The mobile-friendly press release

Media publishers are busy people. They’re on the go constantly, moving from location to location, sometimes with a news crew in tow. They live on their mobile devices. I was recently at our local television studio and watched one of the editors working on his mobile phone, typing faster than I could type on my keyboard. Here’s an interesting question, then: why are press releases decidedly mobile-unfriendly walls of text, not particularly well-suited to mobile devices?

So what would a mobile-friendly press release look like? It’d be relatively short, for one thing, and would contain mobile-friendly media if it couldn’t be shortened up considerably. Here’s an example of taking a press release and converting it into an audio file so that publishers, reporters, editors, journalists, and bloggers could get the information while driving on a commute.

This audio player is mobile-friendly and thus can be embedded into a mobile-friendly web page along with associated video (also made mobile-friendly):

Other ways to make press releases more mobile-friendly? Integrate with the existing app ecosystem on mobile devices. If you’ve got a publisher you work with regularly, ask them what apps they use. If they’re fans of Evernote, ask if you can share a notebook with them and get them documents and information that way. Maybe they’re Google Docs users or Salesforce Chatter users, maybe they’ve got a Dropbox they can share or a Facebook group you can join. Work with them however they prefer to get information best in order to get your company, products, and services noticed (assuming they are noteworthy to begin with).

Christopher S. Penn
Vice President, Marketing Technology

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