Doing Words

How to write and deliver a startup press release

// October 12th, 2011 // Other news

I’m so old that I had a whole career in journalism and PR before the visual web even existed. I know, I can hardly believe it myself, but maybe that’s a symptom of early-stage Alzheimer’s. So I’ve written and read a lot of press releases over the years. Press releases are much less important these days, for various reasons, but they can still add some momentum to your startup business. Here’s some tips for the first-time press release writer.

Most first-timers work really hard to make sure they’ve written a good story, but when you’re writing a press release, that’s actually not the goal. A time-poor journalist scans press releases very quickly looking for good news angles, things which, in a couple of keystrokes, can become a headline and first paragraph that will draw the eye of the reader.

A great news angle:

• Is stated simply, without jargon or overly formal language
• Is never more than 15 words
• Makes a surprising assertion
• Leaves a question unanswered

Usually it’s not possible to get that all in a single 15 word sentence. Instead, try to write your news angle as 2-3 (max 4) bullet points.

An example:

• New Aussie online store growing fast, even though it sells only one product
• For young professional men who don’t have time to shop for fashion
• Young, charismatic, founder with a surprising business story

The simplest way to improve your press release is to make the first bullet point your headline and put the second two news angles as bullet points between the headline and body copy.

With good news angles up the top of your press release a journalist may not even read the rest of your press release, just call you for an interview before they really understand what the story is. Or they may run the whole press release as their story.

No numbers

From this day forward until you’re required by ASX/NASDAQ to report the data publicly, never disclose how many customers and how much revenue you’ve had, currently have, or expect to have. Instead, you talk about growth in customers and revenue in terms of “doubled” or “tripled” or “grown by 150% since launch” or whatever. Never disclose a hard number as it can be used against you by competitors, media, analysts, investors and others in future.

Distribution

If you’re a startup and can’t afford a media relations agency to distribute your press release to the media, for heaven’s sake don’t try to research the email addresses of relevant media contacts and send them out yourself — there are more important things you should be doing (MVP, customer discovery, analysis, pivot, you know the drill). Traditional distribution services like AAP MediaNet in Australia will be too expensive so try PRWire, Get2Press, Getthewordout or google “australia press release distribution” — there’s heaps of ‘em. If you have an international story, PRWeb is good. Don’t tweet or Facebook press releases (very poor form) though you may be forgiven for tweeting a link to a blog post based on your press release.

Be prepared

Be prepared to take a phone interview about your business and the product as soon as the press release is out (though don’t be disappointed if you don’t get a single one first time around). It’s important to be well-prepared — practice with a journalist friend if you have one, with a media relations professional if you can afford one, or just a buddy who watches too much TV news and can do a convincing impression of a cantankerous journalist.

Take the interview on your mobile phone — that way if the interview’s not going the right way and you need to stop, recover and think about how to get things back on track, you can hang up on the journalist and call them back, blaming poor network coverage for the drop out.

If you don’t know the answer, if you can’t remember the industry statistic, if you can’t remember the caller’s name: be honest and admit it. Offer to call, text or email back with the missing info and make sure you do it before you take another journalist’s call, or really, do anything else at all. A frustrated journalist with only 90% of the story will be tempted to make up the missing 10% or punish you by writing a negative piece.

Good luck!