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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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My question for Stowe

Neville reports on Eric Schwartzman’s interview with Stowe Boyd and Stowe’s assertions that…

  • A social media press release is a waste of time, and
  • Organizations should stop issuing press releases and simply use blogs

While Stowe does not ruffle my features (his assertion), he does put me in an odd position of defending old media. It’s odd because I spend most of my time evangelizing and advocating new media, and have been since the days of BBS’s and CompuServe (back when the only way you could get CompuServe was with VT-100 terminal emulation).

After reading the many posts and comments the last time Stowe’s assertions made the rounds of the blogosphere, and then listening to Eric’s “On the Record Online” interview, I’m convinced that Stowe—whom I like a lot personally and of whom I think highly; I read his blog every day—is a Silicon Valley IT guy who doesn’t understand that not everything works everywhere the way it does in the Valley. For Sun Microsystems to announce a new product with a blog post instead of a press release might work great. But since most PR is local, and most PR has nothing to do with technology, the same doesn’t necessarily hold water elsewhere.

Eric plans to interview Stowe again during the “PR Convergence” conference in Los Angeles in a couple weeks (Stowe is a keynoter). (Conference organizer John Gerstner asked me to speak there, too, but unfortunately I had a paying gig in Ohio instead.) He wondered if I had any questions for Stowe, and I offered one. But given Neville’s post, I think I’ll ask Stowe that question here (and I think it’s still a good question for Eric to ask in his interview):

So, Stowe…

You’re the public information officer for the town of Bumfuck, Idaho. (Please don’t email me if you’re from Idaho. I love Idaho. Really.) The town has a population of 3,500. Half of them are online. That’s not an unreasonable number, given that nationwide, about 75% of Americans are online and the densest concentrations are in the bigger cities and particularly on the coasts. Of these, only about 15% read blogs. That’s also not unreasonable since nationwide, according to research from Gallup, 60% of Americans don’t look at blogs. Further, most people in town get information from the local newspaper and local TV stations. This is also consistent with research that shows local newspapers and TV remain the most trusted and accessed source of information (check here and here).

The town council has just passed a new parking ordinance, and as the PIO, you need to make sure the people in town know about it. Do you…

  • Deliver a press release to the local newspaper and television station, or
  • Blog it, or have the mayor blog it, or have members of the town council blog it?

Companies that don’t pay attention to social media do themselves a disservice. But as Mitch Joel notes in the video in the post just before this one, “Everything is ‘with,’ not ‘instead of.’”

By the way, if you’re not Stowe, feel free to answer the question anyway, but be sure to explain your answer!

Incidentally, we (crayon) seem to be having some success with the social media press release we produced for Coca-Cola’s “Virual Thirst” effort.

 

04/23/07 | 13 Comments | My question for Stowe

Comments

  • 1.Hmmmm, I'm interested in knowing how your experience with the social media press release has been. Are there things you would do different next time, any improvements that can be made? How has the response been?

    Skye Lemmon | April 2007 | Oslo

  • 2.To play Devil's Advocate here (and I actually agree with you, Shel, but I enjoy being argumentative), one could aruge that the PIO or the mayor could blog it and reasonably expect that the local newspaper, radio, and TV outlets would read the blog, since they are likely part of the 50 percent with online access. It is not unusual for small towns to have odd information distribution methods that the local media simply adjusts to.

    Of course, local or state laws often mandate specific (and sometimes archaic) means of public disclosure, so the town may be required to directly notify the media of the ordinance change in which case not sending a press release could violate the law.

    And while I'm at it, I would argue that such a small town probably wouldn't have a PIO anyway! :)

    Chip Griffin | April 2007

  • 3.Forget Bumfuck Idaho, how about my town in Metro New York where I have a hard time convincing the school board that they should update the district's web site with snow closings... becauase as you know, no one around here uses the web for information.

    Folks like Stowe who spend their whole lives inside the Valley bubble don't get it. The rest of the world, and I don't mean a whole mess of unwashed uncivilized masses but fairly well educated people with lives and mortgages and kids in school, still get their news from the local TV and radio stations and the local newspaper.

    The answer to your question- as you put it- is not 'either / or' but 'with.' If I could get the school district to put snow closings on an RSS feed while they are still notifying the local radio stations, that would be a start.

    David Parmet | April 2007 | Pound Ridge, NY

  • 4.Chip, here in Bumfuck, the editor of the weekly newspaper is a 72-year-old retired reporter from the Idaho Statesman. He bought the paper when he retired 15 years ago so he could keep his hand in the news business. He has a dial-up connection so he can get Word documents that stringers have emailed to him.

    ;-)

    Shel Holtz | April 2007

  • 5.Shel, I guess it's pretty hard to lose an argument when you control the facts! :)

    Chip Griffin | April 2007

  • 6.True, Chip -- on the other hand, I was assistant editor of a community weekly early in my career and knew the owners/editors of most of the weeklies in the area -- and none of them were hip, young journalists.

    Shel Holtz | April 2007 | Toronto, ON, Canada

  • 7.Fair point, Shel. Though I have not worked in the media, I have worked with lots of small-town media over the past 20 years and I couldn't agree more with your characterization.

    Chip Griffin | April 2007

  • 8.Having lived in Idaho, and a pretty small town, I'd have to say that I probably would have had lunch in the same restuarant with the publisher/editor of the local newspaper sitting at a nearby table. Likely, I would have turned to him and told him what was up, or he would have asked. I would have told him and he would have said, "I'll send Tom over," with Tom being his eager young recent graduate of J-school.

    I might have told him to look on the blog, or read the mayor's blog, but he probably would have laughed because he was having lunch at the time with the mayor.

    Too frequently we forget that the local media is pretty well intrenched in the local community. So they already know what's on the public's mind and where to go to get the information.

    And my example works for towns of 3,500, 26,000 and 200,000. It even works in Las Vegas, 2,000,000 people and growing.

    As Michael Tangeman recently blogged: give the editor a solution that works for him. I think we should remember that communication is our main goal; whatever tool we choose to use.

    Michael Sommermeyer | April 2007 | Las Vegas, NV

  • 9.That's a great point, Michael, and so true. Thank you! Of course, a few words with the mayor at lunch won't provide the details the editor needs to build into a story, so the press release or media advisory or fact sheet -- just to make sure all the major points are covered -- would still be a worthwhile tool.

    Shel Holtz | April 2007

  • 10.Even after all of this discussion -- and this here additional "I agree with Shel, but..." -- I still don't see anything that shoots Stowe out of the water on this.

    Perhaps the confusion stems from Shel's question, which gives us an either/or that pits against each other two items that aren't by any means mutually exclusive.

    "Do you... A) Deliver a press release to the local newspaper and television station, or B) Blog it, or have the mayor blog it, or have members of the town council blog it?"

    Well, what if you do option B for anyone who's down with that, and then perform option A: deliver the product from option B. The product, of course, is a blog post rather than a "press release." Either way, it's still written information that's presumably valuable. If the editor's a 72-year-old Luddite, print the blog post and hand it to him. How is that different than printing your "press release"? I suppose we're splitting hairs at this point.

    I think the real answer here is Shel's fav: It depends. These universal blanket statements about "blog posts can replace press releases" or "traditional media are dying" distract from reality. Reality is that we have information, and we need to get it in the right hands/ears/mailboxes. Arguing over how is like arguing over how to make dinner: You've got a handful of options, and I don't care how you do it, just make it taste good.

    Mike Keliher | April 2007 | Minneapolis

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