Write an incomprehensible press release for starters. Then send it to journalists who don’t understand it or realize its importance.
Here’s an example. Perhaps the worst lead in a press release I’ve ever read:
Aqua Comms and Epsilon Partner to Bring European Route Diversity and On-Demand Connectivity to NJFX’s Colocation Campus
WALL, NJ – May 15, 2017 – NJFX, the first and only colocation campus to sit at a cable landing station and offer Tier 3, carrier neutral data center capabilities, announces the addition of Aqua Comms DAC (“Aqua Comms”), the operator of Ireland’s first dedicated subsea fibre-optic network interconnecting New York, Dublin and London, and Epsilon Telecommunications, a privately owned global communications service provider, to its ever-growing connectivity ecosystem. With the introduction of Aqua Comms, NJFX customers can strategically diversify their connectivity options to key European hubs, bypassing legacy chokepoints within the U.S.
Aqua Comms has deployed a Point of Presence (PoP) within NJFX’s colocation campus, allowing NJFX customers to directly access the carrier’s suite of services without incurring cross connect fees. Epsilon and Aqua Comms have partnered to deploy Infiny by Epsilon – an on-demand connectivity platform – within the NJFX facility, and Aqua Comms will use the Cloud Link eXchange (CloudLX) module of Infiny to rapidly interconnect….
You get the idea. It goes on and on like this. This might be big news in IT circles, but for no one else who might be interested in the story that lies behind the news. I usually get my share of press releases in my in-box, but I can’t figure for the life of me why anyone thought that I would be interested. Nothing I’ve published in my columns or elsewhere comes close to the level of detail or puzzlement.
While I was a PR director at a high-tech company that, among other things, developed, patented and leased petrochemical refining processes, I had the same problem. One of the petroleum engineers would write a press release about a big sale or a new process, but no one but petroleum engineers could understand it. My job was to make this company known to a wider group of people, e.g. investors, as I tried to explain the originator of the press release. His response was that we’d look silly explaining stuff that “everyone” already knew. My solution was to do a couple of different press releases—one for his engineering buddies, and one for the general media that fully explained what the hell it all meant.