TravelMole and other travel media regularly received dozens of press/news releases each day by e-mail. Majority of these releases never make it to online production – those that do make it to their online archive have some very professional traits and characteristics common to the original sender of the material.
Lou Taverna of Hospitality 1ST says, “the majority of submittals, via e-mail, can be classified as very unprofessional, the sender seems to have little knowledge of what’s really involved with formatting a release destined for the online world. Much of the content is lost among poor formatting and releases that have the look of an advertising template or sales flyer.”
Following are ten suggestions, if you really want your materials to be respected and ultimately reach a much wider audience.
1. Be sure contacts mentioned do not reply with “Out of Office” emails.
2. The release should immediately be available from the senders web site archive (if one exists), as many editors prefer to view it online and it is time-consuming and frustrating if not available. If you don’t have the resource to accomplish this, consider using a service (e.g. TravelMole’s Press Zone).
3. E-mail from a real person (i.e. [email protected]) and not a generic e-mail address (i.e. [email protected]). This person should be able to respondent immediately to media inquiries… not some canned response.
4. All links should be fully formatted, so editors don’t have to re-type them in their browsers to reach the referenced site (i.e. include http:// with any/all web sites mentioned.
5. Releases should only be formatted in MS-Word (those files with a .doc extension), which is used by most editors, not PDF files.
6. Not all editors like HTML emails, thus safer to send email release in text format without getting to fancy with formatting (i.e. using tabs, indents, type larger than 10-points, or crayon-colored type, etc.)
7. Avoid titles/subjects IN ALL CAPS, as it caused editors to spend time re-formatting it.
8. Photographs, logos and other graphics should only be submitted in .gif or .jpg formats. “Tiffs” (or .eps files) are great for magazine productions but never used on web pages. The best solution is to offer an online archive of images (fyi, TravelMole offers such a service).
9. Avoid sending attachments, which clogs editors’ email boxes. Use links for downloading of documents.
10. Avoid self-serving, glorifying superlatives to describe your company, product or service, as more than not, it causes work for editors to take them out.
Reported by Charles Kao
