Make your press release boilerplate sizzle

The end of your news release shouldn’t be an afterthought, but an opportunity to tell your story

Q: What are the 100 most boring words a communicator writes every day?

A: Your boilerplate—the stock company description appended to every press release and company announcement.

While factual information may provide necessary context to company news, the dry, impenetrable nature of the text seems at odds with the otherwise energizing goal of most releases. Perhaps this disconnect stems from the name “press release,” increasingly a misnomer when stakeholders can now access our announcements via the Web.

As we encourage this behavior through RSS options, links on Twitter feeds, and prominent positioning of news on corporate websites, we must in turn place more emphasis on the “release” portion—the idea that boilerplates can serve as motivation for others to share your news—rather than the “press” portion that implies a specific set of facts to convey.

Let’s take a look at a couple examples of releases and offer some ideas to get more out of those last 100 words. Here are examples (pseudonymed to protect the innocent):