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Press release tips for CES 2010

Today's News is Tomorrows History
Creative Commons License photo credit: [BarZaN] Qtr [Boston]

We are attending our seventh CES and our coverage will begin in less than 12 hours as we get on the road. Watch us on Twitter for live updates. We will also be posting photos to our Flickr account and posting updates here on talkingDigital.

Attending CES as press is quite fun. We enjoy the press parties, the free food, using the press room and the backroom demonstrations of future products.

If there is anything we don’t like about attending CES as press, it is the overwhelming barrage of email press releases.

The typical press release starts out thusly… “Another CES is upon is. We know your time is valuable, but we wanted to give you a special invitation to visit us at…”

Another favorite line is… “Our company is announcing an exciting new line of products that promise to change the way people (insert verb).

None of these press releases does much at all to attract our attention. I do read them, but I don’t care to follow up. If anything, these press releases are primarily tools for building brand recognition at the show.

Here are a few tips for creating a solid press release for CES and other big shows where schedules are limited.

Attach a picture – Sure it was proper etiquette five years ago to include a link rather than an attachment, but those days are gone. Virus writers have discovered far more effective methods of sending viruses and everyone who deserves to hear your message has broadband Internet. As long as the attachment is small (under 1MB) there is no real reason not to include a picture of the product.

Link to the product web page – Don’t just include a link to your company website, make sure there is a link to the exact product you are pitching.

Invite bloggers to cut and paste – Many bloggers are not trained in professional journalists. However, most of them have heard terms like fair use, plagiarism, and copyright and they fear falling on the wrong side of the law. If you invite bloggers to copy and past a well written article in the style of a third party blog post,  you may be more successful in getting the information picked up. If writers know that they have permission to use a well written article verbatim, lazy bloggers will likely do so.

Post video – Include a link to a video on YouTube of your product in action – if applicable. Make sure to use YouTube, not an obscure video service that may require a plug-in or long load times.

Keep it short, very short – If you make a compelling case to visit the website, we don’t need all of the product info in the press release. Pitch the product, get us interested, then close it up with contact information.

Press releases can be very effective, but only if they get the press interested in the product being pitched. If the press release is 800 characters with four hyperlinks and no pictures, there is a good chance it will never be read unless it says “Apple Announces New Tablet Device” in the subject line (don’t do that unless it’s true though).

04

01 2010

Less than a week before we begin our CES 2010 coverage

The Strip from Stratosphere II
Creative Commons License photo credit: wili_hybrid

We head off to Las Vegas a week from today – attending our first press event later that same day. We look forward to all of the great new tech.

Here are a few things that we hope we don’t see at CES:

Digital Picture frames – They were great five years ago, they were getting old two years ago. If they show up this year, we are going to ask very pointed questions to the exhibitor as to why they wasted the money for booth space.

Bluetooth headsets – Unless it’s the size of a grain of sand, it’s not worth showing us. We don’t care about what kind of noise reduction it has or how stylish it is. We will only talk to you about it if you give us a free one.

Netbooks – We love netbooks but they are all 50 different brands of the same device. 10.1″ screen, the latest Intel Atom (or whatever the netbook processor will be), 1-2GB RAM, 160-320GB hard drive, 4-8hrs battery… If you surprise us with one that has a projector built in, that might be cool, but probably not.

Any iPhone app – Save it for CeBIT or Macworld (if there is still such a thing), we love the iPhone, but don’t want to listen to a 15 minute pitch for a product we need to speed at least a week with before we decide how we feel about it.

Cell phones that will never be released in the US – The Koreans always dazzle us with their booths full of fancy phones, but all they do is waste our precious time that we need to spend looking for gadgets and gear that our listeners and readers have no hope of ever getting their hands on.

The world’s largest flat panel TV – Even if it’s 500 inches, there is no way of communicating how massive a massive TV is via photos. We are no longer impressed by bigger, faster or prettier.

A new $300 ebook reader – Before we can get excited about ebook readers they will have to fall well below $100 and  view PDFs, doc and every other ebook format natively. We might consider paying $150 if it offers Kindle-like EVDO downloads for free.

Essentially, we want to see something new. It is time for something that will revolutionize the way we all live. This will take something affordable that fulfills a need that everyone has.

November talkingDigital & HelpMeRick podcast

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On the third Wednesday of every month we join forces with HelpMeRick.com to do a little public affairs show on KAFM 88.1 in Grand Junction, CO. We always discuss tech and pretend to have a topic.

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