Brian Solis on Social Media Press Releases

I was involved in a kerfuffle early in 2007 regarding the Social Media Press Release, sort of. I say sort of because initially my comments were not directed toward the SMR concept, but some not-very-insightful comments about social media in general that were made by advocates of the SMR (see Enough Already: Getting Social Media All Wrong, Social Media and Press Relations: The Press Release Is Dead, and then a cascade of other posts like The Perfect Example Of PR People Not Getting It, and then Shel Holtz Is The Perfect Example Of PR People Not Getting It).

Brian Solis, a guy who does get it, and who has transcended his PR roots, is laying it all out there. Although he doesn’t state it in these terms, he’s basically saying that for PR to be effective in the blogosphere, it not only has to be directed at the blogosphere, it not only has to look, taste and feel like blogging, it really has to be honest-to-god blogging. The Social Press Release is then just a way of saying, blog it.

[from PR 2.0]

The Social Media Releases I have experimented with look nothing like the original template [Tom Defren’s, I believe - Stowe], but they help tell a story in a BS-free format without all of the spintastic hype, usual leadership posturing, and self-congratulating comments.

If press releases weren’t so powerful, then we wouldn’t have that stat of over 50% of IT customers sourcing press releases as their main source of information. Nor would we have two-to three of the top wire distribution services listed as top sources in the Techmeme Top 100 Leaderboard.

And let me ask you this. How many times have you made the front page of digg?

I’m with Brian, although I wish he would spit it out. SMRs as originally dreamed up are dumb, and smart PR folks are adopting blogging as a means of getting the stories out.

What I wrote in January in the argument with Shel Holtz still holds:

[From Shel Holtz Is The Perfect Example Of PR People Not Getting It]

[from Shel Holtz’s comments on The Perfect Example Of PR People Not Getting It]

So, let me see if I have this right:

1) The only fodder for conversation in the blogosphere is other blogs, and no other media are worth talking about.

I only said that people in the blogosphere were using blogs to have a conversation. They could be conversing about anything, including the New York Times, last night’s football game, or information received via press release. But the notion that companies are part of the conversation simply by pushing out press releases — of whatever flavor: social or anti-social — is just dumb. You don’t join a conversation by shouting what you want to say over and over and ignoring what people are talking about. Sorry.

2) An employee blogging about something pertinent to his organization needs to (a) include all the boring information most people don’t care about (but some do) in his post or (b) leave out information (that may be required by regulatory agencies) — information that fit very neatly into the “dead” tool called a press release.

People can put whatever they want — or are required by law to include — in anything they publish. My point is that people should drop much of the crap that defines press releases — third party voice, bullshit quotes that no one ever actually said, and so on. How come we continue to have this ongoing debate and none of the PR folks ever focus on these aspects of press releases? The basic tone and format is stupid, and no one will discuss it. Instead, they want to argue about my advocacy for blogs as being adequate to transmit information about companies to the world in a fast and simple (and perhaps better) manner, compared to news wire-oriented press releases.

3) The “press” — all those local weekly newspapers and trade publications and mid-market TV stations and websites from media outlets like the New York Times — can just find another way to get information despite the fact that the press release worked perfectly well for them because the press release has been declared “dead” by people who “get it” better than they do.

Newpapers are drastically diminishing in importance in the world. There are laying off people at a prodigious rate. Warren Buffett has declared that the industry is dead and just hasn’t realized it yet. The argument that the press release is the right mechanism to transmit important information to the world because it works so well for newspapers, is something like saying that oats are what we should put into the gas tanks of cars because it works so well for horses. The same can be said for conventional TV, which just had the lowest viewer numbers, proportional to population, in decades.

4) Companies requiring an official statement of record can just invent something new because the press release is “dead” but a blog post won’t satisfy that requirement.

I have made my argument in several earlier posts about the need for an identity broker service to validate comments made by company representatives. None of the PR folks have yet picked up that thread and discussed it. I guess they are simply stuck, and can’t move into a possible future without press releases, while the rest of us can envision it with no trouble.

5) One tool — a blog post — fulfills every need, even if it means jamming a round peg into a square hole. If it ain’t conversation, it ain’t acceptable. (Bad news indeed for fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)

I never said that blogs fulfill every need, but it is a group of PR folks that are trying to socialize press releases, and bring them into the blogosphere. Perhaps there are some people in corporations that would like to have bloggers write about what they are doing?

6) There is no reason an organization should ever broadcast anything. Ever.

My point about broadcast is that people don’t trust broadcasted messages anymore. Companies can do whatever they want, but I, and the rest of the world, now have the ability to get our information via other modes of communication: the power has shifted to the edge. They don’t control the means of our communications. Companies may feel that they have good reasons for broadcasting messages: economics, expediency, whatever. In general, however, people will tune out or simply discredit such communication as a cheap attempt to manipulate the recipients of the “message” — the “audience” — without fully attempting to engage them in dialog.

So, there, I said it. Again.

And Brian did too, sort of.