Social Media and Public Relations: The Press Release Is Dead

Wow. Never write an incendiary blog post and then get on a plane. I was in transit all day yesterday (20 January) and missed the furor arising from my Friday morning post, Enough Already: Getting Social Media All Wrong.

Robert Scoble chimed in, mentioning in passing that coporporations are required by law to release certain information by press release:

[from Stowe’s right: kill the social media press release idea now]

Just give us a damn demo of your product and tell us about it. That’s why I usually do two videos with companies: one’s an interview, usually about 30 minutes or so (sorry Loren, it’s long, but then if you want the facts about a new product, you gotta spend some time) and the other is a demo, hopefully about five minutes or so.

I really don’t get why society needs a stupid press release. Oh, OK, I guess we need to pre-write stories for bloggers and journalists since they can’t write their own opinions or reports down, right? Sigh.

Why not use a blog? I have no idea. Oh, I remember Jonathan Schwartz telling me that there’s government rules that says he has to send stuff to major newspapers in a press release done by one of the major press release firms.

This legal issue was touched on at the Third Thursday get-together, I think by Joel Tesch of Businesswire (whose name I had forgotten in the earlier post). But from my perspective, rather than propping up the "news wire" model of disseminating information, let's try to get the government to change the laws. Instead of propping up Businesswire and it's approved competitors in a government-mandated oligarchy, let's come up with something more sensible, and less 19th century

Mike Manuel thinks I am opposed to the microformat approach of hRelease (I am not), although I simply didn't dig into it in my post:

[from Third Thursday Raises Stink]

Of course, if you haven't seen this already, Stowe Boyd thinks our talk just proves (to him) that PR folks still have a lot to learn about social media, and he says so in a kick-in-the-nuts sort of way. He makes some valid points, the kind those of us stuck inside the PR echo chamber need to hear from time-to-time. I'll give him that, but I also think Stowe makes some bullshit assumptions about the PR industry and the changes many of us are already working to incite. For example, why he misses (or dismisses) efforts to form a standard PR microformat for press releases (i.e., hrelease) in his diatribe about the social media press release is, well, strange to say the least....

Hmmm. I don't think my assumptions about the PR industry are bullshit, and I am in favor of hRelease and other microformat projects, as I have been saying since microformats (like tag) have come out.

What I am against is the tendency of PR professionals trying to bridge across a revolutionary divide by appeasing their clients with a watered down version of what social media is all about, and their attempt to redefine what is going on at the edge so that those remaining at the center (= corporate clients) can continue to do what they have been doing all along, with just some new window dressing. Note that this approach also allows the PR professionals to continue to do what they have been all along, such as writing press releases.

Emergence Media suggests my my comments are cynical (why?) and that PR professionals should be measuring the outcomes of their social media experiments before pushing them on the world:

[from Social Media Release (SMR): Metrics Anyone?]

Of course, the cynics will look at SMR as simply a Press Release with “Social Media Optimization” or simply “a bloggish Press Release”. But, I believe that SMR is a required evolution of the traditional Press Releases - for it to remain relevant and engaging to the public at large. And for that, Brian Solis, Chris Heuer, Todd Deffren and others are doing a great job in helping promote SMR and advance online PR.

I don’t believe in discounting SMR, but the question that Stowe Boyd asks “Why not just use blogs” is an important question to address. Maybe the answer depends on how the client wants to be positioned: fully open and cutting edge via blogs or partially open and more “traditional” via SMR?

But in any case, intelligent debate can only be done with evidence and data. Other wise, this debate is simply a mental/philosophical exercise. I’m a supporter of SMR, but if we want to debate SMR constructively let’s try to have some data to base our arguments.

So who is going to release the first report on the number of SMR Diggs, Del.icio.us and Trackbacks? Edelman? The SocialMediaRelease.org? Or maybe their critics like Strumpette?

I am all for press releases to undergo evolutionary pressures, which of course is exactly what is going on. However, evolutionary pressure does not always lead to an adaptation to new conditions: many species just die out, like the archeopteryx and neanderthals. Perhaps that's what is going to happen here. It is not pre-ordained that press releases will evolve into something better suited for the new world, and the same can be said about PR professionals.

The metrics issue is interesting discussion that I hope the PR types will dig into, in the ongoing controversy around these ideas.

Marketing Begins At Home suggests that Scoble and I shouldn't even be getting press releases because we are not journalists (oh, please... get real):

[from Missing the mark]

Stowe Boyd doesn’t like the social media news release. Big surprise. Neither does Robert Scoble.

Here’s a big shock guys… neither of you are the targets of this effort. Neither of you are journalists (last time I checked) and even if you were, no self respecting PR person would be caught dead sending either of you a news release.

This is total horseshit. Everyone is trying to influence bloggers, as well they should.

A comment I left behind there:

Actually, I get 10-30 press releases per week, so there are several hundred flacks out there that should immediately drop dead, according to you. (Wink).

Anyhow, I view press releases as being something like the sensationalist tabloids in the supermarket checkout lines: I know they are full of lies and intentionally overblown hyperbole (Bat Boy Found Living In Cave! Madonna Has Sex With ETs!), but they are amusing, and occasionally a glimmer of something interesting sneaks through, despite everything.

But, if your point is that because press releases aren’t designed to target people like me and Robert, therefore we should shut up and mind our own business, then you are totally offbase. Many of the arguments supporting socialized press releases have to do with the surprising number of average people accesing them at Yahoo, for example. And, anyway, bloggers are obvious targets of press activities, in case you have been living in Antarctica for the past five years. And even if I weren’t an obvious target, I could still have an opinion.

But I don't know if they still respect themselves after sending me a press release... of if they did beforehand, either.

Deep Jive Interests zooms in on the social press release, itself:

[from Why Social Media Press Releases “Matter”]

They [social press releases] are the ungainly misbegotten children of blogs, trying to live in both a spun and yet the same time un-spun world.

I know some firms are trying to get it “right”, and I’m the kind of guy who believes that intentions are worth something — but hopefully not so naive to believe that things are going to happen over night.

Social media press releases are far, FAR from perfect. But, as long as they’re used as a bridge to further conversations with clients about a blogging strategy that is honest and not filled with malarky … then you know what?

I’m willing to stomach it.

We'll see if other people are. I'm not, anyway. That's not to be read that I am opposed to hRelease: I just am negative on the future of press releases, in whatever guise.

Rob Hyndman singles out my post as the best rant of the year, so far. I particularly enjoyed his comment, responding to Brian Solis suggesting that I had missed the point:

[from Tell Us What You Really Think, Stowe comments]

Thanks, Brian, but I don’t really need to read anything else to understand that Stowe is right on point - and you understand that my post was less about the idea of a social media press release than the role of PR more generally, I assume. And I don’t personally think this is an Edelman issue. It’s simply the expected tension between the authenticity of social media and the lack of it in much of business. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is as immutable as the law of gravity. And that, unfortunately, is going to have the communications industry in the crosshairs for quite a while - between a Stowe and a hard place, I suppose.

Brian Oberkirch closes the circle by looking for the silver lining in this flapdoodle and praising the hRelease effort and its advocates:

[from The Case for hRelease]

I’ve written before about my misgivings over the Social Media Press Release. Stowe Boyd reports his dismay at the way social media was presented in tandem with the proposed release format at this week’s Social Media Club in San Francisco. Robert Scoble says that we should just kill the whole idea and focus on demo’ing products.

I appreciate the work that Chris Heuer, Phil Gomes, Todd Defren and others are doing as they push a reluctant PR community to engage with social media, update their toolset and learn a different way to conduct corporate communications. It’s a tough slog, and they are leading a charge.

[...]

So, where I am right now with the idea of a social media-based press solution: let’s use better writing, a more open approach to replying to feedback, blogs and a richer markup (hRelease) to make our press information more freely available, more indexable, remixable, and just more useful. Instead of being an end in itself (or merely a set of message points we hope others reprint verbatim) hReleases should jumpstart more conversation.

I am not opposed to developing an hRelease format to encode corporate data, links, etc., and I agree with nearly everything Brian suggests.

I am not certain what must be in a social press release, really, except some sort of testable ID that proves it was posted by the company involved -- which is why Businesswire and its ilk serve a semi-official role in the dissemination of corporate information: they are, at core, indentity brokers.

The social press release effort is too timid in its goals. What we need is a more secure, more reliable form of identity associated with social media -- in general -- that could be used to confirm that some posted information was actually made by a real person, acting as the spokesperson for a company (like some widely-accepted form of OpenID). Then Jonathan Schwartz could simply post the quarterly results and his comments on them at his blog. And, oh, if the lawyers have to look them over first, ok, fine, cool. But we don't necessarily need a horde of PR flacks involved. Let's just create a non-profit, build a verifiable and secure way to allow companies and the representatives to validate their online utterances. The formatting, after all, can be wildly variable, but the identities should be screwed-down tightly. Companies will think twice about have PR flacks assuming the sock puppet identity of the company president by ghostwriting blog posts.

Scott Karp suggests that the term "social" is hopelessly overloaded with meaning:

[from Demented And Sad, But Social]

Stowe was set off by a meeting on a proposed “social media release” format for press releases called the hRelease. Brian Solis explains constructively the genuine aims of reinventing PR for a social media world, but I can’t help thinking that much of “negative energy” here is the result of the word “social.”

There is way too much hype, way too much ideology, way too much orthodoxy, and way too many hopes, dreams, and expectations packed into this poor overused word. There are many good intentions, and real revolutions, all enabled by technology. But the discussion of everything “social” in media is starting to feel, well…maybe The Breakfast Club, that fountain of mid-80s wisdom, said it best:

Claire Standish: So academic clubs aren’t the same as other kinds of clubs.
John Bender: Ah… but to dorks like him, they are. What do you guys do in your club?
Brian Johnson: Well, in physics we… we talk about physics, properties of physics.
John Bender: So it’s sorta social, demented and sad, but social.

Brian Solis does a yeoman's job of trying to explain the reasoning behind the effort:

[from Enough Already: Getting the Social Media Release All Wrong]

But blogs and video demos aren’t ready to displace press releases – at least not yet – and at the end of the day, they are additional ways to open dialogue. It’s all about the steps that get us out of using painfully out-of-date tools that have no place in the world of socialized news and the sharing of information.

Hence, the need for a tool that provides information in a way that works across a spectrum of applications, while getting us one step closer to creating a closer relationship between producers and consumers, companies and customers, and most importantly between THE people that comprise all of the above segments.

The truth is that the wires are getting it all wrong as the IR Web Report points out. And, it’s polluting the intention behind this movement and stripping away credibility away from those of us who are diligently working on fixing something that has been broken for a long, long time.

Someone on the panel misused the term “audience” which in all honesty has no place in the world of social media. According to Stowe, “Please, please, please don't talk about audiences when you are theoretically promoting social media. As Jay Rosen has suggested, we are the people formerly known as the audience.”

He’s absolutely right. In the discussion of press releases with PR people who are starting to learn about social media, “audiences” still speak volumes when discussing the distribution and dissemination of news to various readers – unfortunately, many people aren’t there yet and they’re not connecting audiences with people. But “People” is also too generic when looking through the scope of a sniper rifle. It begets further division in order for PR to connect at a deeper and more meaningful level…

So, let’s get this straight.

Amen.

Brian mentioned my quoting Jay Rosen at the Third Thursday meeting. Jay commented on my post:

Dead on, Stowe. Thanks for writing it. Part of the problem is the idea of "message" too. The message comes first, the people second, in corporate speak.

Yes, I agree that the PR-industrial complex has its prorities all wrong.

Tara Hunt also groaned in a comment on my earlier post:

Stowe, this rocks. I wasn't there because when I go to these things, I inevitably leave upset.

In fact, even the term "social media" makes me want to cry. WTF is social media? People are social and we aren't just idly waiting here to have really impersonal, crappy PR messages stuffed down our throats.

Damn, I promised myself I would just ignore this inane sector of the world and wait for it to eventually die off, but as long as we put money before people, the disrespect will continue.

Chris Messina suggests that the centroids don't want to earn their chops the social way, by building up a reputation by credible posting of useful information. They are drunk on their brands, and have neglected the basis of social media: people talking to each other. They are stuck on the broadcast model, and can't let go of the loudspeaker.

I have to say that I agree Stowe, but that you might be preaching to a bunch of dinosaurs basking in the tar pits on the eve of the next ice age.

The problem is not with starting with "better stories" -- it actually starts with a genuine and fundamental respect for, as Stowe called them, "people". Unless you can achieve that, and I'm not sure it's even possible at a corporate level, you're going to have a hard time "inventing" better stories to tell "us".

The problem with the SMR (which sounds more like AK-47 than it should) is that it still pushes information in "blips of transparency" that you expect people to somehow care more about than their friends, who are pushing similar, yet ongoing and consistent "blips of transparency" that, over time, have resulted in genuine relationships forming. You can't expect drive-by honesty to replace decades of abuse and indirection.

Instead you've gotta start from the bottom, just as us edglings all have, and earn your way into our feed readers and Google Alerts, just as others who have come before you, and with whom we've established lasting ties, have. If you expect to do any less work on your way to redemption, well, you might as well take one more good roll in that thar tar pit and fade gracefully into the night.

Jeneane Sessum comments:

the most social press release is a phone call from someone I respect.

She also expands on this at Allied:

[from OMG Stowe Said The P Word]

The call for a social media press release is a straw man. It is easier to fix formatting and links in an OldPR tool than it is to figure out how to bring an old-world discipline into new territory.

We are not an audience. You should not be broadcasting. Hello, it's time to take delivery.

Hugh McLeod agrees:

Stowe Boyd tells it like it is. It seems most PR folk are STILL pretty clueless about Social Media.

Final Word

I applaud any efforts, philosophically, that are an attempt to shake the corporate centroids into a real dialogue with us, the edglings. However, I don't believe in hedging, over-simplifying, or reusing outdated rhetoric in an attempt to make it easier for the poor, benighted corporate types to make the trip to the promised land without hard work. The core dynamics of webology can't be put aside for the sake of offering PR agencies' clients a baby step by baby step path into the new age of interaction. We are putting aside lying, so let's not even lie to the liers. Let's not perpetuate false and misleading metaphors, like "audiences" and "crafting messages for our markets".

Let's get down to the real basics. We are people. We are already engaged in conversation among ourselves. If corporations want to jump in, fine, go ahead. The water's fine. But you have to drop the old line model in its entirety, or you will have zero success. PR people who really get this, like Brian Solis, Mike Manuel, and many others, can be a great help to companies making the transition. But it serves no one's interests in the long run to make the transition seem easy, or to let the corporates approach the effort with an "as little change as possible" mindset. And those that do so are harming themselves, their clients, and their discipline.

The most basic purpose of the machinery of press releases is the identity authentication that wire services provide. We can replace that with something more open, less oligarchic, and more 21st century. The rest of the junk surrounding press releases is just that: junk. Fake quotes (or even real ones, pulled from context), a disembodied third person voice, and a sensationalist, superlative-dripping style: let's please drop the whole edifice, fix the identity verification issue, and move on.

And PR professionals can play a role, educating their clients in the new ethics and esthetic: openness, authenticity, transparency -- all within legal limits, of course -- but it will take a good while to learn. And this is an opportunity for a top-to-bottom shakeout of the industry: those that get it will survive, and the others will have to find a new livelihood.

This is a close echo of what is happening in print media, where the journalists who get the blogosphere will do fine, and the others will be fired, and will have to find work in... PR? Maybe not anymore.

[Update: 6pm ET, 21 January

Shel Holtz and Chris Heuer, two of the panelists at Third Thursday last week, responded to my Friday am PT post, Enough Already: Getting Social Media All Wrong. I hadn't seen the posts initially because they didn't trackback to my blog.

Shel and Chris both use ad hominem arguments -- a well-known logical fallacy, guys -- to try to undermine my words.

Shel suggests that I don't know anything about press relations, so I should shut up:

[from Throwing Out The Tool With The Bathwater]

For me, one of the great frustrations of working in the PR profession is the number of people who think they understand it without the benefit of any background in it. Public relations is a field in which scholars devote their lives to researching models and theories. You can earn a doctorate in PR. The field of PR research has exploded to align effort with results. Associations collect volumes of case studies and analyses. The body of literature that comprises the study of PR is vast and rich.

Yet there is no shortage of people who have never studied the business, never read a single textbook, never attended a single workshop, who are ready and willing to tell the profession how to do its job. To insist that the profession use a tool one way or another—or to abandon it altogether—is no different than me telling NASA engineers which tools to use to build their next-generation spacecraft. I know nothing about aerospace engineering, and I just don’t have the chutzpah to pass judgement on the work of those who do. There’s a lot of chutzpah among those who think they get PR but don’t. Few think they could architect a bridge, but everybody thinks they’re a communicator.

[... and he closes with this...]

Now if you’ll pardon me, there’s a contractor working on a house down the street. He’s using some tool I don’t understand, but I see nails laying around and I don’t get why he just doesn’t use a hammer, so I’m going to go tell him so. I don’t know crap about construction, but what the hell?

First of all, I disagree that I have to be a trained PR professional to discuss public relations and social media ("don't try this at home! This man is a trained professional."). This is not neuroscience, Shel. Also note that I was recruited to lecture on the impact of social media on marketing and public relations by the American Marketing Association, a role I fired myself from after growing frustrated with professionals who sought only to learn how to do the minimum in adopting social media to their business. At any rate, I believe everyone has the right to talk about anything.

Then Shel changes tack suggesting that press releases are not dead, just in need of trained professionals who know how to use them... and perhaps a facelift:

Make no mistake: The press release in its current form is broken. Some—those produced by professionals who know how to use the tool—work just fine. There are plenty of case studies to prove it. But the tool in general is shopworn and outdated, designed solely for the print medium. It is broken, in part, precisely because it has been available to people who have not studied the practice of public relations and have absued it. (Equally clueless people routinely demand, “We need some publicity; send out a press release!” as if it’s the solution to every communication challenge. It’s not.)

The press release is broken, in part, because there are practitioners who prefer the easy way out over creativity and innovation in dispensing their clients’ or organizations’ messages. They use the release in an effort to get coverage when they really have no news to share. They fail to tell a good story or they have no story to tell. Ultimately, though, the press release is broken mostly because it does nothing to discourage these kinds of misuse.

I agree with the "it's broken" part, and the stuff about clueless press releases.

Shel clarifies the regulatory issues behind publicly traded companies that Robert Scoble raised:

That rule is easily found with a minute or two of research. It’s called Reg FD—Regulation Fair Disclosure—which, according to Wikipedia, mandates “that all publicly traded companies (in the U.S.) must disclose material information to all investors at the same time.” The requirement existed, under Securities and Exchange Commission rules, in other guises before Reg FD was introduced in 2000.) There is no requirement that companies employ press releases to accomplish this. On the other hand, there have been no viable alternatives.

The goal of Reg FD is to make sure that no single group is able to take advantage of the information contained in a material announcement before another group. As a result, the information must be disseminated in such a way that it is easily available to a mom-and-pop investor, through channels they are accustomed to using, at the same time it’s available to a hotshot broker, an institutional investor, or an industry analyst. Some have argued that subscribing to an RSS feed solves that problem, but public awareness and adoption of RSS (PDF file) still hovers at somewhere less than 10 percent. So do blogging and RSS ensure everybody has access to the information at the same time? As effectively as getting it to every newspaper, financial publication, TV show, radio show, Bloomberg terminal, ticker display and news-focused website? Nope, it would be available solely to the few media-savvy.

Most people I talk to outside of my work (neighbors, family, people I see at my religious institution) don’t even read blogs, no less understand what RSS is. At the Third Thursday event, Chris Heuer asked who among the attendees didn’t know what RSS was. The bartender raised his hand.

The numbers are higher among journalists, but still low overall. To suggest that a company can officially, fairly, and consistently deliver the message concurrently to all audiences by posting it to a blog is, frankly, absurd.

Regular readers of this blog—and listeners to my podcast and visitors to my wiki—will know that there are few more passionate advocates of social media than me. I’m also a realist. I do fervently hope that one day blogs and RSS are ubiquitous enough that they will reach everybody and satisfy regulatory disclosure requirements. But that day ain’t today.

The interpretation of Reg FD could soon be that posting information in a generally accesible way on the Web -- so that it is indexed by Google and found in sites like Yahoo -- could make it more generally accessible than passing it through the news wires. After all, your neighbors down the street don't have an account on news wires, do they, Shel? No, but I guess you are suggesting that the role of broadcast media -- TV, newspapers, etc. -- and financial analysts should remain institutionalized in the dissemination of corporate info: they are the ones with these accounts. However, these folks all have access to the Web, too, and they all know what RSS is (although I don't though what relavence that has). The notion that journalists today do not have ready access to the Web, but do have access to news wire services, is silly.

As I stated earlier in this piece, the real issue here is identity brokering, which Shel starts to touch upon:

When the day arrives that we can rely solely on blogs (or whatever they evolve to) for distribution of authoritative corporate information, how do we ensure that authoritative corporate information is distiguishable from the 1.3 million blog posts currently created each day? How can journalists know that what they’re reading is credible, trustworthy information coming directly from the source? To date, reporters have known this because the information was sent through a reputable wire service; the credibility was built in. Those services will continue to exist, but as companies look to social media as another channel for distributing information—and for making the message more conversational—the same concerns arise. Ensuring that people who need the information get it when it’s released, and that they can readily identify it as credible and authoritative, are additional goals of the effort to establish standards for a social media release.

Ok, we establish an identity brokerage, and corporations can attach such identity proof to blog posts that hold important corporate information. They would have to ensure that their blogs were indexed or spidered by major services, as well as the identity brokerage website itself. Users could register for immediate notification from the service for any corporations they are interested in watching. (Sounds like a good business model, by the way: Edgio meets Businesswire.)

But I don't get the "wheat from the chaff" rhetoric. How many press releases are dropped on the wire everyday? Gazillions. We obviously have to rely on technology to notify us about stuff that is relevant. We don't read everything, obviously.

So it is with blog posts, unless we can establish tools to ensure the messages get into the hands of the audiences with an interest in them in a timely manner and in such a way that they’re identified as something more than just another blog post.

Like I said, stamp them with a proof of corporate identity, and tag it.

Then Shel steps in it:

That’s right, you heard me, I said “audiences.” In his remarks at Third Thursday—and again in his post—Stowe poo-pooh’d the use of the term, trotting out Jay Rosen‘s oft-quoted notion that he is now part of the group “formerly known as the audience.” In this regard, it’s important to remember two important numbers: 10 percent and 1 percent. According to research often cited by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, 1 percent is the number of people within a group who actually create content; 10 percent is the number who interact with it. Or, to put it the way they did in their terrific book, “Citizen Marketers”:

The rule is simple: About 1 percent of the total number of visitors to a democratized forum will create content for it or contribute to it. Furthermore, we postulate that about 10 percent of the total number of visitors will interact with the contributed content. Interact may be described as writing comments or voting on content items...We established the 1 percent rule using existing data that’s publicly available and requesting data from a number of communities that rely on volunteers to create content. One example of the 1 percent Rule can be found with Yahoo Groups, a free service from Yahoo that allows anyone to create an online community for just about anything. About 9.2 million people visit Yahoo Groups each month, but only about 1 percent of them are content originators, according to one of the company’s technology chiefs.

So let’s be clear. One percent create content. Ten percent interact with it. That leaves 89 percent who simply read it. They are not engaged in the conversation. They are passively absorbing content. Now, when I type “define: audience” into Google, I get a long list of definitions. Most support the notion that those 89 percent are part of an “audience”:

• the part of the general public interested in a source of information or entertainment
• the potential or expected number of people who have an opportunity to see an advertising message
• the person or people for whom a piece of writing is intended
• the intended readers of a text
• A group of people who are receptive to a medium or message

...and so on. The idea that there is no audience any more—that we’re all equal parts producer and consumer of content—makes for a nice sound bite. It’s also complete bullshit. Spend a morning commute on BART and convince me that all those people reading the San Francisco Chronicle and Contra Costa Times are engaged in the conversation. The current state of social media should be well understood by anybody who has read Geoffrey Moore: We are only maybe one-tenth of the way across the chasm.

The idea of an audience also supports segmentation (note the definition above, “the part of the general public interested in a source of information"). An employee audience has different information needs than a customer audience. The customer audience is a small segment of the overall consumer audience. Doctors require different content about a drug than patients who need something other than what pharmacists need. And so on.

Oh boy.

The biggest problem with the "audience" term is not that 90% of people are not bloggers, nor do they "generate content" (another phrase that I despise). It is broadcast-oriented. I am all for corporations joining the dialogue in the blogosphere (and oh man are they trying to do so), but they can't do it by broadcasting messages to people that they perceive (as does Shel, I guess) as essentially passive "consumers of content". So long as companies want to buttress their mistaken priorities -- the ease and apparent control involved in pushing "content" to the "eyeballs" out there -- they will, especially so long as trained professionals like Shel will tell them they can have it both ways, by extolling social media on one hand and then undermining the social dimension by stating that only broadcast will really work.

Maybe I sound like a dewy-eyed millennialist, but I believe that more people will become active participants in social media as it becomes more accepted. All those folks at MySpace, LiveJournal, and Facebook are active participants. Maybe this is generational. Maybe its a function of the amount of time you have spent online reading. I don't know. But none of that makes me want to agree with Shel.

When he says "That leaves 89 percent who simply read it. They are not engaged in the conversation. They are passively absorbing content." I think he demonstrates that he doesn't get it. The dynamic of social media is derived from the ability to interact, the first person voice, and what arises when a conversation takes place. Not everyone has to be an author or a commenter, but when enough do, the whole dynamic changes, and everyone involved -- even those not commenting -- benefit. And they are more likely to become active participants the more they are exposed to it.

Re: regarding the need, supposedly, to centralize press releases, I actually have more faith in distributed, Internet-like models for getting out press releases than centralized broadcast techniques. More to follow on that.

I never really commented in that post on hRelease or the mechanics of microformats in this context, so I direct Shel and your attention back to the statements in this post.

Regarding Chris' post, its mostly an ad hominem attack on me, suggesting that I "in my infinite wisdom" was offering my opinions without carefully understanding the nuances of the panelists' comments. He also suggests that I should have call the panelists to get their "side" of the "story". Here's the comment I left on his blog:

Chris -

As I said in my email, I was in transit all day yesterday, and didn’t log in to the firestorm my post caused until this morning. So, I didn’t approve your comment until then, along with 17 others and five trackbacks.

Now then:

1. “Stowe in his infinite wisdom” — this is short hand for me getting above myself, right? Chris! I thought you were above personal attacks! My, my! Tsk, tsk!

2. I didn’t attack the idea of the social media press release, at least not very hard. I mostly attacked the pundits for using outmoded thinking about PR and social media. Although I did question the basic premises of social media press releases, which is not the same as attacking. Unless you are paranoid and defensive, and think that raising questions is unhelpful. I elaborated some more today on the social press release itself, in the course of deconstructing the furor caused by my post: see http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2007/01/social_media_an.html.

3. It is a journalistic canard that there are two “sides” to every “story”. I am happy that you have posted your impressions. I am sorry that you seem to have gotten steamed up about the whole thing. I wasn’t attacking you. In fact, I didn’t single out any of the speakers: I simply related my unhappiness with the general tone of the meeting, and suggested some reasons why.

4. It is particularly odd to suggest that I should call you or the other panelists to get your “side” of the “story”. I was there. It was a public forum. I raised various questions there, panelists commented: inadequately, as I commented in the post. Statements were made. I wasn’t embellishing, but instead I was simply blogging my thoughts and impressions. This is the blogosphere, Chris, not the New York Times fact-checking some deep background story about Iran’s nuclear plans. If you think that bloggers should call people up and fact check before posting something about their statements or writing, why didn’t you wait to call me before posting this piece? Because you know — below the implicit accusation of my treating you and the others unfairly — that it’s silly. That’s not how the blogosphere works.

end Update]

tags : pr social media press release new media brian solis chris heuer jay rosen scott karp rob hyndman robert scoble mike manuel jeneane sessum tara hunt chris messina brian oberkirch emergent marketing marketing begins at home social media release new media release deep jive interests death of the press release

Comments

[Amanda Chapel]

No matter how much this is imbued with enthusiasm, self righteousness and pseudo business acumen... the whole premise is still RISK couple with undetermined benefit. My take away here is that you’d like the lightweight social PR folks to be even more wacky. That would certainly make my job easier.

- Amanda

[david parmet]

Stowe - If it's "horseshit" when I suggest that PR people shouldn't be sending you and Robert press releases, why do you complain about receiving press releases in your comment on my blog?

Is it OK to pitch bloggers or isn't it? It's got to be one or the other, you can't have it both ways.

I pitch bloggers, I've pitched you and I've pitched Robert. My point about news releases you and Robert and whomever else are receiving are most likely irrelevant, something you seemed to be saying in my blog. But here you say it's "horseshit."

So which is it? Cause if it's OK with you, I have about 20 releases coming out from various clients over the next month or two I'd love to send you.

[Stowe Boyd]

David -

It's fine to pitch me. I get pitched all the time. I even glance at press releases, although there are very few that don't set off my bullshit detectors. My argument is all about PR people's approach to social media. I never weighed in on how to pitch bloggers, aside to point out that the notion that they aren't "meant" for us just legitimate journalists is out of date, or maybe demeaning.

[david parmet]

Stowe - are you a journalist?

PS: I'm not - I get a ton of releases and usually I just point out to the senders that they are wasting their time.

[Shel Holtz]

Stowe, you're welcome to comment on PR all you like. The "don't try this at home" shot is putting words in my mouth.

And I've been invited to lecture on the impact of social media non-profit organizations and the healthcare industry. It doesn't make me an expert on them. Being invited to lecture on social media and PR doesn't make you an expert, either. Just a good speaker.

My point is that you're making suppositions about the goals and objectives employed in the deployment of them. And you're wrong in those suppositions. If you want to know what's right, read Seitel's "The Practice of Public Relations or Cutlip's "Effective Public Relations." But I don't suppose you will. I suppose you'll just continue telling everyone a tool is dead despite your incredibly superficial understanding of it.

Before you declare me clueless about social media, you should read my other work -- my blog, my books, listen to my podcast. I would never pass judgement on you based on a single post. (In fact, I continue to think you rock. I just think you're dead wrong about this.)

[Shel Holtz]

Oh, two more points.

One, my numbers summary was meant to point out that most people getting information continue to get it through broadcast. Sorry. It's just a fact. They watch TV news, read the newspapers, listen to the radio, they read Google News and Yahoo! news pages. They don't read blogs. And these, Stowe, are the primary target of a press release -- it is through these channels that the organization gets its message -- by broadcast -- to people. There is a ton of research to support this. Blog readers -- forget about those who write and comment on them -- are a minority! Therefore, to drop the press release in favor of blogs eliminates the majority of people from the information flow.

Yes, the nature of conversation in the social space changes the information. What you don't understand is that the social media release is designed to promote just that while still achieving results that a simple blog post cannot, no matter how simple we wish things could be.

Second, as much as you don't like "audience" and "content," I don't like "get it." It's the overused phrase of the decade.

[Colin Henderson]

Thats what you get for having a life and jumping on a plane! The answer is simple. You are right Stowe ... PR is old and Social Media is new. To expect the old to slot into the new is like suggesting that we fit a horse into the engine compartment of a Ferrari.

[Usher Lieberman]

Jonathan Schwartz documents some of Sun's efforts to get corporate blogs recognized as a mechanism for complying with Reg FD here.

If you're interested, my own thoughts on that are here.

Want to really influence the government to change Reg FD and perhaps make real headway on killing the press release? Work with Mike Dillon to organize an industry advocacy group with Sun in the lead.

I’d take on that task myself, but you see I’m too busy writing press releases at the moment ;)

[Lars Plougmann]

Interesting that the talk is about numbers when the big opportunity is still unquantified. Those companies that manage to engage with and excite their customers, stakeholders, potential customers, interested parties, their community or, indeed, their audiences, gain an advantage by doing so. In extreme cases this benefit is called viral.

Interacting with content is not just about writing about it on a blog or rushing over to update Wikipedia or a vertical wiki, it is forwarding an email to friends asking if they have seen this or mentioning it in conversation. Ideas are spread by people. Google only indexes the top of the iceberg.

[Nick Rice]

Shel, you make some great points - as usual. I think there are two issues here. The primary issue is that most communications, regardless of media, are poorly written. This is why so many people scoff at press releases. On average, they are too focused on the company and not the user benefits. Not to mention that they have terrible headlines and very few stand out from the crowd. But the good news is that writing and level of attraction can be improved with talent, training and measurement.

The second issue is one of distribution, to your point. Traditional media still drives consumption for the majority of the world. Distribution channels for a press release are tried and true. Depending on your audience, there are multiple feed systems that get your information in front of the desired journalists. As of today, blogs are an ancillary venue. RSS feeds are a wonderful distribution platform, but very few people take advantage of them or participate as a percentage. And if you're not subscribed, there's very little chance of you seeing the message. Right now the largest "push" mediums are TV and magazines/newspapers.

Bloggers are no doubt picking up steam - at least the top tier bloggers - especially in the software/application space. TechCrunch gets more PR-style communications than almost anyone; and those communications probably do not go through the traditional media channels. It's really a question of audience - as much as social media mavens may hate that word. I, for one, do not think it's going away anytime soon. The social media crowd will no doubt be the next evolution; but we're not there just yet.

[tien]

Stowe,

This is the best damn read...of Q1 :)

Amen indeed.

PS-I'm looking up the book you mentioned. thanks.

[Ann]

I like your blog, it’s always fun to come back and check what you have to tell us today.