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John Mims at Altryianview points out a post by the Bad Pitch Blog that claims that “Google has advised Business Wire that media release headlines that are longer than 22 words will be ignored by the search engine’s spiders.” While that might have some people doing a quick word count on headlines in their press releases, John underlines the more important point “headlines longer than 22 words will be ignored by editors too.”

He has an obvious, but sterling piece of advice - “In a nutshell, headlines are never published so they should be used to get the editor to read the first sentence of your release. Of course, they must pertain to the subject, but they can be off-beat, funny, thought-provoking – anything to get the editor to read your lead. Be creative!“

PR executives can easily overlook what actually happens when their press release lands in a journalist’s inbox. Just think of the hundreds of emails they receive on a daily basis. Ignoring that, have you even thought about when you receive an email. Just how much thought do you give an email from an unknown address with a long subject title? Now multiply that by one hundred!

Ignoring the headline debate, there’s other considerations that we also overlook. As part of our ongoing education programme in Edelman, we recently invited a producer of a leading radio show into the office. One piece of advice he gave us was that PR executives often don’t distinguish between the different mediums they issue press releases to. For example, they would at least appreciate if they received a slightly modified release noting whether someone is available for interview on the subject.