Swindon Town released a ‘Club Statement’ yesterday following their implementation of a ‘new media strategy’. Public Relations professional Simon Brooks offers his opinion on their statement…

THE club are very disappointed and surprised in the way in which our new media arrangement has been portrayed locally and presented to the national media. [We weren’t paying attention when Newcastle and Southampton attracted criticism when they tried to pull similar stunts.]

So we are very clear: the football club are looking to start something different this season [We want to see what we can get away with]. Bearing in mind the change in training facility (which is a considerable distance from Swindon) [We know the location of our training ground has no bearing on whether or not we choose to talk to journalists but we’re hoping by bringing in a positive, you won’t question the negative], our in-house journalist, Tom Otrebski [who will do what he’s told otherwise he won’t get paid], will be conducting interviews with players, management and staff during the week as well as producing a lot of behind-the-scenes material that will engage the fans and give them more of an insight [This sounds meaningful, no-one will check that the actual meaning is ‘an accurate and deep understanding’] into how the team and the club is run [We only want you to see what we choose to talk about].

This will be distributed on all the club’s official media channels [We don’t believe anyone else should be making money out of talking about us] and also on a new and exciting media platform called Fanzai which the club have decided to trial [We’re willing to be guinea pigs if the price is right]. This was first trialled on Saturday during Town’s pre-season friendly with Everton [We realise that not everyone knew that this was on, sorry about that].

Fanzai is a family-friendly app which is free of the profanity and abuse that users may experience on existing social media. Fanzai’s unique approach to social media is something the club decided to align themselves with [We hope to drive new revenue through selling our fans’ data to third parties] and launch our media output through. [We’ve mentioned Fanzai three times now, we hope this is enough to persuade you to download it.]

For the avoidance of doubt, post-match access and the reporting on matches by the media will remain exactly the same as last season [We’ll fulfil our contractual obligations to the League, it’s not like we’re managed by Sir Alex Ferguson]. There is not a blanket media ‘ban’ as is being reported [we hate the way we can’t control what other people say about us]. We are trying something fresh which we feel will give supporters a new insight into their football club [It’s actually our football club, but we hope this sounds suitably inclusive.].

The writer, Simon Brooks, has supported Swindon for more than 25 years and has been writing news releases for the last 15 of those.

Follow @smnjbrks on Twitter