Monday’s blog about the misdirected press releases generated a lot of interest, both in the form of official blog comments, as well as email messages.
Sara, who works in the public relations industry — and sends me good press releases — emailed me her thoughts:
“…love your blog – and cannot believe what utter rubbish press releases you receive! We work so hard to ensure that our clients’ releases are going to the correct journalist, and feel dismayed and disappointed that other agencies cannot be a little more astute when it comes to selecting publications to target!”
From my perspective, I concur that Sara and her company (Berkeley PR) do an excellent job in properly targeting press releases and do so in a professional and helpful manner. I am sure that if everyone functioned with similarly high standards that I would have had no examples to share in Monday’s post.
She further theorized that
“Press releases and other articles are simply distributed to every website and journalist…in the world with the hope that the copy will by syndicated to other sites with embedded hyperlinks – which in turn should help the natural search rankings.”
So then, if my blog had included links to the culprits’ websites, I would have been doing exactly what they wanted. I wish I could say that I’m too smart to fall for that, but this time it was just dumb luck.
By the way, I had so much fun sharing outrageous headlines with you on Monday that I think I’ll do it again sometime.
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Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is a full-time, career author. He’s published scores of books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of blog posts, with experience as a publisher, editor, and commercial freelance writer. A passionate wordsmith, his goal is to change the world one word at a time. Learn more at PeterLyleDeHaan.com.
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