When it comes to effective PR, editors are the real experts. I was delighted that Per Henricsson, editor at Elektroniktidningen sent me the following thoughts about the importance of dates on press releases:
Does the date really matter?
Recently I got a press release about a new ground-breaking product from well known company. Well, actually it was sent by their PR agency, but that’s business as usual. I get tons of press releases and when the daily one from a big US semiconductor company appears in my e-mail at 5 pm, I know it’s time to start heading home.
Normally, I just read the headlines of the press releases before clicking on the delete button, but this one caught my attention despite the fact that it was fairly long. ”…. world’s thinnest waterproof …” product of its kind. “This is something that my readers would be interested in and something I can easily turn into a story for our website”, I thought.
Of course I had to translate it into Swedish first, I couldn’t just copy and paste like my English colleagues. In Sweden we have a saying that goes “never check a good story”. The thin and waterproof component sounded familiar, so I did a search on our website.
Bingo! I remembered correctly. One and a half years ago, the company issued a press release saying that the they had developed the world’s thinnest and waterproof product of that kind. I had written the piece and I was beginning to feel stupid. The new press release didn’t offer that many details, so I still couldn’t be sure that it was the same ”product” I already had written about. I gave the part number to Google and my fast and cheap research department rewarded me with a hit. It turned out to be the original English press release issued by the company on December 12 last year. Today was January 25, 2012. Fooled again!
Normally I would just say the f-word, ditch the story and begin with another one, but this time I sent a short e-mail to PR-agency asking them why they had changed the date on the press release? The original was dated December 12 and the one they sent was a more vague “January 2012”. It’s hard to express oneself in a foreign language and maybe I wasn’t clear enough when I wrote the question. The answer I got simply stated “Did you mean compared to product availability in Japan?”
A similar thing happened with one of the high profile semiconductor companies last spring. Their PR agency changed the date on the press release regarding a soft core from May 2 to May 4, the day they sent me the press release.
The reason? A public holiday in Europe prevented them from sending the press release on the correct date, hence the date had to be altered. We didn’t have that day off in Sweden so I had picked up the story from my US colleagues and published it the day before I got the press release.
That’s just two examples. I’m sure most of them just slip trough unnoticed. And does it really matter? Probably not. A product is interesting to my readers a long time after it is released. A news story is still “new” if my readers haven’t seen it before. But, the world is shrinking all the time. And If I get caught, my readers regard me as lazy and ignorant. And they lose confidence in me in the same way I lose confidence in the PR agencies.
So does the date really matter? I’d love to hear what other agencies and journalists think about this issue.
Per’s observation that he remembered the product the second time around confirms my theory that all good eds have long memories.
As an editor myself, I consider dates on PR to be essential. Some PR agencies remove the dates altogether or fudge them deliberately to fool sleepy eds. This bugs me for 2 reasons: firstly it creates the thought in the back of my mind that I can’t trust the agency in question; and secondly it means I have to waste time either googling the product or visiting the website of the manufacturer in question to see when the PR originated.
Of course some product types have a longer shelf life than others. I don’t particularly mind running product news on a connector that’s a couple of years old but if it’s e.g. a mixed-signal chip and it’s more than a few months old, chances are it’s already obsolete or outperformed by newer devices.
As Per points out, just because it’s not new doesn’t mean it’s not news to my readers. An added danger is that, in a competitive publishing environment, I can’t afford for my readers to notice that I’m publishing product news after competing magazines – at least not on a regular basis. Let’s not forget, engineers have long memories too!
What do you think of the following comment I received from a PR-company with a Japanese customer?
“The purpose of our press release this week is to announce that the product is fully available on the European market. I think you’re the only one who has spotted that we made the announcement in this way. Hope you understand – have a good weekend.”
Hi Per,
I guess there is a place for this kind of release – we see it sometimes in the IT market. BUT if you’re announcing availability in Europe, then the release should clearly state that – not dress up the announcement as a brand new product. To be honest, I’m surprised that companies would still be rolling products out region-by-region: I suspect that in some cases the company is really pre-announcing products in other geos, but being more honest about availability in Europe. Mike