It’s still in use. It will not die. What must we do to kill it? It’s crawling from the grave wriggling, clinging to life in the information bog. It’s alive. It’s alive…
Why won’t the press release die? More precisely, why can’t we stop writing about its imminent death? See New PR Wiki Hot Issues: Press Releases to trace the origins of the discussion back to 2005. For the current flare up see Tom Foremski’s incendiary post Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die! (Feb. 2006), with all the subsequent responses on the uselessness/usefulness of the traditional press release. Foremski, a former Financial Times journalist, mad as hell, issued an enlightened call to arms that kicked this discussion into high gear:
“Press releases are created by committees, edited by lawyers, and then sent out at great expense through Businesswire or PRnewswire to reach the digital and physical trash bins of tens of thousands of journalists. This madness has to end. It is wasted time and effort by hundreds of thousands of professionals.”
The IDEA is to strip out all of the bullshit and hype from traditional mechanical, and useless press releases and rebuild it as a focused compilation of relevant facts, links, media and a subscription feed to help readers write, tell, and share a story their way (without having to sort through a sea of crap to find out what’s real, what’s canned, and what’s important.) This is what a good release should be anyway, regardless of trends and titles. Basically it’s the press release redux. It takes out what’s wrong with press releases and modernizes them into a usable format for journalists, bloggers, and individuals. – Brian Solis
May, 2006 Todd Defren of SHIFT Communications unveiled the Social Media Press Release as a response to Foremski’s seminal DIE PRESS RELEASE post (Foremski is now writing a book on the death of the press release). Thousands of copies of the SHIFT social media press release template were downloaded in the first 60 days of posting - the concept generated a lot of buzz in PR blogs. And – how’s this for PR? - the news was picked up by BusinessWeek. See SHIFT de.licio.us page for a measure of the intense dialogue that continues nearly every day around the death of the press release. Clearly, if it has not yet been demonstrated that we have come up with a successor to the press release, PR pros love talking about it.
So, if the press release is dead, what do we replace it with? In a series of very helpful interviews and analyis of the social media press release, HealthcareVox.com (Aug. 2006), a site devoted to healthcare marketing, started asking the right questions. They invited SHIFT, PRWeb, and PR Newswire (MultiVu) to discuss their social media services and how they are bieng used.
PRWeb direct-to-consumer offering includes RSS, SEO. They are the best option, they say because “Our exclusive EyeCasterâ„¢ technology is an important part of our Online Visibility Engineâ„¢, delivering your headlines to 2,000+ Web sites and blogs.”
Samples of MultiVu’s Multimedia News Release (MNR)  - logos, photos, audio/video, and links. Elements are used to assemble a dynamic HTML platform, with all information regarding a news story in one place.Â
Early last month Edelman Worldwide began offering StoryCrafter, a web based tool for publishing social media news releases. It features:
- Core facts
- Quotes
- Multi-media
- Links
- RSS feeds
- Resources – Post to de.licio.us. Digg this story
- Technorati tags
- Boilerplate
- Contact
- Trackback and comments
It’s the “comments’ feature that PR firms, and their clients, will find most daunting. Every piece of news now goes through a consumer-generated cycle of additional commentary that stretches the story to regions you may not want to go, offering a perspective you may not want to hear.
Tracked on Wednesday, December 06, 2006 at 7:39:33 AM |
Dutch Perspective :: Public Relations + Cultural Affairs |
Edelman just introduced another version of Todd Defren’s original Web 2.0 news release, or social media release, and a tool to create one. It’s not very new or innovative and aesthetically it can be much improved. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that… |
From a theoretical standpoint, the social media press release makes a lot of sense. From a practical standpoint, how do clients who are steeped in tradition and hampered by regulatory and legal constraints begin to use and benefit from the new social media tools – the subject of part II, coming soon.Â
Resource: Google Group: “New Media Release”