NewsCactus Blog

The traditional approach to creating a press release is to use the inverted pyramid writing style and answer the five W’s — who, what, when, where, why and how.

The release format would include:

• Contact information
• Headline
• Sub-heading
• Dateline
• Lead sentence/paragraph
• More details
• Quote
• Boilerplate

For a variety of reasons, this format is becoming ‘old school.’

Everyone is busy, including journalists. New press release formats get to the point faster and highlight key points easily. They also include links to supporting resources and accompanying multimedia files.

The social media release is gaining popularity, as well as housing your corporate news in a social media newsroom.

The NewsCactus online newsroom is equipped with social media bookmarking functionality. Its modules and additional links also fit the bill for social media releases.

A social media release is designed to be more authentic, to create a dialogue and provide open access to information by anyone. It should foster and support a sense of community.

A social media release should include:

• Contact information
• Headline
• Sub-heading
• Quick facts
• Multimedia elements
• Dateline
• Lead sentence/paragraph
• More details
• Quote
• Boilerplate
• Keywords
• Tags/bookmarks

And when you write a release, stick to the conventional wisdom in KISS — keep it simple stupid. More often than not, less is more. Write so the announcement is something you’d actually be interested in and read if you were someone else. Don’t use industry jargon or buzz words, rather write in language that’s easily accessible for your intended audience, and be sure you know who that audience is when you set out.

If you’re writing for the Web, you’re familiar with the importance of incorporating appropriate keywords in your prose.

If you’re a business communicator and you’re writing press releases without much thought as to who would search for your release, and what words they’d use to find it, it’s time to change.

With the digitization of information, companies who provide search mechanisms have become huge conglomerates (i.e., Google). Most of us no longer pull a printed directory to search for information, we go online and do a search. We Google it.

Thus, as communicators, it behooves us to write so that our information can be found, quickly and easily in online searches.

Here are a couple of handy tools to help you know what keywords people are searching for and what keywords you could incorporate into your news releases to help secure higher search placement:

Google Trends

Keywords at Wordtracker

For those of you familiar with Web-based applications, TinyMCE and other tools that allow you to format text for the Web, you may have noticed frustrating abnormalities in text created in Word and pasted into Web applications.

It’s true — Microsoft Word is evil when it comes to being transferred to the World Wide Web. Word encodes the text, which messes with the way it’s published on the Web.

The best solution we’ve found is to take your Word document, copy the text, paste it into Notepad or some other type of plain text program, then copy the text from Notepad and paste it into your browser window.

In version 1.1 of NewsCactus we created a new tool button to provide for copying from Word and pasting directly into the NewsCactus administrative page. This omits the step originally required of going from Word to Notepad to your NewsCactus admin site.

But a word to the wise: when your document is in Word, always go through a plain text editor (like Notepad) before pasting the text onto the Web. Chances are you’ll need to follow this procedure for WordPress and other types of blogs, unless you elect to compose inside those programs.