I was talking yesterday to the head of one of the big training certification bodies about how to increase the chance of their press releases getting into the pages of the professional press.
I thought it might be useful to set down the way it works for me, in case anyone reading who represents a commercial supplier was wondering.
If a press release is about some milestone for your company (millionth order, expansion into a new region, new product), it isn't material for our news pages. Put bluntly, it's very newsworthy to you but probably not to the majority of health and safety managers. There are trade publications that will carry that material as news, but not the professional mags. Apart from anything else, we get up to 30 releases of that type every day; we'd never have room.
But if you are just keen to get your organisation's name in the news pages, that's not so difficult. The trick is to give journalists a hook they recognise as news. It's a bit like tricking cats to eat their worm pills; crush up the corporate info and hide it in some chunks of appetising newsworthy information. I think i'll leave that analogy while the going's good.
So the fleet maintenance company that commissions a survey (and a proper survey, not just 30 companies) that finds one in three company cars is not properly roadworthy, is going to get a mention because that's a great bit of information to put in front of our readers. They look good for warning people, and so do we.
err, that's it.
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