I think you can.
Sure you need the crispness of your message in the “form” of a press release — but what about the ideas suggested in this article from Beaupre PR. I think that it won’t be too long until we see this as the gold standard in how innovative companies get their news out.
Time to reinvent the press release?
There is a movement bubbling in the PR blogosphere to re-invent the press release. It’s time that the old saw caught up to the new “social media” era of Web 2.0… in which news should be tagged, linked, syndicated, blogged, Digged, Flickred, MySpaced, and “conversationalized” online, proponents say.
The idea for the so-called new media press release stemmed from a call-to-arms blog posting titled Die! Press Release! Die! Die! by Tom Foremski, a former Financial Times reporter whose Silicon Valley Watcher blog is considered one of the most influential in U.S., according to Bacons.
The traditional press release is nearly useless, he argued, too heavy on spin and too light on the supporting facts, Web links and other resources journalists typically turn to flush out their stories. In his own words:
“[Press releases] typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin, they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes. Often they will contain quotes from C-level executives praising their customer focus. They often contain praise from analysts, (who are almost always paid or have a customer relationship.) And so on…Press releases are created by committees, edited by lawyers, and then sent out at great expense through BusinessWire or PRNewswire to reach the digital and physical trash bins of tens of thousands of journalists. This madness has to end. It is wasted time and effort by hundreds of thousands of professionals.”
Foremski’s remedy is to deconstruct the press release into components that are tagged, linked and can be easily re-assembled as needed by reporters. It’s a simple premise of “Give me the ingredients; I’ll do the cooking.”
The release could include collections of quotes from customers, execs, experts, analysts, etc., as well as links for relevant reports, financial data, images, etc. And everything is tagged using a collectively agreed upon schema. Reporters choose which parts of the press release they need, with the tagged components providing the near-publishable bits and pieces of content.
Foremski’s call-to-arms has already been embraced by a number of PR agencies who are working to create a standardized template that expands upon his new media press release vision. The template extensions include things like links to podcasts and video, RSS feeds to Del.icio.us pages of relevant supporting information (Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking Web service for storing and sharing Web bookmarks), and even the ability to let readers add Technorati or Digg tags.
But the big question is, will companies get on board? The new media press release may be a great idea if it catches on. Yet it’s a stark departure from the traditional release’s narrative format which companies have come to love.
The plethora of news aggregators on the Web have transformed press releases into pseudo-news stories that yield “hits” across a wide range of online news sites and rank high in Google searches. In fact, InformationWeek recently reported that press releases have surpassed trade journals as the leading source of information for knowledge workers, according to an Outsell Inc. study of 7,000 respondents. Will the new media press release format work in these situations where a story narrative is expected?
A more probable scenario is that the press release will morph over time. Perhaps it will start with a hybrid that blends the traditional press release with elements of the new social media format (i.e. more use of links). – Steve Hodgdon
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