Business Wire’s Joseph Miller (product mgr in San Antonio office) just completed an insightful study on what makes news releases effective, summarizing them into seven traits. His methodology was simple and straightforward. He defined hit releases as those getting the most release reads (or page views) and took the top 10 releases on Business Wire’s EON (Enhanced Online News) for each full month so far in 2010. He looked at 40 releases in total.

For each release, he counted the words in the body, the date and time of release, whether the release included a photo, and so on for a total of seven main traits.

The “Average” Hit Release: Across the board, these releases were an average of 642 words, with the longest being nearly 1500 words and the shortest being just over 250 words. The word counts were quite evenly distributed as well, and there didn’t seem to be any word count exceptionally more likely to hit than another. In total, 58% of releases were over 500 words.

The most common day of the week to release was Thursday, which was the date of choice for 22.5% of releases. Tuesday and Wednesday were close behind with 20% of releases each and Monday and Friday were slightly less likely at 17.5%. Just one lonely hit was released on a Saturday and no hit releases premiered on Sundays.

Moving on to the best time of day (rounding to the nearest hour), 10am and 12pm ET were tied for the most frequent, each with 12.5% of releases. Additionally, 40% of all the hits were released before noon, 35% between noon and 3pm, and 25% from 4pm onward. It looks like news consumers tend to be early risers, so get your release out during the workday if you can.

The Seven Traits from Top to Bottom:

1) 87% of releases included at least one link in one form or another in the body of the release, with many of the top releases containing quite a few very descriptive links. If your company happens to be a holdout in the release linking game, I hope this may persuade you to start adding descriptive links to your press releases.
2) 73% of releases incorporated some special formatting within the body of the release, whether it be bold, italics, underlining or an embedded image. In today’s xhtml world, special formatting can be an excellent way to emphasize key points of your releases, break your content into distinct sections and provide cues for ‘skimmers’ to gather meaning as they quickly scan content for relevant information.
3) 68% of releases had a subheadline. This stat was the most surprising to me. The subhead seems to have an unclear role in press release SEO, since it’s not really the headline and not really the body either. While the robots digesting releases may not pay it much mind, it’s clear that the subhead offers valuable supplementary guidance to readers as they consider whether to continue on reading a release and possibly even share that release.
4) 58% of releases included the company name in the release headline (Ex. Company X releases XYZ app). Of course, this also means that 42% didn’t include the company name and still performed quite well with readers. There is very little real estate available within your headline and if it is more than 22 words you might not make it into Google News. With this in mind, consider the goal of the release and campaign when making your choice. If company branding is a chief concern, including the name is probably a good idea. However, if the focus is more product or service focused, for instance, maybe the company name should take a back seat.
5) 35% of releases included a photo or video, with the vast majority of those including a photo only. It’s safe to say that much fewer than 35% of all releases include multimedia, so it’s clearly a good idea to include multimedia in order to help your releases stand out. Product photos, charts, infographics, company executives, high-resolution logos . . . the list of possibilities is nearly endless.
6) 23% of releases encouraged social sharing or engagement within the body of the release, typically Facebook or Twitter. All EON releases already offer social sharing chicklets covering all major social networks, so it’s not absolutely critical to give them additional emphasis within your release. However, if social engagement is a priority or your release is geared towards “sharability”, why not give readers a bit more of a push?

7) 5% of releases, just two, had any special characters in the headline. So perhaps adding special characters in headlines is not a good idea.

Judging from Miller’s study, the news release is not only alive and well — where basics still apply — but it is thriving on the Internet as it offers opportunities to hyperlink to expanded useful information.

How many books did you read in 2008?

Will eBook readers increase America's appetite for books?

According to a survey for the AP in August 2007, 27% of Americans did not read a single book in the previous year… not one.  You wonder who these people are til you remember that statistically 50% of the people you pass on the street are below average.  Still… I mean, COME ON.  I had been wondering about this for a long time when I came across the numbers in a NYT article from 1/27/08… I had clipped it and forgotten it.  Another 27% read 15 or more books.  But here’s the real shocker (to me)… 8% of Americans read more than 51 books a year!

Now I read a lot, at least I thought I did.  A really bad year for me is 15 books… that’s what I did in 2007.  Typically though, I’ll get through around 25.  My record until this year was 41, but in 2008 I passed it and read 43.  I know this because for 30 years now, I’ve carefully written down the title of every book I read each month.  My goal was 52… one per week, and as you can see, I’m still trying.

Reading Rules

I’m pretty anal about that list.  To get on it, I have to read every bit of a book… 19 chapters out of 20 doesn’t make it, though I generally skip the Foreword.  No skimming either.  Although I’m fairly fast — I average a page a minute day in and day out — I still read every word… none of that speedreading stuff where you sort of scan a line without mentally seeing individual words.  I want to actually hear every word, if only in my mind.

Early on I had to set rules about what sort of things counted.  For instance, although I occasionally read a play or movie script, I don’t count them… they’re too short.  Figure it out.  A play or movie goes 90 minutes tops.  They’re printed roughly a page per minute of performance… that is, with all sorts of double spacing and short lines of dialog.  If you can watch a play in 90 minutes, you can read it a heck of lot faster… for me in about 45 minutes.  That’s too short to put on my list.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, I DO count, but only if I’ve done some serious backup reading and study on the play in question.  Doing that, reading the account of the period in Churchill’s History of the English Speaking People for instance, plus working through all of the word lookups, etc., turns one of Shakespeare’s histories into a long afternoon.  OK, that’s long enough to put on my list.

I also count most audio books… books on tape… audible dot com.  I load them onto my iPod and listen to them while walking the dogs or even driving.  Those books are typically 6 to 10 hours long, and that works out to a lot of pages and ergo… they make the list.  I find fiction and simple business books work well in the audio format, but books with a lot of charts and maps don’t make it.  I once read Churchill’s 6-volume History of World War II, and tried doing one of them as an audio book… it didn’t work because you couldn’t see the maps.  Most of the books I listen to, I also own in conventional paper form.

Enter the Kindle

I’ve used eBook readers before and love them.  Many years ago my wife gave me one of the early units made by RCA, I believe.  It had its faults, but I found it to be wonderfully handy.  The form factor was spectacular, and the way it fit in your hand was a marvel.  You could set bookmarks by electronically dog-earing page corners.  You could tap a word on the screen and a little window would pop up with a dictionary definition and a pronunciation guide.  You could dial the font size up and down so you could read without glasses.  In fact, in all but two ways it was an incredible little device.  The first was the memory was limited so you could only put in one book at a time.

You would think that one book is enough, but both my wife and I are used to packing a lot of books when we take off for a long weekend or more.  When I go to Reno to show horses for a week in July, we each pack a large cardboard filing box with the books we want to be available.  Not that we’ll read them… at least more than a couple… but we have no idea what we’ll be in the mood for and we want choices… a couple books of the several genres we each read.  That takes a lot of space and certainly adds a ton if we’re packing for an airplane trip.  If the eBook reader could store a dozen books or so, it would be perfect… a HUGE space and weight saver.

The other problem was that there were not many titles available, and in the end that was the killer for me.  To be really useful, you need most if not all of your books to be available in the appropriate electronic format.  The Kindle has solved both of these neatly.  You can store more books than anyone could conceivably need over the course of a month.  And, at last count, there was well over 200,000 titles available and the list was growing by leaps and bounds every day.

Sales of the Kindle were fairly slow until Oprah endorsed it around Christmas time.  That was about the same time I mentioned to my wife I’d like one for Christmas myself.  What I got was an IOU… Amazon shipments are now out to March.  OK, I can wait.  I have my iPod… currently “reading” Outliers on it.  And of course there are stacks of books… the 20th century kind… waiting for me.  This is the year… 52 books… 52… I can feel it.

This market is soooo crazy.  Right now company stocks are not being priced by valuations but rather relative to each other, as in who can lose money the longest?  This is what’s going on in airlines and it’s especially what’s going on in autos.  Sadly, there’s some of that going on in techland too.  Companies are being evaluated on how much cash they have, and on that basis Intel, for instance, wins.  Again, this is a relative thing… they look relatively good.  Relative is a funny word, as in when you stop hitting yourself over he head with a hammer, it feels relatively good.