Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Give a fool enough rope and he’ll hang himself

So much is written about the death of the press release. Some people seem to think that press releases are going to be replaced by blogs or some other medium of communication. Of course everytime I hear this, I really have to convince myself that the same people work in Public Relations.

Let me just start off with the obvious. If you have a client that wants media coverage and to establish a share of voice, then the news release is the most effective way of accomplishing this. Unfortunately some people’s concept of news is somebody else’s idea of spam.

Anyone that says that the press release isn’t the best way to achieve this is living in another world. In Ireland we have numerous national and regional publications. There are some regional papers that have space to fill and are looking for PR agencies to supply them with releases to do so.

Do people actually think that you should post about the news on a blog and the same journalist, who is under time constraints, is going to visit your client’s blog as well as their competitors?

Before anyone says it, no they are not going to sign up to their RSS feed and those of competitors also. Why? Probably because they haven’t heard of RSS!

Seriously, people who harp on about blogs as a replacement for press releases make far too may assumptions about journalists. I fax and post some information to a couple of journalists, suddenly you expect them to be subscribing to RSS!? The fact of the matter is that new channels like blogs will never replace press releases, they will compliment them instead. PR practitioners should always look for new ways to distribute releases and therefore should also make them available through RSS, on top of how they normally distribute them.

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