All About Abby

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I'm a senior Management major/Public Relations minor from Cincinnati about to graduate in May from Ohio Northern University!

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

All About the Release

I am glad our week six readings had to deal with PR press releases because at my internship this past summer, my supervisor told me one thing I need to improve on is my writing skills, especially when it comes to writing news releases. While the chapters we read this week don’t exactly deal with how to write a good press release, I still took away some great information from The New Rules of Marketing and PR, by David Scott.

I found out the water company I worked for did some good things when we wrote press releases, such as: we sent out press releases when we had something interesting to share, when we won an award or new customers, and when we were holding press conferences. Also, the water company simultaneously posted our release on our own website so more customers could see the news right away and we posted links in the releases to lead customers to the water company’s website. The water company kept the news release live for as long as the content was appropriate. The links we included in the press release was very important because the link allowed our customers to find more information about our company and led the customers to specific content. The link can lead to increased views on pages of the website and increased website search engine rankings.

However, we could have done some things better with our news releases. The water company did not add social media tags to our press releases. We could have used Technorati, digg, or del.icio.us so the press release would have been found by more people. Another thing my past company did not do is sent the release to one of the news release wires, like Business Wire, Market Wire or PR Newswire. Also, the water company did not have a regular editorial calendar that included a series of news releases to show the company was busy. The media room on our website was lacking news releases at times which showed that the company was not moving forward or had nothing to contribute to the industry.

The readings for week six were helpful and I will definitely apply these lessons at my next job.

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