I sent out my first press release recently, for some small changes to my business' services, I did this release mainly to get go through the process as I plan on having a few major releases in the next little bit. Anyways I noticed that my release got picked up by one web hosting news site and well the PR was very different then the one I submitted and they took out some important words, and the PR makes no sense now. For example they had one sentence as: "Simplify hosting now offers bandwidth and disk space on every hosting plan" well thats not even the quote that was in the PR, I mean of course we offer that what kind of hosting plan doesn't offer that. The whole point of the PR was to announce that we launched a domain service and INCREASED bandwidth and disk space. Without the word 'more' the sentence makes little sense. I was a bit upset at the fact their changed the PR so much to the point where it looked nothing like the original. So my question is does this happen all the time? Should I expect this for my other PRs I have coming up? I can understand some formatting changes but to completely alter the PR so that it changes the message makes no sense to me. BTW the sentence about offering BW and storage was in there twice so it wasn't a typing error. Thanks for reading my babbling message.
A PR is sent out to inform the "press" of some news. The real press, if interested, will write a story based off of your PR and not just copy and paste into whatever format they are using. Actually, sometimes they do just cut n paste. The site you speak of probably lacks a real journalist and that's why errors were made. It happens. In your PR, it's important to be very clear about what's new. Don't be coy about it. Also explain how the new stuff is different than the old stuff. For instance, you could say that you feature "more" or "increased" bandwidth, but what's that mean? How much was there before? How much now? You don't have to get technical, like 100G more, but you do need to be specific. An easy way would be to point out that you now give away X% more. Finally, your next step is to contact the source and inform them of their mistake AND how to quickly fix it. Good luck!
MarketJunction is right. Your best bet if there is inaccurate information is to try to contact them. If it's just bad writing, however, there's much less that you can do.
I will send them an email. I'm just hoping this isn't going to happen all the time. I pobably should have used a % for the amount it was increased instead of a generic term like 'more'. Atleast I learned something and that was the point of this PR. thanks
Good luck with it. Remember to read over your PR and ask yourself questions. It's also a good idea to have others read it and see what questions pop up. It's amazing how much information is misinterpreted or left out when you create something that's second nature to you.
My fiance wrote it out, but it never dawned on me to use something like 25% more BW and storage. I'll remember for next time thats for sure.