Fun with PR

The sort institutions and media outlets that receive press releases, are the sort of organisations that are highly unlikely to take any notice of a website created by someone they never heard of that doesn't have a commercial angle and hasn't had any press already. Media outlets especially, typically don't give press to anything that would make the story by doing so, they want there to be a story there already. And in general I have found that professional organisations work with mental scripts; if something doesn't arrive from a channel they recognise or in familiar form, they cannot make any sense out of it, regardless of what it might actually be.

Such it is with the new website I just finished, Melbourne Street Art 86.

Aspects of the site would seemingly be an ideal resource for tourists interested in street art, but I soon discovered a number of websites related to Melbourne tourism, that could in theory have an interest in the site, have shuttered doors and windows for email contact... with the exception of a hatch ready to receive press releases. Okay, I thought, I may as well do one of those for the site. And it might be fun too... in fact, doing it felt a little like like dressing up in one of those period outfits with big frills around the neck, when actually you are just a dude in a tee shirt with a serious minded attitude to a project.

And much as it felt silly doing it, because Melbourne Street Art 86 is something I  put together in my spare time for fun, not some slick operation housed in a mirrored glass office building staffed by I-phone toting clones, it is a legitimate website of use to the public with a certain bit of polish. So why not do the PR thing like the big boys do... is what I have to communicate any less important than those in whose shadow I walk?

So this is one of those curious contradictions - a press release that is a kind of parody of a press release as much as it is a genuine press release too.

It is not hard to make something look as though it is a press release from a major organisation, though this one is a little more flowery than most of those. I just looked at a few on line and whipped this up in about 15 minutes on Word. I also added some sample maps and guide pages, which I won't show here (see the site, they are on most suburb pages).

It is a little like those shows when the heroes flash fake FBI badges and act the part and everyone treats them like they real thing. Except I doubt that will happen here.

I had a bit of a chuckle today wondering what some of the places I sent this too, including a couple of newspapers, will make of it, when it looks at first scan a little like something from big street and then they read it is a community website that gives everything away for free and has a URL of "blogspot.com'.

Those sort of things shouldn't really matter, but often enough in our sort of world, they do.