Any fool can write a good press release that hits its target audience and creates an impact. Writing one that fails to make an impression requires more work. Fortunately there are people who have mastered the art. As an editor I’ve seen some great performance over the years and I’d like to share this expertise with you.

Here are my top ten tips for ensuring your press release gets minimum attention:

1. Cripple its chances of reaching editors and journalists

Everyone can read plain text messages contained in the body of an email. The message will almost certainly get through to any kind of desktop email clients, all flavours of web mail, as well as Blackberries, iPhones and Palm Pilots. To reach less than 100 percent of your potential audience, try putting some of the following clever barriers in the way.

Attachments are an effective way of cutting down the reach of your press release. People reading email on mobile devices often have trouble reading them. Spam filters can treat them with suspicion and if you’re lucky the recipient may use Lotus Notes as a client and have difficulty decoding the attachment.

Another advantage of attachments is that you can trim your audience further by using difficult-to-open file formats: such as the new .docx file format used by Word 2007 – many journalists will struggle to read them.

Attachments are great for bulking up the size of your release so it won’t squeeze through email gateways. If you’re  clever you can put high resolution logos in, say, your Word attachments.  These add  nothing to the press release but can swiftly push the file size over the email gateway threshold.

A further reason for a sending press release as an attachment is its invisibility to email search. So, when a journalist decides to look for your press release among the hundreds and thousands in their email in-box, it will be extremely difficult to find.

2. Minimize relevance

One of the best ways to make sure your press release fails is to make sure it has no relevance to any sane audience. For example, if you are a technology company and you buy a new fleet of cars you can squander your PR budget and make sure any future release goes directly to an editor’s recycle bin by sending the story to the technology press.

3. Send it out whenever

Timeliness is everything. So by sending out releases when you feel like it, you can boost your chances of failure. Better still, for print publications try waiting until five minutes after the final deadline. For online publications wait until the story has already broken elsewhere.

4. Organize schedules so contacts are unavailable for interview

Good journalists are such annoying creatures. Rather than simply printing your press release verbatim and passing the contact details over to their advertising departments, they may want to speak to the people mentioned in your releases. A tried and tested technique for avoiding these complications is to send the people overseas shortly after dispatching the release. International communications are good these days, so just packing them off to a partner conference in Atlanta isn’t good enough, you need to make sure they are on an 18 hour trans-pacific flight or, better still, holidaying on a remote island.

5. Use poor writing skills

Obvious when you think about it. If your writing is poor and confused so that editors and journalists can’t understand your message you’ll kill two birds with one stone.

First, you’ll make sure the first message gets spiked in the too hard basket.

But second, as a bonus, you can establish your reputation as an illiterate idiot that isn’t worth bothering with under any circumstances. That way, your future releases will go straight to the junk pile without even being read.

6. Try bullying

Sadly this powerful technique is often underused. By threatening to talk to a journalist’s editor, or an editor’s boss about their poor response to your press release you can permanently undermine your relationship with scores of people (remember journalists talk to each other so this is an efficient way of burning lots of bridges).

Another approach is to tell the journalist the company in question is advertising thus triggering their professional editorial independence.

7. Don’t bother with photographs

Journalists and editors like photographs. They love good photographs. By making sure they are no photographs of any description you’ll increase the chances that your press release is regarded as totally useless. If you think that’s taking things too far, try sending out crappy, unusable photos. Photos with dozens of un-named people work well in this respect. Getting people to hold champagne glasses, stand in front of company logos, gather around a totally unreadable normal-size bank cheque or impersonate public enemy number one mug shots are all effective techniques for creating instantly ignorable press release photographs.

8. Send it to everyone regardless

This is a great way to upset journalists and degrade both your personal and company reputation. At the same time if you work for a PR agency you can bill the client heaps for having a, er, comprehensive, mailing list and then bill them for time as you and your staff spend all day on the phone dealing with angry editors.

9. Keep things as dull as possible

Journalists prefer interesting stories. Public relations professionals recognise this and use clever tricks like passive sentences, boring ideas, irrelevant background facts, tired clichéd adjectives and implausible anodyne quotes to turn them off and help speed their press releases on their way to the great recycle bin in the sky.

In house and government public relations people are usually better at delivering boring releases than agency staff – if you’re worried your writing sparkles too much, they have much to teach you.

10. Make sure the subject line obscures the message

Even experienced public relations operatives can slip up by giving an email release an interesting subject line. The danger is that after putting in all the hard work required to guarantee nobody takes the slightest notice of their press release they use active language to put a relevant timely subject line message that tempts editors and journalists to open the document and read more.

The good news is there are fail-safe subject lines that are certain to turn off editors and journalists so they can just skip past your release. A classic subject line like press release will probably work, if that’s too simple try important press release or important press release from Company Name.

A neat by-product of badly written subject lines is they can often fool spam detection engines into rejecting a message altogether; phrases like important announcement from Company Name or message for Clark Kent can come in handy here.

Marketing communications, the business of letting people know about your products and services, can be broken down into two distinct parts: advertising and publicity. For more about the differences between the two, see Use publicity to get noticed.

As the earlier post says, advertising is straightforward. You pay money directly to a media company. In return, you retain control over your message and how it is presented. It’s a commercial transaction.

Publicity is different. It can still cost you money – there are plenty of businesses who will willingly accept payment for their promotional services – but in general you don’t pay the media to propagate your message and you have no say over timing, placement or presentation. You can’t even be sure it will run.

In theory, you should be able to get publicity when the story you want to tell is so compelling that journalists and editors will fall over themselves to ensure it appears in their publications, blogs or broadcasts. Just remember their idea of compelling is unlikely to coincide with your opinion.

Editors are driven by the need to provide readers, viewers or listeners with the hottest news, up-to-date information, the most relevant background features and the best stories. They may also be looking for something entertaining to brighten up their pages.

Contrary to what you may think, they generally don’t care at all about whether their stories help you or your business. Or at least they shouldn’t if they are doing their job properly. However, there are some, less than totally independent publications where this logic doesn’t apply.

Another common misunderstanding about publicity is that the best way to get it is to use something known as the press release. This is a pre-written version of the story you’d like to see in print. Press releases are often written in a highly stylised format, containing the basic facts together with some background.

Press releases can work, but in general they don’t. Many go straight into the bin. And rightly so. That’s the usual place for rubbish. Others are stored, maybe for future reference or to keep potentially useful contact information in a handy place. They mainly exist because clients like them – they create an aura rather than the reality of useful media activity.

In fact, there are publicity experts who believe the overwhelming majority of press releases are never read by journalists, let alone used as the basis for an editorial item.

Some of the best communications professionals – they may call themselves public relations consultants, press agents or even something ridiculously bombastic like media consul – will tell you that press releases are only one, not particularly useful strategy and account for a tiny fraction of their work.

We’ll look more closely at the mechanics of press releases another time.

Remember, publicity involves enticing the media to write or broadcast information about your company, product or services because you have something new, important, exciting or otherwise interesting to say.

Often the best way to do this is to call a journalist and tell them, quickly and concisely, just what your story is and why it may be of interest to their readers. Like everything else in business, this is largely a matter of forming the right relationships.

If you don’t feel comfortable doing this, get some media training or hire a press agent to do the calling on your behalf. Good public relations professionals know precisely who to call and how to pitch stories in a way that will make them more interesting to journalists or editors. They can introduce you to the right people, set up face-to-face meetings or organise phone interviews and help you prepare for these.

Occasionally when you have something particularly important to announce, you may want to hold a formal press conference or maybe host a less formal gathering of journalists for morning tea, lunch or afternoon cocktails. This kind of event works best when used sparingly, it’s not always the best way of telling a specific story, but it’s a great way to make or maintain contact.

Related articles by Zemanta

• PR Spam: 10 Ways to Avoid Being Blacklisted
• Public Relations is Not Obsolete; It Just Needs New Spots
• PR Advice for Startups
• Communications Evolution, Again
• The Changing Role of Public Relations
• 5 Ways To Get Your News Out And Why They Are All Broken

If you have a product or service to sell, it’s important that as many potential customers as possible get to hear about it. Word-of-mouth marketing is a great jumping off point when you’re starting out but eventually you’ll almost certainly need to reach a wider audience. This usually means engaging with newspapers, magazines, the Internet through web sites and blogs or broadcast media.

There are two basic ways a business can use media to get attention; advertising and publicity. Newcomers sometimes confuse the two. That’s a big mistake as they are radically different and operate in parallel universes.

Advertising is always a strictly commercial matter. Generally you buy a fixed amount of space in a printed publication or air time from a radio or TV broadcaster. Online is more complicated, but it generally comes down to display advertising like banners and boom boxes or text ads. These can appear on web sites, in electronic newsletters or even as part of an application like Gmail. When you buy advertising you provide the advertising content, or what people in the business call copy, at your expense.

If you’ve got enough budget you can hire a creative team to prepare the copy on your behalf. This costs money, in some cases a lot of money, but it can be worth it if you’re running a major campaign: clued-up advertising specialists know how to press the right buttons and get results. They can be brilliant, but this isn’t always the case.

With advertising you get to say where, when and how often the copy will run. More importantly you have complete control over the message and the way it is delivered. (Well up to a point; some publishers will refuse certain ads and there are laws about what you can and can’t say in an advertisement). Advertising prices are loosely-based on the number of readers, listeners or viewers the media delivers. Experienced buyers of advertising often think in terms of CPM or the cost of reaching one thousand people.

In contrast with advertising, you have almost no control over publicity; all the important decisions are made by editors, journalists, photographers and other media professionals. They may choose to listen to you or read your material, but they might equally ignore your input.

In principal it all depends on the newsworthiness of your message. If your story strikes a chord, they’ll take notice. If it’s boring, they’ll ignore it.

Surprising though it may sometimes seem, professional journalists have a strict ethical code. They are not for sale. Their job is to keep their readers informed about important events in their own area regardless of any external commercial considerations.

This is why you should avoid applying any kind of commercial pressure when seeking publicity. For example, don’t imply that you will place advertising with their media property in return for favourable treatment.

At best you will insult them or offend their professional pride. At worst you will create a situation where ethical considerations mean they either can’t touch your story or they choose to take a more hostile approach just to sheet home their independence.

If they take notice of your publicity, the best media operators will attempt to get behind the message you want to send. Their over-riding loyalty is to their readers. Professional journalists don’t regard aiding your sales as any part of their job. Nor should they.

This might seem confusing to some people, after media companies are usually commercial business. You might think editors and journalist would jump at the chance of making money. However, taking a longer term view makes good business sense. A media property with a strong ethical code will be held in high regard by its readers, listeners or viewers.

This not only means that more people get to consume the property’s editorial; it also means they get to see the advertising material. Significantly, a product with strong editorial will usually deliver the better, i.e. more involved or wealthier, kind of customer. At the same time, research shows advertising works best when the editorial is credible.

Even when a journalist does respond to your publicity in a largely favourable way, they still get to choose what is said, where it is said and when the story runs. They choose the angle. They also get to decide how many words to devote to your message and they can choose whether your rivals get to comment or not. An editor might choose to use your supplied photographs or other graphic material, they may not. A journalist – usually a sub-editor, will write the headline and captions.

You wouldn’t normally expect to pay money to a publisher when they use your publicity. However, there are some media properties that will ask for a payment in return for running it.

Alternatively some properties might agree to run your vetted publicity material in return for you buying advertising. In fact there’s a whole spectrum of arrangements from total separation of editorial and advertising all the way to properties that are, in effect, nothing but paid advertising.

At the extreme end of the scale you are dealing with vanity publishers – people who will take your money and make you look good. Your mother may like the result, but you won’t sell much this way.

As a general rule of thumb, publications that sell their editorial integrity are not well-regarded by their readers – that’s your prospective customers. Experienced publicity people often discount the value of these publications.

Apart from anything else, readers tend to know when they are looking at paid-for editorial and learn to trust it less than truly independent content. In particular, younger, media literate, people are especially cynical about this kind of material.

One commonly used measure is that four of their readers would be worth one reader of a more prestigious, editorially independent title. That also applies to advertising in these publications – you can expect to pay considerably less for your space in a publication that isn’t fully independent.

While many businesses organise their own publicity, others hire specialists to do it for them. The most common arrangement involves hiring a public relations or PR consultant. Amongst other things it’s their job to know which media properties and individual media professionals are receptive to which message.

A good PR company can save you a huge amount of time and trouble. They’ll help you prepare your message and train you in the art of handling the inevitable follow-up questions. They’ll make sure the message gets to the right people at the right time.

Some public relations companies have a considerable amount of intellectual property tied up with publication and journalist databases. Other operators keep all this information in their heads, Palm Pilots or Filofaxes. They cultivate contacts and learn the best way to approach each potential outlet.

Be warned that public relations companies rarely guarantee results. In fact, you should go out of your way to avoid any PR operator who makes that kind of promise.

One misconception is that publicity is all about issuing press releases or holding press conferences. Both can have an important role to play, but they are only the tip of the iceberg; most important PR takes place out of sight. We’ll look more at this later.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Future PR Skills 2008: Create a “New Media Relations” Program
• Internet Ad Spend To Pass Broadcast By 2011, Despite Slowing Economy: VSS
• Get Noticed (and Other PR Blog Jots)
• TV Decoder: Traditional Media Not Dead Yet