Alright, this will probably be my last blog post for over a week. I promise, this ones good!

As you may know (or may not know) Howard Stern did his first show on Sirius satellite radio this morning. Over the past week I’ve seen him on TV a few times. A&E had a Biography show on him, he was interviewed by Larry King, not to mention countless articles in newspapers all over the US leading up to this.

I happened to notice this story by the UPI over on the front page of The Drudge Report tonight.

It was a short wire story, but a few key excerpts tell it all: “Shock jock Howard Stern’s first 5 1/2 hour broadcast on Sirius Satellite Radio Monday contained an estimated 129 expletives, a watchdog group said… FamilyMediaGuide.com CEO David G. Kinney said his group supports an uncensored media environment.”

At first it sounded to me like a press release issued by a conservative right wing group. Well I was right about it being a press release, but ..Hmm.. this “group’s” CEO supports uncensored media? Interesting.

I headed over to the site, FamilyMediaGuide.com.Hardly a “watchdog group”; a better description: commercial website. This press release was clearly planned in advance and seems to have had the desired effect.

As website owners, we can learn a lot from this successful release. To make it simple, here are the lessons I picked up on from their press release (if you’ve got your own ideas, please post them in the comments!)

1. Piggy back off of relevant news stories and events.
2. Don’t be afraid to pick controversial issues. I see too many press releases that might be interesting to the site’s owner, but are as dry as a bone in the desert to everyone else. Controversy is an easy thing to exploit whether you are a business owner, a politician, or a radio/TV talk show host (think about it, Howard Stern, Rush Limbough, Bill O’Reilly..)
3. Put a little extra work into your press release. All someone had to do was listen to a few hours of Howard Stern, and write a tick mark on a page everytime someone said F this. Lets see, listen to a 5 1/2 hour broadcast, maybe 1 hour writing and issuing the release, and in return a bunch of major media mentions. If that sounds like a lot of work to you, well, I’m not going to say what I’m thinking
4. Sound legitimate. From the actual press release — “Three specially trained auditors from FamilyMediaGuide.com were immediately hard at work “data capturing” the show.” Whether or not this is true or not, who knows. What matters is that is sounds pretty authoritative.

If you want to know more about writing press releases read this.