May
24
Old Wine, New Vessels
Unlike a number of my colleagues, I can’t get that excited about Shift’s attempt to remake the press release format. Are press releases lame? Sure. Do PR pros need to change their way of thinking? Sure. (That’s one of the things we’ve been preaching @ Ketchum and lots of other places lately.)
That said, this template is a distinction without a difference. Social media is about connection, not content. If you take the same-old corpspeak and put it into a sexier format (“The kids are using the Digg, make sure our ‘news’ is Diggable.”), you haven’t done much. In no way are you availing yourself of the real power of social media. Didn’t one of the newswires bake in delicious support for their material recently? Again, glad that you are aware of the aggregators that are going to render your distribution channel inefficient & therefore null, but you still haven’t done much in trying to hijack delicious.
Instead of making clients feel like they are doing social media by tarting up their message points and pushing it out via other channels, how about:
- Having them actually read & track blogs.
- Actually participate in the communities that matter to their business.
- Banish the media relations mindset from their approach (along with the odious ‘blogger relations’) and instead start genuine conversations with media, developers, customers, etc.
- Take a truly niched approach and actually use the range of tools available to work the edges.
- Teaching clients the value and potential of syndication (which Shift could demonstrate by offering RSS feeds of its own press material).
We are stoked that the discussion is headed in this direction. We think that media outlets and PR shops alike have to do much more than merely add cosmetic changes to stay relevant.
Follow more of the conversation here & here.
Nice to see a PR firm that really gets it. The template is great. It will be interesting to see if the wires pick this up and add these types of options to their releases. PRWeb already allows for a little of this, but not nearly as well as this does.
I can definitely see adding these elements to press releases posted to some of my clients’ sites.
Comment by CarlenLea — May 25, 2006 @ 11:34 am
Nice to see a PR firm that really gets it. The template is great. It will be interesting to see if the wires pick this up and add these types of options to their releases. PRWeb already allows for a little of this, but not nearly as well as this does.
I can definitely see adding these elements to press releases posted to some of my clients’ sites.
Comment by CarlenLea — May 25, 2006 @ 11:34 am
Hi Brian – Thanks for the comments. First off, I *agree* that this can’t be about “tarting up message points” and that nothing replaces true news value and good writing. However, I hope you had a chance to check out the “Pitching 2.0″ post of last week at PR Squared, to get a sense of how I think these tools could be used to create a much more collegial relationship between the media and PR.
It’s not meant to be “about” the template; the template is a tool to facilitate collaboration, context, relationships. You need to dig just a li’l deeper to see where we’re headed, and I hope you can find the time. Your feedback welcome!
(p.s. – Thanks, CarlenLea!)
Comment by Todd Defren — June 5, 2006 @ 9:21 pm
Hi Brian – Thanks for the comments. First off, I *agree* that this can’t be about “tarting up message points” and that nothing replaces true news value and good writing. However, I hope you had a chance to check out the “Pitching 2.0″ post of last week at PR Squared, to get a sense of how I think these tools could be used to create a much more collegial relationship between the media and PR.
It’s not meant to be “about” the template; the template is a tool to facilitate collaboration, context, relationships. You need to dig just a li’l deeper to see where we’re headed, and I hope you can find the time. Your feedback welcome!
(p.s. – Thanks, CarlenLea!)
Comment by Todd Defren — June 5, 2006 @ 9:21 pm