Tag: Public Relations

Not the end of the Press Release, but…

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Christopher Cox has responded favorably to Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s idea that financial disclosures currently required to be made by press release could be posted to a company blog instead.

Schwartz had suggested it in a letter to Cox, and also had posted the correspondence to his blog.

The AP now reports that Cox responded to Schwartz not only by mail, but also on Schwartz’s blog.

“The (SEC) encourages the use of Web sites as a source of information to the market and investors, and we welcome your offer to further discuss with us your views in this area,” Cox told Schwartz in his posting on the CEO’s blog. (He also sent Schwartz a letter by mail.)

Said Cox: “Assuming that the (SEC) were to embrace your suggestion that the ‘widespread dissemination’ requirement of Regulation FD can be satisfied through Web disclosure, among the questions that would need to be addressed is whether there exist effective means to guarantee that a corporation uses its Web site in ways that assure broad non-exclusionary access …”

What could be broader and more non-exclusionary than a company blog, to which anyone can subscribe? I thought this was a great idea when Schwartz suggested it, and I’m really glad to hear Chairman Cox being supportive.

You can read Chairman Cox’s comments in full here.

Regulation FD was designed to prevent insiders and analysts from unfairly trading on insider information. Blogs democratize information and make everyone an insider.

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Edelman Disclosure of More Fake Wal-Mart Blogs

Shel Holtz mentioned this morning (and has blogged about) the disclosure of more fake blogs produced by Edelman for Wal-Mart. His closing comment:

I applaud Edelman for introducing transparency to these blogs (yes, of course, they should have featured such transparency from the get-go) while simultaneously questioning the wisdom of PR agency account members speaking for a client. I was just listening to Inside PR on my way home from an assignment last night. Terry Fallis and David Jones zeroed in on this very topic and both agreed that it is inappropriate for agency reps to act as spokespersons on the client’s behalf. Does a blog change that dynamic or is it no different than getting up and speaking for the client at a press conference?

I think the key difference is when a blog represents itself as being just “average people” instead of paid representatives. But I agree that Edelman was smart to reveal this now instead of waiting for one of the Wal-Mart opponent groups to dig it up (which would lead to Digging, too.)

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Blogging Myself

During the pre-conference seminars and the first day of this conference, I have been blogging the presentations other people have been making for three reasons: as my personal note-taking device, to give my Mayo Clinic colleagues a reference resource on these topics, and to make the information available to my fellow conference attendees and any others who might find it valuable.

So now, given the fact that I’m doing the presentation, it’s kind of difficult to blog it contemporaneously. That’s why I did it in advance. Here’s my prediction of what I will be discussing. And if I’m wrong, this should be a good resource anyway. That would be the best of both worlds, because it would mean what we discussed was more valuable than what I had planned.

I define new media broadly, as anything that doesn’t require an FCC license or buying ink by the barrel.

As Shel Holtz says, new media do not replace old media. They are supplementary and complementary. And given the relative audience sizes, traditional media are still more important than new media, and should be the primary focus. Rocketboom, for instance, has a worldwide audience about the same size as what WCCO TV has in the Minneapolis-St.Paul DMA alone. But if we can pursue new media in a way that opens opportunities for mainstream media, that’s the smartest way to go.

New media (audio and video files on the web) have led to significant traditional media stories, such as this one:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaaAYVUWP0I]

Just as important is being smart about production, to get as many media applications out of a single video shoot as possible.

I talked with Shel just now about how to get “Add to Del.icio.us” and “Digg This!” added to my posts, and he suggested that FeedFlare, which is available through feedburner.com (also free).

Even though they are not technically blogging or podcasting, innovative use of the web relating to a big story can help facilitate major news coverage while minimizing the burden on the people involved in the story. Here’s one example of a web update site used in this way, and here’s another.

Here’s the big wrap-up:

Everyone who is here today has already invested significant time (2+ days) and money (travel, lodging, conference fees) to learn about new media. It would be a shame

  • Get a FREE RSS reader and subscribe to some feeds (like this one)
    Get iTunes (FREE) and subscribe to some podcasts, including For Immediate Release
    Start a FREE personal blog and experiment with links, comments and trackbacks
    Open a FREE YouTube account and upload a video
    Try Flickr or another FREE photo service
    Get Audacity to record audio FREE
    Incorporate these assets into your blog so you better understand the possibilities for your business

    • Shel Holtz: Seminar and Keynote Review II

    Shel highlights TheNewPR/Wiki, which is one of his (and my) favorites for PR professionals. This site has, among other things, examples of corporate blogging policies. I blogged about it here.

    I need to also check out LinkedIn, a social network for grown-ups (like MySpace.) Shel has talked a lot about Second Life, too…which today announced it had surpassed 1 million virtual residents.

    I need to look into the Social Media News Release, which pulls out key facts, quotes, and adds multimedia instead of having all of the narrative of a regular press release. This is a neat concept.

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    PR Growing Faster than Advertising

    Thanks to Shel Holtz for pointing out this article in the Charlotte Observer about the growth of PR firms, and how companies are moving their spending from advertising to PR because it’s becoming harder, with fragmented audiences, TiVo and the like, to use traditional advertising to get messages across.

    Shel made the good point in his For Immediate Release podcast that the growth of traditional PR vs. advertising may be one reason why PR firms have been slow to adopt social media…just as they were slow to implement the internet. When times are relatively good for your basic service, it probably makes sense to focus on the “bread and butter.”

    Still, it’s important to learn some of these newer methods, because times change and the media landscape is changing rapidly. I heard an interesting tidbit at a recent meeting, that in 1965 it was possible to buy 3 ads on network TV and reach 85 percent of households. Today that max (except on Super Bowl Sunday) is something like 15 percent. And I believe Pew found that network newscasts are down 50 percent in audience since the launch of CNN.

    With radically democratized content production and distribution with virtually no barriers to entry, the audiences will continue to break into smaller segments.

    That’s where social media come in, as a way of aggregating niches of people who share interests. They (we) will point each other to things we find useful. And it means audiences are no longer passive consumers, but also a content contributors.

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