From Venmark International, a company that specializes in writing product releases, comes a spot-on list of the things that engineers do wrong when they try to write their own press releases.

You can read the whole thing, and download a PDF of the article here. But here's the list. Uuuurgh! It makes my editor-skin crawl.

ISA Marketing and Sales Summit v.5.0

You are invited to submit an abstract for ISA's 5th Annual
Marketing and Sales Summit, In Search of the Holy Grail:
Integrating Marketing and Sales, sponsored by the ISA
Management Division. The Summit will be held 1-3 September
2010 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Don't miss your opportunity to share your expertise,
solutions, and best practices for how to survive and excel
beyond 2010 with other marketing and sales professionals.

CONTENTS
* How to submit an abstract
* Conference Location

Ah, the Interweb! How wonderful, how easy, how lazy it makes PR folks.

Here's the latest untargeted pitch I received. Boy, can you say really untargeted?

NEWS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
APOSTLE MINISTRY INC
Contact: Rev. Edward G. Palmer

Solid Rock Church Pastor Steals Son's Wife
Apostle Ministry Establishes Legal Fund To Help Son

...this has to do with process, batch and hybrid automation and control systems how?

 But here's the kicker!

Here's the disclaimer at the bottom of the message:

At Rockwell Automation's Automation Fair in 2009, we were treated to a little bit of live theater. Several RA product managers put on a show about the features and usability of PlantPAx, the version of FactoryTalk and Integrated Architecture that RA has optimized for process, batch and hybrid automation. It was cute, a little rocky ("in any live demo, three things can happen, and two of them are bad"), but it made its point extremely well, and was very easy to follow and understand.A Day in the Life

Recently, I have been noticing that the number of poorly targeted email press releases I'm receiving has been increasing.

I've also noticed what I call pseudo-targeting. The PR firm can't be bothered to research the media outlet they are targeting so they send out something like this:

Dear Walt: