Jonathan Rick wrote an interesting article recently at TechRepublican.com:  “Blog Posts are the New Press Releases.”

I agree with him 100 percent.

I would also add that YouTube videos are the new TV commercials, Facebook pages are the new social clubs, and “tweets” are just, well, new.

But those are different topics for different blog entries. For now, read what Jonathan Rick has to say about blogs supplanting press releases:

The staple of public relations is the press release. It’s been around forever; follows generally agreed guidelines for format, content, and length; and still succeeds in its objective to publicize the item in question.

And yet, bound by stale conventions that suffocate originality and don’t play well with multimedia, the press release has become obsolete. It’s not that there’s no longer a need to announce big news formally. It’s that there’s a better way to do it than drafting 400 words of boilerplate.

Indeed, as Claire Cain Miller reported in a much-discussed article last week, the pr agency representing Flickr never issued a release on its behalf—not even when Yahoo acquired the photo-sharing Web site. Similarly, when Google has exciting news to share, it does not use a wire service.

Rather, both companies self-publish blog posts. They do so, I suspect, not because blogs are hipper, but because they’re more genuine, more personal, and more flexible than their old media counterparts. Instead of a flack ghostwriting quotes for a CEO, the individual(s) who managed the project can craft a first-person narrative recounting the project’s past, present and future with pictures and videos and links. Then, as other bloggers pick up the post, “two days later, BusinessWeek calls,” as Donna Sokolsky Burke, of Spark PR, puts it.

When you visit Google’s online “press center,” the first thing listed is not press releases. It’s blog posts. If you think this is accidental, think again.

The press release is dead. Long live the press release.

What do you think, are blog posts the new press releases?  And have modern day campaigns learned what the business world apparently already knows: that it’s better to talk to your constituents with interactive, first person stories than standard, stilted  form letters?

Tags: blogs, eCampaigning, press releases

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under eCampaigning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.