Sat 17 May 2008
Rant on.
When will YOU (FS) public relation people (do they really exist???) learn to write something more original to us news editors ? After more than 5 years at simFlight and 3 years at Avsim I am getting extremely and hopelessly bored by the continuous bloated texts that people submit us every day.
5 out of 10 PR’s start with the same wording…..
“XXX is proud to announce….” or “…. XXX released the long-awaited….”. Or even worse “XXX now released the eagerly awaited…”. Or how about this one: “… XXX published the much acclaimed….”.
Come on guys, how dumb do you think our readers are? THEY are getting bored too! And an only slightly critical reader may want to know ‘much acclaimed’ by whom !!?? Yourself, no doubt! And who decides if ‘we’ are ‘eagerly awaiting’ anything from you ? Sure, it may happen at times, but more often than not these sort of ‘hot air’ texts are being thrown on to us by the most obscure of ‘companies’ in the business… ones that often have only one or two products out.
Oh, and yes, WE are proud of our achievements too (although often getting them on the market causes more headaches than joy) but do we need to go around and tell the world that we’re so proud of ourselves? Nope. So why do you !?? There are enough ‘egos’ in this crummy world already!
So, to make life for us editors AND readers just a tad more enjoyable, why not change your publicity blurbs to something more original?? Here are a few examples for you:
“XXXX knows you have not been waiting for this, but we still thought to publish the new ‘product x’. See if it fits your stable, who knows? Available here…”
or
“We at XXX got so bored lately that we decided to make a new product after all, and since we can’t just use it for our own pleasure we’re offering it for sale here….”
Perhaps not brilliant, but more akin to the truth and it just MIGHT attract MORE ATTENTION than the boring and inflated ‘proud and eagerly’ bunch of bloated PR’s.
Rant off.
That’s my thought for the weekend for ya! Come to think of it, I’ll try some of my own medicine, too. After all, I’m a FS PR bloke (for hire!) myself.
Have a great one!