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I’m writing this as a preamble to our July 10 teleseminar with Stacy Armijo. Just some stream of consciousness thoughts.

The first, and biggest paradigm shift in the new world of PR is that, ironically, online PR rarely has anything to do with what we think of as the traditional media or press. In the old days, a media or press release went to an editor or reporter, and then they decided whether to incorporate your news item into the next publication cycle. Your release might be published verbatim as an article, or used as source or background material for a bigger story.

Nowadays, of course, you can just release your information directly to your customer. Not that you’d notice that anyone really takes this lesson to heart. Most of the press releases I see tout company xyz as the leading provider of cutting-edge scalable blah-blah to conserve operational assets, etc blah blah blah. Fooey. Talk to me. I’m right here. Tell me why I should care about your little news item. In fact, take a few seconds out and see if what you’re saying is worthy of a press release in the first place.

Two ways to humble yourself real quick vis-a-vis releases:

• Honestly, what level of news are we talking about? Is it new to the entire world? New to your industry? New to your company? New to your division or group? I sweat that one day I’ll see a press release that amounts to “Acme Systems discovers the power of the Internet!” I know that sounds harsh, but I see a lot of stuff like that, and so do you. Try to release news that truly new to the world or your industry, stow the rest.
• Remove all adjectives and see if what you have to say is still worthy of the effort. Your “cutting-edge, extensible, scalable best-of-breed security application” becomes “security application.” Are you impressed now? Well, guess what, none of us were impressed with the adjectives in it, so now you know how we feel. Removing all that dross allows you to drill down (oops) and tell us what it is that your thingamajig does, and why we should care.

Other things that online PR is good for? Well, let’s just take it back to the basics of marketing. If you create great content, then others will link to you, including all those press outlets you’re trying to attract. The more links, the more traffic, the more search engine visibility, the more links you’ll get, with more traffic. Guess what you can do with traffic? That’s right, you can put things in front of them that translate into money. Whether ads, links to specific product landing pages, whatever….and if you do it right, you can avoid the huge costs of buying traffic.

Hmmm, seems elementary. Why isn’t everyone doing this? Because corporate America has long ago figured out that it’s easier to outsource creativity to outside agencies then to build value with compelling, informative, empowering, and educational content. They’d rather see some cool kids with ipods and black turtlenecks create a 30-second spot that compares their product to a Transformer with a Beastie Boys soundtrack. Or something.

Well, guess what….just a few incoming links from Digg, or a major blogger, or half-a-dozen published articles that link back to you can really increase your visibility.

<announcement>So here’s what we’re announcing: a link baiting service. That’s right, I’ve been a published writer for 19 years, and I can write circles around anyone. I can help you put together powerful pieces that will attract metric boat loads of traffic. </announcement>

Okay, enough of that. More thoughts on all this later. Happy 4th of July!

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