I caught a press release over the wire last week from the State of Colorado. An overly lengthy press release, I might add. The purpose of the release was to pimp a recently completed branding effort for the state.

Press releases are more art than science. Only a small fraction of them ever get picked up by the media. Using Colorado as an example, here are three rules to follow to increase the odds of getting your story out.

First, when I was a newsman, I liked releases that were simple and interesting. I always figured if it was interesting to me it might be interesting to my audience. So the first rule is to write the release well. Make it sound interesting.  Every editor or reporting reading it will tell right away whether he’ll pick up the story or not. Binary choice. Takes about eleven seconds.

Second, keep it short. Don’t embellish. Let the story tell itself. The Colorado release is overwrought, overblown and, at over a thousand words, overgrown.

What do we learn in the release? That the branding effort (itself branded “Making Colorado”) is the “most inclusive,” “most collaborative”  and most “ambitious branding effort ever undertaken by a state.”

Certainly not the most modest.

Third, if it’s not newsworthy, don’t bother releasing it. The fact is, not everything that happens in your  organization is newsworthy. A newsroom isn’t a Middle Eastern bazaar. Don’t try to hawk all your wares there. Colorado came up with a new brand and a new logo. That’s nice. But not necessarily newsworthy. Happens every day. But the State claims it’s the first “unified” brand for Colorado. What does that mean and why should anyone care?

The release goes into agonizing detail about the bureaucratic effort that went into designing the new logo, the new brand, and apparently, the press release. After 12 months and over a million dollars (including pro bono and in-kind contributions) Colorado came up with a simple triangle with an evergreen tree and the Postal Service abbreviation for the state: CO. Huh? And it took nearly eleven hundred words to say that? Call me crazy, but it looks more like the international warning sign for carbon monoxide presence than it does something worthy of an important state like Colorado.

State brands or slogans should be something you’d be proud to put on your license plates. North Carolina—First in Flight. Commemorating the Wright Brothers. I think of them every time I fly coast-to-coast in five hours.  New Hampshire—Live Free or Die. If you’ve ever met someone from New Hampshire you understand that one. My favorite: Delaware. Home of Tax Free Shopping. Simple. To the point. And about what you’d expect from the domicile of thousands of corporations.

Colorado's new slogan “It’s Our Nature” is clever by a half. And the press release tries too hard to sell it. And it raises the question: What about Wyoming? Montana? Alaska? They are all breathtakingly beautiful states. What makes Colorado more natural? What makes Colorado Colorado?

Having done a good deal of work with government over the years I understand that your work is often subject to collaborative review, endless iterations , and political calculus. I get that. It looks to me like this campaign had too many hands in it, all of which, unfortunately, are listed in the release.

If you’re in charge of putting out press releases, remember the the three rules: keep it interesting, keep it short, and, above all, before it hits the wire make sure its worthy of a mention here and there.

There is a new healthcare product on the market in Michigan and it could end up saving consumers thousands of dollars, according to the vendor. And it’s almost deceptively simple in its design.

The Healthcare Blue Book aims to do for healthcare what the Kelley Blue Book did for used car shopping: allow you to compare prices before you buy. The Healthcare Blue Book identifies the prices of more than 200 medical procedures—from surgeries to imaging tests. So says the product’s vendor, Priority Health.

Priority Healthis a non-profit health plan in Michigan. Their Blue Book uses Priority Health’s contracted provider fees to figure out what Priority calls a “fair price” for healthcare services. The product evaluates prices throughout Michigan based on whether they are fair, more expensive than fair, or below the fair benchmark.

Like it or not, we’re all consumers of healthcare. The older we get, the more we consume. One of the reasons we’ve let healthcare get so expensive is that we’re not savvy shoppers.  There’s no reason shopping for healthcare should be any different than shopping for a car.

Until the late 1950s buying a new car was a mystery to most people. A buyer had no clue what the car cost to make, what the manufacturer’s markup was, and how much the dealer made. A buyer was just guessing when he negotiated with the dealer, who held all the cards.

In 1958 Oklahoma Senator Mike Monroneysponsored the Automobile Information Disclosure Act of 1958.  The law required car manufacturers to post the suggested retail price of the car on the vehicle. It was a start. Consumers could at least know what the manufacturer thought the car was worth. Salesmen in bad suits and loud ties could no long lard up the price with secret dealer markups.

Eight years later a publisher named Edmund’s began publishing quarterly guides with car purchasing information: list price, markup, cost of options and other data. If you knew about Edmund’s you could negotiate a fairer price because the dealer was no longer the only one at the table who knew what things actually cost.

In the mid-1990s, Edmund’s took its information to the Internet and forever changed the way people buy and sell new cars. Now both parties—buyer and seller—had the same data. Car buying became less about pulling the wool over buyers’ eyes and more about working professionally with buyers to find the right car at the right price.

Products like the Healthcare Blue Book have the potential to shine a light in the dark recesses of healthcare—the Finance Department—much like Sen. Monroney and Edmund’s did for buying a new car.

In a technology-driven world we often want the Big Solution. The sexiest, most technical, most awe-inspiring solution to a problem. It’s that way with healthcare. I don’t think that health information exchanges, ACA, ACOs, HIEs or any other alphabet soup solutions will necessarily get us to the level of healthcare reform we need.

I think that small, incremental, common-sense steps like establishing pricing transparency with products like the Healthcare Blue Book, restoring cuts to tax-free savings for medical expenses, making insurance truly portable from job to job, medical liability reform, health savings accounts, and selling insurance across state lines to increase competition have to be part of any solution.

As I tell my kids, take care of the little things. If you do that the big things usually take care of themselves.