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Significant, substantial, meaningful and unique: words to avoid

by Matthew Stibbe on March 11, 2010

Tim Phillips’s analysis of press releases on Factiva shows a worrying trend. The number of press releases that contain the words ‘significant’, ‘substantial’, ‘meaningful’ and ‘unique’ in the same text has nearly trebled in the last seven years. Something should be done.

I don’t really understand how writers get away with this. Journalists automatically discount [...]

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Search engine marketing for beginners

by Matthew Stibbe on February 10, 2010

Nearly every business has a website and we all know that Google (and to a much lesser extent Yahoo!, Bing and other search engines) help people find products and services they want. The challenge is to make sure that when people look for a business like yours, they actually find your business and not [...]

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Apple iPad: can you have too much hype?

by Matthew Stibbe on January 27, 2010

As Apple’s new slate nears its launch date finally appears, the level of hype is rising almost exponentially. I think there is a real risk that no matter how good the iSlate is, it will not be good enough to live up to the speculation. Mark Morford captures the risks  of over-expectation and techno-lust perfectly [...]

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Inside the newsroom: Why doesn’t the media cover my company?

by Matthew Stibbe on January 25, 2010

Mark Macias takes us inside the newsroom in this guest post. As an Executive Producer with WNBC-TV and Senior Producer with WCBS-TV, Mark Macias has vetted story ideas from reporters, producers, publicists and viewers. He is the author of Beat the Press.
It’s the one question every news junkie wants to know. How do the news [...]

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Absurd spammy press releases sent to my blog

by Matthew Stibbe on November 3, 2009

As promised, here are the headlines for the most absurd press releases sent to my blog in the last month plus the PR companies behind them.
I can see no reason at all why these PR companies would want to target ME with these stories.
I’m pretty sure that all the PR companies concerned are billing [...]

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Do PR companies understand blogs yet?

by Matthew Stibbe on September 30, 2009

Thanks to the success of this blog, I now get press releases from PR firms.
A few are useful, such as announcements of books in my field or writing tools or people I might like to talk to. (For instance, myWriterTools who pinged me earlier this year or the folk at MindJet who sent a [...]

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SpinVox: it’s made of people

by Matthew Stibbe on July 24, 2009

BBC technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, reported yesterday that SpinVox was using call centres in South Africa and the Philippines to do much of the work of transcribing voicemail messages instead of the company’s much-vaunted D2 voice-recognition software.
The complaint rests on two charges: that the company wasn’t doing what it said it was doing and [...]

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