How To Write A Press Release: Cuil Gives Us A Nice Lesson

One day, “cuil” was an ugly typo, the next it was being coughed up as “the new google” all over the web, on 24-hour tv news & in the middle pages of newspapers across the world.

Within 24 hours of launch, 5,696 people had bookmarked cuil at del.icio.us. To put that in context, that’s 5 times as many del.icio.us adds as Barack Obama’s official website has had to date.

So how’d they do it?

The simple answer is: very straightforward PR.

If you ever plan to put out a press release, you should take a look at the cuil launch release on their site. It’s a very standard press release, with some nice hooks tucked in there to appeal to the average journalist.

The hooks cuil tried to push

Here are the hooks cuil tried to push in their launch press release:

1. Biggest search engine: ‘120 billion web pages indexed’, ‘3x more than any other search engine’
2. Different look: ‘magazine-style layout’ (bound to appeal to a magazine journalist, you’d have thought)
3. Different results: ‘unlike any other search engine…’
4. Privacy protection: this point appears 3 or 4 times through the short release

The hooks that stuck in the media

Not all of cuil’s hooks stuck. ‘Privacy’ & ‘Different look’ didn’t even get a mention in some articles, whereas some other elements were totally focused on:

Biggest search engine.
This is always a winner: biggest, fastest, strongest, shortest… extremes & ‘records’ are utterly failsafe themes- especially combined with nice-looking stats. Almost every article mentions “3x bigger than Google”.

Ex-Google employees.

The fact that cuil has at least one ex-Google employee was tucked away in the cuil release, with a single passing mention. Yet every single article managed to pick out this fact. Many made it the headline/core of the piece. Why? Because it has totally universal appeal:

1. We’ve all heard of Google.
2. We all know Yahoo was once toppled by Google & part of us believes it could happen again.
3. The risk that paid off: “Why would anyone leave Google?” we think, “To make something even more successful than Google!” is the answer many of these articles hint at.

Perhaps including this as only a passing mention worked in cuil’s favour: The journalist who picks up the press release thinks “great, I’ve found a gem tucked away here” rather than thinking “yawn, another spoon-fed press release for me to reword”.

Genuine?

Reading many of the day-1 Cuil articles, it’s patently obvious the writers don’t believe Cuil has any chance at beating Google. Yet few writers say this outright; they all act under the pretense that it could ‘kill’ Google.

And that is something to remember when you come to put out a press release: You’re not writing a persuasive document, you’re simply providing the tools to tell a story.