Bulldog Reporter's Daily Dog: Traditional News Release is Marketing's Best "Conversation-Starter"

If marketing is a conversation, what can PR professionals do to start it? For the answer, you need look no further than the traditional press release, which has been reborn as the most effective "conversation-starter" in the marketer's arsenal.

The press release was seen as a bastion of old-school PR, where news was mailed to as broad a media list as possible, with hundreds of follow-up phone calls in hopes that stories would appear. This approach was quickly outmoded in the era of the Internet, when companies could reach a global audience instantaneously. Some said the traditional press release was an anachronism destined for the dustbin of history.

But the online medium has proven to be more hospitable to the news release than many expected. Online PR and search-engine optimization techniques have changed the rules of the game. In the past, you used a release only to get the attention of the media, who carried the information in it along with whatever they dug up on their own to deliver the story to their audience. Now, you use a press release to reach not only the media, but all your other audiences as well. These audiences include customers, resellers, shareholders, media and analysts who follow your story—even your own employees.

Yet once you've gotten the attention of all these audiences, you must be prepared to "have the conversation" with them. How you initiate and manage this conversation is critical to your success. The following are three steps to be successful in using the news release as a "conversation-starter":

1. Make your release relevant and accessible to all audiences, not just the media. Today when you post your news release online, you have to expect anyone might read it, so you should write it for a broader audience than in the past. Include information that customers can understand, that shareholders might find useful, or that your employees can use as they champion your cause. Integrate plenty of links to useful information on your own and others' websites. Make sure your release is search-optimized: SEO is what makes your audience find you rather than you having to find your audience. And put an RSS feed on your news site, so interested readers get new information from you automatically, as soon as you post it.
2. Invite feedback, and be ready to engage with everyone who responds. Make sure you and your colleagues are ready to respond to audiences, beyond the media, who want to engage in a conversation. Prospective customers may want to speak to a salesperson or proceed directly to an e-commerce site where they can buy your products. Or, they might want links to additional information, including websites of third parties who have endorsed or recommended your products. Shareholders, institutional investors and financial analysts might see something in the release that raises questions they need answered right away—so you need to coordinate with your investor relations department whenever you put a release on the wire. If employees have questions, they will need answers right away from your internal human resources people.
3. Track and measure your activity and response. "You can only manage what you can measure." The beauty of the web is that you can keep track of all your outreach and interactions, including the response rates of different audiences. But it also means measurement is a requirement, not a luxury. Therefore, it is important to integrate web metrics with all your other measures of PR's return-on-investment. You should track all the interactions resulting from the conversations you start while you measure both quantity and quality of results, including positive/negative indices and tone of coverage. Showing how many people have responded to your release, and documenting the conversations and coverage that ensued, will go a long way toward demonstrating the value of your outreach while providing feedback enabling constant improvement.

Paradoxically, the news release is one of the oldest tools in the PR professionals' toolkit and also one of the newest. Once you begin using it as your principal "conversation-starter" with audiences who find you online, you will see the dialogue and the positive results of your marketing and communications programs take on a life of their own.

Peter Granat manages all Cision North American teams responsible for marketing, sales, business development and client management. Previously, he was the Senior Vice President of Sales & Business Development at MediaMap, which was acquired by Cision in late 2003.

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