In case you recently developed amnesia, it’s holiday time again. Do you have time-sensitive press pitches you need to send out? Take your time and think it through before hitting “send.”

If there’s any way to avoid sending a press announcement the week before, during or after a holiday, avoid it. Things are hectic everywhere, and in the media just as many people want to spend their holidays at home as in any other business. Writers are squirreling away “evergreen” stories to run while a skeleton staff is on duty, covering for vacationing colleagues and keeping up with the “must-do” assignments.

However, some companies have news that has to go out, perhaps it is something that was unforeseeable or an event happening within the week and there’s just no rescheduling.

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Whether or not you believe print media is dying, there’s no harm in spreading the word of your business far and wide.

The key to getting your news in print (or online) is to write it right. Most mainstream outlets use a specific style of grammar known as Associated Press style. It includes different abbreviations, punctuation and structure from prose you would find in a book. Find a cheat sheet for AP style here, but consider having your release edited or proofed by someone with media experience.

With shrinking budgets everywhere (smaller budgets=smaller staff), outlets are looking for print-ready material. There’s a real possibility to have your news printed verbatim if it’s in the right form.

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We talk and think a lot about social marketing here at Start Philly. It is clearly a startup space many people have rushed into and more and more move into every day.  Over on Max’s blog he muses about the rise of the social branding agency.  What’s interesting about this is that it takes a bit of an old school approach to a new school medium.   It almost brings the human back into the social circle.

Many tools, such as  CoTweet, HootSuite, and TweetFunnel, are out there enabling more and more types of entities to track their brand, track their pr, their marketing efforts etc.  The problem is they still put the onus to act and react on this data on people whose primary skill set may not be in these fields.  Sure, pretty graphs sell, and people want insights into their data from 5,000 feet, but unless you have trained people on the ground to help you manage what you’re seeing, you’re not too much better off than you were before.

One thing I do like about these tools however, agency or not, they all win.  “Social media” is a trendy phrase, but just an inevitable evolution, and no matter who wins those wars be it Twitter, Facebook, or the next big thing, these tools and agencies helping people manage this type of data are here to stay.