Educate your clients

You've just landed a new account and both you and the clients are celebrating. You, because you've just landed a new account, and the client - because at last they get to let the world know how wonderful they are. But you're an enlightened company and know that the media don't want pages and pages of releases rambling on and on with quotes from at least three different people intertwined with the last 20 years of the company's history.

You prepare your first batch of releases and submit these 'one-pagers' to your client. "Well, these seem fine," is their initial response, "but you haven't put in our latest sales figures, and then there's Joe Soap who's recently joined us from Company A, where he single-handedly took them from zeros to heroes and did we mention that our CEO is a keen amateur photographer and by the way I can't see the bit where you tell the media our product is UNIQUE!"

They won't take your word for it and they probably don't read Bizcommunity and the many media experts who constantly write that they don't want more than two, maybe three, paragraphs tops in a release.

Simple answer

The answer is simple, or maybe not too simple.

Have you thought of getting your clients together for a media breakfast where you invite an editor or senior journalist (in their field of expertise) and get them to sit and listen to just WHAT THE EDITOR WANTS? Yes, of course this won't change some of them - but it will certainly influence most of them and make your job easier.

If you feel you don't have enough clients or that the particular 'expert' you want is just too busy, then maybe you could ask them for a simple email laying out what they are and are not prepared to look at in the form of releases. Even this will go a long way to making your life easier.

Maybe then they will understand what the media mean when they say they won't read past the first paragraph unless it tells them something they don't already know and grabs them enough to read the next paragraph...