A recent newsletter that the Think Tank PR team received contained research showing that a press release with video content is three times more likely to be published. And that started a discussion in the team.The research was based on a sample of 124 news releases that included related video content that were distributed and tracked by RealWire during the period September 2010 and July 2011. The combined editorial and blog coverage these releases achieved was compared to the results of 965 news releases that didn’t include video content.
Adam Parker, RealWire’s chief executive, commented: “The coverage analysis implies that including video content with a news release dramatically increases its impact. In part this may be related to its ability to make your story stand out and at the same time provide another form of content for people to find and share in relation to it. Certainly with YouTube being the second most popular search engine it is not surprising that in over 94 per cent of the releases studied that included video, PROs opted to host their related video on a social media sharing site and then embed the content in their release page.”
However Parker is not convinced that this is the whole story. “Another reason for the enhanced coverage could be that video content often seems to accompany news releases that are broader in interest and more conversational in nature compared to the majority of corporate announcements. This suggests that it isn’t simply the act of adding a video that potentially leads to improved coverage in many cases, but also the nature of the underlying story itself.”
And therein lies the key – to misquote a phrase “it’s the story stupid”. While we now need to consider with each story or announcement the possibilities of bringing it to life using all available channels and techniques, it’s still a matter of judging what the right channels are to best get the specific message across, and of course combining that successfully with content.
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