A fellow German colleague from another international PR agency, Tapio Liller, today blogged some thoughts on his personal blog I like to share globally - they are worth it: What if we axed press releases altogether? | Open Source PR.
He talks about the difficulties he as a European often has with ideas of media relations for tech firms - b/c they come to him like this:
They want us to replicate what they do in the States: flood the media with heaps of - let’s face it - useless, meaningless, hollow, fake, gibberish bullshit. Elsewhere on the web there’s a name for that sort of unsolicited messages. It’s called spam.What I really like about Tapio's post is his "What if" thinking. Although I am a little biased (I worked for a wire service that distributed press releases) I am totally with him - let's at least try to think about a pr world without press releases.
How do we "get the message out" if we don't send out releases? Is it really blogging or editorial content? Yes and no I think - most of my social media work for clients in the last years has been without sending a single press release out. Even the launch of a blue chip company blog last fall (the employee blog of Daimler AG) was done without any of these - and traditional media came anyway.
The idea of becoming media ourselves as brands and companies and just "getting the message out" on our turf is definitly worth thinking about.
What do you think: Should we "axe press releases altogether"?
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Comments (1)
Near the end of your post, you mentioned "the idea of becoming media ourselves as brands". This is something that I have been putting some thought into recently. (You can find a post here: http://ringblog.typepad.com/corporatepr/2008/06/brands-as-media.html)
I wrote, "As long as the only option for brand awareness to achieve scale was buying space/time on other platforms, their freedom to create new experiences was limited. When a brand is itself a platform, worlds of possibilities open up."
I would appreciate your input on my ideas if you have some time.
Posted by Elizabeth Albrycht | July 16, 2008 5:50 AM
Posted on July 16, 2008 05:50