In the UK, we used to have a blog satirsing technology PR called ‘The world’s leading’. You know the routine: ‘the world’s leading supplier of scalable, enterprise, buzzword blah blah blah’.

‘But the client (or more precisely, the client’s marketing director) asks for that to be in the first paragraph’. Then provide some genuine PR consultancy: no news, no news release.

• Using today in the first line – there’s a dateline for a reason
• Embargoes – they don’t work anymore, especially when you send me an embargoed release and I did not agree to an embargo
• Overuse of the em-dash. But that just might be me.
• Inability to write – the current crop of PR people are unable to write a tight, good press release. It’s faster for me to write internally than to send to a firm. One hour versus days.
• The misuse of over and utilize. Okay, there is a disagreement on the over versus more than usage, but utilize means to use something for a purpose other than it is originally meant (eg, I utilized the book as a door stop).

We need to get back to basics.