I decided to drill deeper, this morning, on a press release I glanced over yesterday about a company adding a new branch of its software line, one  focused specifically on college campuses.

The press release had the basics, but I wanted to know more because I couldn’t wrap my little brain around one assertion being made.

So I went to the Website, and there is no mention of the ballyhooed new product. Nothing. Zip.

I went to the news section. No press release.

Sheesh.

If you release a new product, the intention is to get people excited about it and wanting to know more. Only some will pick up the phone and call your sales people. The rest will go to your Website, and if there is nothing there, guess what happens …

I actually see this a lot, and it makes no sense.

The simple remedy is to coordinate your marketing and message. The PR goes out when the Website page is ready to spark up and there is a PDF file to send out when people ask. Basic stuff.

I wrote recently on my other blog about the merits and perils of digital signage companies using Twitter to promote themselves. Quite a few companies now have Twitter accounts, but there’s not all that many doing effective things with it.

A lot of accounts are pretty much orphaned – the sign of companies or more likely individuals at companies who decided to set up an account, did a few posts, and then pretty much forgot about it.

Some others are on there a lot, but the people doing the posts don’t always remember they are posting under the company banner. Popping up a tweet saying “the development team just handed the new version release over to QA  … on track for Q4 release” is great for customers and prospects to read. Putting up “Went to Nine Inch Nails show last night, seriously hung over this AM” is not so good. But it happens.

That’s the sort of thing you MIGHT do on your personal Twitter account, but it is NOT what the company wants out there. Up for debate are the tweets corporate accounts do that inject a little personality, like what music someone is listening to or the horrors of travel. A little of that is OK, but I have “unfollowed” some people who are clearly in love with themselves.

The other peril with Twitter, like any of this social stuff, is to essentially spam your followers with micro-posts about everything your read, see and think. You are sending the message that you’ve got nothing but time on your hands.  And from the perspective of some of your followers, particularly if they have things like Tweetdeck running, you’re getting to be a pain in the butt.

Much is being written about Twitter as it steadily grows its user base and evolves. Maybe it will be something else in a year that everyone is using, or maybe this is another Google and a business mainstay. Whatever the case, this sort of real-time communication and marketing is here to stay and we all need to learn how to work with it.

As I see stuff, I will pass it along. But there’s one thing you need to know. If you write for your company, start learning to write in 140 characters or less. That’s what a micro-post in Twitter gives you.

Also … David Weinfeld writes regularly on his Digital Signage Insights blog about the industry and he has a good piece up about social media and our sector.

I have seen this three times in the last couple of months in Google Alerts that bombard me all day about digital signage and digital out of home.

“DigiSignMax Premium announces launch of new Website!” gasps the press release.

Super. But the only people who care are the people who did the Website. If they are staff and they need to get stroked a little, well … maaaaybe. But they’re still the only ones who care.

The bigger issue – a press release about a marketing facelift is telling prospective customers, partners and investors there is very little shaking around the office.  Press releases are for news, and to generate buzz. The wrong kind of press release can actually work against you if it’s looking like your company wanted to to get something, anything out in the trade press.

I have been involved in the digital signage sector for more than a decade, in a whole pile of different capacities. I’ve found myself selling software, pitching venture capitalists, yelling at tradespeople. Now and then, I’ve stopped and wondered, how did I get here???

That’s because I spent the first 20 years of my working life as a journalist, or at least in a journalist environment. I went from newspaper reporter to editor, and then on to new media guy.

But at my core, I am still a writer and it is what I am, at least, told I am good at. Some 10 years on from jumping into the digital signage sector, I find myself writing for a living once again. More weird little twists and turns got me to this point, but I am very happy with where I ended up.

I now run my own company, called pressDOOH. Pronounce it like the magician phrase, “Presto!”

It was set up for two reasons:

1 – I really didn’t want another boss, other than myself.

2 – Lots of people in this industry know I have writer in my dark past, so they’ve asked me to give them a hand on things like press releases and white papers because they were pretty much incapable of stringing words together into coherent paragraphs. They even offered to pay me!

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

So here I am, and it is evident from the short time I have been at it directly that there is indeed a need. This blog is not intended to peddle my services. The main Website is for that. I’m writing this blog because there is such a crying need in our young industry to get a little more professional in what comes across in our marketing materials and press releases.

A lot, an awful lot, of the material that gets issued day to day by companies is riddled with cliches and nonsense phrases, or so weighed down by technical jargon even the propeller-heads would be confused. And there is SO much hype and so little substance to what is being put out there in attempts to get a little attention and love.

I am not the last word on this stuff, but I spent a bunch of years filtering out the noise of press releases and PR as a newspaper editor at a big daily. And through my other blog, Sixteen:Nine, I read a ton of press releases each day. So I have a pretty good sense of what’s gonna work and what probably does the opposite.

My hope is this will be interactive and I get some feedback from people.

More than anything else, I hope we’ll all start to read less hype, fewer buzzwaords and jargon, and put up with less noise, in this very promising, very fast evolving industry. The hype and the cliches are by no means unique, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do something about it.