for this evolving, but very

much alive, medium. “I learned the very structured AP Style Guide

way to write releases,” he says. “But that’s changed as keywords and

phrases have suddenly become important and the scale and reach of

the Internet have opened up end users as a channel.”

Web-Based Communications to Reach Buyers Directly

http://www.prnewswire.com/

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Smith doesn’t let keywords dominate how he writes, but he tries

to be very aware of keywords and phrases and to insert key phrases,

especially, into releases whenever he can. “We don’t think that a sin-

gle keyword works, but phrases are great,” he says. “If people are do-

ing a speciﬁc search, or one with company names that are in our

release, then the goal is that they will ﬁnd our news release.”

Driving Buyers

into the Sales Process

Smith is careful to include product information in the end-user-

focused news releases he crafts for WebEx. “We try to think about

what’s important to people,” he says. “We put free trial offers in the

releases that are about the product.” About 80 percent of the releases

that WebEx puts out are product or customer related. Since WebEx

is a public company, the other 20 percent are earnings releases and

other regulatory releases. “WebEx is a great mix of real end-user sto-

ries,” he says. “People get why you need Web meetings, so it is easy

to tell the story using news releases.”

Because the Web meeting story is a compelling one even for those

who don’t know the product category, Smith also looks for ways to

create a viral marketing buzz. For example, he pays attention to ma-

jor events in the news where WebEx online collaboration would be

useful.

“We donated free service for limited use during the time that

Boston trafﬁc was snarled as a result of the Big Dig tunnel closures.

We did the same thing for the New York City transit strike.” Smith

knows that people are likely to consider WebEx services during this

kind of unusual situation. Offering the service for free often creates

loyal future users.

Direct-to-consumer news releases are an important component of

the marketing mix at WebEx. “We do track metrics, and we can see

The New Rules of News Releases 67

http://www.Webofﬁce.com/go/bigdig/

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how many people are going from the release to the free trial,” Smith

says. The numbers are signiﬁcant. But with such success, there’s also

a danger. “We don’t want to abuse the news release channel,” Smith

says, explaining that the company also has a media relations strategy,

of which news releases are a part. “We want the news releases to be

interesting for journalists, but also to provide consumers with things

to do, such as get the free trial.”

WebEx is successful in using news releases to appeal to all con-

stituents—the ﬁnancial markets players who monitor the company’s

stock, the journalists who write (and speak) about WebEx products

and services, and also the consumers who are searching for what

WebEx has to offer. WebEx, and thousands of other innovative or-

ganizations like it, prove that a direct-to-consumer news release

strategy can coexist within an organization that cares about media

relations.

Reach Your Buyers Directly

Under the old rules, the only way to get “published” was to have

your news release “picked up” by the media.

We’ve come a long way. The Web has turned all kinds of compa-

nies, nonproﬁts, political campaigns, individuals, and even churches

and rock bands into just-in-time and just-right publishers. As publish-

ers, these organizations create news releases that deliver useful infor-

mation directly onto the screens of their buyers—no “press” involved!

Web-Based Communications to Reach Buyers Directly

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Audio Content

Delivery through

Podcasting

udio on the Web is not new. Audio clips have been available on

Web sites since the early days. But until recently, audio ﬁles

weren’t used much because they were difﬁcult to locate and impos-

sible to browse, and there was no easy way to get regular updates.

The result was that most ﬁles were long—an hour or more—and

people had no idea what was in them without actually listening.

Not many did.

The transformation from static audio downloads to radio station–

like podcasts, which are much more valuable to listeners (and also

more valuable as marketing vehicles for organizations), occurred

because of two developments. The ﬁrst development was the abil-

ity to add audio feeds and notiﬁcations to RSS. This enables listen-

ers who subscribe to an audio feed to download new updates soon

after they are released. When audio content was liberated from the

need for one large download and went instead to being offered as a

series of continuous audio clips, the concept of shows took off.

Hosts modeled their shows on radio, producing content on spe-

ciﬁc subjects catering to distinct audiences. But the podcasting

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business model is very different from broadcast radio. Radio spec-

trums can support only a ﬁnite number of stations, and radio sig-

nals have limited geographic range. To support the technical

infrastructure of radio, broadcasters need large audiences and lots

of advertising (or donors in the case of public radio) to pay the

bills. Contrast that with Internet audio podcasting, which is es-

sentially free (except for minimal hosting fees and some cheap

equipment). A podcast show is available to a potentially world-

wide audience, allowing millions of people the opportunity to cre-

ate shows and listen to them.

The second major development was the availability of those pod-

cast feeds through iTunes. Now all iPod users can simply subscribe

to a feed (usually at no cost), and then every time they plug their

iPod into their computer, the new shows from the feeds they sub-

scribe to automatically download and are copied to the iPod. People

who commute and listen to their iPod in the car or on the train, or

those who work out with an iPod, suddenly have access to regularly

updating shows from the myriad niches that they speciﬁcally

choose. With podcasting, people instantly liberate themselves from

the tyranny of mainstream, hit-driven broadcast radio and can listen

to shows based on their speciﬁc interests.

Perhaps we should back up for just a moment. The term podcast-

ing confuses some people. A podcast is simply audio content con-

nected to an RSS feed. The medium does not specially require iPods,

although that’s how the word was derived. You can listen to a pod-

cast on an iPod (or on any other MP3 player) or directly from your

computer—no iPod required.

Now marketers have a tool to efﬁciently create and deliver au-

dio content to those people who wish to receive it. Marketers eas-

ily develop a show that speciﬁcally targets their buyers’ personas

and deliver regularly updating content that is welcome and useful

to the audience. By appealing to a niche market and delivering au-

dio that people choose to hear, an organization is seen as a

thought leader and is the ﬁrst choice for listeners looking to make

a purchase.

Web-Based Communications to Reach Buyers Directly

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Putting Marketing

Back in Musicians’ Control

Music is a classic example of a long-tail business. Before the Web

came along, bands that didn’t have a major label behind them couldn’t

hope to get national or global attention. The best they could do was

to establish a local audience in a city or region, or perhaps with a de-

ﬁnable market such as northeastern U.S. college students. Enter

podcasting. Now anybody with some simple and easy-to-use equip-

ment can set up as a radio station and get instant global distribution

via iTunes and other distribution services.

George L. Smyth hosts the Eclectic Mix podcast,

where he chal-

lenges listeners to open their minds to new and diverse music and

promotes bands that he likes at the same time. The banner of his site

even has a deﬁnition of eclectic, to make sure people understand his

approach: choosing what appears to be the best from diverse sources,

systems, or styles.

“On each show, I select an artist and spotlight their music,” Smyth

says. “I play literally anything from classical to punk. My interest in

music goes back to my college days, when I would copy records to

tape and trade with my friends. I had lost track of music for a while,

but recently I’ve found that there’s really great music out there, and I

can share it with many more people than with the tapes.”

Smyth is evangelical in his descriptions of how podcasting has

changed the face of music. “Podcasting of music has been a real suc-

cess with the under-twenty-ﬁve crowd,” he says. “Podcasting has al-

lowed people to hear the music of groups that are good but perhaps

don’t have a big label behind them. In the past there was no choice,

but now there is a choice. Many artists will tell you that they just

want people to hear the music. If you do listen, maybe you’ll like it

and want to spend money on tickets and perhaps a download of mu-

sic from iTunes. Many bands don’t make much money from CDs, so

Audio Content Delivery through Podcasting 71

http://www.eclecticmix.com/

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