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I sent out a 400 word press release with a typo in the CEO's name and got the best pickup we've had all year
Last month I was rushing to get a funding announcement out the door before a trade show in Chicago, and I spelled our CEO's last name wrong in the headline. I caught it 20 minutes after it went live on the wire, panicked, and sent a correction. I figured that was it, we'd look sloppy and maybe three small blogs would pick it up. Instead we got 47 pickups, including two industry newsletters that never cover us, and every single one ran the correction note. A reporter from a trade pub actually emailed me and said the correction made the story feel more human and less like a canned announcement. What I learned is that corporate comms folks are obsessed with perfect copy, but the tiny imperfection is what made editors stop scrolling. We spent $800 on that wire and got more pickup than the $3,000 blast we did in the spring. Now I'm wondering if I should stop scrubbing every release for 90 minutes before it goes out. Has anyone else noticed that a small mistake gets more attention than a clean send?
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ryanhayes7d ago
Spent 90 minutes one time proofing a release only to realize I'd been reading the same sentence so long I stopped seeing it. My finest moment was definitely emailing a client "please find attacked" instead of attached, so maybe I'm just ahead of the curve on this whole thing.
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