“We’re kind of stuck on making an old format meet a new purpose,” notes Jeff Domansky, CEO of Peak Communications and author of the popular public relations blog, The PR Coach.

“The first social press release format came out seven years ago, but we’re not using it. People are falling back on the old format, and complaining that it doesn’t work.”

[Editor's note: Shift Communications used PR Newswire's multimedia press release ("MNR") to issue their social media release template. The MNR remains popular today.]

So what does work in crafting messages today? Building storytelling into the mix.

“Write a good story that communicates all the salient information you need to get out there, and do it in an interesting way,” suggests  Steve Farnsworth, chief strategist at Jolt Digital Marketing and publisher of the widely read Steveology blog. “Stories are how we understand things.”

In addition to building understanding, framing messages in the context of a story makes them relatable and memorable. Stories provide contextual glue that makes key messages stick.

“You can tell the story, and press releases are a great way to do it,” says Farnsworth. “Press releases should be journalistic, not formulaic. Trustworthy content has a balanced point of view. It asks and answers the right questions. It doesn’t love itself. It tries to inform and educate.”

Adding narrative elements to your press releases

Building a story into a message as succinct as a press release can be challenging. The key is to add narrative elements to your press release, such as:

• A quote from the member of the product development team (instead of a canned exec quote) discussing the genesis of the product, and problem it solves or the opportunity it creates.
• A video clip of a customer describing a successful outcome or demonstrating the utility of a product.
• An account from an employee on the service side of the business, describing decreases in support or other indications of customer happiness.
• An infographic illustrating potential savings or efficiencies that could accrue over time.

“There’s a huge opportunity for communicators who are brave enough to deviate from the status quo and try new things,” notes Lou Hoffman, CEO of the Hoffman Agency, a leading Silicon Valley PR firm and author of the Ishmael’s Corner blog, where storytelling is a common theme.

But storytelling can be a tough sell to executives, who may be focused more on promoting the brand than serving the audience. Hoffman is waging an ongoing war against “corporate drivel.” He believes that a good story can fit strategically within the PR message, as long as the message answers two questions:

• Does the content deliver the “frame” that today’s journalists need to write a story?
• Does the content resonate with the target audience when reaching out to customers/prospects directly?

The storytelling arc

Putting the audience in front of the brand is one challenge when it comes to writing more engaging copy. Figuring out how to build the story into the content – especially when you’re drafting a press release – can also be difficult at first. But the classic storytelling arc, in which the scene is set, the conflict arises and is resolved in the climax, which then leads to the denouement, is a structure that works for a press release, too.

Borrowing from Hoffman’s post on storytelling techniques, this is our simplified vision of how the storytelling arc structure can work for press releases.

If you frame the message in terms of the story of the experience you would expect your audience to encounter if they bought your product used your service/read your book/attended your event/etc., the storytelling arc structure makes a lot of sense. To the point of the aforementioned war on drivel, it also leaves precious little space for, shall we say, the wandering narrative that folks up and down the approval chain are tempted to stick into your press release.

Though they’ve been around for decades, the press release is ripe for a re-think.

“Look at the release as the executive summary of any newsworthy things that comes out,” suggests Eddy Badrina, co-founder and chief strategy officer at BuzzShift, a digital strategy agency. “Break the formula. Dive into the value proposition, the benefits, case studies, the feature set and the CEO’s visionary take on what the announcement means to the company and the market.”

There’s no reason for any message we issue to be classified as boring, dull or dead. Taking pages from the storytellers’ playbook will help keep your messages lively, relatable … and effective.

Have you experimented with different approaches to your press releases? I’d love to your out-of-the-box approaches to press release writing! Stick a link in the comments for me to admire and tell me the story of YOUR stories!  :)

Author Sarah Skerik is PR Newswire’s vice president of content marketing, and is the author of the e-book “Unlocking Social Media for PR.” Follow her on Twitter at @sarahskerik.

“Press releases have a chance to be something so much more relevant,” notes Steve Farnsworth, chief strategist at Jolt Digital Marketing, and publisher of the widely-read Steveology blog. “But they have to be immediately specific and relevant.”

Who’s reading press releases (and why?)

According to research PR Newswire conducted with Forrester on the visitors to PRNewswire.com, a significant portion of millions of monthly visitors are engaged in researching a product or service, and they find  press releases through their use of search engines.  People are also accessing press releases increasingly on mobile devices –views to PR Newswire’s mobile site have almost doubled in the last year. 

What’s the attraction? Press releases, as on-record statements from the organizations issuing them, are viewed as credible sources of information, and they are read and shared by the public, as well as journalists, analysts and bloggers.

“Most press releases that are produced aren’t read by the media, they’re read by the people,” says Farnsworth. “Your readers are going to be your stakeholders, and you’ll reach more directly that way than through the media.”

The long tail of the press release

Many communicators distribute the press releases in one way or another, whether through an email to industry players, a newsletter to customers or a commercial newswire service.  Once distributed, press releases develop an amazing ability to work their way into key industry niches, attaining the credibility of earned media status as they are liked, commented upon and shared.

Additionally, press releases are read long after they’re issued and the PR department has moved on to other things.  PR Newswire’s data indicates that most of the views the average press release will accrue over the four months following the distribution of the message – longer than many communicators expect.   A good message can actually increase its audience’s attention span.

To capitalize upon the ongoing attention the message generates, the press release also needs to provide direction for interested readers to take.

“The press release needs to be a guide to something bigger or better than itself, such as an infographic or ebook,” commented Eddy Badrina, co-founder and chief strategy officer at BuzzShift, a digital strategy agency.  “In fact, all those things you spend time creating probably deserve a press release.”

The recent “Dove Beauty Sketches” campaign included a exemplary press release that – while also loaded with multimedia elements – was also masterfully written to capture attention behind-the-scenes information about the wildly successful social media campaign.

Author Sarah Skerik is PR Newswire’s vice president of content marketing, and is the author of the e-book “Unlocking Social Media for PR.”  Follow her on Twitter at @sarahskerik .

First, a little background. When we’re talking about website user experience, we’re referring to all the different aspects of content, structure, and navigation that enable a site visitor to do the things he or she wants to do, whether that means reading a white paper, registering for an event, browsing information or purchasing things. Poor UXD means that something on the site prevents the visitor from doing what he or she intended to do.

This blog post was actually inspired by a press release I reviewed for a client last week. It was long, wandering from topic to topic. It tried to tell the story of a new product along with the story of the product pipeline, as well as the story of a successful acquisition. It tried to achieve too much, and as I read through it, I really wanted to stop reading. And that is exactly what we don’t want our readers to do.

As we’re drafting press releases, we should be thinking about what exactly we want our readers to do, and then structure the content accordingly. But how do we design press releases (and other content, for that matter) to encourage readers to move forward, to the outcome we want them to take?

Here are a few ideas:

1. Identify the specific outcome you want your primary audience to take. In most cases, you’ll want other constituents to read the story, too. But trying to serve all audiences in one message is tough to do. Focus the content on one audience, and one outcome, such as getting industry media and bloggers to write a particular story, generating social shares of an image or getting readers to click on a specific link.
2. Focus the content of every paragraph on leading the reader to that outcome. If your writing starts to veer from the path, so will your reader. Stay focused on the key message. Other messages will need their own separate vehicles, whether that means another press release or something else, such as a blog post or inclusion in a customer newsletter.
3. Structure the content to enable the reader to get to the desired outcome. It’s important to assume that most readers do not read all the way through a piece of content, unless it is meeting their needs and hooking their interest every single step of the way. This means that in addition to keeping the message focused, you need to put links where people will click them – such as right after the first paragraph, rather than at the very end of the copy where they could be easily overlooked. Weave links and access to supporting information throughout the content.

As writers, we need to think first about what our readers want to read and accomplish, rather than what messages our organizations want to convey. Press releases should march the reader straight to the key points of the story and wrap up with an inevitable conclusion. Just as marketers strive to prevent their sales funnels from leaking, and webmasters focus on increasing the time visitors spend on the site, writers need to be thinking about maintaining reader attention as they author content.

Sarah Skerik, PR Newswire’s vice president of content marketing, is the author of the e-book “Unlocking Social Media for PR.” Follow her on Twitter at @sarahskerik

However, as an organization builds out a content strategy, it’s also important to consider the role the published articles, case studies, press releases, blog posts, white papers, etc., work together to create a pathway for readers that ends (ideally) in conversion.

“Content creates the context for consumption,” noted Ninan Chacko, PR Newswire’s CEO, at the recent Content Marketing Summit hosted by the Business Development Institute. “Earned and paid media historically have been separate silos, but that’s changing. Social media has brought the two together. Audiences don’t live in the paid or the earned environments. The challenge is now how to craft content that lives across different media.”

The challenge for communicators, he went on to say, is in understanding the resulting metrics, and how engagement activities, such as social interactions, contribute ultimately to conversion.

“Ninan made a great case for engagement as a metric. While retweets, likes, and other signs of engagement might not directly translate to leads, they are invaluable when it comes to measuring the success of your efforts,” wrote blogger John Brhel of Social Eddy, in his own recap of the event, titled, “Top 5 Quotes from Content Marketing Summit 2013.“

Here is Ninan’s presentation deck, which illustrates the connection between content and customer conversion:

A snapshot of the Dove “Real Beauty Sketches” MNR. Click the image to see it live.

The biggest viral story this month was undoubtedly the latest in the Real Beauty campaign from Dove. Titled “Real Beauty Sketches (#wearebeautiful),” this installment clearly illustrated the issues women have with negative self-perception.

And while I could spend a lot of time talking about the genius of this campaign, I’m going to focus on how the organizations behind the campaign – Unilever, Ogilvy Advertising and Edelman – chose to promote the campaign.

Days later, the global Tweet stream is still going strong.

It’s not unusual at all for a brand to promote a new advertising campaign with a press release. In most cases, the press release is pretty standard, describing the campaign, the related calls to action and special offers for customers. The press release for the Dove campaign, however, took a different angle.

An exemplary headline:

Instead of focusing on the campaign, the PR team at Edelman focused on some of the stories underlying the campaign, and they did so right out of the gate with a compelling headline:

FBI-TRAINED FORENSIC ARTIST CONDUCTS A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT TO ILLUSTRATE THE ONGOING STRUGGLE WOMEN HAVE WITH RECOGNIZING THEIR OWN BEAUTY

Dove® “Real Beauty Sketches” Campaign Reveals the Dramatic Difference Between Self-Image and What Others See

This is a fantastic headline, for a few reasons:

• The headline elegantly captures the two key themes of the press release.
• Credibility for the story is built immediately noting that an FBI-trained forensic artist is at the center of the social experiment the campaign illustrates.
• It doesn’t waste space with the brand name or campaign title. Those are relegated to the subhead, which neatly describes the Real Beauty Sketches campaign itself.
• It is almost tweetable, checking in at 136 characters (with spaces) but I’m not going to quibble length, because the descriptive language employed in this example works, and is necessary.

This is the kind of headline treatment I’d like to see on more press releases – one that leads with facts and story elements, rather than a brand announcing something. It reminds me of advice I heard Kevin Helliker of the Wall Street Journal give PR people and years ago: Write the headline you want to see in the paper, and use that in your pitch email and press release headline.

Followed by a near-perfect lead:

The writer of this press release set the hook with the lead sentence, and followed immediately with salient facts that ensured the reader didn’t go anywhere but onward:

The way women depict themselves is dramatically different from how others perceive them. Over half (54%) of women globally agree that when it comes to how they look, they are their own worst beauty critic¹, which equates to a staggering 672 million women around the world.²

Once again, we see restraint employed when it comes to brand mentions. The brand and campaign aren’t mentioned until midway through the opening paragraph.

Now, let’s be clear: I’m not anti-brand, not at all. But I think most will agree that the lead sentence from this release is leagues better than the more standard-issue (and, let’s face it, boring) lead we see so often. You know the one I’m talking about:

XYZ organization, a leading provider of whatever, is proud to announce today a jargon-laden description of something.

The lead paragraph doesn’t exist for to extol the virtues of the organization issuing the release. It exists to set up the story and develop the reader’s attention. Whether the goal of the press release is gaining media coverage or engaging the audiences or driving social awareness (or any combination thereof,) a well-written lead will go a long way to securing the results you want to see for the campaign.

My advice when it comes to leads is simple:

• Don’t confuse the lead with the boilerplate. Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to leave company information out of the lead. The exception is material news from a public company, when putting the company name and ticker symbol in the lead is standard practice.
• Use the lead to develop the story.
• Think back to the inverted pyramid of journalistic writing. Put the key points at the top of the message.
• The lead and the headline should work together to describe and then start to develop the story – even in a press release.

“Unselfish” story angles

The body of the release is devoted to developing two stories, offering an up-close look at the forensic artist who did the sketches of the subjects, and at the underlying issue of negative self-perception. I use the term “unselfish” to describe this approach, because it puts the audience first. The focus on the artist’s professional background and his experience with the campaign is meaty stuff. Any reporter covering this story would be interested in these details. And for the more casual reader – the millions of individuals who read, tweet and share press releases each month – the detail on the artist lends powerful credibility and authenticity to the story.

The issue of self-perception, which is at the heart of Dove’s ongoing Real Beauty campaign, is also discussed. Again, the press release writer provided substance – in this case, survey data – that is useful to professional media and credible with other audiences.

Multimedia

If the press release for this highly visual campaign had been text only, the brands behind the message would have left a lot of visibility on the table. Instead of using a plain text format (which by far still the most common press release format used today,) the team wrapped the excellent release in equally good multimedia.

Delivered in the form of a multimedia news release (“MNR” in industry parlance), the message is fully formed, wrapped in three videos that illustrate how the campaign worked and offering interesting insights into the artist and subjects.

There’s no question that the Real Beauty Sketches campaign is a fantastic piece of work. My own Facebook feed has been full of commentary from my own friends for days. And in true Internet style, it’s even spawned a funny parody.

I really like this campaign -- but I truly love the treatment the team gave the press release. Kudos to all of the people behind one of the most effective press releases I’ve seen.

Want to explore new ways to tell your brand’s story? We’d be happy to chat with you about creating a video or a designing multimedia distribution strategy that will increase discovery of your brand’s messages. We’d love to hear your ideas, and help turn them into reality. Contact us for more information.