A PR dilemma

An interesting question came up the other day over at UK Business Forums. Is it best to send out a press release by email, or as a hard copy? Clients ask me this all the time, so I though it might be worth looking at a few pros and cons.

Experience suggests that each option has advantages and disadvantages. Many PRs get sent by email these days. The perceived advantage of email distribution is that it makes the receiver’s life easy. Instead of having to type the story out, s/he just cuts and pastes bits from your email into a Word doc or direct to DTP. Pro-email publicists point out that distributing PRs this way is efficient for both the distributor and receiver.

But there are some problems:

1. Deleting an email is easy. A PR printed on paper is physically there, lingering on an editor’s desk, begging to be published.

2. Sending out mass email can result in spam blacklisting.

3. Printed copy is much easier to read and to take along to editorial meetings.

It’s unwise to assume that all journalists and editors are lazy and will only publish PRs that they can cut and paste straight from an email. The average PR is about 400 words long - about five or six minutes’ typing. If your PR contains a good story, having to type it out isn’t going to discourage anyone.

The fact is that lots of print journalists are getting used to spending the first ten minutes of every working day deleting press releases from their inboxes - often without reading them. Unsolicited email releases are often treated as spam, so sending hard copy gives you a definite edge, especially if you can include freebies or product samples in the package. If you want to send digitized images to support your story (always a good idea), then post them on your website and include the URL in your printed PR.

If you’re targeting web-only media, it’s a different story. In that case consider sending out your PR via an online news service such as www.PRweb.com. Handling it that way reduces the risk that someone will click ‘list as junk’ and get you consigned to the obvlivion of a spam blacklist.

The most important thing to is to write a damn good PR in the first place. On which subject, more soon…