Images and photos are powerful, persuasive -- and underused in public relations.
You hardly ever see press releases accompanied by photos, period, much less print-quality photos that are high-definition, cropped and ready to publish. Including them is smart.
Here are four reasons why you should use images whenever you can.
1) People react to photos instantly
When you read something, it takes time. An incredible amount of time, compared to looking at a photo. Reading a story or oped might require five minutes, and your brain is digesting words and ideas the whole time.
Your brain is wired to make sense of an image or photo in milliseconds. Giant portions of your noggin are devoted to doing nothing else except for analyzing and reacting what the eyes see.
People react powerfully to photos and images. It's visceral, emotional and subconscious.
2) Photos attract -- and keep -- readers
We are visual creatures. People are more likely to read a story or oped with a photo or image, even if that image is a relatively boring chart. The worst thing is a sea of gray text. Nobody wants to read it, and nobody does.
Twitter accounts with a profile photo have ten times more followers than twitter accounts with no photo. Ten times. Ten percent would be a statistical advantage. Twenty percent would be huge. Ten times as many followers is insane.
3) The eyes beat the brain
It isn't a fair fight. The brain doesn't even stand a chance.
A group of European brain researchers wanted to see whether visual cues would have an affect on the amazingly specialized brains of wine tasters and reviewers. They put red dye into white wine and had tasters rate the wines.
Every one of them was fooled; they used terms exclusive to red wines to describe each glass. If they'd been blindfolded, they wouldn't have been tricked at all. Their eyes betrayed them.
Do your words matter? Absolutely. It just makes no sense to your words into battle without the most powerful ally -- great images.
4) Newsrooms need great images
Editors and reporters swim in a sea of press releases, pitches and opeds. It's almost always words.
You rarely see great photos or video with a release or oped. That's a huge mistake.
Newspapers, especially weeklies, are desperate for good photos. TV stations need images. Stories without images get reduced to "readers," which are tiny little pieces where the news anchor says a sentence or two about a story, then moves on to a story that does have great images.