Please Release Me!

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?