Warning! Long post follows.

For me, one of the great frustrations of working in the PR profession is the number of people who think they understand it without the benefit of any background in it. Public relations is a field in which scholars devote their lives to researching models and theories. You can earn a doctorate in PR. The field of PR research has exploded to align effort with results. Associations collect volumes of case studies and analyses. The body of literature that comprises the study of PR is vast and rich.

Yet there is no shortage of people who have never studied the business, never read a single textbook, never attended a single workshop, who are ready and willing to tell the profession how to do its job. To insist that the profession use a tool one way or another—or to abandon it altogether—is no different than me telling NASA engineers which tools to use to build their next-generation spacecraft. I know nothing about aerospace engineering, and I just don’t have the chutzpah to pass judgement on the work of those who do. There’s a lot of chutzpah among those who think they get PR but don’t. Few think they could architect a bridge, but everybody thinks they’re a communicator.

The latest example is particularly discouraging. The foofaraw was ignited by some people for whom I have deep and

un

abiding respect. Stowe Boyd and Robert Scoble are in my “must-read” feeds; out of the 800 or 900 feeds to which I’ve subscribed, theirs are in a folder of a mere 40 or 50 I make sure to read every day. But their recent attacks on the group working to develop a standard for the social media press release are based on an egregious lack of understanding. In neither case has either blogger delved into the background of the effort, explored the problem it is meant to fix, or spoken to the people who would be the target of a social media release. They have simply jerked their knees and passed judgement on a tool about which they evidently know extremely little. (I’ll keep reading their blogs; they’re smart guys with important things to say.)

Some background

The whole thing began with a panel discussion at the latest Third Thursday event in San Francisco. Chris Heuer moderated the panel, which included me, Brian Solis, Tom Foremski, and Business Wire’s Joel Tesch. (You can listen to the entire panel discussion, including Q&A, over at FIR.) Stowe, who was among the attendees, wrote a post that dismissed the concept, and Robert posted an item that agreed. Since both are “A-list” bloggers, off we went.

I won’t retread ground that has already been covered. Here’s a summary of some of the key posts to date:

• Stowe’s original post
• Robert’s concurrence
• Chris Heuer’s response (including the comment he left to Stowe’s post, but which has not appeared; I left one, too, but it has not appeared, either)
• Brian Solis’s response
• A balanced post from Chris Saad

Instead, I’d like to touch on a few points that haven’t yet been raised. Sorry, but it’ll take more than a few words to do so.

Just use blogs

First is the notion that blogs can replace press releases. (They can also regrow hair, get rid of that waxy yellow buildup, and end global warming.) Stowe wonders, “Why not just use blogs? Why do we need these so-called ‘social’ press releases?” Robert opines, “Why not use a blog? I have no idea. Just give us a damn (video) demo of your product and tell us about it.”

In my career, I have been involved in the distribution of hundreds, maybe thousands, of press releases, and not one was about a product (unless that product was being recalled or we were alerting the public to a safety issue). Robert is among a vast number of people who confuse public relations with marcom. (I have spent 30 years in PR but not five minutes in marketing communications.) Would a damn demo video work for an earnings statement? The announcement of a merger, acquisition, or divestiture? How about a product recall? A formal, official response to a crisis?

The lowly, maligned press release is, at its core, a tool. Like any tool, it has the potential for misuse. When we complain about the press release, we are, in fact, complaining about those who produce lousy ones—and they are legion. But should the press release be killed because there are so many bad ones? By that logic, blogs should also mount the gallows steps. They are used by the clueless and less-than-ethical to spread misinformation and disinformation. Organizations mask their identities, hiding behind fake names while claiming an avereage Joe is a big fan of their products. Individuals fail to disclose that they’ve been paid to write about something. Why isn’t there a movement to kill blogs because so many are bad?

Why press releases matter

Make no mistake: The press release in its current form is broken. Some—those produced by professionals who know how to use the tool—work just fine. There are plenty of case studies to prove it. But the tool in general is shopworn and outdated, designed solely for the print medium. It is broken, in part, precisely because it has been available to people who have not studied the practice of public relations and have absued it. (Equally clueless people routinely demand, “We need some publicity; send out a press release!” as if it’s the solution to every communication challenge. It’s not.)

The press release is broken, in part, because there are practitioners who prefer the easy way out over creativity and innovation in dispensing their clients’ or organizations’ messages. They use the release in an effort to get coverage when they really have no news to share. They fail to tell a good story or they have no story to tell. Ultimately, though, the press release is broken mostly because it does nothing to discourage these kinds of misuse. That’s just one of the problems the social media release is designed to fix. Also, we should keep in mind that the development of the social media release is a direct response to the very specific plea of a journalist. God forbid we should listen to our customers when they tell us what they need!

Robert also notes, “I remember (Sun Microsystems CEO) Jonathan Schwartz telling me that there’s government rules that says he has to send stuff to major newspapers in a press release done by one of the major press release firms.” That rule is easily found with a minute or two of research. It’s called Reg FD—Regulation Fair Disclosure—which, according to Wikipedia, mandates “that all publicly traded companies (in the U.S.) must disclose material information to all investors at the same time.” The requirement existed, under Securities and Exchange Commission rules, in other guises before Reg FD was introduced in 2000.) There is no requirement that companies employ press releases to accomplish this. On the other hand, there have been no viable alternatives.

The goal of Reg FD is to make sure that no single group is able to take advantage of the information contained in a material announcement before another group. As a result, the information must be disseminated in such a way that it is easily available to a mom-and-pop investor, through channels they are accustomed to using, at the same time it’s available to a hotshot broker, an institutional investor, or an industry analyst. Some have argued that subscribing to an RSS feed solves that problem, but public awareness and adoption of RSS (PDF file) still hovers at somewhere less than 10 percent. So do blogging and RSS ensure everybody has access to the information at the same time? As effectively as getting it to every newspaper, financial publication, TV show, radio show, Bloomberg terminal, ticker display and news-focused website? Nope, it would be available solely to the few media-savvy.

Most people I talk to outside of my work (neighbors, family, people I see at my religious institution) don’t even read blogs, no less understand what RSS is. At the Third Thursday event, Chris Heuer asked who among the attendees didn’t know what RSS was. The bartender raised his hand.

The numbers are higher among journalists, but still low overall. To suggest that a company can officially, fairly, and consistently deliver the message concurrently to all audiences by posting it to a blog is, frankly, absurd.

Regular readers of this blog—and listeners to my podcast and visitors to my wiki—will know that there are few more passionate advocates of social media than me. I’m also a realist. I do fervently hope that one day blogs and RSS are ubiquitous enough that they will reach everybody and satisfy regulatory disclosure requirements. But that day ain’t today.

Still, the underlying technology for the social media press release is a blog (along with distribution methods developed the the wire services, like Business Wire’s EON). The question is: How is the blog used to achieve the organization’s measurable goals when a simple blog posting—even with a damn demo video—won’t?

Wheat and chaff

When the day arrives that we can rely solely on blogs (or whatever they evolve to) for distribution of authoritative corporate information, how do we ensure that authoritative corporate information is distiguishable from the 1.3 million blog posts currently created each day? How can journalists know that what they’re reading is credible, trustworthy information coming directly from the source? To date, reporters have known this because the information was sent through a reputable wire service; the credibility was built in. Those services will continue to exist, but as companies look to social media as another channel for distributing information—and for making the message more conversational—the same concerns arise. Ensuring that people who need the information get it when it’s released, and that they can readily identify it as credible and authoritative, are additional goals of the effort to establish standards for a social media release.

Let’s look at this another way. In my work in employee communications, I encounter no end of companies that distribute every single news item, regardless of its importance, as a separate email message to employees. One email may talk about a change in dress code as summer gives way to fall. Another reports that a meeting has changed from one room to another. And a third informs employees that the premium medical insurance plan has been eliminated and everybody must now join an HMO. One of those messages is vitally important to employees, yet because they have all been sent as single emails, and employees receive hundreds of such items from the company every month, they each carry the same weight. Employees accustomed to deleting email announcements could easily shitcan the critical benefits notice without even noticing that it’s something they really do need to know.

So it is with blog posts, unless we can establish tools to ensure the messages get into the hands of the audiences with an interest in them in a timely manner and in such a way that they’re identified as something more than just another blog post.

Targeting messages

That’s right, you heard me, I said “audiences.” In his remarks at Third Thursday—and again in his post—Stowe poo-pooh’d the use of the term, trotting out Jay Rosen‘s oft-quoted notion that he is now part of the group “formerly known as the audience.” In this regard, it’s important to remember two important numbers: 10 percent and 1 percent. According to research often cited by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, 1 percent is the number of people within a group who actually create content; 10 percent is the number who interact with it. Or, to put it the way they did in their terrific book, “Citizen Marketers”:

The rule is simple: About 1 percent of the total number of visitors to a democratized forum will create content for it or contribute to it. Furthermore, we postulate that about 10 percent of the total number of visitors will interact with the contributed content. Interact may be described as writing comments or voting on content items…We established the 1 percent rule using existing data that’s publicly available and requesting data from a number of communities that rely on volunteers to create content. One example of the 1 percent Rule can be found with Yahoo Groups, a free service from Yahoo that allows anyone to create an online community for just about anything. About 9.2 million people visit Yahoo Groups each month, but only about 1 percent of them are content originators, according to one of the company’s technology chiefs.

So let’s be clear. One percent create content. Ten percent interact with it. That leaves 89 percent who simply read it. They are not engaged in the conversation. They are passively absorbing content. Now, when I type “define: audience” into Google, I get a long list of definitions. Most support the notion that those 89 percent are part of an “audience”:

• the part of the general public interested in a source of information or entertainment
• the potential or expected number of people who have an opportunity to see an advertising message
• the person or people for whom a piece of writing is intended
• the intended readers of a text
• A group of people who are receptive to a medium or message

...and so on. The idea that there is no audience any more—that we’re all equal parts producer and consumer of content—makes for a nice sound bite. It’s also complete bullshit. Spend a morning commute on BART and convince me that all those people reading the San Francisco Chronicle and Contra Costa Times are engaged in the conversation. The current state of social media should be well understood by anybody who has read Geoffrey Moore: We are only maybe one-tenth of the way across the chasm.

The idea of an audience also supports segmentation (note the definition above, “the part of the general public interested in a source of information”). An employee audience has different information needs than a customer audience. The customer audience is a small segment of the overall consumer audience. Doctors require different content about a drug than patients who need something other than what pharmacists need. And so on.

Organizations seeking to get their messages into the hands of the targeted segment have used press releases rather effectively to accomplish this goal. When I worked for an ophthalmic pharmaceutical company, the press release distribution service with which we contracted was able to parse the right list of media to ensure the message got to those whose subscribers would be most interested in it.

Today, in addition to reaching the still viable print channels with names like Ophthalmology Times, that company would need to reach their online targets. The ability to do so is (you saw it coming, didn’t you?) integral to the development of the social media release.

Yes, but is it really social?

Stowe also sneered at the use of the word “social” in the social media press release. (Both Tom Foremski and I prefer “new media release,” but that’s just quibbling over labels. Who cares what it’s called as long as it works?) The title of Stowe’s post focuses on this: “Getting Social Media All Wrong.” He writes, “Social media is based on the dynamic of a many-to-many dialogue between people.”

Gosh, really? I didn’t know that. Thanks, Stowe.

(It’s worth noting that none of this means organizations shouldn’t start conversations using blogs. It’s just that the goals of a press release and the goals of participating in conversation through blogging are not the same.)

So how does a social media press release accommodate this definition? Let me count the ways:

1. It adds comments, so the distributor of the release may now engage in conversation with readers—any reader.
2. It makes the release more discoverable in the context of the blogosphere, so bloggers will have an easier time commenting on it in their own forums.
3. It parses the information contained in the release—formerly long, flowing narrative—into segmented chunks so bloggers can easily extract the component they want to use or talk about (e.g., multimedia, reproducable artwork like logos or package art, quotes, etc.).
4. It accommodates quick indexing in social bookmark services like del.icio.us and social ranking services like Digg.
5. Tags allow journalists (and others) to see get a broad overview of the converation on that topic by seeing what other bloggers have said about it.

There’s more. You can read all the elements so far proposed for the social media release here.

The root of the issue

The real core of the social media release, though, has little to do with its sociability. Microformats have more to do with usability, ensuring all the various bits of the information are findable and usable in a consistent and standard manner.

Just as XBRL provides a “standard to define and exchange business and financial performance information” (according to Wikipedia), the tagging infrastructure of the social media release will ensure the various standard elements of a news release are apples-to-apples findable and comparable.

The parsing of press release content is equally important. Stowe decries the fact that press releases typically include quotes from executives that no executive uttered. These quotes, in a traditional release, are seamlessly woven into the narrative. In the social media version, they are listed separately in a “quotes” category. Exposed to such light of day—and tagged with the appropriate “quotes” tag, allowing them to spread far and wide—the practice of fabricating quotes probably won’t last long. The transparency of the format will force greater accountability. (During the panel discussion, I noted that Marriott International CEO Bill Marriott has started a blog. Wouldn’t it be great if his blog became the source of quotes appearing in Marriott press releases, with a link back to the original source post that he actually wrote himself?)

The true issue driving the social media release, then, is usability in the era of social computing: as an element of conversation, as a tool for journalists, as fodder for bloggers, as a means of expressing authority and credibility. That’s not something we should kill. It’s something we should encourage and nurture.

Now if you’ll pardon me, there’s a contractor working on a house down the street. He’s using some tool I don’t understand, but I see nails laying around and I don’t get why he just doesn’t use a hammer, so I’m going to go tell him so. I don’t know crap about construction, but what the hell?

UPDATE: I’ll add links to additional posts I find on the topic:

• Deep Jive Interests
• Stowe’s follow-up, which includes links to even more posts
• Lionel Menchada, who runs Direct2Dell, weighs in

UPDATE II: Oh, boy. Stowe has responded to this post as an update to his original post. Evidently, I don’t get the social media space. I guess I’ll just shut up.