Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

New webmaster rules target core PR practices around press releases...At least, so Tom Foremski claims. Wrong Tom. You're way off base with your interpretation of new Google rules and how they will impact PR agencies.

Foremski's best known as the author of "Die press release, die", an infamous rant aimed at PR people. In his post, he misinterprets Google's directions on getting SEO slapped for black hat SEO linking practices. Then he wrongly applies his mistake, concludes somehow that it applies to press releases, and aims it squarely at his favorite target - PR people.

Sorry Tom. The worst practitioners of bad press releases are not PR agencies or legitimate PR pros. They are usually marketing departments or uninformed small business people who mistakenly think press releases are a great way to easily get "free advertising." Their news releases don't contain real news. They simply stuff releases full of marketing nonsense.

If you want proof of that, check out my blog where I've written 4 or 5 best-of-bad-press-release blog posts that have proven to be remarkably popular and entertaining.Most savvy PR people rarely use news releases. In fact, PR pros these days are usually social media leaders, skillful storytellers and adept content marketers.

Unfortunately, the same thing is happening in social media channels, annoying consumers and, instead of engaging them, pushing them away. It's time Foremski wrote the sequel to his famous anti-PR rant and called it "Die Marketing nonsense, die!"There's probably a very nice sequel for me too write as well. Its called "Die lazy journalism, die!"

As much as I would love for the press release to die, it’s still a very effective tool when used correctly.

As Mickie Kennedy from eReleases wrote last month, Google has saved your news release. Gone are the days of keyword-stuffing to make certain you rank high in search results. Google now rewards beautiful prose again.
That said, people still make huge mistakes with their press releases. It's not just limited to PR pros, either. Top-level executives all the way down to interns get them wrong at times.

Let’s look at eight of the top news release mistakes....