Elliot Ng On MicroPR
Elliot Ng of Uptake blog compiles a bunch of recent posts from many, many bloggers and journos about how they want to be pitched. The skinny is that we are all over the place.
Scoble and I are the only ones mentioned who want to be pitched by Twitter; in my case, via Twitpitch. However, I think nearly all of those mentioned would like to see less wordy, simpler press announcements, in whatever format.
I am pushing for a new style of MicroPR, where the media being used channel discussion in better ways than the marketspeak sprawl that we have witnessed in recent years. Fewer useless and ungrounded superlatives, fewer bogus quotes that no CEO ever uttered, fewer bullet points, fewer words.
Elliot doesn't single out MicroPR as a theme, per se, in his compilation, but I think that micromedia is the natural spawning ground of a new sort of open marketing, where the social model of open discourse and the human scale of personal spheres of influence will meet to create a great opportunity for those who adopt the appropriate mindset and techniques.
Of course, it is another opportunity for newbies to get it all wrong and stub their toes on new furniture. So be it.
Elliot also raises a good point about embargoed news, which I would accept by direct message. Yes, I know that means an added, one-time step, where I have to start following the person who wants to send me the message. But I will do that, no problem.
Stowe, thanks for your shout out, and clarifying how to deal with embargo'ed news.
I know you want to use MicroPR to have "Us" (whoever us is) shake things down to the bare minimum. So I did the #twitpitch and it felt a bit weird, but the discipline of distilling complexity down to 140 char is a good thing.
To follow up on my comment I left on your post on 5/10, I really think Chris Brogan's summary of "What I want to be pitched at right at this minute" is a complementary angle to MicroPR. For example, I know you've talked about travel startups before but I don't know if you are currently interested in that. So I don't know if you want to be pitched or not (140 char or not). If there was some way to use microformats, or an about page, or something simple to register current coverage interest, it would help companies not waste time pursuing bloggers that just aren't interested in what they want to say. I *know* this would have to be super easy to do otherwise bloggers won't do it. One way would be to use a special purpose Hashtags-like Twitter account/application where I can either just "#" tag a tweet or DM a tweet to the account so a running profile of my interests is known.
Its really the mirror image side of the #twitpitch. Lets say it was called #twitpassion or something so people can know what I am passionate about right now. Then people won't be bothering me about that 1 post I made 6 months ago about VOIP because frankly I don't care so much about VOIP anymore (real example on my group blog about China, CNReviews.com).
Maybe there is something else like just putting in your blog About Page, or using some kind of Microformat tag, or creating a Wiki with a badge on your site where you can add and remove your passions.
Anyway, thanks for spurring dialog on this issue.
Posted by: Elliott Ng | May 10, 2008 at 06:07 PM
BTW, I'm Elliott Ng (with 2 t's) not Elliot Ng (with 1 t)
On Twitter I'm:
http://www.twitter.com/elliottng
I mostly tweet about social media, online travel, China, and globalization.
Posted by: Elliott Ng | May 10, 2008 at 06:09 PM