Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Consumer--news release....week 6

I'm definitely in agreement with David Scott in our reading this week. His thought about the direct-to-consumer news release was brilliant because no longer do we primarily focus on journalists, instead we should also target the consumers themselves. With the Internet available to essentially anyone, new releases should be more focused on the consumers. Like Scott, I don't think the original news release will ever be replaced, but creating a consumer-focused news release would greatly benefit organizations. Scott writes about the new rules of news releases and I won't repeat them because I know you've read them, but I wanted to highlight two of the rules. One, add social media tags to Technorati, DIGG, and del.icio.us so your release will be found. This rule is extremely important, especially with the growth of social media. I think that if these new releases were written well, and truly focused on the consumer the organization would generate numerous hits on their web site, if they displayed their new releases on these social media outlets. Also, the other rule that I like talks about writing releases that are replete with keyword-rich copy. David Scott explains that when writing these customer-focused news releases we must write more phrases and keywords and don't stick directly to AP style. In addition, I feel that when writing these new releases it is important to have some sort of humanistic component that truly captivates your audience, because these readers are just like you and me, they are not necessarily journalists looking for the cold hard facts, our readers want something to draw them in and something they can relate to. So, in my opinion and to add to David Scott's ideas, I think playing off of different emotions would be most beneficial in writing these new releases. What does everyone else think?

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