David Politis

This was just one of the “loud and clear” messages that struck home in a recent training meeting with Business Wire’s Malcolm Atherton at the Politis Communications offices.

To be specific, news releases with headlines that are eight words long was deemed the ideal length.

Such length best for several reasons, Atherton explained.

1. Shorter headlines improve results in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.
2. Shorter headlines have greater impact with readers as there is less to read.
3. Shorter headlines don’t get truncated in returned search results. (Both Google and Yahoo! only include the first 50 or so characters of a headline in the returned summary result; everything else is cut-off in the summary.)
4. Shorter headlines force writers to truly understand the thrust of a release, boiling the content down to the absolute essence — the core of what is needed — no more, no less.

Simple lesson then: When in doubt, shorter headlines are best for news releases.

On the surface, the headline from today’s Dell Inc. news release seems fairly straightforward: “Michael Dell Assumes Duties as Chief Executive Officer of Dell Inc.”

And yet as one begins to dig a bit deeper into the nuances of the release, I believe that clues begin to emerge as to what likely happened at Dell in the past 24-48 hours.

First some context.

According to Reuters, Kevin Rollins joined Dell in 1996 as senior vice president, corporate strategy following a stint with management consulting firm Bain Inc. After a variety of escalating promotions, Rollins was tapped as CEO of Dell in July 2004.

Note the praise Michael Dell heaps on Rollins praise in the following quote taken directly from the news release announcing Rollins’ promotion to Dell CEO on July 16, 2004:

“There is no single person who deserves more recognition for our great accomplishments than Kevin. His becoming CEO is as much about recognizing what he’s already done as it is about our confidence in his future and Dell’s.”

My how the worm has turned. Now, let’s look at today’s news release.

One, the lead paragraph explains that Mr. Dell will take over as CEO “effective immediately” replacing Kevin Rollins. Notice that the release is not about Rollins resigning; it’s about Dell becoming CEO. Interesting distinction.

The next several paragraphs are all about Michael Dell and how wonderful he is, which is fine.

But note that it’s not until the fifth paragraph that we learn that Rollins has even resigned from Dell at all, both as CEO and from his position on the Dell board of directors. Here again, note the use of the term “effective immediately.”

I point out this phrase because my experience in tracking news announcements during the past 20 years suggests that any time a release says an executive is stepping down “effective immediately” I am quite confident that the decision to resign was not made voluntarily.

Note also in the sixth paragraph that Michael Dell says that “Rollins has been a great business partner and friend,” which sounds perfectly fine, even laudable on the surface to say nice things about a former business partner. But note that the verb used is in the past tense — “has been” instead of “is.”

Obviously I understand that Rollins is no longer Dell’s business partner, but couldn’t this sentence have been written ”Rollins is a great friend and has been a great business partner” just as easily? Maybe it doesn’t roll off the tongue as well, but for something this important, I’m confident the release was written in this manner on purpose.

Finally, there are two more things in the middle sentence of the sixth paragraph that I think bear further examination: “He has made significant contributions to our business over the past ten years.”

Did you see the classic PR mistakes made in this sentence? Specifically, any public/investor relations pro or journalist worth her salt knows that the word “over” is used in PR- and news-writing to signify a place of position and not a period of time. (For example, “He held the bat over his head.”)

Additionally, with minor exceptions (and this isn’t one of them), numbers 10 and higher are always shown as a number and not spelled out in PR- and news-writing, while the numbers zero through nine are always spelled out.

Hence, the sentence should have been written “He has made significant contributions to our business during the past 10 years.”

Taken in concert, I believe all of these points suggest that this release was pulled together very quickly (my guess is within a couple of hours) without the input of PR professionals.

I also believe it was probably written overnight (probably by Dell’s legal counsel) with vetting by Mr. Dell himself and the Dell board, then prepped for distribution and publishing on the Dell Website and shoved out the door.

If I take these suppositions a step further, it would not surprise me to learn the forced decision to resign was presented to Rollins in a Dell board meeting last night.

Do I know this for sure? Of course not.

But almost every news release leaves clues as to what really happened behind the scenes, including today’s release from Dell Inc.

(For more on this topic, check out my other blog post at UtahTechWatch.com.)

Salt Lake City-based ContentWatch announced yesterday afternoon that it has acquired Net Nanny from San Francisco-based LookSmart (NASDAQ: LOOK).

Historically perceived as a market (if not a technology) leader in the Internet filtration/parental controls marketplace, Net Nanny has become something of an orphaned/abandoned product within LookSmart as management has decided to focus the company on the targeted/specialized search engine marketplace.

In fact, a quick review of the LookSmart news release archives shows that the last time the term Net Nanny appeared in a LookSmart news release headline was September 22, 2004 — more than 27 months ago!

Additionally, it appears that LookSmart has not generated any software licensing revenue since fiscal 2003 (ended 12/31) when the company generated $15.3 million in software licensing, or 11 percent of its overall revenue. (See p. 26 of LookSmart’s 2005 annual report.)

So, although the official ContentWatch/LookSmart news release announcing the acquisition does not disclose the price paid by ContentWatch for Net Nanny, I suspect CEO Sunderlage and company got a steal of a price. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that ContentWatch didn’t pay a dime for Net Nanny (but that’s just a wild guess on my part).

Regardless of the price, however, it should be a good addition to the ContentWatch stable of product offerings.

(DISCLOSURE: Politis Communications provided public relations services to ContentWatch on a project basis in 2005.)

Early this morning, University Venture Fund announced that it has tapped 10 MBA students from the Wharton School to assist the UVF in running its $18 million private equity fund.

Founded in 2001 at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business as an entrepreneurial tool for UofU students, the UVF went on to raise $18MM from limited partners, making it both the first and largest student-run private equity firm in the United States.

Following today’s announcement, the Wharton connection brings to the self-sustaining UVF team 10 Wharton students and four faculty advisors, including a Fulbright scholar, the ex-CTO of NASA, a student with an M.D. from John Hopkins, as well as students with work experience from Microsoft, Google and Goldman Sachs. 

Among the first 10 companies UVF invested in, at least one — Omniture (NASDAQ: OMTR) – has experienced a financial exit, specifically through an initial public offering.

For about the 15-billionth time, Politis Communications took at least one of its clients to a ShowStoppers Media Reception at a major trade show. And once again the results were awesome!

This year, we had three clients at the Showstoppers-produced event — HandHeld Entertainment, HobbyTron.com and ifrogz – which was held for the second year in a row at the Wynn Resort & Casino. Very classy!

Showstoppers lined-up roughly 100 companies as co-sponsors of the event, which was crazy enough. But at last count, Showstoppers had more than 1,000 RSVPs from tech journalists and analysts prior to the event.

For its part, Showstoppers put on a fantabulous event. The food was wonderful and plentiful, there were plenty of watering holes placed throughout the ballroom, and they had even gone to the trouble to make arrangements to broadcast the NCAA D-I National Championship Football game between Ohio State and the University of Florida on screens hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the hall. A nice touch for college football fanatics like myself.

At the end of it all, each of our three clients made great contacts at the show, with several nice stories already published/broadcast.

At the end of the day, I will continue to A) recommend media receptions for clients as a very cost-effective and efficient way of meeting a lot of journalists and analysts at one time, and B) definitely recommend Showstoppers as my favorite media reception producers.

Good job, Showstoppers!