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.
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