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.

According to Eric Auchard, technology correspondent for Reuters, “The best way for companies to deal with news media is to treat reporters like a hungry teenagers.” He goes on to say, “We’re impatient…we’re on deadlines and we need to be fed. If we’re not fed, we get angry and have tantrums.” In offering this view to the Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog newsletter a few months ago, he reaffirmed the vital role that the oft-maligned news release plays in helping reporters do their job.

As you may recall from my previous blogs, I am a big fan of news releases as they have evolved into valuable marketing tools for high-tech companies. In the Q&A that follows (excerpted from the Daily Dog interview), Auchard reminds us that news releases still hold great value doing what they were originally intended to do — provide reporters with a succinct, factual summary of a news development.

Why are you pro-press release when so many of your colleagues aren’t?

Press releases are spit upon by the press and they really shouldn’t be. They are very important commodities in the reporting process. We need the information in them to do things like fact check our stories, for starters. So the press release certainly isn’t dead—or, at least, I don’t want it to be. We want product details, specs, contacts, facts, data—and we can find that in press releases. So please send them.

The irony is that many in PR and even the people at Google aren’t doing releases like they should or like they used to. They seem to have bought into complaints from some in the press that releases are boring or useless and that’s just not the case. Some of this may be an effect of the blogosphere, where bloggers have made fun of press releases. The idea seems to be, “Don’t give me the press release—just the facts, please.” But that doesn’t scale.

Sure, every journalist, writer and blogger wants to focus on the meaningful stuff. But press releases are full of things that are boring and necessary to file a story, including the spelling of names, correct capitalizations of funky technology names, and even boiler plates that give you a definition and context about the business and market. Sometimes, even the dateline is important—it tells us where the company is headquartered. And sometimes, it’s the contact information that’s what we need because we can’t find it anywhere else.

Are you saying that companies just aren’t providing press releases anymore—or that the releases they’re providing aren’t useful?

I’m saying both things. One trend we’re seeing is companies not sending releases at all. And another is that releases may be coming too late, for starters. For example, a lot of PR people tell us they’ll get us the release after a briefing. Well, that’s useless. We need it before the briefing so we can ask more informed questions. We don’t want to have to ask the basic factual questions that you can just put in the release for us.

Can you give an example?

Google typically does its announcements on its blogs. The bigger announcements that impact investors, of course, are done in releases. So, we’ll get a call and get briefed and whatever we hear is over the phone.

Why is that a problem for the media—or company?

I have repeatedly had interviews with high-level executives at Google and other places, where I would have had more context and been able to ask more focused questions if I would have had a press release ten minutes in advance. The benefits to the companies and PR people would be: shorter interviews, livelier quotes and more significant interviews that get to the real story or correct angle. If you have a real long press release about a complicated issue like a partnership—that gives us context, for example. It also lets us know how you see, and are positioning, the announcement. Conversely, just stringing together a bunch of facts in a phone conversation or post is where things can go wrong in the reporting process.

Everybody in PR knows the more you give reporters the information they need, the more you control the story. The more you make us fish, the more we go off the reservation and find our own ideas. Of course, reporters should remain independent, but the less you help, the more potential there becomes for negative and incorrect stories.