Disruptive Conversations

It happened again today... I received a news release via email from a PR firm that had some great news in it about which I want to write (and I will). However, there was one fundamental problem:

THERE WAS NO LINK TO THE NEWS RELEASE!

Not in the email from the PR firm. Not on the company/organization's website. Nowhere!

Here is the thing:

I WRITE CONTENT ONLINE!

I LIKE TO ***LINK*** TO OTHER ONLINE CONTENT!

When writing about news, I generally like to include a sentence along the lines of:

Today Company XYZ announced that ...

with a link to the news release.

Help me out here... give me a link and I'll link to it!

To me, this should just be part of PR 101. (And I do this myself... when I sent out a Voxeo news release this morning, I made sure that a copy was available for linking online from our news release page... and I'm also distributing that link in our media outreach.)

When you send me an email with a news release either in the email itself or as an attachment, please also include a link. Don't make me go search for it... if I care enough, I might... but odds are that I won't... and maybe that means I won't write about it.

Now maybe this means that you have to coordinate with whomever manages your website so that the news release goes live on your site at or before the news release hits the wire. Maybe this means that someone has to come in earlier than he or she normally does - or sign in remotely.

Do it!

Get that URL out there on your site. Or if you can't do that, at least send out the URL for where your news release is at the wire service you are using. (And I would argue to make it happen on your site so that you are driving the traffic to your site and content, versus that of the distribution service.)

And then send out that URL along with the news release!

Flickr photo courtesy of striatic.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• subscribing to my email newsletter;
• following me on Twitter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed