Missing Features

Press releases are odd, old creatures. Like the print media to which they were designed decades ago to serve, press releases are on a downward decline into irrelevance.

The goal of a press release is to announce a major development in your company: be it a new product, an acquisition, a spectacular earnings report or an exciting new hire. But the press release has a few problems:

1. Too much corporate blah text reduces readability (and user faith in the information);
2. The general format is unfriendly; and,
3. You can’t easily automatically track when new press releases appear.

No RSS?
Most journalists under 30 know what an RSS feed is, and probably a good amount use an RSS reader to read blogs. Why should these journalists need to be called and pitched by investor relations employees on a press release, when they could just add your company’s RSS feed to their blog roll and know to read the release themselves when it appears?

And let’s not forget about the legions of bloggers who exist around mainstream journalism: they are reporting on your company, discussing decisions offer opinions on future performance to possible investors. And they definitely use RSS to track other blogs and announcements.

Keep It Relevant

Blogs engender so much more faith in content than press releases. Why? Because a well written blog post lacks the corporate blah text — the fluff text — that kills the entire piece. The whole press release format is tired: solid opening summary (bam!), filler, meaningless quote (wam!), filler, solid closer (with more information phone number!).

The biggest risk to having a company blog is losing relevance over time. It’s critical to maintain that relevance by keeping your message clear, focused, on target and relevant to the user. Most of the guidelines for email newsletter usability work for the corporate blog.

Make It Easy

The internet is the great communication equalizer: journalists no longer need a network of contacts at organizations in order to get instant access to instant news from the business world. Regular Joe Citizens can find this new now, just as easily.

Here a few pointers for your corporate blog:

• Unless you are Google, post infrequently occasionally but consistently;
• Make your posts as relevant to the user as possible (tell the sys admin to post about esoteric topics in generalization on his own blog);
• Define internal media rules for the blog: male clear which topics shouldn’t be discussed, outline legal issues and define a posting schedule and editing/approval process;
• Use blogging software that lets you schedule a post to be published (most press releases have to be released late at night, and you don’t want to be in the office at 11 PM on a Friday after six pints of Oatmeal Stout at the District Chophouse, no matter how amazingly perfect a pint of their stout is); and,
• Use blogging software that offers clean URLs and outputs standards compliant HTML and CSS to ensure maximum exposure to search engines crawlers.

More reading: All Websites Are Blogs.

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