B.L.,

As is my wont, this goes on a bit long, but feel free to do with it what you will.

Okay, I guess I should weigh in here with some responses on this whole "screwed the pooch" press release.

FROM: Beth Strohbusch - bstrohbusch,ektron.com

I tend to like humor or quirkiness to attract attention. With that said, if Rick wanted the press to pick up his news, a "Top 10 list" may not be the best approach. As Shel says, it doesn't tell the story….

If Rick's goal is to drive awareness of and PR/Marketing eyeballs to his Executive Summary Consulting Services Web site, his Top 10 approach may be a winner. Marketing/PR news lists and blogs are buzzing with this story. I was intrigued enough to visit Rick's site, spend time there, and forward his info to colleagues with a recommendation that we consider his services.

Bingo. More on the objectives below.

Did he want the wires to reject his news release? Probably not. Yet, the wire's actions generated buzz. Rick's probably seeing a major blip in his Web traffic.

Actually, we did have a pretty good idea it would be rejected, which was definitely part of the plan. We would have been happy if they had put it on the wires, but we were doubly happy that they didn't. Again, more below.

FROM: Joe Ramirez - ramirez,jampole.com

In the current era of spam, speculation and disinformation, preserving their credibility as sources of legitimate, reliable news is probably one of the wire services' foremost concerns.

I agree that it goes too far to conclude that preserving credibility requires banning humor, but in this case the wire services were probably concerned that the release hardly seemed like news at all.

PR Newswire and BusinessWire have "credibility as sources of legitimate, reliable news"??? Gimme a break. I mean, our national standards for journalism have sunk pretty low in recent years, but to consider press release wire services legit news sources is ridiculous. As far as I'm concerned, they are not much more than an advertising channel to a niche audience: journalists. You pay to play. That's hardly the standard for respectable news sources.

I think Michael O'Connor Clarke, SVP at Weber Shandwick, said it best on his blog in reaction to this press release and its subsequent banning:

IMHO, the wire services are being idiot wussies by responding like this. They seem to have completely forgotten (and overstepped) their role here. They're not editors, fercrissakes - and neither are they communications professionals - they're simply a conduit. Their job is not to assess or to judge; merely to fulfill. Clueless sods."

As for newsworthiness and the seriousness of their channel, PR Newswire put out this press release just a week earlier:

"McDonald's(R) Corporation Names Ronald McDonald Chief Happiness Officer"

Sure, when it's a Fortune 500 company, then having a sense of humor and putting out BS masquerading as news is fine and dandy.

If the rejection was based on the "screwed the pooch" phrase, I guess one could say the services were being too prudish, but I'm not sure.

Actually, I could see them objecting to that phrase, which is why, as B.L. pointed out, I offered to rewrite the release insomuch as eliminating any objectionable language, but they told me it wouldn't matter, it simply wasn't a press release as far as they were concerned, and I was a hot potato they wanted to drop. The basically said get lost, we don't want your business not matter how you intend to rewrite it (that's not a literal quote, but not far off, certainly the intent, if more politely but firmly stated). To my mind, my offense was mocking the very sanctity of the traditional press release, which was too close to the bone for them to countenance.

One last observation: If you issue a news release in the form of a long joke, and then follow up by making a joke about how that release was rejected, how long will it be before the company sending out such "news" is regarded as a joke as well?

Well, I think you're giving press releases too much credit there. The proof is in the pudding. People who come to our site can judge its quality on the face of it. The point was we don't take ourselves too seriously, we have a sense of humor. You can trust us for reliable delivery of news about e-marketing, but we realize e-marketing isn't cancer, world hunger or terrorism. I think we can laugh at ourselves, and poke fun of others here and there, without undermining our credibility. At least, we've never yet heard the objection from readers that they don't appreciate our occasional irreverence; in fact, just the opposite.

So here's the deal: we (and by "we," I mean Andy) made a big mistake by neglecting to do a trademark search on our name, and thus we had to change our name. Frankly, I didn't expect that was a story that was going to get much play anywhere, not matter how we spun it. The mainstream press (NYT, WSJ, BizWeek or second-tier serious pubs) have never heard of our tiny startup to begin with, so why would they or their readers care that we changed our name? I doubt they would. Marketing and e-marketing trade pubs might have more reason to take note, but they appear to be threatened by us as an upstart competitor coming after their market (MediaPost and IAB SmartBriefs, for example, didn't report on Andy Bourland, formerly founder of ClickZ, coming out of retirement to acquire us, which was a real story in our sector, despite my having sent them that release in advance).

As B.L. suggested, we could have packaged together a story about ourselves as a case study in terms of rebranding and name changing in order to get some publication to pick up the story, but it sounded like a lot of work, and we're stretched thin as it is. More importantly, were we to put the resources into doing that much PR for our brand, this wouldn't be the story I'd elect to tell. After all, it wasn't a story that made us look good. And as for it being a case study, we were only announcing the change; we didn't have the experience of knowing yet how successful it would be.

My PR objectives in this (and I should note that I have years' of experience as a journalist and one year's experience doing PR) were the following:

1) We had to make some explanation, to our readers at least, for the fact that we were changing our name, so we had to write something. Because it was a dumb mistake that made us look bad, we decided we'd rather beat any critics to the punch by making fun of ourselves first, sweetening the bitter pill.

2) The most important audience for this announcement was our existing readers, so they'd know what was going on. (We weren't even sure that the company with whom we had the trademark dispute was going to let us keep the old domain active for redirecting web site visitors to the new domain, so we wanted to make a splash to be sure people knew the new domain so they could find us. As it turned out, we have been able to use the old domain for redirecting for the time being, so that hasn't been a problem). Equally as important, if not more so, was to alert all the bloggers who already link to us (several dozen at least), so they would know to change their pointers to the new domain. This was especially important, as those pointers are what secures us a high Google PageRank. If we soft-sold the story or told it seriously and dryly, it wouldn't gotten as much attention and they'd be less likely to take notice as soon.

3) While we didn't expect any journalists to really write about the name change, we figured we'd have a better chance of attracting their attention with a release that was funny and a bit outrageous, just to introduce them to the brand. Journalists were not really our primary audience for this release, but any attention they might pay to it would be gravy. (Why then put out a press release? Lots of people read press releases these days besides journalists, notably bloggers. It's also, for better or worse, come to be the official way to make virtually any announcement.)

Also, the first release we'd put out, about Andy acquiring the business, was similarly written in a wacky style, just because we're bored of traditional release format, so we had something of a reputation to uphold.

As for getting banned by the wire services, as I say, I had a strong suspicion that might happen. The first press release we put out wasn't this outrageous, but it was certainly irreverent. I thought it was harmless enough, but I learned later that BusinessWire warned the PR friend who put it out for us that "if you try to put another release like that out, we'll revoke your membership." Judge for yourself how deserving that rebuke was.

So, I thought it was likely that they would object to this one. I played fair, and did offer to tone it down, but I wasn't going to reformat it like a dry traditional release, if that's what they required, which apparently was the case. I'd already envisioned the headline "Read the Press Release Banned by PR Newswire and BusinessWire" in advance and was delighted by the chance to use the strategy when I could. Running those two posts back to back gave the release extra bump, and we got about as many links from bloggers to the "Banned Release" post as we did to the original "Screwed the Pooch" post. While we didn't achieve my secret objective of getting listed on Daypop, we did make Popdex and stayed there for several days (it turns out you don't really need that many links to make Popdex).

All in all, we think it worked out pretty well: we got a lot of buzz around the Net, we got a lot of links the first day of our new domain, which will go towards boosting our Google PageRank, we made a lot of people aware of the name change, and no one else mocked us for our mistake, because they couldn't out do our own self-effacing mockery.

As for the phrase "screwed the pooch," I first heard it the week before on prime-time TV, in the show Law & Order, from the mouth of the Assistant D.A. (Jack McCoy), grilling a witness on the stand. As B.L. noted, I ran a search on Google and found the phrase has relatively wide use, meaning "messed up big time." I figured, if was good enough for a courtroom TV drama, we shouldn't be too prudish about using it. (I did, however, first run it by our editor, who somewhat uneasily blessed it.)

In fact, that wasn't really in the headline of the release, it was the punchline to the release and in the headline to the blog post about the release. (The headline of the release itself was "Top 10 Reasons Why MarketingFix.com Changed Its Name to Up2Speed.com, Only to Change It Again a Few Weeks Later to MarketingWonk.com.")

The original punchline for the release was, "It Turns Out That Andy Bourland Isn't a Super Genius After All: He Forgot to Do a Trademark Search on 'Up2Speed.'" (this following the headline of the earlier press release, being "Andy Bourland, Super Genius, Launches Up2Speed, the Best Site Ever About I-Marketing"). Andy wasn't wild about being the brunt of the joke, so we replaced it with a "we made a mistake" approach.

"Screwed the pooch" had that Lenny Bruce edge to it that was intended to make people sit up and take notice. For all you dog lovers out there, any implied bestiality was not meant literally. No pooches were harmed in the preparation of this PR strategy. (Of course, I'm a cat person, anyway.)

Rick