No matter what your business, you can make great use of a media release (press release to the ink stained wretches). Although it’s a little old school in our social media age, media releases can be an effective tool to spread your message.
5 Tips about Media Releases for Your Small Business/Private School/Summer Camp/Non-Profit Organization
- Send to people you know. It always comes back to the primary Walking Maverick lesson – Build the Community. In this case: build relationships with important bloggers in your industry, get to know the media people that like to cover stories like yours, have a good email newsletter. People enjoy helping people they know.
- Be prepared. Don’t wait until the day before you launch your next big event/product/season to have your media release outline prepared in your computer. Take a look at How to Write a Press Release from WikiHow or sign up for a service ($) like PRWeb.
- Make it a habit. If you are prepared (see above) then it should only take you a few minutes to a half an hour to prepare a media release. Knowing that, you can send out a release fairly frequently (is every 2 weeks too much? Depends on your community). Building some traditional brand recognition involves getting your message in front of folks a few times before they start to pay attention. Be careful not to be a spammer.
- Blog/Tweet/Facebook it. You’ve already done the work… now get that message out far and wide.
- Include A LINK! IMHO, the most important of #4 is Blog it. Create a blog post that gives the details and some photos of the event/product/season. Make sure you have a link available (preferably a custom landing page created just for this event/product/season) in your media release. When I was receiving regular releases as part of my previous social media job it would drive me C_R_A_Z_Y when people would send me text but no links. I would write about their event/product/season and would try to send my readers to their website but they wouldn’t have taken the time to post the original information.
When are you using media releases in your organization?