In the ooollllddd days, you could hand out embargoed news and assuming you had a good relationship with the media, the news would sit in the can until the agreed-upon time. But the Internet and online media changed all that, for good.

In the tech news space, in particular, the embargo has become a cause celebre. TechCrunch, one of the gorillas in the tech media space, has been pushing for the death of embargoes for awhile, and their wish may be coming true. TechCrunch may be a little early in writing an obit, but in the end, they may be right.

For other tech journalists, however, it’s still something of an open issue — and one we’ll discuss next Wednesday (along with many other topics of interest to tech PR) on the PR University webinar, Tech Media and Trends PR Can’t Afford to Miss: Top Tech Influencers Reveal Best PR Practices for Reaching Consumers in Today’s Economy. Panelists include:

• Nancy Blair, Senior Assignment Editor/Technology, USA Today
• Spencer Ante, Computers Department Editor, BusinessWeek
• Jim Kerstetter, Executive Editor, CNET News
• David Lidsky, Articles Editor, Fast Company
• Tom Foremski, Author, “Silicon Valley Watcher”

How do I know we’ll be talking about this? Two reasons: it came up today on our pre-webinar prep call, and I’m the moderator and get to ask the questions.

How to avoid the trash bin? That’s easy — pitch real news, facts and figures, information that the journalist’s audience really might want to know. Skip the self-serving pseudo ads — those are the ones that get deleted FAST.

But the title of this post is 3 no-nos, so here’s a list of other no-nos:

1. Using ALL CAPs in the subject line — why are ya yellin’ at me?
2. Putting the words “press release” or “news release” in the subject line — yer wastin’ precious space, pardner.
3. Including attachments — send links, not attachments. Repeat — send links, not attachments.

For more handy email pitching tips, tune in to PR University next Wednesday, September 16, for a lively webinar called, “Perfect Email Pitches: Master PR Scribes Reveal How to Craft Copy That Boosts Opens and Media Coverage in Today’s Shrinking News Hole.” I’m moderating, and the panelists will include:

• Harry Medved, Head of Public Relations, Fandango
• Jane Mazur, Executive Vice President/Director of Media Relations, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide
• Dan Beeson Director of Media Relations for Mother Nature Network
• Nancy Brenner, Senior Vice President/Director of Media Relations, MS&L Global Public Relations

Now, though, the web makes the term virtually meaningless. So many different people and audiences other than the media can access our press releases in real time that calling it a press release is almost a blunder. [If someone's got a better phrase, let me know]

So if reaching many different audiences is now both a given and an objective of our releases, what do we need to know to make the most of the opportunity?

This, in a nutshell, is what we will be talking about on Wednesday at 1 PM ET on the PR University audio conference, “New Ways PR Can Use SEO and Smarter Writing Techniques to Reach Wider Audiences.”

I’ll be moderating and will be joined on the call by:

• Paul Furiga, ABC, President, WordWrite Communications
• Laura Sturaitis, Senior Vice President, Media Services & Product Strategy, Business Wire
• Paul Dyer, eMedia Director, WeissComm Partners, Invigorate Communications
• Greg Jarboe, President & Co-Founder, SEO-PR

We’ll be covering these and other topics:

• SEO Fundamentals: How to conduct preliminary keyword research—plus online tools and new techniques for finding your company or brand’s keyword sweet spot
• Word counts, hyperlinks, headline writing rules and other SEO guidelines for optimizing press release copy without alienating readers
• Using video, audio, photos and multimedia to boost your online footprint
• SMR Update: What a social media news release (SMR) is and how it differs from a traditional press release
• Overcoming the challenges of creating and distributing effective social media news releases
• Online Distribution: How to seed your releases, announcements and ideas in blogs, forums and even Facebook, LinkedIn and beyond
• Measuring your success: new tools for measuring the effectiveness of your press releases

Hope you can join us!

Think about it: aside from pronouncements from the White House, how often are news stories just verbatim press releases from an organization? Virtually never, right? Instead, all news stories are broad stories about a particular situation, with many elements, possibly including you, your boss or your organization.

Yet to this day, the vast majority of press releases are written in that stilted, third-person style (“So-and-so announced today”) as if we were contributing an article to an imaginary media outlet.

Why, just today, I surfed over to PitchEngine.com to check it out — this is a site that intends to help PR people shift from issuing stilted old media-style press releases to new style press releases that are supposedly more user-friendly for the social media environment. But they don’t apparently have editors stopping users from taking their old third-person perspective and jamming it into the SMR format.

A couple of today’s PitchEngine headlines, plucked fresh from the site:

• THE WILMA THEATER Announces Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo as the final selection for its 2009-2010 Season
• Paws Unlimited Foundation Holds their Open House to Raise Awareness and Funding for their No-Kill, Ten-Acre Animal Shelter in the Greater New York Region

Do you care? Why should you?

But, there was a ray of light in this headline:

• Revenue Sharing Cuts from Governor, Legislature to Trigger More Crime, Layoffs Statewide

It’s about Michigan (should have been in the headline) and was posted by the Michigan Municipal League. But at least it’s about other people and not about them!

According to a survey of more than 2,300 journalists conducted by Bulldog Reporter and TEKgroup International, email was the preferred method of delivery among 75% of respondents. Other methods trailed far behind:

Commercial newswires (such as PR Newswire or BusinessWire) 8%
Official alerts sent from a corporate online newsroom 7%
U.S. Postal Service 2%
Fax 0.8%
Express delivery 0.5%

So, should you skip using expensive wire services altogether? In some cases, that may be the right and cost-effective way to go. But wire services offer an important secondary benefit: giving your release third-party credibility and placement of your release in databases like Factiva, and on web sites that simply post press releases verbatim.

Nevertheless, pay a lot of attention to your email pitches — they’re crucial. Write good, non-spammy subject lines. Keep your story pitch at the beginning of the email brief. Include links to background material — not the materials themselves.

The release was about a new client win. Now, the vast, vast majority of new client press releases are turgid and boring and will get picked up only by the narrowest trade media, if at all. In our case, this client win probably won’t get picked up by any trade media, because the niche is so new.

So I submitted a release to Business Wire with the following headline and lead:

Shareholder Representative Services (SRS) Relieves Venture Capitalist of the Stockholder Representative Headache
Former Shareholders of Era Systems Name SRS as Their New Representative in Merger With SRA International

San Francisco, CA – February 19, 2009 – Being the representative of the shareholders who sold a venture-backed company to a big corporation is a lot of work – even if the merger goes flawlessly. Venture capitalist Jonathan Perl with Boulder Ventures knows firsthand – he has been a shareholder representative before, and recently signed up to do it again, in the merger of Era Systems Corporation, which was acquired in 2008 by SRA International (NYSE: SRX).

This time, Perl thought better of his decision and turned the job over to Shareholder Representative Services (SRS), the professional choice for managing the post-closing escrow period after a merger.

To my surprise, I had a call from Business Wire after submitting this release last night, with the editor there saying that this wasn’t a properly written release, because it had a soft news lead, and that “the media” prefers hard news leads. They recommended I rewrite it, though I didn’t get the call in time and the release went through as submitted.

As it happens, I had written an early draft in that stilted format, but my client urged me to loosen it up a bit. Here’s the original version:

Former Shareholders of Era Systems Corporation Name Shareholder Representative Services (SRS) To Represent Them After Merger With SRA International

San Francisco, CA – February 19, 2009 – Shareholder Representative Services (SRS) has been named the official representative of the former shareholders of Era Systems Corporation, which was acquired in 2008 by SRA International (NYSE: SRX).

In its role as shareholder rep, SRS will professionally managing the post-closing escrow process on behalf of the former shareholders of Era. This includes handling potential claims by SRA International related to working capital disputes, earnouts, breaches of representations or warranties; communicating with escrow agents and other parties to the transaction; and resolving other matters that may arise.

OK — which version do you like better? To me, it’s a no brainer — the first is much more lively and creative. Yet to the brains at Business Wire, this wouldn’t be a “successful” release because it wasn’t written in the old rigid style.

I tried to get a call back from Business Wire today but didn’t hear from anyone. But let me tell you what I am thinking:

I wrote the release for the web, not newsrooms. I had already planned to send the release via email into the newsrooms I cared about, and wasn’t relying on Business Wire to generate other pick-up, which I knew it wouldn’t. In fact, I paid for the cheapest wire distribution possible, because what I was really going after comes free — web distribution.

Within minutes after my release went out as written, it was on MarketWatch, MercuryNews.com and StreetInsider.com, as well as many other web sites. Since I had embedded links to my client in the release, many of these brand new web pages now linked to my client’s web site.

This is why I used Business Wire — because I know that they have redistribution agreements with tons of web sites, who will post my release automatically after I put it on the wire.

So now, look back on the two leads — which one would you want to read if you found my release on the web? And to Business Wire — don’t you think it’s time your media relations advice took into account the Internet and SEO?

PS — I got a report from Business Wire  on the distribution of the release, but it noted that the report did not provide information on whether the release was picked up by the “thousands” of web sites that repurpose Business Wire releases. Why not? That’s what I’m paying for!

MatchPoint works as follows: you copy the text of your press release into MatchPoint’s easy-to-use web-based software, and MatchPoint analyzes the keywords in your release and spits out a list of journalists and bloggers who have recently written articles using those words, along with headlines for the articles themselves.

In other words, instead of building a media list based on geography or “beat,” you can actually build a list based on recent stories journalists and bloggers have covered. It pulls from six months of bylines (over 3 million) from 11,000 print, 25,000 online news, and 10,000 blog posts.

As I said, this is a real step forward, a new way of looking at media relations. I gave the site a test drive (anyone can sign up for a two-week free trial, after that it’s $65/month), and came away impressed with the service. The lists I got back (bloggers and mainstream media are listed separately) included both journalists and bloggers I knew about, and some I didn’t. And of course, it gave me recent clips that I could reference in a custom pitch to these targets.

My only reservation about MatchPoint is that it gives you a media list based on past coverage, including some one-off coverage that may not be representative of what that journalist covers. While I think journalists may be more willing to give a PR person a break of they pitch a story based on this past coverage, it’s still not going to get you future coverage if the story you are pitching isn’t really close to their beat.

Which brings us back to the truism of media relations: it’s all about the relations part. If you blindly pitch a story based on your MatchPoint results, and you get a lot of rejections, it’s not MatchPoint’s fault. But if you use MatchPoint as high quality media relations intelligence, it will likely increase your pitching success.

I recommend you read the 3 parts in their entirety. But here are a few nuggets of wisdom:

• Identify the crucial descriptive keywords for your release. Use these terms to craft a solid, compelling headline and first paragraph for certain. Think like a searcher, not like a brand manager. Avoid jargon and “it” and use a descriptive keyword instead. Include a beefy quote (why this news is important), not just by the company spokesmen. Industry analyst (or pundit) and customer comments are far more powerful and validate the value of your news announcement.
• Use keywords sparingly (within title of the release and 1st paragraph especially; 3x max). Unless the proper name of your product or service is already well-known, emphasize a common description rather than its name, e.g. write “proposal writing software” rather than “PropWritePro.”  If there are too many keywords/topics for one release, then write multiple versions for your target audiences.
• Include the “http://” in any URLs you write. For very long URLs, consider using a URL replacement solution like TinyURL.com.  This helps with emailed releases, (though it’s not helpful for SEO because you loose the direct link). 

Thanks to Web Ad.vantage for posting these articles.