Embargoes Aren’t PR’s Only Problem

December 17th, 2008 by Nick Gonzalez

For those of you who don’t know, I used to write at TechCrunch. After busting my hump for a little over a year and a half and producing over 450 stories amongst other duties, I left to join SocialMedia.com. So, I’m more than familiar with the environment that led Michael to lash out at PR firms and declare the “death of the embargo” (it’s generated a lot of buzz). In fact the refusal of companies to do anything really interesting and just push press releases was part of the frustration that made me want to leave (”No, I don’t care about your ‘revolutionary’ social-bookmarking-video-answers clone”).

But for me the “race to the bottom” generated by breaking embargoes has exposed another problem in how the industry delivers news. Social media hasn’t freed PR from the control of traditional media and democratized messaging, it’s simply replaced it with a new oligarch, bloggers!

But it’s also a ditch the industry dug itself and it will bury them if they don’t do something different. Information has traditionally flowed from the top down–execs brief their PR department on an announcement, PR firm briefs the journalists, journalists spread the word to their audience. It’s a process of one to many.

The process has several advantages. PR firms could then wave that article at clients along with circulation numbers to justify value. PR firms also owned the relationships between companies and media. The editorial process also provides the added advantage of a high signal to noise ratio.

However, Social media can be different. Social media has the ability of going many to many or even many to one. What do I mean? Virality doesn’t happen because one person wrote about you. It happens because many people did. Take, for example, applications on Facebook and MySpace. These developers won their audiences user by user. Each person shared a genuine message with their friends, and those friends responded.

The one to many communication funnel is turned on it’s head. Instead the audience gets the journalists to talk about you. (e.g., kudos to Lil Green Patch in Fast Company) We see this paradigm all over Twitter and Digg. A story becomes a story when enough people talk about it.

Tags: advertisers, publishers

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