Please Release Me!

Or thereabouts.

I just went through rebirth of www.ktvz.com so … I still wish one day to turn this idea of a “truly public reltaions” set of principles/guides into a book/sideline.

This morning, I spent 15 minutes on a “free consultancy” to a nice local lady trying to make a big project happen in a short amount of time. One suggestion: Get a Website up, pronto. I suggest Squarespace, still one of the easiest full-featured Website-creation tools I’ve found, and thus, I remember to go check it out.

If I just put a little time into this thing, I believe it would pay big dividends. But there’s never enough time, of course.

So anyway, as I was saying;-)

Squarespace keeps getting better, and I haven’t used it to the extent I should to promote my vision of truly personal public relations, and how the Net makes that possible.

But thanks for visiting, and please make any comments you feel could spark discussion. Folks are still visiting here - the points and ideas are just as valid as they were a year or two ago, if not moreso - and I still want to help others make better use of the Internet for communicating what they, their groups and their businesses are up to.

So drop me a line, or make a post! I’d be most appreciative.

At this rate, this site will never get fed properly, but see… I have this place that I’m quite proud of, and I even have a lil’ blog there, which I’m going to point to this spot - hi folks! - and hopefully I’ll find time now and then to add to the pointers I’d love to offer everyone about how to do news releases.

I still have the vision/dream in my head of a book/consultancy/etc. on the whole issue of "the New PR," but let’s get real - my hands are full! And gloriously so. So feel free to ask me specific questions, go the forum here and post a note to get a discussion going - whatever.

And thanks for visiting!

 I’m a writer, every day. An author, as it were. Never had a book "in me," or so I thought. But I truly believe there’s a niche to fill and a desire to tell the world a better way to market one’s self, project, group or business.

And in the world of self-publishing tools like iUniverse  there’s ways just as easy as Squarespace (though not as inexpensive;-) to create a book that you think will help people. I’m smack-dab in the middle between vanity "family history," see my name in print of a book, and having any illusions about best-sellerdom.

I think it can be a combined vision/mind-opening look at the Net’s tools and how to better use them for communications, and a nuts-and-bolts news-release primer.

Your thoughts, input and suggestions are VERY welcome, and most appreciated.

I’ve changed the name of this Website (again), having found two things: There’s a LOT of folks out there (especially PR folks) rethinking their ways in the new world of blogs, etc. (and to my way of thinking, overlooking the humble e-mail to a certain degree), and so the name(s) I thought of are being used for things such as the NewPR Wiki.

Secondly, the original name - Please Release Me! - is less stuffy, and makes folks laugh. A nice way to greet folks, before you get into all the heavy lifting. Exactly my intentions here, as well as in a possible book by the same name.

I still want to encompass the good and bad about press releases. People do desperately need reference points when it comes to informing the public, through the media, about what they are up to.

But that is not the exciting thing! The truly revolutionary, not evolutionary, thing about online PR is that it FINALLY breaks through the “big lie” of traditional PR - that it’s not about a relationship with the public, but with the media, currying favor with those that get those stories in Time or Business Week or the National Semiconductor Poobah’s Trade Rag.

There will always be a need for that type of “old-line” PR. The real challenge of 21st Century communication is how to bypass the traditional media and communicate directly with your customers/members/prospects. To make full use of the personal-connection power of e-mail, Websites (and yes, RSS feeds, blogs, podcasting and whatever comes next) to build a relationship that hitherto was simply impossible, but can be so much more lucrative and rewarding, in every sense of those words.

I just did a Google on the ‘New PR’ term and as I expected, it’s been used a bit. But it seems, from what I’m seeing, that the direction is a bit skewed. Of course the traditional PR firm’s role has changed as the world and online media have changed.

But my efforts are not about using e-mail to communicate with an editor or reporter or publisher. That’s using a new tool in the same old boring, ineffective, hit-or-miss way (can you imagine the flood of e-mail, fax and other information that floats into every newsroom these days?) No, if there’s one thing the “more than half the folks online have broadband now” Brave New World makes possible (even imperative) is the whole prospect of disintermediation.

We’ve all heard how little of our brain’s resources we use, day to day. Let us not do the same with the mostly untapped resources we now have online. We can either move the “Dear Insert Your Name Here” junk-dreck to a new medium, or we can truly tap into what this medium makes possible.

Shall we explore together?