Preparation
What the Press Release Does For You
This lets you take all that information and distill it into a format that you can share with anyone. Jeff Bezos is credited with getting people to write a press release to describe a new feature or a new thing Amazon was launching to help everyone really think about things from the customer perspective.This is such a great exercise in what's called "design thinking". So we're going to zoom in on this a little bit and look at the sections.
Extra Credit
You can go online and find press releases that inspire you.. That's an an exercise I encourage you to do.
The Format
I am using a format from many of my favorite press releases, but if you notice, they often start with, you know, Dallas, Texas company name, or the, the title will be, company name announces some big thing, company name announces revenue. Or funding or whatever the, whatever the thing is, you have that headline. That's the first step. Then they always start with city date. So Dallas, Texas, uh, let's see. Three years from when I'm saying this will be 2025, so maybe November 7th, 2025. Now you just can fill in the blanks, whatever your industry is.
So let's say it's software, software industry leader result maps today announced, I don't know, let's say 10 million subscribers. You also want to, as you're building this, this, these are just the outline chunks. We're not into the whole story yet. Throw in a quote, throw in one of those quotes that your, that your client or customer said, and then talk about it. Put yourself. Forward in the future. What are you going to say about it and complete this sentence, you know, so Scott Levy said, or c e o, Scott Levy said the best part of this is how our people made this happen and all the clients we touched, helping them bring their visions to life for so many different people, creating so much value and prosperity for the world.
It's just really special, right? There's my imaginary quote, my real quote, that's in our vision. Fill in one of the quotes from an employee after. And then this next sentence is after experiencing whatever growth, again, you're filling this in from the grid company name is hitting a stride where it's been noted by the press or magazine or whatever it is. Fill in one of the quotes, fill the target. Press in your vision, in your story grid. And then close by saying Companies in whatever the market is looking for solutions to, whatever the problem you solve can reach out to you. Right? Use this to go ahead and fill out an actual press release and make sure you have that at the ready to show your people just to get.
This is so useful, even if it's not a, everyone on the team must memorize this while chugging a beer or whatever. Weird thing you would do in a fraternity or something like that. You don't, your team doesn't have to memorize this, but when you're introducing the vision, it can be really powerful to get people to plug in and really feel the clarity of the vision. And we're gonna write this first because it's a little bit easier, and it's got your, it's got your creative juices going, your neurons are firing, and it's going to make it easier now for us to take a step back and ask ourselves. A couple of more challenging questions. Why does all this stuff matter to us? And we're going to play a game called the Five Why's.