If Don sounds crabby, he has every right to be.

The paragraph of boilerplate he lifted here is just one of thousands of paragraphs in press releases that otherwise intelligent humans can’t understand because the press releases contain big words and industry gobbledygook that make their eyes glaze over.

Don probably reads hundreds of these kinds of press releases every month and routinely hits the “delete” key. I did when I worked as a newspaper editor for many years.

You are correct when you say that the boilerplate is not the news. But when you post a press release online, or send it to the media, every line of that release must be ready for prime time.

Here are some guidelines that might help you when writing other releases:

–First, there’s nothing wrong with writing a press release announcing that someone from your company will speak at a conference. It positions your employee as an expert in his field, and people who are searching for information about the conference will find it through the search engines. Business journals routinely print short notices about things like this.

–Use short words people can understand instead of long words. Several long words strung together like “significant transactional performance” and “accelerating adoption of virtualization and ascendance” make the problem worse.

–Avoid using quotes that don’t sound like actual quotes. The long quote in the second paragraph of the release is incomprehensible.

–Avoid buzzwords like “scalable,” “mission-critical” and “proven leader.” In boilerplate, play it straight and simply explain how you help other companies solve their problems.

–Make sure your releases include keywords that people would type into the search engines if they’re looking for the kind of information your release provides. Don’t assume that the headline, for example, must include your company’s name. Often, a much better strategy is to use keywords.

I hope this helps.

Joan Stewart
89PressReleaseTips.com
PublicityHound.com

I’d like to try and provide some clarification, as well as see what I might have to learn from you, as my job is of course to appeal to your interests, not raise your ire.

Though I can’t be sure which release you were referring to (we issued releases on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week) I will presume given the timing of your blog entry that you were referring to the 11/19 release, which we issued to a Seattle-Metro distribution wire. Of course, that list includes AP, NYT and Dow Jones bureaus, so it gets distributed to a wider audience.

Our 11/19 release details a speaking engagement one of our spokespeople participated in today at Supercomputing 2009 and I have included it in full below. As you will see, the text you referred to is simply our company boiler and is by no means intended to be “news.” Was that text all your feed provided? If so, I’d be very interested to know as that would highlight a glitch in the system.

Though I don’t believe our speaking engagement at Supercomputing is news to you, I do hope you may revisit the full release’s text for yourself and see we did not issue our boiler as “news.”

I would much appreciate any and all thoughts/guidance you may have.

Cheers,
Lucas Welch | PR Manager
Isilon Systems

Isilon to Present at Supercomputing 2009

SEATTLE – November 19, 2009 – Isilon® Systems (Nasdaq: ISLN) today announced it is presenting as part of the Exhibitor Forum at Supercomputing 2009, taking place at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OR, from November 14-20, 2009. Isilon Senior Product Manager Nick Kirsch will be presenting, “Maximizing the Potential of Virtualization and the Cloud: How to Unlock the Traditional Storage Bottleneck,” at 11:30 a.m. PT today, November 19, in room E143-144.

“With the accelerating adoption of virtualization and ascendance of cloud computing, it’s critical that organizations deploy the best storage architecture for these environments to ensure long-term IT efficiency,” said Nick Kirsch. “While the data fragmentation and management complexity challenges of traditional SAN and NAS severely limit the potential of server virtualization and cloud computing, Isilon scale-out NAS unlocks the storage bottleneck and enables organizations to maximize their investment.”

Isilon is also exhibiting at Supercomputing in booth #1411 and demonstrating its S-Series product line which delivers more than 1.7 million IOPS and over 45 gigabytes per second (GBps) of aggregate throughput from a single file system. With its significant transactional performance, the Isilon IQ S-Series enables organizations to empower the most data-intensive virtual and cloud computing environments, improving workflow efficiency while reducing costs. For more information on Isilon’s solutions for the virtual data center, please go HERE.

About Isilon Systems
Isilon Systems (Nasdaq: ISLN) is the proven leader in scale-out NAS. Isilon’s clustered storage and data management solutions drive unique business value for customers by maximizing the performance of their mission-critical applications, workflows, and processes. Isilon enables enterprises and research organizations worldwide to manage large and rapidly growing amounts of file-based data in a highly scalable, easy-to-manage, and cost-effective way. Information about Isilon can be found at http://www.isilon.com.
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